Unspoiled Quotes

From the east comes the sun, bringing a new and unspoiled day. ~ Clinton Lee Scott

Our precious heritage of natural and unspoiled beauty and unpolluted streams, once exhausted and destroyed, can never be replaced. ~ Alvin O'Konski

The Devonian and Cornishman will be found by the visitor to be courteous and hospitable. There is no roughness of manner where unspoiled by periodic influx of strangers; he is kindly, tender-hearted, and somewhat suspicious. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

And he loved my mother. I saw him on the last days of his life lift that oil-scented right hand and enter its fingers into her ordered hair and rustle it free of its pins as if he had been offered velvet or the fur of a rare animal. Forever I hold that gesture. For me it was perhaps the last remembered pleasure belonging to him. It is the unspoiled core of whatever I know of love and family (and I have not been successful at the craft of it). Our shyness at embracing each other - it rarely happened - did not matter. I felt safe and comforted in his house. ~ Michael Ondaatje

Is it - I'm not certain - possible to love someone if your first interest is the use you can make of him? Doesn't the gainful motive, and the guilt accruing to it, halt the progression of other emotions? It can be argued that even the most decently coupled people were initially magnetized by the mutual-exploitation principle - sex, shelter, appeased ego; but still that is trivial, human: the difference between that and truly using another person is the difference between edible mushrooms and the kind that kill: Unspoiled Monsters. ~ Truman Capote

No one can feel more gratefully the charm of noble scenery, or the refreshment of escape into the unspoiled solitudes of nature, than the laborer at some close in-door employment. ~ Lucy Larcom

Body exercise is incomplete if it focuses exclusively on muscle and is motivated by the ideal of a physique unspoiled by fat. ~ Thomas Moore

He poured, properly this time, even a little heavy. The dark liquid looked black in the glass, and she had to restrain herself from gulping it. Fresh tobacco. Black currants. God, it was so good. She kept it in her mouth for a count of ten before she swallowed. If there was any magic in this world that was not magic, it was wine. She smelled wet hay from a tumbledown field in Tuscany in the early morning, after the sky turned light, but before the sun burned off the dew. It reminded her of somewhere else too, a place she'd never seen, let alone smelled - someplace green and unspoiled and far away, which she knew well even though she'd never been there, just as it knew her well. She felt its pull on her, as she always had. But for the moment she let its name escape her. ~ Lev Grossman

The purity of unison singing, unaffected by alien motives of musical techniques, the clarity, unspoiled by the attempt to give musical art an autonomy of its own apart from the words, the simplicity and frugality, the humaneness and warmth of this way of singing is the essence of all congregational singing. This, ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape - -the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The images start to darken and she feels another hunger well up in her, this one having to do with another kind of desire. The desire to feed, to possess, and the aggressive thrill of a predator capturing and killing its prey as it tears into unspoiled flesh. Its teeth ripping and rending and the satisfying coppery taste of blood. There is the ultimate moment of surrender of drinking away the life essence. The pinnacle of lust which mounts in the very last breath, when the light drains from the victim's eyes and when the soul fades ... Then there is only a triumphant cry to the moonlight and the beckoning depths of the ever waiting water. ~ Melissa St. Hilaire

In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan - room and board included prepaid - and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods. ~ David Mamet

We were on a family holiday to Cyprus to visit my aunt and uncle. My uncle Andrew was then the brigadier to all the British forces on the island, and as such a senior military figure I am sure he must have dreaded us coming to town.
After a few days holed up in the garrison my uncle innocently suggested that maybe we would enjoy a trip to the mountains. He already knew the answer that my father and I would give. We were in.
The Troodos Mountains are a small range of snowy peaks in the center of the island, and the soldiers posted to Cyprus use them to ski and train in. There are a couple of ski runs, but the majority of the peaks in winter are wild and unspoiled.
In other words, they are ripe for an adventure.
Dad and I borrowed two sets of army skis and boots from the garrison up in the hills and spent a great afternoon together skiing down the couple of designated runs. But designated runs can also be quite boring. We both looked at each other and suggested a quick off-piste detour.
It was all game…age eleven.
It wasn't very far into this between-the-trees deep-powder detour that the weather, dramatically, and very suddenly, took a turn for the worse.
A mountain mist rolled in, reducing visibility to almost zero. We stopped to try and get, or guess, our directions back to the piste, but our guess was wrong, and very soon we both realized we were lost. (Or temporarily geographically challenged, as I have learned to call it.)
Dad and I ~ Bear Grylls

Once upon a time we all walked on the golden road. It was a fair highway, through the Land of Lost Delight; shadow and sunshine were blessedly mingled, and every turn and dip revealed a fresh charm and a new loveliness to eager hearts and unspoiled eyes.

