She really was pretty, for a grown-up person, but when you are seven, beauty is an abstraction, not an imperative. I wonder what I would have done if she had smiled at me like that now: whether I would have handed my mind or my heart or my identify to her for the asking, as my father did.
Like colors or a spring tree against that kind ofblue sky that pulls your heart out through your eyes. Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.
She stood by the tea-table in a light-coloured muslin gown, which had a good deal of pink about it. She looked as if she was not attending to the conversation, but solely busy with the tea-cups, among which her round ivory hands moved with pretty, noiseless, daintiness.
That's the worst thing they do to you, to any of you. Whatever those brain lesions are all about, the worst damage is done before they even pick up the knife: You're all brainwashed into believing you're ugly.
They're brainless girls, otherwise they wouldn't be seen dead here. They're pretty, with ugly, appealing smiles and conversations we can't hear. They breathe smoke and blow it out, and words drop from their mouths and get crushed to the floor. Or they get discarded, just to glow with warmth for a moment, for someone else to tread on later.
That is just what life is when it is beautiful and happy - a game! Naturally, one can also do all kinds of other things with it, make a duty of it, or a battleground, or a prison, but that does not make it any prettier...
I wish he would look at me the way he looks at his subjects. Because then he'd see there's more to me than shy, just like I see there's more to him than slacker
Around 2 a.m. the snow started to fall. It was quite a lovely view and I breathed it in like I only do when I truly love something, and there was a small sadness creeping in through my chest because I knew I would have to leave it, go back to my basement with no stars in sight. But I pushed it aside because those moments are rare and I'm happy because now I know this place exists and that's all you need sometimes. You need to know that lovely places exist and you can go there, when things go wrong, and it's a place of solace.
She was still glad she looked like Scully. He wasn't pretty either, but pretty people weren't the kind you need. Pretty people saw themselves in the mirror and were either too happy or too sad. People like Billie just shrugged and didn't care. She didn't want to turn into anyone pretty. Anyway, she had scars now, you only had to look.
His smiles were hard won, but when they came, they were well worth it. They lit up his face like summer sunshine. The rest of the time, and far more frequently, he seemed lost in winter. And when he laughed, he was a different person.
Why hoard away so many back-issues of People Magazine? Fashion magazines are just empty promises. You can go bankrupt blowing all your cash on expensive beauty products, but the only way you'll ever look just like the people on those glossy front covers is if you know how to use computer editing software for photographs. Besides, people who think they are ugly, are never really all that ugly anyway. People who think they are pretty, are rarely ever all that pretty.
They peered at him with their shining honey warm molasses-brown eyes. Their smiles, the white smiles pinned to their faces, were wide as all of summer.
She'd have the two of them eating out of her shoe. I've watched her in action, but I could never get away with it. And, I console myself, being cute hasn't made her all that happy.
"Her mother's injunction on competing with other girls is a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down: "You just have to be smarter than the ones who are prettier and prettier than the ones who are smarter"