beauty-in-literature

You know what?_ he whispered, out of breath, __ou__e about to be in a whole lot of trouble. We probably better go.

Beauty is wasted on the self-absorbed.

The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

Moon is the light from a lantern in heaven

There__ an immense dramatic possibility in describing that universe. The books, for me, were an enormous relief in that sense of how they were written to allow primary emotion, elemental emotion, to matter enormously but to give the thing an extraordinary flow so you don__ notice at what point that you__e actually overwhelmed by this. There__ no showiness, at all. It__ the opposite of showiness. I think, if it was a painting, it could be very grey abstract, almost, with some lines and very, very beautiful. But you wouldn__ have a notion of where the beauty was.(Talking about the short stories of Alistair MacLeod, who he discovered while working on The Modern Library.)

Beauty is the moment when time vanishes. Beauty is the space where eternity arises.

Real beauty has no boundaries_.

The Brightness of her cheek would shame those stars as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night.

Beauty is the moment when time vanishes and eternity arises.

Life is not always perfect. Like a road, it has many bends, ups and down, but that__ its beauty.

Did you know, that one night; one moonless, clear, shining night; with the shadowy silhouettes of trees crisp against the star-filled sky _ I, on the high, level terrace of my flat, stretched out my hand! Against all odds and possibilities of unbelief and grief _ a life of searchings, discontent, and a nagging sense of unreality_ A spider-web intuition of a spread-out, intricate illusion that wilfully withheld the truth from me.

I woke to the sound of rain.

What a face this girl possessed!__ould I not gaze at it every day I would need to recreate it through painting, sculpture, or fatherhood until a second such face is born.

Christmas is the marriage of chaos and design. The real sound of life, for once, can burst out because a formal place has been set for it. At the moment when things have gotten sufficiently loose, the secret selves that these familiar persons hold inside them shake the room...An undercurrent of clowning and jostling is part of the process by which we succeed finally in making our necessary noise: despite the difficulty of getting the words right, of getting the singers on the same page, of keeping the ritual from falling apart into the anarchy of separate impulses. From such clatter--extended and punctuated by whatever instrument is handy, a triangle a tambourine, a Chinese gone--beauty is born.

My Love wakes in a puddle of sunlight.Her hands asleep beside her.Her hair draped on the lawnlike a mantle of cloth.I give her my lifefor our love is wholeI sing her beauty in my soul.

I sat up in the strange bed fearing it had been a dream, afraid I would never see her again. Not because I wanted anything from her, only her presence. The disappearance of the presence of beauty is the most despairing of events on this time-wheel of ours that rolls onward towards death.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

To own beauty is the first lie of it.