On that road we heard the song of morning stars; we drank in fragrances aerial and sweet as a May mist; we were rich in gossamer fancies and iris hopes; our hearts sought and found the boon of dreams; the years waited beyond and they were very fair; life was a rose-lipped comrade with purple flowers dripping from her fingers.

We may long have left the golden road behind, but its memories are the dearest of our eternal possessions; and those who cherish them as such may haply find a pleasure in the pages of this book, whose people are pilgrims on the golden road of youth. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Both Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King used these phrases ("playing out of one's mind," or "over one's head") to describe their performances while winning tghe finals at Wimbledon in 1975 ... The player loses himself in the action, continually breaki g the false limits placed on is potential. Awareness becomes acutely heightened, while analysis, anxiety and self-conscious thought are compoletly forgotten. Enjoyment is at a peak - pure and unspoiled. ~ Timothy Gallwey

I have thought that the word America must mean different things to the people who live under its aegis. I would that for each of them it might be symbolized by one -- at least one -- memory of some aspect of unspoiled nature. America -- wide, far-reaching, insouciant -- has been the amphitheater for our civilization. I wish each of us could appreciate its vast beauty, and could see how far the elements of our civilization fall short of the sheer majesty of our America. ~ Harvey Broome

Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all? ~ Dilgo Khyentse

He's unspoiled. We're all scoundrels, and he's only pretending to be one. He's a pure soul."

"Yes, until he runs into temptation for the first time."

"He'd resist it."

(Moša and Valerija about Tirke) ~ Vladimir Stanković

Long time friends have a way of touching and impacting our lives in ways never imagined. As we all try to find our own place in this ever changing world, it's comforting to know, that even though separated by time, distance or circumstance, what remains constant is an unspoiled bond of love and loyalty that can be depended upon for a lifetime. One of God's most special gifts…is friendship. ~ Jason Versey

THEY WERE PEOPLE who went in for Negroes - Michael and Anne - the Carraways. But not in the social-service, philanthropic sort of way, no. They saw no use in helping a race that was already too charming and naive and lovely for words. Leave them unspoiled and just enjoy them, Michael and Anne felt. So they went in for the Art of Negroes - the dancing that had such jungle life about it, the songs that were so simple and fervent, the poetry that was so direct, so real. They never tried to influence that art, they only bought it and raved over it, and copied it. For they were artists, too. ~ Langston Hughes

He's completely unspoiled by failure. ~ Noel Coward

The time has also come to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

Woman too commonly commits the sin of self-sacrifice whereby she consents to be sequestered in the home, without intellectual stimulus, so that the tranquil flame of her unspoiled soul should radiate purity and nobility upon an indefinitely extended family. ~ Rebecca West

In the midst of the complexities of modern life, with all its pressures, the spirit of man needs to refresh itself by communion with unspoiled nature. In such surroundings- occasional as our visits may be- we can achieve that kind of physical and spiritual renewal that comes alone from the wonder of the natural world. ~ Laurance S. Rockefeller

the evils of ego devour the soul with darkness, destroy all hope, and eat away at any chance of experiencing the pure beauty of a glowing, unspoiled love ~ Bodhi Smith

Life is calmness with squabbling,
accumulating traditions and self-consciousness.
elaborate meals, medicine, law,
pretty pictures unspoiled,
rocking the cradle and holding the hammer,
impressive skies of gray and blue,
believing in what we can't settle,
the mystery of iniquity,
the absolutely sincere predictions of fools,
lighter moods like these. ~ Brian D'Ambrosio

I dispelled my invisibility for a few seconds in his full view, a finger resting provocatively on my lower lip, giving him a come-hither look under a streetlight. His jaw and the bottle of Żubrówka dropped at the same time. It shattered, drawing his eyes to the sidewalk, and I took the opportunity afforded by his distraction to disappear again.

