Grim Beauty Quotes

They watched her sit, holding the bundle up before her, the lamp just at her elbow belabored by a moth whose dark shape cast upon her face appeared captive within the delicate skull, the thin and roselit bone, like something kept in a china mask ~ Cormac McCarthy

So rather than spending my golden years searching for the meaning of my life, I rather believe I'll just keep on trying to make some meaning out of my life right up until I pitch over nose first into the dirt for that little nap. - Tom King (I Ain't Afraid of No Grim Reaper) ~ Tom King

The one-eyed is always beauty in the land of the blind. ~ Randa Abdel-Fattah

A poet has a sacred duty. He has to hear unsung songs and see unseen beauty. ~ Debasish Mridha

I use beauty as a way of helping people to receive difficult or upsetting ideas. The topical issues are merely a vehicle for making one aware of one's own perceptual shift-which is the real thrill. ~ Fred Wilson

I prefer to suffer than repent because I stand by my decision and capable enough top pay for it Or reap the beauty later. ~ Ravindra Shukla

My stepmother was no beauty. She was round and squat with a face not unlike a potato that had been scrubbed. ~ Sally Gardner

I had drunk so deeply of grief and innocently gambled so hard with fate and irony that a special kind of vision was gathering in my eyes, not entirely clear just yet. This was the same look people saw in your eyes when you have died for beauty and come to live accepting nature as life with no promise of paradise, and mad at people who couldn't see that. ~ Martin Prechtel

Life, a beauty chased by tragic laughter. ~ John Masefield

It was Chicago with its World's Fair which vivified the national desire for civic beauty. ~ Daniel Burnham

Developing a skill is painful, though. It is difficult. And that's part of the satisfaction. You will only find meaning in what you struggle with. What you struggle to get good at next may not seem the exact right thing for you at first. With time and effort, however, you will discover new possibilities in yourself-an ability to solve problems, for instance, or to communicate, or to create beauty ... ~ Atul Gawande

Far from creating a new formalism, what these can yield is something far transcending surface values since they not only embody form as beauty, but also form in which intuitions or ideas or conjectures have taken visible substance. ~ Max Bill

No matter how perfect is physical beauty of a girl, if she could trample and not to appreciate the love, she doesn't worth of being loved. ~ Hassan El Fakiri

Everything in nature has its own intrinsic charm, as the work of its Creator's hand; but the chief beauty of the whole lies in its suggested relations to humanity. Things announce and wait for persons. The house would not have been thus beautifully built and furnished, except for an expected tenant. ~ Lucy Larcom

I see the mountains in the sky; the great clouds; and the moon; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is "it" - it is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory, achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; with the moon up there and those mountain clouds. ~ Virginia Woolf

It is as much our duty to live in the beauty of the presence of God on some mount of transfiguration until we become white with Christ as it is for us to go down where the needy people grope and grovel, and groan and lift them to new life. ~ Frank Laubach

For the thousandth time he wished he'd just met her. That they were but two strangers traveling together, that such lovely, filthy thoughts did not break him in two, but were only a pleasant pastime as he slowly fell under the spell of her aloof beauty and her hidden intensity.
…
But no, they'd met long ago, in the furthest years of his childhood. Their chances had come and gone. All they had ahead of them were a tedious road and a final good-bye. ~ Sherry Thomas

FAIR river! in thy bright, clear flow Of crystal, wandering water, Thou art an emblem of the glow Of beauty - the unhidden heart - The playful maziness of art In old Alberto's daughter; But when within thy wave she looks - Which glistens then, and trembles - Why, then, the prettiest of brooks Her worshipper resembles; For in his heart, as in thy stream, Her image deeply lies - His heart which trembles at the beam Of her soul-searching eyes. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

When I focus on beauty, I can find it even in the midst of ugliness. ~ Debasish Mridha

Education is the best friend. An educated person is respected everywhere. Education beats the beauty and the youth. ~ Chanakya

