#symmetry

Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33) ↗

— Tim Willocks

#apple #asymmetry #atlantic #autumn #blind-man

The universe is built on a plan the profound symmetry of which is somehow present in the inner structure of our intellect. ↗

— Paul Valery

#inner #intellect #our #plan #present

Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. ↗

— Derek Walcott

#fragments #granted #love #stronger #symmetry

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness. ↗

— E. T. Bell

#art #creative #feeling #fitness #generality

Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature. ↗

— Camille Paglia

#against #flux #freezes #giving #halts

It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend at once both the ensemble and the details. ↗

— Henri Poincare

#both #clearly #comprehend #details #diverse

So that ideas of sort of relaxed symmetry have been something for years that I have been concerned with because I think that symmetry is a neutral shape as opposed to a form of design. ↗

— Robert Rauschenberg

#been #concerned #design #form #i

I don't know if it's a sign of all the chaos that is happening out there or not, but I've lately craved the structure and order of classical music, the balance and symmetry. ↗

— Helen Reddy

#chaos #classical #classical music #craved #happening

If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world. ↗

— Dave Van Ronk

#music #real #real world #related #see

Take a sound from whatever source, a note on a violin, a scream, a moan, a creaking door, and there is always this symmetry between the sound basis, which is complex and has numerous characteristics which emerge through a process of comparison within our perception. ↗

— Pierre Schaeffer

#basis #between #characteristics #comparison #complex