"That was mean," Oberon said, watching the man look wildly around for me and pawing at his eyes as if to clear them.

Why? I asked. I've done him no harm.

"Yes, you have. You will haunt him for the rest of his life. I know from experience."

You're haunted by someone flashing you on a street corner?

"No. It was a dog park. Atticus and I were just arriving and she was leaving."

Oh, here we go.

"She was so fit and her coat was tightly curled and she had a perfect pouf on the end of her tail like a tennis ball. I saw her for maybe five seconds, until she hopped into a Honda and her human drove her away. And now I can't see a Honda without seeing her."

But that's a good thing, isn't it? Kind of romantic? A vision of perfection you can treasure forever, unspoiled by reality.

"Well, I don't know. In reality I'd like to try spoiling her, if she was in the mood."

Look, Oberon, that man is lonely. He's too skinny and sweaty, and I'm willing to bet you five cows that he's socially awkward or he wouldn't be staggering drunk at this hour. Bu ~ Kevin Hearne

Over at our place, we're sure of just one thing: everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don't think of grown-ups, and we don't think of children. But just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us, that maybe the world has made us forget. ~ Walt Disney Company

I watched the surrounding landscape with great curiosity, and I wanted to discover the words that could describe all its unspoiled beauty. ~ Daniel J. Rice

Can't we make a blusterer ourselves? asked Jón Hreggviðsson. Can't we scratch that damned sign with the ax-point onto the chopping block and get a beautiful, chubby woman in here tonight, right now-or preferably three? It was no easy matter to create such a sign, because in order to do so the two men required much greater access to the animal kingdom and the forces of nature than conditions in the dungeon permitted. The sign of the Blusterer is inscribed with a raven's gall on the rust-brown inner side of a bitch's skin, and afterward blood is sprinkled over the skin - blood from a black tomcat whose neck has been cut under a full moon by an unspoiled maiden. Where'd you find an unspoiled maiden to cut a black tomcat's neck asked Jón Hreggviðsson. ~ Halldor Laxness

It's best to keep America just like that, always in the background, a sort of picture post card which you look at in a weak moment. Like that, you imagine it's always there waiting for you, unchanged, unspoiled, a big patriotic open space with cows and sheep and tenderhearted men ready to bugger everything in sight, man, woman or beast. It doesn't exist, America. It's a name you give to an abstract idea ... ~ Henry Miller

If love was a lucky penny, shiny and unspoiled, secreted in a most unlikely place, then it's tarnished flipside was loss. ~ Ellery A. Kane

To the unspoiled, even a snikebite is a loving kiss. But to the spoiled even a loving kiss is a snake bite. ~ Mikhail Naimy

A jewelry box? Ballerinas? She'd been such an active girl that any jewelry she'd been given would have been lost or broken right away. It was Faye Marie who'd loved-
"My sister," she gasped, then louder. "My sister!" She clasped her hands together in a pleading gesture. "My lord, I beg pardon of you, but you're mistaken. I believe you gifted that treasure box to my older sister, Faye Marie. She's the one who loved ballerinas. I was obsessed with-"
"Pegasus." The old justice's eyes melted from cold to kindness. "It was a trick question. I'd forgotten your birthday was so close to mine, and shared my spice cake out of pure guilt." His lined face wrinkled as he smiled with a fond memory. "You were a kind little soul, unspoiled for a girl raised in such wealth. You forgave me instantly and informed me that spice cake was, indeed, your favorite present ever received. ~ Kerrigan Byrne

We thank those Senators, both Republican and Democrat, who stood firm against tremendous pressure from the Bush administration, pro-drilling members of Congress and their allies in the oil industry. They recognize that the budget is an inappropriate place to decide controversial national policy matters like America's energy policy. We urge all members of Congress to remain steadfast in their belief that the vast, unspoiled wilderness of America?s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is more than a line item in the Federal Budget. ~ Carl Pope

Bolshevism is knocking at our gates, we can't afford to let it in ... We must keep America whole and safe and unspoiled. We must keep the worker away from red literature and red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy. ~ Al Capone

Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. ~ Oscar Wilde

Yet they are unmoved when told of the cruel blow that fortune has dealt them, happy to see out their days on this unknown and unspoiled atoll. They will tell you that the view from their windows is infinitely more magnificent than Manhattan's glittering skyline. ~ Giles Milton

