Exquisite Quotes - Page 9

• The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Dance, Art

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• ~I've learned the value of absorbing the moment. I remember the first time Ripley saw her shadow. My God, it was like shadows had just been invented. It was the most exquisite moment.~

  Thandie Newton

  Parenting, Shadow, Saws

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• One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love - to serve the loved one without his knowing it - is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

  Simone Weil

  Life, Knowing, Atheism

  Simone Weil (2015). “First and Last Notebooks: Supernatural Knowledge”, p.84, Wipf and Stock Publishers

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• Everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken atwill from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness.

  James Branch Cabell

  Life, Tasks, Useless

  James Branch Cabell (1930). “The Cream of the Jest: The Lineage of Lichfield, Two Comedies of Evasion”

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• If the divine creator has taken pains to give us delicious and exquisite things to eat, the least we can do is prepare them well and serve them with ceremony.

  Fernand Point

  Pain, Food, Taken

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• Pressing his thumb down on her jaw to part her lips, he kissed her again, angel dust glittering in the air. "Mmm." She rubbed against him. "Did you make a change to your special blend?" Angel dust, he'd told her, was normally rich and exquisite, but not sexual. Elena had only ever tasted Raphael's blend, and it was always oh-so-sexual-today, it also held a dangerous bite. Kisses down her throat. "I wouldn't wish my consort to suffer ennui.

  Nalini Singh

  Angel, Kissing, Air

  Nalini Singh (2013). “Archangel's Legion”, p.46, Penguin

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• It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.

  Thomas Harris

  Congratulations, Self, Monsters

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• Enjoy that?' Tanith said with a little grin. Valkryie grinned back, her eyes bright. 'I keep telling Skulduggery he should get a bike.' What does he say?' He says people who wear leathers, like you, should ride motorbikes. People who wear exquisite suits, like him, should drive Bentleys.

  Derek Landy

  Eye, People, Suits

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• If all we are allowed is hours, minutes, I want to be able to etch each of them on to my memory with exquisite clarity so that I can recall them at moments like this, when my very soul feels blackened.

  Jojo Moyes

  Memories, Soul, Want

  Jojo Moyes (2010). “The Last Letter from Your Lover”, p.117, Hachette UK

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• For those who know the value of and exquisite taste of solitary freedom (for one is only free when alone), the act of leaving is the bravest and most beautiful of all.

  Isabelle Eberhardt

  Beautiful, Leaving, Taste

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• Well, I’ve had my fun; I’ve had it, he thought, looking up at the swinging baskets of pale geraniums. And it was smashed to atoms—his fun, for it was half made up, as he knew very well; invented, this escapade with the girl; made up, as one makes up the better part of life, he thought—making onself up; making her up; creating an exquisite amusement, and something more. But odd it was, and quite true; all this one could never share—it smashed to atoms.

  Virginia Woolf

  Girl, Fun, Creating

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.161, Wordsworth Editions

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• The Ego is an exquisite instrument. Enjoy it, use it--just don't get lost in it.

  This is quotes copyright © By Pumpkin Limited

  Ram Dass

  Spiritual, Wisdom, Ego

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• Sin ought to be something exquisite, my dear boy.

  Emile Zola

  Boys, Sin, Dear

  Emile Zola (2007). “The Kill”, p.141, Modern Library

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• The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly.

  Wallace Stevens

  Believe, Finals, Fiction

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “Opus Posthumous: Poems, Plays, Prose”, p.244, Vintage

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• When he takes the knife to the canvass the servants find him lying dead with a knife through is heart and "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage." and the portrait "in all the wonders of his exquisite youth and beauty." p 349

  Oscar Wilde

  Lying, Heart, Knives

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• Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Writing, Years

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• His lies were so exquisite I almost wept.

  Dave Eggers

  Lying, Deceit

  Dave Eggers (2007). “What Is the What”, p.196, Vintage

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• What is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones.

  Carl Sagan

  Hands, Ideas, Two

  "The Burden of Skepticism". The Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 12, Issue 1, www.csicop.org. Fall 1987.

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• He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

  Virginia Woolf

  Dream, Memories

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1058, Delphi Classics

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• Shut the door, they're coming through the window, shut the window, they're coming through the door," are the words to an old song. They fit my lifestyle with newly arriving butcher/censors every month. Only six weeks ago, I discovered that, over the years, some cubby-hole editors at Ballantine Books, fearful of contaminating the young, had, bit by bit, censored some 75 separate sections from the novel. Students, reading the novel which, after all, deals with censorship and book-burning in the future, write to tell me of this exquisite irony.

  Ray Bradbury

  Song, Book, Reading

  Ray Bradbury (2012). “Fahrenheit 451: A Novel”, p.210, Simon and Schuster

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• I envy you your peace of mind, your clean conscience, your unpolluted memory. Little girl, a memory without blot of contamination must be an exquisite treasure-an inexhaustible source of pure refreshment: is it not?

  Charlotte Bronte

  Girl, Memories, Envy

  Charlotte Bronte (2013). “Jane Eyre”, p.173, Simon and Schuster

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• A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

  Milan Kundera

  Beauty, Fashion, Laughter

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• In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful. Men yearn for poetry though they may not confess it; they desire that joy shall be graceful and sorrow august and infinity have a form, and India fails to accommodate them.

  E. M. Forster

  Beautiful, Men, August

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• Did you ever, in that wonderland wilderness of adolesence [sic] ever, quite unexpectedly, see something, a dusk sky, a wild bird, a landscape, so exquisite terror touched you at the bone? And you are afraid, terribly afraid the smallest movement, a leaf, say, turning in the wind, will shatter all? That is, I think, the way love is, or should be: one lives in beautiful terror.

  Truman Capote

  Beautiful, Love Is, Thinking

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• Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me.

  C. S. Lewis

  Jobs, Writing, Wonderful

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