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002657a
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Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.
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ugliness
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Neal Stephenson |
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fc051e9
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I know it's not clothes that make women beautiful or otherwise, nor beauty care, nor expensive creams, nor the distinction of costliness of their finery. I know the problem lies elsewhere. I don't know where. I only know it isn't where women think.
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ugliness
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Marguerite Duras |
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c963721
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Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.
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face
humor
mirror
ugliness
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P.G. Wodehouse |
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1a903d2
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I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.
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beauty
good
ugliness
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John Fowles |
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560ec4c
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Is there any creature on earth as unfortunate as an ugly woman? (wonders Lady Catelyn Stark)
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ugliness
woman
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George R.R. Martin |
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f801002
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However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?
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description
emotion
observation
passion
people
personality
psychology
sincerity
ugliness
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Honoré de Balzac |
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345669d
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Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors--the living--could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs--those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact--had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome. The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you your life?
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causes
childhood
christian-martyrs
christianity
comrades
conscription
death
fanaticism
friends
kamikaze
martyrdom
martyrs
masochism
memorials
november
orwell
patriotism
poppies
principles
religion
sacrifice
self-abnegation
self-importance
soldiers
suicide
suicide-attack
theocracy
torture
ugliness
war
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Christopher Hitchens |
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afbce8c
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She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.
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paradox
ugliness
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Truman Capote |
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10834d5
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I thought the two ugly ones were sisters, but they got very insulted when I asked them. You could tell neither one of them wanted to look like the other one, and you couldn't blame them, but it was very amusing anyway.
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ugliness
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J.D. Salinger |
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c4b8cff
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Because the child must have a valuable thing which is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination.
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imagination
ugliness
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Betty Smith |
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f1c4edb
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Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.
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children
ugliness
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Ray Bradbury |
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def9c1b
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The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words.
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death
languages
polyglots
questionnaires
talents
ugliness
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Christopher Hitchens |
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a8d431c
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I didn't want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness.
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body-dysmorphic-disorder
clothes
mirrors
ugliness
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Franz Kafka |
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a3cb3f9
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There are more nasty things in pretty packages in the world than most people would believe.
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ugliness
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Mercedes Lackey |
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Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it.
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beauty
social-injustice
ugliness
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Tom Robbins |
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406a1e2
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That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease.
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good-and-evil
humanity
infectious-diseases
summary
ugliness
world
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Don DeLillo |
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2c8b8e5
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When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it makes you take a closer look at your own.
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tears
ugliness
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John D. MacDonald |
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d57d80b
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"Her eyes, always sad, now looked into the mirror with particular hopelessness. "She's flattering me," thought the princess, and she turned away and went on reading. Julie, however, was not flattering her friend: indeed, the princess's eyes, large, deep, and luminous (sometimes it was as if rays of light came from them in sheaves), were so beautiful that very often, despite the unattractiveness of the whole face, those eyes were more attractive than beauty. But the princess had never seen the good expression of thise eyes, the expression they had in moments when she was not thinking of herself. As with all people, the moment she looked in the mirror, her face assumed a strained, unnatural, bad expression."
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ugliness
unattractiveness
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Leo Tolstoy |
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I don't mind [being ugly], do you?
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ugliness
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George Eliot |
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How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?
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powerless
sadness
suffering
ugliness
why
world
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Gustave Flaubert |
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e8aa1e8
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A stab had clearly once been made at de-uglifying these public spaces by painting a corridor a jaunty yellow. This was because, it turned out, babies come here to have their brains tested and someone thought the yellow might calm them. But I couldn't see how. Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.
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buildings
cadaver
humor
oppression
oppressive
ronald-mcdonald
ugliness
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Jon Ronson |
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c2f786d
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Intelligence and effort can be no compensation for ugliness.
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ugliness
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Hanif Kureishi |
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"In some of the early northern European paintings, Christ looks like you flushed him out from under a bridge, but in Sunday-school books and the sorts of pictures they sell at Christian supply stores, he falls somewhere between Kenny Loggins and Jared Leto, always doe-eyed and, of course, white, with brown--not black--hair, usually wavy. And he always has a fantastic body, shown at its best on the cross, which--face it--was practically designed to make a man's stomach and shoulders look good. What would happen, I often wonder, if someone sculpted a morbidly obese Jesus with titties and acne scars, and hair on his back? On top of that, he should be short--five foot two at most. "Sacrilege!" people would shout. But why? Doing good deeds doesn't make you good-looking." --
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ugliness
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David Sedaris |