“Everything is as utterly vain as stirring up cold ashes, as insubstantial as the moment just before dawn.
And the light shines serenely and perfectly forth from things, gilds them with a smiling, sad reality. The whole mystery of the world appears before my eyes sculpted from this banality, this street.
Ah, how mysteriously the everyday things of life brush by us! On the surface, touched by light, of this complex human life, Time, a hesitant smile, blooms on the lips of the Mystery! How modern all this sounds, yet deep down it is so ancient, so hidden, so different from the meaning that shines out from all of this.”
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“Oh God, I thank You for having created me as I am. I thank You for the sense of fulfillment I sometimes have; that fulfillment is after all nothing but being filled with You. I promise You to strive my whole life long for beauty and harmony and also humility and true love, whispers of which I hear inside me during my best moments.”
Source: An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941-1943; and Letters from Westerbork
“He kept his eyes on mine, his gaze unblinking, and I stared right back into the blue. He moved almost imperceptibly and in the space between a heartbeat his lips touched mine.”
Source: Hunting Lila
“But now I wanted nothing more than to be the girl so free that fireflies shined as her night-lights, cicadas sang her symphonies, and the forest stood as her cathedral.”
Source: The Last Carolina Girl
“Looking at the wingless angel Harold firmly believed her shadow should be in color.”
Source: Harold
“When beauty ends, the beauty of deeds remains.”
“There is something romantic about feeding a predator from the palm of your hand, I think- a creature which might bite you if it chooses, but chooses not to. But how does one turn such awful beauty to lead and ink on a page?”
Source: Our Hideous Progeny
“Funny, the thing that hooks you. It’s not always the eyes or the wifely parts; sometimes it’s just the curve of a well-made arm against dark oak.”
Source: The Blacktongue Thief
“People do want to be young and beautiful. When they meet in the street, male or female, if they're getting older they look at each other's face a little ashamed. It's clear they want to say, Excuse me, I didn't mean to draw attention to mortality and gravity all at once. I didn't want to remind you, my dear friend, of our coming eviction, first from liveliness, then from life. To which, most of the time, the friend's eyes will courteously reply, My dear, it's nothing at all. I hardly noticed.”
Source: A Grace Paley Reader: Stories, Essays, and Poetry
“She looked at the rounded buttocks of those made to kneel; she loved their polished chests, the muscularity of their limbs, and above all, perhas, the nobility of suffering in their handsome faces.”
Source: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty