“What a man seeks is beauty, plain and simple. No other way to put it. The rustle of her clothes, her scent. The sweep of her hair across his naked stomach ( . . . ) That the man knows not how to even name that which enslaves him hardly lightens his burden.”
Source: The Passenger
“He was more beautiful than words can say, and Aschenbach felt painfully, as he had often done, that words are able to praise physical beauty but not to reproduce it.”
Source: Death in Venice
“Pleasure is our deep human response to an encounter with beauty and goodness. In these moments of pleasure—of delight, enjoyment, awe, and revelry—we respond to God impulsively with our very bodies: "Yes, we agree! Your creation is very good.”
Source: Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
“It is no accident that the psalmist enjoins us to taste and see that the Lord is good—not simply to reason or confess that God is good, but to taste it. My body, this tea, and the quiet twilight are teaching me God's goodness through my senses. I'm tasting, hearing, feeling, seeing, and smelling that God is good.”
Source: Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
“Being curators of beauty, pleasure, and delight is therefore an intrinsic part of our mission, a mission that recognizes the reality that truth is beautiful.”
Source: Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life
“This was one of her glorious moments. She felt a wonderful lightness of spirit—a soul-stirring joy in mere existence. The creative faculty, dormant through the wretched month just passed, suddenly burned in her soul again like a purifying flame. It swept away all morbid, poisonous, rankling things. All at once Emily knew that Ilse had never done that. She laughed joyously—amusedly.”
Source: Emily Climbs
“To produce a masterpiece requires grand ideas, unswerving commitment to the dream, years of sweat and pain…Such beauty does not come cheaply.”
Source: The Stone Cutter: A novel of Petra In Ancient Arabia
“She stands there until she realizes she is waiting. Waiting for someone to help. To come and fix the mess she's in. But no one is coming. No one remembers, and if she resigns herself to waiting, she will wait forever.
So she walks.
And as she walks, she studies Paris. Makes note of this house, and that road, of bridges, and carriage horses, and the gates of a garden. Glimpses roses beyond the wall, beauty in the cracks.”
Source: The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
“Adorned and yet exposed. It was mystifying.”
Source: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
“If one wanted beauty, one had only to rest one's eyes on her, so fine and old and lovely, like an ivory carving; flowing down like water into her chair, so slight and supple were her limbs, the firelight casting a flush of rose over her features and snowy hair. Youth had no beauty like the beauty of an old face; the face of youth was an unwritten page. Youth could never sit as still as that, in absolute repose, as though all haste, all movement, were over and done with, and nothing left but waiting and acquiescence.”
Source: All Passion Spent