Chris > Chris's Quotes

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#1

“A rose trapped inside a fist.”
― Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins

tags: beauty

84 likes

#2

“But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.
- Tithonus”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

tags: beauty, death, gifts, gods, immortality, youth

50 likes

#3

“Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”
― Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

tags: beautiful, beauty, destiny, question, sad

92 likes

#4

“...gracious your form and your eyes as honey : desire is poured upon your lovely face Aphrodite has honored you exceedingly...”
― Sappho

tags: beauty, compliments

107 likes

#5

“The slow arrow of beauty. The most noble kind of beauty is that which does not carry us away suddenly, whose attacks are not violent or intoxicating (this kind easily awakens disgust), but rather the kind of beauty which infiltrates slowly, which we carry along with us almost unnoticed, and meet up with again in dreams; finally, after it has for a long time lain modestly in our heart, it takes complete possession of us, filling our eyes with tears, our hearts with longing. What do we long for when we see beauty? To be beautiful. We think much happiness must be connected with it. But that is an error.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

tags: beauty

130 likes

#6

“So that’s how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the
loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us - that's
snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely
changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to
play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the
end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off
behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday.
Leaving behind a feeling of insurmountable emptiness...
Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost.
Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can
disappear, melting together in a single, overlapping figure. And as
we live our lives we discover - drawing toward us the thin threads
attached to each - what has been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to
bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them
closer, holding on to them. Knowing all the while that their lives
are fleeting.”
― Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart

tags: beauty, loss, love, relationships

375 likes

#7

“All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one's heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

tags: ashes, beauty, cherishing, grace, grief, hurt, pain

136 likes

#8

“No man or woman born, coward or brave, can shun his destiny.”
― Homer, The Iliad

182 likes

#9

“Beauty is something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul. And when he has made it, it is not given to all to know it. To recognize it you must repeat the adventure of the artist. It is a melody that he sings to you, and to hear it again in your own heart you want knowledge and sensitiveness and imagination.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

tags: art, beauty

137 likes

#10

“It slowly began to dawn on me that I had been staring at her for an impossible amount of time. Lost in my thoughts, lost in the sight of her. But her face didn't look offended or amused. It almost looked as if she were studying the lines of my face, almost as if she were waiting.
I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to brush her cheek with my fingertips. I wanted to tell her that she was the first beautiful thing that I had seen in three years. The sight of her yawning to the back of her hand was enough to drive the breath from me. How I sometimes lost the sense of her words in the sweet fluting of her voice. I wanted to say that if she were with me then somehow nothing could ever be wrong for me again.
In that breathless second I almost asked her. I felt the question boiling up from my chest. I remember drawing a breath then hesitating--what could I say? Come away with me? Stay with me? Come to the University? No. Sudden certainty tightened in my chest like a cold fist. What could I ask her? What could I offer? Nothing. Anything I said would sound foolish, a child's fantasy.
I closed my mouth and looked across the water. Inches away, Denna did the same. I could feel the heat of her. She smelled like road dust, and honey, and the smell the air holds seconds before a heavy summer rain.
Neither of us spoke. I closed my eyes. The closeness of her was the sweetest, sharpest thing I had ever known.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

tags: beauty, depth, description, love-interest, romance, sadness

183 likes

#11

“On no subject are our ideas more warped and pitiable than on death. ... Let children walk with nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life, and that the grave has no victory, for it never fights.”
― John Muir, A Thousand-Mile Walk To The Gulf: The American Naturalist's 1867 Journey Through the Post-War South

tags: beauty, death, ideas, inspirational, joy, life, victory, warped

235 likes

#12

“In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium-dream - an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos.”
― Edgar Allan Poe, Ligeia

tags: beauty, greek-mythology, youth

173 likes

#13

“I’m trying to write something so good, so pure, so perfect that I’ll never have to have children; I’ll have created something that can stand in for me, that can live on after me..”
― Chelsea Hodson, Tonight I'm Someone Else: Essays

tags: immortality, writing

10 likes

#14

“Let your heart shine even more than your face. The beautiful contents of your heart can never be forgotten, but your face will be a history.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

tags: beauty, contents, contribution, creation, death, eternal, eternal-life, forever, history, immortality, inspiration, life, love, stages, time

15 likes

#15

“If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.”
― John Donne

tags: beauty, love

28 likes

#16

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them
pressed me against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

tags: beauty, terror

107 likes

#17

“I'd keep your beauty timeless.
like a flower pressed in a book, yes
I wouldn't let it fade
Folded in the chapters of my mind”
― Richard L. Ratliff

tags: beauty, book, fade, flower, keep, love, lovers, memories, memories-quotes, mind, timeless

22 likes

#18

“Beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.

It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart inflamed and a soul enchanted.

It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.

It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a win attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels forever in flight.

Beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in the mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

tags: beauty

33 likes

#19

“and the evening was so beautiful, that it made a pain in my heart, as when you cannot tell wether you are happy or sad; and I thought that if I could have a wish, it would be that nothing would ever change, and we would stay that way forever.”
― Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

tags: alias-grace, atwood, beauty, evening

24 likes

#20

“The woman who first gives life, light, and form to our shadowy conceptions of beauty, fills a void in our spiritual nature that has remained unknown to us till she appeared. Sympathies that lie too deep for words, too deep almost for thoughts, are touched, at such times, by other charms than those which the senses feel and which the resources of expression can realise. The mystery which underlies the beauty of women is never raised above the reach of all expression until it has claimed kindred with the deeper mystery in our own souls.”
― Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White

tags: beauty, soul

58 likes

#21

“Bury us, and mark our names above. Let us be free.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

tags: achilles, ashes, dead, free, names, patrochilles, patroclus

319 likes

#23

“Ashes have no fear to burn in hell
In your heart's paradise angels dwell
Rib cage fastens all sins of the wrong
Your bones will sing you mortality’s song”
― Munia Khan

tags: angels, ash, ashes, burn, dark, darkness, dwell, fear, heart, hell, mortal, mortality, paradise, rib-cage, ribs, sin, sing, sinner, sinners, sins, song, wrong, wrongdoing

3 likes

#24

“Aequat omnes cinis.”
― Seneca

tags: ashes, death, equality, latin

14 likes

#25

“How I wish I was like the water,
Flowing so freely with every drop
Let my every emotion wonder,
No need to start, nor even stop
How I wish I was like the fire,
Burning with every flame up
Leaving a trace of hot desire
As a Phoenix raises its' wings up
How I wish I was like the earth,
Raising each flower from the ground
Seeing the beauty of death and birth
And then returning to the ground
How I wish I was like the wind,
Hearing each whisper, sound and thought
A lonesome and wandering little wind,
Shattering all that has been sought
Oh, how I wish I was where you are,
Not separated by empty space, so far
It seems like we're galaxies apart,
But we find hope within our heart
And how I wish I was all of the above,
So I can come below and yet forget,
The beauty of angels which come down like a dove
And demons who love with no regret.”
― Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache

tags: angels, beauty, birth, burning, death, demons, desire, dove, drop, earth, emotion, fire, flame, flower, flowing, freely, galaxies, ground, hearing, heart, hope, hot, lonesome, love, phoenix, regret, sound, space, start, stop, thought, trace, wander, wandering, water, whisper, wind, wings

63 likes

#26

“I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it  will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty  lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter  beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the  casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a  glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.”
― Jean Genet, The Thief's Journal

tags: beauty, destiny

19 likes

#27

“My love,
you are driving the entire world mad.
The nightingales are committing suicide
one by one out of jealousy of your voice.
The roses took one glance at your beauty
and folded themselves from shame.
The trees now only whisper your name
and the sky hasn’t stopped crying since you looked up.
Have pity on us, my love.
We have already broken all the mirrors and glass
out of fear that you will forget us
and fall in love with yourself
once you see what we all
cannot stop seeing.”
― Kamand Kojouri

tags: beauty, beloved, birds, cry, crying, driving, ecstasy, envious, envy, fear, fold, forget, glass, in-love, jealous, jealousy, kamand, kamand-kojouri, kojouri, love, love-poems, love-quotes, love-yourself, lover, mad, madness, mirrors, my-love, name, nature, nightingales, pity, roses, see, seeing, shame, sky, suicide, trees, universe, voice, world

33 likes

#28

“until only infinity remained of beauty”
― John Ashbery, Some Trees

tags: beauty, infinity

27 likes

#29

“And looks commercing with the skies,
Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes.”
― John Milton, L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas

tags: beauty, nature, soul

13 likes

#30

“In this treacherous world
Nothing is the truth nor a lie.
Everything depends on the color
Of the crystal through which one sees it”
― Pedro Calderón de la Barca

tags: absolutes, evil, good, lies, perception, truth

171 likes