There's always going to be somebody that you consider maybe more beautiful. But nine times out of ten here in L.A., that beauty isn't home grown. It's usually manufactured. It sort of encourages me to work more within myself because I think that's not what appeals to me. Plastic and tons of makeup. ~ Amanda Schull

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything! ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Our friendship is made of bendy straws, long midnight letters,
my so-called life marathons, sleepless sleepovers, diner milk shakes, apron strings, a belief in beauty,
sucking helium, and the most trust I've ever felt for anyone, including myself. ~ David Levithan

Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men's eyes when deciding what provokes it. ~ Naomi Wolf

Life is wonderful and strange...and it's also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It's hilarious and it's deadening. It's a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....

What interests me - and interests me totally - is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives - which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids' LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway - against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?

How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn't that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too? ~ Anthony Doerr

Jill ... had explained homosexuality, after Mike had read about it and failed to grok
and had given him rules for avoiding passes; she knew that Mike, pretty as he was, would attract such. He had followed her advice and had made his face more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had had. But Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse a pass, say, from Duke
fortunately Mike's male water brothers were decidedly masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill suspected that Mike would grok a 'wrongness' in the poor in-betweeners anyhow
they would never be offered water. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

When we love, we see beauty; we speak in beauty; we walk in beauty. In love, we are beauty itself. ~ Catherine Ingram

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken. ~ Naomi Wolf

Of course his name would be Dominic. It meant "gift from God." AKA a life-support system for an ego. Still, that didn't mean he wasn't fun to stare at. Dominic Rossi looked like a dream, the kind of dream no woman in her right mind would want to wake from.
She had always been susceptible to male beauty, ever since the age of ten, when her mother had taken her to see Michelangelo's David in Florence. She recalled staring at that huge stone behemoth, all lithe muscles and gorgeous symmetry, indifferent about his nudity, his member inspiring a dozen questions her mother brushed aside. ~ Susan Wiggs

By day it is filled with boat traffic - water
buses, delivery boats, gondolas - if something floats
and it's in Venice, it moves along the Grand Canal.
And by daylight it is one of the glories of the Earth.
But at night, especially when the moon is full
and the soft illumination reflects off the water and
onto the palaces - I don't know how to describe
it so I won't, but if you died and in your will you
asked for your ashes to be spread gently on the
Grand Canal at midnight with a full moon,
everyone would know this about you - you loved and understood beauty. ~ William Goldman

For there was never any yet that wholly could escape love, and never shall there be any, never so long as beauty shall be, never so long as eyes can see. ~ Longus

It seems to me, and I am personally convinced, that the Church must never speak from a position of strength. [These are shocking words.] It ought not to be one of the forces influencing this or that state. The Church ought to be, if you will, just as powerless as God himself, which does not coerce but which calls and unveils the beauty and the truth of things without imposing them. As soon as the Church begins to exercise power, it loses its most profound characteristic which is divine love [i.e.] the understanding of those it is called to save and not to smash ... ~ Anthony Of Sourozh

Whenever I find myself talking of the beauty and the poetry of the Bosphorus and Istanbul's dark streets, a voice inside me warns against exaggeration, a tendency perhaps motivated by a wish not to acknowledge the lack of beauty in my own life. If I see my city as beautiful and bewitching, then my life must be so too. A ~ Orhan Pamuk

I wrote "Bootylicious" because, at the time, I'd gained some weight and the pressure that people put you under, the pressure to be thin, is unbelievable. I was just 18 and you shouldn't be thinking about that.You should be thinking about building up your character and having fun, and the song was just telling everyone to forget what people are saying, you're bootylicious. That's all. It's a celebration of curves and a celebration of women's bodies. ~ Beyonce Knowles

Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power. ~ John Ruskin

Focus your energy on the fragrance and beauty of the petals not on the thorns. ~ Amit Ray

Beautiful lips display eloquence.
Beautiful ears display patience.
Beautiful hands display excellence.
Beautiful minds display intelligence.
Beautiful hearts display kindness.
Beautiful souls display transcendence. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo