beauty
In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable—which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.
Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 197.
The abstract beauty of Japanese art issues from the abstract beauty of their lives. They do not like clutter. They like to look at one flower at a time, one painting, one pot. They have a storage house for the objects of art which are not being displayed.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (Vol 7, 1966–1974) (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 22.
Another thing we have in common was good, solid, loving, and companionate marriages. On one of our car trips, I complained over the useless, trivial hyperactivity of my eyes gazing at women. At any conference, or in an airport on the way, I find myself continually checking out the beauty of young women, dwelling on figures and faces. It disturbed me that I wasted time and energy evaluating quarries I would never mine. Wendell agreed explosively, as if he had been waiting for someone to bring up the subject. He suffered from this idle habit himself, and found himself in lecture halls doing inventories of the female audience. One day, he told me, he saw one face that was absolutely perfect and irresistible to him. It was a few seconds before he realized that his eyes had lighted on his wife, Tanya.
“The Best Noise in the World,” in Wendell Berry: Life and Work edited by Jason Peters (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 46.
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
Herzog (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), 237.
We find a delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.
“Illusions,” in The Conduct of Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1904), 316.
“Well, I am pretty,” replied Charlotte. “There’s no denying that. Almost all spiders are rather nice-looking. I’m not as flashy as some, but I’ll do.”
Charlotte’s Web (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), 37.
An echo is often more beautiful than the voice it repeats.
Sebastian Melmoth (London: Arthur L. Humphreys, 1905), 131.
Being a poet, divining beauty, is like divining nature—a gift. It does not matter if one does not create. It is enough to have the poetic vision. To see the beauty hidden. As I did tonight, hearing someone whistle in the distance as I stood by an open window. I felt all kinds of moods of streets at night, of walking with loved women, of the dark blue and whiteness, and the strange, magical desertion of streets at night. I felt it all exactly in a moment, such a rush of impressions that they can hardly be seized. Algernon Blackwood: “To feel like a poet is not to be a poet.” True, yet, poetry making is not necessarily the printing of words. It is a philosophical outlook, an epicureanism, a hedonism.
John Fowles, entry dated September 24, 1949, in The Journals: Volume One 1949–1965 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 4.
Only in this sun-steeped country can a heavy table, a wicker chair, an earthenware jar crowned with flowers, and a dish whose thick enameling has run over the edge, make a complete furnishing.
Break of Day (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001), new introduction by Judith Thurman, 62.
Beauty is worth saving. An impractical, beautiful dirt road with a shading canopy can nourish a person’s mind and spirit, and people who are fed by the lovely aspects around them enrich the life of any town.
“Country Road,” in Settled in the Wild: Notes from the Edge of Town (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books, 2010), 124.
Doing beautiful things is its own reward. If you do something that you’re proud of, that someone else understands, that is a thing of beauty that wasn’t there before—you can’t beat that.
“Penn and Teller Interview,” Telegraph, by Benjamin Secher, July 9, 2010.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Only press on: no feeling is final.
From The Book of Hours in The Poetry of Rilke, trans. and ed. by Edward Snow (New York: North Point Press, 2009), 33.