Exquisite Quotes - Page 12

• Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Execution, Language

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

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• We are herding the young in that direction so that they are not sitting still and contemplating, Goddamn it, a page of exquisite prose by Charles Dickens, which is filled with rage about poverty and the need of a household to survive. That's not in the table for consideration now. And people don't understand that beautiful rage of Dickens because they don't share it. They haven't got time to worry about an oppressed culture, a subclass.

  Frederick Busch

  Beautiful, Sitting Still, Worry

  Source: www.identitytheory.com

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• Everyone had always told me I had to see alpine flowers, since I was writing about flowers, and I had never seen these. So I happened to be teaching a class at the University of Colorado, and I got to go for hikes that took me there. But my perspective was most often down at ground level, trying to see quite tiny exquisite flowers.

  Martha Ronk

  Flower, Teaching, Writing

  Source: www.raintaxi.com

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• My verses, I cannot say poems. . . . I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.

  Dorothy Parker

  Sneakers, Missing, Horrible

  Dorothy Parker (1996). “The Uncollected Dorothy Parker”, Bloomsbury Academic

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• We should learn from the snail: it has devised a home that is both exquisite and functional.

  Frank Lloyd Wright

  Home, Should, Snail

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• The difference between the Japanese and the American is summed up in their opposite reactions to the proverb (popular in both nations), "A rolling stone gathers no moss." Epidemiologist S. Leonard Syme observes that to the Japanese, moss is exquisite and valued; a stone is enhanced by moss; hence a person who keeps moving and changing never acquires the beauty and benefits of stability. To Americans, the proverb is an admonition to keep rolling, to keep from being covered with clinging attachments.

  Carol Tavris

  Moving, Opposites, Differences

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• If love was a choice, who would ever choose such exquisite pain?

  Margaret Landon

  Pain, Choices, Ifs

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• Suffering accepted and vanquished. . . . will give you a serenity which may well prove the most exquisite fruit of your life.

  Desire-Joseph Mercier

  Sadness, Giving, Serenity

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• The exquisite order displayed by our scientific understanding of the physical world calls for the divine.

  Vera Kistiakowsky

  Science, Order, Design

  "Evolution through the Back Door". www.freerepublic.com. June 15, 2003.

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• The complete novelist would come into the world with a catalog of qualities like this. He would own the concentration of a Trappist monk, the organizational ability of a Prussian field marshal, the insight into human relations of a Viennese psychologist, the discipline of a man who prints the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin, the exquisite sense of timing of an Olympic gymnast, and by the way, a natural instinct and flair for exceptional use of language.

  Leon Uris

  Prayer, Men, Discipline

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• So in writing, there is always a right word, and every other than that is wrong. There is no beauty in words except in their collocation. The effect of a fanciful word misplaced, is like that of a horn of exquisite polish growing on a human head.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Writing, Growing, Horns

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1992). “The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.376, University of Missouri Press

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• The spectacle of Nature is always new, for she is always renewing the spectators. Life is her most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Nature, Experts, Life Is

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• I held a blue flower in my hand, probably a wild aster, wondering what its name was, and then thought that human names for natural things are superfluous. Nature herself does not name them. The important thing is to know this flower, look at its color until the blends becomes as real as a keynote of music. Look at the exquisite yellow flowerettes at the center, become very small with them. Be the flower, be the trees, the blowing grasses. Fly with the birds, jump with a squirrel!

  Sally Carrighar

  Real, Flower, Names

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• We may remark in passing that to be blind and beloved may, in this world where nothing is perfect, be among the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. The supreme happiness in life is the assurance of being loved; of being loved for oneself, even in spite of oneself; and this assurance the blind man possesses. In his affliction, to be served is to be caressed. Does he lack anything? no. Possessing love he is not deprived of light. A love, moreover, that is wholly pure. There can be no blindness where there is this certainty.

  Victor Hugo

  Life, Men, Light

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• I'm with the president nearly every day. We engage in complex conversations about some of the most weighty matters facing the world. I deliver to him this exquisite product that's been developed by my officers. He engages in a way that shows his understanding of the complexity. He asks really hard questions. He delivers policy outcomes based on the information that we provide him. My observation of the president is that, we deal in serious matters.

  Mike Pompeo

  Understanding, President, World

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• I have occasionally had the exquisite thrill of putting my finger on a little capsule of truth, and heard it give the faint squeak of mortality under my pressure.

  E. B. White

  Truth, Giving, Thrill

  E. B. White (1989). “The Letters of E. B. White”, Perennial

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• Good manners on a man are like wearing an exquisite suit. They never go out of style

  Coco Chanel

  Men, Good Man, Style

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• Since my stroke, I have begun to see so many miracles all around me. I look out of the window in my room: verdant grass, silver-tipped oak leaves, tall palm trees gentle swaying as they reach to the sky, masses and masses of roses. All colors, so many shapes, exquisite fragrances.

  Kirk Douglas

  Sky, Color, Rose

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• A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

  Rose Macaulay

  Freedom, Hot, Austerity

  Rose Macaulay (2011). “Personal Pleasures”, p.101, A&C Black

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• We can rest contentedly in our sins and in our stupidities, and anyone who has watched gluttons shoveling down the most exquisite foods as if they did not know what they were eating will admit that we can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

  C. S. Lewis

  Pain, Stupidity, World

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• Look up at the miracle of the falling snow,—the air a dizzy maze of whirling, eddying flakes, noiselessly transforming the world, the exquisite crystals dropping in ditch and gutter, and disguising in the same suit of spotless livery all objects upon which they fall.

  John Burroughs

  Fall, Weather, Air

  John Burroughs (2012). “In the Catskills Selections from the Writings of John Burroughs”, p.16, tredition

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• When the first-rate author wants an exquisite heroine or a lovely morning, he finds that all the superlatives have been worn shoddy by his inferiors. It should be a rule that bad writers must start with plain heroines and ordinary mornings, and, if they are able, work up to something better.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Morning, Lovely, Ordinary

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• Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home, the delicious retirement of dependent love.

  Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

  Retirement, Home, Life Is

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• Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.

  Henry James

  Artist, Circles, Problem

  'Roderick Hudson' (1877) preface

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• It is at once by way of poetry and through poetry, as with music, that the soul glimpses splendors from beyond the tomb; and when an exquisite poem brings one's eyes to the point of tears, those tears are not evidence of an excess of joy, they are witness far more to an exacerbated melancholy, a disposition of the nerves, a nature exiled among imperfect things, which would like to possess, without delay, a paradise revealed on this very same earth.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Eye, Imperfect Things, Poetry

  "L'art romantique". Book by Charles Baudelaire, 1869.

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