On Beauty
Beauty, after all, is almost always a matter of angles and resolve. Urban renewal projects were accomplished so frantically it seemed like time-lapse photography.
Gabrielle Zevin • Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow: A novel
It tends not to be young couples in love who stop to admire a weathered brick wall or the descent of a banister towards a hallway, a disregard for such circumscribed beauty being a corollary of an optimistic belief in the possibility of attaining a more visceral, definitive variety of happiness.
Alain de Botton • The Architecture of Happiness (Vintage International)
is good-looking in a kind of unhappy way.
David Foster Wallace • A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
I would say that most of our experiences of ourselves are quite deeply irrational. If you stop a couple in the street and say to them, why are you married? You are not going to get a rational answer from them. You’re going to get murmurings, some sentimental, some partially logical, some apologetic, some unsure.
Zadie Smith • Opinion | Zadie Smith on Populists, Frauds and Flip Phones
Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.