A Quote by Ian Mcewan

...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation.

Ian Mcewan

Quote Topics

Band Beauty Discovered Had Hand Infinite Narrow She Ugliness Variation

Quote Author

Ian Mcewan
British - Novelist
Born: June 21, 1948

Beauty is, in some way, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages... a beautiful object must always follow certain rules. A beautiful nose shouldn't be longer than that or shorter than that, on the contrary, an ugly nose can be as long as the one of Pinocchio, or as big as the trunk of an elephant, or like the beak of an eagle, and so ugliness is unpredictable, and offers an infinite range of possibility. Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God.

Umberto Eco

The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks. She spent half her time in thinking of beauty, bravery, magnanimity; she had a fixed determination to regard the world as a place of brightness, of free expansion, of irresistible action, she thought it would be detestable to be afraid or ashamed. She had an infinite hope that she would never do anything wrong. She had resented so strongly, after discovering them, her mere errors of feeling.

Henry James

The woman had a humble, cringing manner. Of course, she had discovered that, having neither money nor virtue, she had better be humble if she knew what was good for her.

Jean Rhys

My mother had never had a day's illness in her life and never thought to have checks. Then, at 78, she discovered she had breast cancer and passed away the next year. But if she'd had a check two years before, they could have done something about it, they could have saved her.

Rick Wakeman

She had witnessed the world's most beautiful things, and allowed herself to grow old and unlovely. She had felt the heat of a leviathan's roar, and the warmth within a cat's paw. She had conversed with the wind and had wiped soldier's tears. She had made people see, she'd seen herself in the sea. Butterflies had landed on her wrists, she had planted trees. She had loved, and let love go. So she smiled.

Sonya Hartnett

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly.

Truman Capote

She looked at her hand: Just some hand, holding a cheap pen. Some girls’ hand. She had nothing to do with that hand. Let that hand do whatever it wanted to.

Cynthia Voigt

I have no right to beauty. I had been condemned to masculine ugliness.

Renee Vivien

I had a ten-piece band when I was 21 years old, the Bruce Springsteen Band. This is just a slightly expanded version of a band I had before I ever signed a record contract. We had singers and horns.

Bruce Springsteen

The ugliness of the beauty is much horrible than the ugliness of the ugliness.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

Nobody ever discovered ugliness through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.

Susan Sontag

Then she had been a fiancee, a young wife, and a mother, and she had discovered that these words were far too small ever to contain the experience.

Kim Edwards

After the loss of my sister - my darkest time - I tried to think of the beauty she'd brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind.

Susanna Kearsley

Even at the age of eight she would fall asleep by pressing one hand into the other and making believe she was holding the hand of the man whom she loved, the man of her life. So if in her sleep she pressed Tomas hand with such tenacity, we can understand why: she had been training since childhood.