#ugliness

Which natural gift would you most like to possess? The ability to master other languages (which would have hugely enhanced the scope of these answers). How would you like to die? Fully conscious, and either fighting or reciting (or fooling around). What do you most dislike about your appearance? The way in which it makes former admirers search for neutral words. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#death #languages #polyglots #questionnaires #talents

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. ↗

— J.D. Salinger

#ugliness #humor

Beauty he loved for its own sake; ugliness, which more often than not was a form of inverted beauty, fascinated him. Life offered far too little of either, and far too much appalling mediocrity, which he thought hideous. ↗

— Lloyd Biggle Jr.

#life #mediocrity #ugliness #ugly #beauty

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. ↗

— Jane Jacobs

#dishonest #disorder #even #exist #ignoring

That was' one time when my technique absolutely deserted me, I must admit. There was a wax face that he had created himself to cover his own ugliness. I was in his clutches and I had to hit him in the face. ↗

— Fay Wray

#admit #clutches #cover #created #deserted

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. ↗

— Tom Robbins

#beauty #social-injustice #ugliness #art

Time takes the ugliness and horror out of death and turns it into beauty. ↗

— Dodie Smith

#death #horror #into #out #takes

الجمال والقبح ليسا في ذات الأشياء ، ولكنهما في الذات التي تتعامل مع الأشياء ، وفي الظرف الذي تكون فيه الأشياء ↗

— تركي الحمد

#novel #things #ugliness #beauty

The ugliest thing in the world is a beautiful woman without the brains or courage to know that [beauty] is nothing more than an accident. ↗

— Charlie Fletcher

#beauty #courage #ugliness #beauty

That's the world out there, little green apples and infectious disease. ↗