If I could do anything, I would go to the middle of our planet Earth and seek uranium, rubies and gold. I'd look for unspoiled monsters. Then I'd move to the country.
Florie Rotondo, age 8 ~ Truman Capote

Standing on soil feels so much different than standing on city pavement; it lets you look inward and reflect and see who you really are, while you see a beautiful, unspoiled land as far as the eye can see. It allows your inner life to grow. ~ Ricardo Montalban

A typical battlefield of this struggle is Hawaii, America's most deceptively beautiful state. For most residents and visitors, it seems an unspoiled island paradise. In actuality it is a killing field of biological diversity. When ~ Edward O. Wilson

We cry because language is imperfect and fails to reach all the way down to the bottom-most depths of life, not even halfway down into the deepest charms, our tears begin where our words stop, are they messages from the abyss, the unspoiled depths? ~ Jon Kalman Stefansson

Bears find themselves at the spot where two deep-seated but contradictory human impulses collide: the desire to feel protected from unforeseeable danger and the longing for unspoiled nature. ~ Bernd Brunner

If we are to use the words 'childish' and 'infantile' as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing. Who in his sense would not keep, if he could, that tireless curiosity, that intensity of imagination, that facility of suspending disbelief, that unspoiled appetite, that readiness to wonder, to pity, and to admire? ~ C.S. Lewis

We're told that parents push their children too hard to excel (by ghostwriting their homework and hiring tutors, and demanding that they triumph over their peers), but also that parents try to protect kids from competition (by giving trophies to everyone), that expectations have declined, that too much attention is paid to making children happy.
Similarly, young adults are described as self-satisfied twits - more pleased with themselves than their accomplishments merit - but also as being so miserable that they're in therapy. Or there's an epidemic of helicopter parenting, even though parents are so focused on their gadgets that they ignore their children. The assumption seems to be that readers will just nod right along, failing to note any inconsistencies, as long as the tone is derogatory and the perspective is traditionalist. ~ Alfie Kohn

And now she finally understands what she has always observed on people's faces when they are at the seaside. Years ago, ... she would notice how people's faces turned slightly upward when they stared at the sea, as if they were straining to see a trace of God or were hearing the silent humming of the universe; she would notice how, at the beach, people's faces became soft and wistful, reminding her of the expressions on the faces of the sweet old dogs that roamed the streets of Bombay. As if they were all sniffing the salty air for transcendence, for something that would allow them to escape the familiar prisons of their own skin. In the temples and the shrines, their heads were bowed and their faces small, fearful, and respectful, shrunk into insignificance by the ritualized chanting of the priests. But when they gazed at the sea, people held their heads up, and their faces became curious and open, as if they were searching for something that linked them to the sun and the stars, looking for that something they knew would linger long after the wind had erased their footprints in the dust. Land could be bought, sold, owned, divided, claimed, trampled, and fought over. The land was stained permanently with pools of blood; it bulged and swelled under the outlines of the countless millions buried under it. But the sea was unspoiled and eternal and seemingly beyond human claim. Its waters rose and swallowed up the scarlet shame of spilled blood. ~ Thrity Umrigar

Absolutely delightful, at first for its unspoiled picture of late-nineteenth-century Japan as seen through the eyes of three remarkable but very different Americans, [the missionary William Elliot Griffis [1843-1928], the scientist Edward Sylvester Morse [1838-1925], and the writer Lafcadio Hearn], and then for the marvelous reconstruction of how Japan worked on their minds, radically changing their perceptions of the country and the whole relationship between East and West
between the barbarian and the civilized. The book is a tour de force. ~ Edwin O. Reischauer

Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Contemporary writers use animal-transformation themes to explore issues of gender, sexuality, race, culture, and the process of transformation...just as storytellers have done, all over the world, for many centuries past. One distinct change marks modern retellings, however, reflecting our changed relationship to animals and nature. In a society in which most of us will never encounter true danger in the woods, the big white bear who comes knocking at the door [in fairy tales] is not such a frightening prospective husband now; instead, he's exotic, almost appealing.

