“And are you in love? And are you happy? And do you sometimes write a poem? And have you had your hair cut? And have you met anybody of such beauty your eyes dance, as the waves danced,”
— Virginia Woolf, from a letter to Quentin Bell written c. February 1930 (via violentwavesofemotion)
“I will leave my mouth between your legs, my soul in a photographs and lilies, and in the dark wake of your footsteps, my love, my love, I will have to leave violin and grave, the waltzing ribbons .”
— Federico García Lorca, excerpt of Little Viennese Waltz
(via antigonick)
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
—
C. S. Lewis (b. 29 Nov 1898), from “The Weight of Glory,” in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses
“jolie-laide”
— (idiom) Only the French would have such a way to describe beauty. A wonderful slang expression, it literally means “pretty and ugly” but describes the type of feminine beauty that is human, and not manufactured by plastic surgeons. It’s a kind of fascinating quirkiness implying charisma, a face you want to keep looking at, even if you can’t decide whether it is beautiful or not. (via wordsnquotes)
“There is a Japanese word for things made more beautiful by use, that bear the evidence of their own making, or the individuating marks of time’s passage: a kind of beauty not immune to time but embedded in it.””
— Mark Doty /
Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
(via herpaperweight)
“The Mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite different from the tragedy of fogs. Certain evenings at the base is the seaside mountains, night falls over the flawless curve of a little bay, and there rises from the silent waters a sense of anguished fulfillment. In such spots one can understand that if the Greeks knew despair they always did so through beauty and its stifling quality.”
— Albert Camus, Helen’s Exile (via evmousia)
“Glancing upon the empty chariot, that of the sun Goddess, that she was, in her auroral beauty; my heart, it touched the Grecian seas and couldn’t help but boast the immortal love that I harbored in my bosom for her pale gold feet, the way she had taken my heart replacing it with her immortal kiss, in which I laid, unknowing, that desires can sometimes be the fatality of Kingdoms.”
“You morning-star, Godchild of Aphrodite, miracle of beauty,”
— Alexander Pushkin, from The Collected Works; “To Olga Masson,”
“She is a beauty. Yes, a marble nymph; angelic eyes, unearthly lips…”
— Alexander Pushkin, from The Collected Works; “A Suite of Lighted Rooms,” (via violentwavesofemotion)
“I am athirst for thy beauty; I am hungry for thy body; and neither wine nor apples can appease my desire.”
— Oscar Wilde, Salome (trans. Lord Alfred Douglas)
