Chloé Cooper Jones > Quotes

“We'd not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, not gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we'd not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we'd been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“You could have made me come home," I say.
"No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“We seek beauty, but our understanding of its nature is limited. We find it primarily in easy-to-appreciate human forms. As we grow older and learn more, we journey closer to the truth of beauty. We begin to perceive it more powerfully in minds than in bodies. We stay on our quest, ascending, going higher and higher in our conception of beauty. As we do, our capacity to recognize beauty grows larger. We can take in more. Our eyes adjust to the bright light of the true nature of beauty until, at last, we may be able to behold it - perfect beauty, which is "pure, clean, unmixed, and not infected with human flesh, colors, or morality." Glimpsing to at last, we become part of a bigger sum, something vast and immortal.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“throughout all this, I was acutely aware of how quickly the experience of beauty dissipates and is replaced by boredom and the dullness of obligation.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“We are meant to understand the scope of the suffering while we also know we can't understand the scope of the suffering. I might shut down. I might feel numb, unable to hold it all at once.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm... a one; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure..."
Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insights endurance, and our capacity or attention. In difficult beauty, one often encourages intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness - the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle - that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“It is a deft act of erasure to be told how to process a situation by a person who would never experience it.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“so tenderhearted, so sensitive to life—his same receptors that were open to beauty were as open to suffering.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“is a deft act of erasure to be told how to process a situation by a person who would never experience it.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I care if you are happy. I'm in love with your happiness. My focus is on how you feel not what you do.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“No matter what you’ve been through, your story is one among many. Try focusing on that,” she says. “Focus on the feeling of the world getting wider.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“If love is the name of the pursuit of the whole, what is the name given to finding it?
I close my eyes and focus on the feeling of the world getting a little wider.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“The way words stay, the way sentences stay, the way memories invade my present, the way a stranger looks at me and speaks: shards that become a mirror.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Do you remember who you were? We’ve both changed, but the difference is that I didn’t know who I wanted to become, and you did, that was clear, and so I knew I needed to stay out of your way and just let you become the version of yourself you wanted to be, which I knew was, at its core, good. I knew you wanted to be good.” “How did you know that, and I didn’t?” “I can see you,” he says.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Beauty is what we're told is beautiful and what we're told becomes the truth.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I knew you were on your way toward the person you wanted to be, and you’d get there if I just let you get there.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“You could have made me come home,” I say. “No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“But I’m not helpless, I’m struggling. People don’t always recognize the difference.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Newness invites the eye and I am always a new thing.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My father understood a good story is a circle that finds the hero back where they started, but with new knowledge. He wanted this to be true. He also knew a good story ended with the hero realizing the world was bigger than he thought, bigger than himself. But the hero can't realize this until he returns home, and my father didn't have a model in his life for the return, only the quest, so he couldn't write the story because he could never get to the ending.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“He brought the full force of his empathy to his every conversation with me. He could do this because he kept his commitments to other people to a minimum. He was pathologically disinterested in status or pleasing people on a large scale. He knew this often worked against him -- made him seem hard to get to know, made him appear boring or icy in social situations. Some people dismissed him quickly, but he barely noticed this and cared not at all. He was uncompromising in his priorities. He had chosen to love a small group of people -- a few lifelong friends, a few family members, Wolfgang, me -- and he gave us the gift of his full attention and energy.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones

“other emotions, like ambivalence, fear, devotion, obligation, resentment, excitement, and on and on. These feelings are not in opposition to love, but are love’s texture.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My familiar defense mechanism was taking over, which was to feel superior while abstracting to theory. I could convince myself that I was above, in both taste and intelligence, the experience of a pop concert. Anything of such mass appeal must be, by definition, lacking —merely facile pleasure, or what British philosopher Bernard Bosanquet called easy beauty.

Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm ... a rose; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure...."

Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet, required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insight, endurance, and our capacity for attention. In difficult beauty, one often encounters intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness-the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle— that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Philosophy, by its very nature, required uncertainty. It was, wrote Maria Popova, “the art of remaining in doubt.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My father believed, along with the Greek philosophers he revered, that ignorance was, allegorically, a cave, one that we could be freed from if only someone would break our chains and walk us from darkness and into the light.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I look at Wolfgang and I see someone smart and kind," says Andrew. "I want him to be critical, but not at the expense of camaraderie. His compassion and his intelligence are complex enough to allow for both if we just don't--"
"Don't what?"
"If we don't get in his way.”
― Chloe Cooper Jones

“I found his disdain exciting. He projected a radical social freedom I felt I could not access for myself. The man did not soften the edges of his actions and felt free to wield his principles like a weapon and, although I was the recipient of the blow, I welcomed it as instructional. I'd be further in life if I'd claimed more freedom and had not so fully absorbed the lesson that my social value depended on my being com-promising, deferential, small.

The man's cruelty brought comfort; it shored up the story I told myself about myself and validated my deepest suspicion: I was invisible. The indifferent man gifted me the satisfaction of being right.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: 'A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm...a rose; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all of these afford a plain straightforward pleasure...'
Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet, required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insight, endurance, and our capacity for attention. In difficult beauty, one often encounters intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Outside these walls are probing, restless streets. In here, I'm a living memory, suspended in static, cut off from the present moment. Outside the moment arrives, arrives, arrives, is arriving.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My disability is obvious, but its details are unclear, to look at me is to feel information both shown and withheld. These ideas in opposition create cognitive dissonance and this makes people uncomfortable in a way not reducible to prejudice alone.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty