“Beauty was thinking of all she had heard and seen, stimulated against her will by Laurent’s suffering.”
Source: Beauty's Punishment
“From then on, every time I felt the shock of beauty I felt torn between the enthusiasm that drew me to it and the impotence that nailed my feed to the ground.”
Source: The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles: A Memoir by Françoise Hardy
“To love life, really, must mean caring not only for the garden plot but also the wilderness beyond the fence, beauty and mystery for their own sake, because of how meager a world would be without them.”
Source: High Tide in Tucson : Essays from Now or Never
“She is a beauty. Yes, a marble nymph; angelic eyes, unearthly lips…”
“Burdensome beauty - for your sole sake
Heaven has put away the stroke of her doom,
So great her portion in that peace you make
By merely walking in a room.
(Broken Dreams”
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
“But in the grave all, all, shall be renewed.
The certainty that I shall see that lady
Leaning or standing or walking
In the first loveliness of womanhood,
And with the fervour of my youthful eyes,
Has set me muttering like a fool.
(Broken Dreams)”
Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
“There is not a creature in all this part of the world who could in the least understand with what heart-beatings I am looking forward to the flowering of these roses, and not a German gardening book that does not relegate all tea-roses to hot-houses, imprisoning them for life, and depriving them for ever of the breath of God.”
Source: Elizabeth and Her German Garden
“This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and coarse, and ill colored.”
Source: Gulliver's Travels
“I thought maybe if I looked ugly and less pleasant, the men would not look at me and I'd be safe. I wouldn't wash my face for days. I didn't want to look attractive in any way, at all, lest it invited undue attention and that indescribable guilt. I wanted to somehow become invisible.”
Source: Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir
“There the tree rises. Oh pure surpassing!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh great tree of sound!
And all is silent, And from this silence arise
New beginnings, intimations, changings.
From the stillness animals throng, out of the clear
Snapping forest of lair and nest;
And thus they are stealthy not from cunning
Not from fear
But to hear. And in their hearts the howling, the cry,
The stag-call seem too little. And where before
Was but the rudest shelter to receive these,
A refuge fashioned out of darkest longing
Entered, tremulo, the doorpost aquiver, -
There You have fashioned them a temple for their hearing.”
Source: Sonnets to Orpheus