“For one moment, Beauty knew terror. But a delicious abandon took hold of her.”
Source: The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
“In the morning Beauty awoke knowing she had dreamt again of her prince, but unable to remember any particulars of the dream. There were only the words echoing in her mind, the tone a mixture of urgent warning and ardent plea: "Do not trust appearances.”
Source: Trompe l'Oeil: Beauty and the Beast Retold
“Her looks would make even her own mirror feel insecure.”
Source: Losing our Marbles?
“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