Whereas once wilderness was threatening to civilization, now it's been tamed and cultivated; the dangers of the animal world have a nostalgic quality, removed as they are from our daily existence. This removal gives "the wild" a different kind of power; it's something we long for rather than fear. The shape-shifter, the were-creature, the stag-headed god from the heart of the woods--they come from a place we'd almost forgotten: the untracked forests of the past; the primeval forests of the mythic imagination; the forests of our childhood fantasies: untouched, unspoiled, limitless.

Likewise, tales of Animal Brides and Bridegrooms are steeped in an ancient magic and yet powerfully relevant to our lives today. They remind us of the wild within us...and also within our lovers and spouses, the part of them we can never quite know. They represent the Others who live beside us--cat and mouse and coy ~ Terri Windling

At home we have lost the capacity to see what is before us. Travel shakes us out of our apathy, and we regain an attentiveness that heightens every experience. The exhilaration of travel has many sources, but surely one of them is that we recapture in some measure the unspoiled awareness of children. ~ John W. Gardner

There in the mountains, close to the delights of Nature, everything you see and hear is a joy. It is a joy unspoiled by any real discomfort. Your legs may possibly ache, or you may feel the lack of something really good to eat, but that is all. I wonder why this should be? I suppose the reason is that, looking at the landscape, it is as though you were looking at a picture unrolled before you, or reading a poem on a scroll. The whole area is yours [...]. You are free from any care or worry because you accept the fact that this scenery will help neither to fill your belly, nor add a penny to your salary, and are content to enjoy it just as scenery. This is the great charm of Nature, that it can in an instant discipline men's hearts and minds, and removing all that is base, lead them into the pure unsullied world of poetry. ~ Soseki Natsume

[Voltaire] theoretically prefers a republic, but he knows its flaws: it permits factions which, if they do not bring on civil war, at least destroy national unity; it is suited only to small states protected by geographic situation, and as yet unspoiled and untorn with wealth; in general "men are rarely worthy to govern themselves." Republics are transient at best; they are the first form of society, arising from the union of families; the American Indians lived in tribal republics, and Africa is full of such democracies. but differentiation of economic status puts an end to these egalitarian governments; and differentiation is the inevitable accompaniment of development. ~ Will Durant

The Three-Decker

"The three-volume novel is extinct."

Full thirty foot she towered from waterline to rail.
It cost a watch to steer her, and a week to shorten sail;
But, spite all modern notions, I found her first and best -
The only certain packet for the Islands of the Blest.

Fair held the breeze behind us - 'twas warm with lovers' prayers.
We'd stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs.
They shipped as Able Bastards till the Wicked Nurse confessed,
And they worked the old three-decker to the Islands of the Blest.

By ways no gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of Cook,
Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took
With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed,
And a Church of England parson for the Islands of the Blest.

We asked no social questions - we pumped no hidden shame -
We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came:
We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell.
We weren't exactly Yussufs, but - Zuleika didn't tell.

No moral doubt assailed us, so when the port we neared,
The villain had his flogging at the gangway, and we cheered.
'Twas fiddle in the forc's'le - 'twas garlands on the mast,
For every one got married, and I went ashore at last.

I left 'em all in couples a-kissing on the decks.
I left the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques.
In endl ~ Rudyard Kipling

My ideal relationship with a book is that I will read it for the first time entirely unspoiled. I won't know anything whatsoever about it, it will be wonderful, it will be exciting and layered and complex and I will be excited by it, and I will re-read it every year or so for the rest of my life, discovering more about it every time, and every time remembering the circumstances in which I first read it. ~ Jo Walton

Those corrupted by the pursuit of power, despite another's attempt at unspoiled love, cannot be rescued from the darkness that devours the soul ~ Christy Hall

When you're born, you're pure. Unspoiled and trusting. Some say, it's the only time we're perfect. You're also born covered in blood and placenta. No one gets nostalgic about that. ~ Christopher Titus

You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. ~ Harold Macmillan

That still did not invalidate their purity in his eyes, so long as they continued to live the way they lived: sitting on the floor, eating with their fingers, cooking and sleeping first in one room, then in another, or in the vast patio with its fountains, or on the roof, leading the existence of nomads inside the beautiful shell which was the house. If he had felt that they were capable of discarding their utter preoccupation with the present, in order to consider the time not yet arrived, he would straightway have lost interest in them and condemned them as corrupt. ~ Paul Bowles