By Category: Looks & Beauty

“Shadows nestled in his cheekbones, as if in love with them.”

-I Was a Teenage Fairy, Francesca Lia Block

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“She was too thin for a Titian or a Renoir but she contrived a pale, smug Cranach Venus with a bit of net curtain would round her head and the necklace of cultured pearls they gave her when she was confirmed at her throat. After she read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, she secretly picked forget-me-nots and stuck them in her pubic hair.”

-The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter

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“The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she was made of flesh and blood. O, my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park. For hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe; she would follow with her finger the elegant structure of her rib-cage, where the heart fluttered under the flesh like a bird under a blanket, and she would draw down the long line from breast-bone to navel (which was a mysterious cavern or grotto), and she would rasp her palms against her bud-wing shoulderblades. And then she would writhe about, clasp herself, laughing, sometimes doing cartwheels and handstands out of sheer exhilaration at the supple surprise of herself now she no longer a little girl.”

-The Magic Toyshop, Angela Carter

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“From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.”

-The High Window, Raymond Chandler

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“'For that couple of minutes she symbolized everything that is wrong with how we perceive beauty as a society, she was the store bought ideal that drives girls to bulimia and anorexia. She was the skinny thinspiration that helps thirteen year olds put off eating for just one more day, and so I walked over and punched her.'”

-Lockpick Pornography, Joey Comeau

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“The Architect, by the relationships which he creates he wakes in us profound echoes, he gives us the measure of an order which we feel to be in accordance with that of our world, he determines the various movements of our heart and of our understanding; it is then that we experience the sense of beauty.”

-Le Corbusier

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“Youth is beauty
Money is beauty
Hell, beauty is beauty sometimes.”

-Cradle and All, Ani DiFranco

Recommended by ariasna.

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“Her face is a map of remembered trouble and absorbed guilt, The green eyes look broken, as if their glass has shattered. A motorway pile-up of wrecked mascara. Lashes jewelled with tears.”

-I, Lucifer, Glen Duncan

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“Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.”

-White Oleander, Janet Fitch

Recommended by annalise.

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“His eyes were focused upon a spot of brilliant color on the roof of a house farther down the alley.It was a girl in a red negligé, silk surely, drying her hair by the still hot sun of late afternoon. His whistle died upon the stiff air of the room; he walked cautiously another step nearer the window with a sudden impression that she was beautiful. ...He watched her for several minutes. Something was stirred in him, something not accounted for by the warm smell of the afternoon or the triumphant vividness of red. He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful--then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever know.”

-The Beautiful And The Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald

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“...and Lactamaeon, second in command of Yr, whispered If one is to be doomed, one must be beautiful, or the drama is only a comedy. And therefore, Unbeautiful...”

-I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Joanne Greenberg

Recommended by drenchedinwine.

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“The hollows around her eyes were darkly glamorous, her mouth sullen: she had the beauty of an insomniac.”

-Here Kitty Kitty, Jardine Libaire

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“The hussar looked at Anna, and her face burned and then went cold, because she understood that before that time she had never pleased anyone in the way that she pleased the young horseman, and yet she'd not spoken, and she didn't know what it meant, to delight a man only by the way she appeared, to be looked at as if time was running backwards and he'd come face to face with his dearest memory before she was a memory, knowing her completely in an instant and unknowing her in a life.”

-The People's Act of Love, James Meek

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“Skin is beautiful, don't ruin it with scars just because your life isn't as beautiful. For once life becomes beautiful to you again, your skin wont be so beautiful anymore.”

-Meg

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“Beauty never slumbers;
All is in her name;
But the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.”

-Autumn Chant, Edna St. Vincent Millay

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“Sometimes, while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride - and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look - a gray furry question mark of a look: 'Oh no, not again' (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours - how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and - 'Pulease, leave me alone, will you,' you would say, 'for Christ's sake leave me alone.' And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.”

-Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov

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“There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark.”

-Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

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“I might be down in the dumps a hundred times, but each time I would clamber out again to good coffee on a lacquered tray beside an open fire. Each time I would clamber out to silk stockings and perfume. Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.”

-Henry and June, Anaïs Nin

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“Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. 'Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?' she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything.”

-Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Joyce Carol Oates

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“From her lips ampersands and percent signs
Exit like kisses.
It is Monday in her mind: morals

Launder and present themselves.
What am I to make of these contradictions?
I wear white cuffs, I bow.”

-An Appearance, Sylvia Plath

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“Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may.”

-Symposium, Plato

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“...Ursula begins penciling in her own face, emphasizing and even exaggerating those features of which she was ashamed as a teenager and of which she now makes a point of being proud: the ridge on which her eyebrows are set, her muscular jawline, the elongated slope between her nose and her upper lip. It's important to have these features, she thinks, for the same reason it's important to live in a cramped apartment with a lumpy futon. With a face like this, in a place like that, she's never in danger of feeling glamorous. She can sit on a pile of moldy pillows on the floor of her windowless living room, so dark the ceiling lamp needs to be on in the middle of the day, and she can pull up the hem of her nightshirt, as she did this afternoon, and look down at her thighs and not feel sexy, not feel attractive at all, feel quite unattractive, in fact, whereas if she were on a white couch in a spacious room with oversized windows and sunlight warming her thighs, who knows? She might look at those legs and think of those legs' being looked at and think of herself as being sexy and even glamorous, too. Because glamour is a matter of context. And white, empty space, as she learned from her pile of out-of-date library books, is the number-one glamour cue in advertisements. Anything placed on a white, empty background is instantly glamorized, be it a perfume bottle, a watch, a hair-care product, an upscale toothpaste, or a woman's body. This was what Ivy wanted, white space, nothing but white and space. Ursula marveled at all that white space when she went to break the lease on her sister's apartment, too white and spacious for Ursula herself to afford. A white couch, a bed with white sheets, a small white table and white chairs, symmetrically placed amid four white walls: Ivy aspired to the absolute zero of glamour. Her ideal was to have no context at all, only weightlessly to crowd-surf on an endless sea of strangers who would hold, fondle, and pass along every facet of her glamorous existence. A kind of utterly passive immortality.”

-The Savage Girl, Alex Shaker

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“Boys are just boys after all, but sometimes girls really seem to be the turn of a pale wrist, or the sudden jut of a hip, or a clutch of very dark hair falling across a freckled forehead. I'm not saying that's what they really are. I'm just saying sometimes it seems that way, and that those details (a thigh mole, a full face flush, a scar the precise shape and size of a cashew nut) are so many hooks waiting to land you.”

-The Girl With Bangs, Zadie Smith

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“Everyday you can see
Changes in her hair and smile
I can wait a million days
While her smile goes away

Sometimes I feel dizzy
By the slices in her hands
Secrets in her lipstick mouth
Shining on again.”

-Roseblood, Mazzy Star

Recommended by Doodle.

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“Beauty is terror.
Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.
And what could be more terrifying and beautiful,
to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely?
To throw off the chains of being for an instant,
to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?”

-The Secret History, Donna Tartt

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