Sweetness Quotes (page 13)
In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarm failed to yield up its treasures, the fault was mine, not his. If my eyes swooned shut while I read The Sweet Cheat Gone, Proust’s pacing was never called into question, just my intelligence and dedication and sensitivity. And I still entertain these sacralizing preconceptions about high art. I still admire what is difficult, though I now recognize it as a “period” taste and that my generation was the last to give a damn. Though we were...
Edmund White
What hope is here for modern rhyme
To him, who turns a musing eye
On songs, and deeds, and lives, that lie
Foreshorten'd in the tract of time?
These mortal lullabies of pain
May bind a book, may line a box,
May serve to curl a maiden's locks;
Or when a thousand moons shall wane
A man upon a stall may find,
And, passing, turn the page that tells
A grief, then changed to something else,
Sung by a long-forgotten mind.
But what of that? My darken'd ways
Shall ring with music all the...
Alfred Lord Tennyson
...he could feel the earth beneath, all the deep stone of it, cool and hard near the surface of the earth, but hotter and softer as you went deep, until it flowed like honey, a vast sweet fiery ocean of molten rock a thousand times more voluminous and ten thousand times heavier than the sea. It felt to him as if it were his own blood, and his heart pumped it.
Orson Scott Card
Fear is an unavoidable element of the mortal condition. Creation in all its ravishing beauty, with its infinite baroque embellishments and subtle charms, with all the wonders that it offers from both the Maker and the made, with all its velvet mystery and with all the joy we receive from those we love here, so enchants us lack we lack the imagination, less than the faith, to envision an even more dazzling world beyond, and therefore even if we believe, we cling tenaciously to this existence,...
Dean Koontz
[Wendy has just become the Lost Boys' mother] Peter: Discipline. That's what fathers believe in. We must spank the children immediately before they try to kill you again. In fact, we should kill them. Wendy: Father. I agree that they are... perfectly horrid, but... kill them and they should think themselves... important. The Lost Boys: So important, Peter. Curly: And unique. Wendy: I, propose something far more dreadful. Medicine. The sticky, sweet kind. The Lost Boys: Kill us, Peter.
J. M. Barrie
I meet you. I remember you. Who are you? You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. How could I know this city was tailor-made for love? How could I know you fit my body like a glove? I like you. How unlikely. I like you. How slow all of a sudden. How sweet. You cannot know. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. You’re destroying me. You’re good for me. I have time. Please, devour me. Deform me to the point of ugliness. Why not you? Why not you in this city and in this night, so like other...
Marguerite Duras
O brother, the gods were good to you. Sleep, and be glad while the worldendures. Be well content as the years wearthrough; Give thanks for life, and the loves andlures; Give thanks for life, O brother, anddeath, For the sweet last sound of her feet, herbreath, For gifts she gave you, gracious andfew, Tears and kisses, that lady of yours.
Algernon Charles Swinburne
THE FOX AND THE CROWA Crow was sitting on a branch of a tree with a piece of cheese in her beak when a Fox observed her and set his wits to work to discover some way of getting the cheese. Coming and standing under the tree he looked up and said, "What a noble bird I see above me! Her beauty is without equal, the hue of her plumage exquisite. If only her voice is as sweet as her looks are fair, she ought without doubt to be Queen of the Birds." The Crow was hugely flattered by this, and just...
Aesop
He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odor, its form, its title. What he loved in a manuscript was its old illegible date, the bizarre and strange Gothic characters, the heavy gilding which loaded its drawings. It was its pages covered with dust? dust of which he breathed the sweet and tender perfume with delight.
Gustave Flaubert