Beauty Underneath Quotes

Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).

His hand rested above my hip, having a totally different impact on me. My skin tingled underneath the chiffon. Daemon cleared his throat as he glanced away. 'You...you look beautiful, by the way. Really too good to be with that idiot.

Beauty's only skin deep. Everybody has ugly days. We're all made of the same stuff underneath. Acting right is better than looking right. Realize what make you special beyond looks. Evil can look pretty on the outside.

You never knew Lyanna as well as I did Robert, you saw her beauty, but not the iron underneath

People always want to know what it feels like, so I’ll tell you: there’s a sting when you first slice, and then your heart speeds up when you see the blood, because you know you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, and yet you’ve gotten away with it. Then you sort of go into a trance, because it’s truly dazzling—that bright red line, like a highway route on a map that you want to follow to see where it leads. And—God—the sweet release, that’s the best way I can describe it, kind of like a balloon that’s tied to a little kid’s hand, which somehow breaks free and floats into the sky. You just know that balloon is thinking, Ha, I don’t belong to you after all; and at the same time, Do they have any idea how beautiful the view is from up here? And then the balloon remembers, after the fact, that it has a wicked fear of heights. When reality kicks in, you grab some toilet paper or a paper towel (better than a washcloth, because the stains don’t ever come out 100 percent) and you press hard against the cut. You can feel your embarrassment; it’s a backbeat underneath your pulse. Whatever relief there was a minute ago congeals, like cold gravy, into a fist in the pit of your stomach. You literally make yourself sick, because you promised yourself last time would be the last time, and once again, you’ve let yourself down. So you hide the evidence of your weakness under layers of clothes long enough to cover the cuts, even if it’s summertime and no one is wearing jeans or long sleeves. You throw the bloody tissues into the toilet and watch the water go pink before you flush them into oblivion, and you wish it were really that easy.

I gaze out at the glittering sea, the breathtaking sky above it, and think of birds and the moment before the fall, and how my sister as a child had been strong enough for the both of us, and I wonder when exactly that changed. I don't know when, but it did. Jake was right - I'm strong in a way June never was. Because I know that I want to be here. Even with the pain. Even with the ugliness. I've seen the other side - marching side by side down city streets with people who all believe they can change the world and the view of the sunset from Fridgehenge and Tom Waits lyrics and doing the waltz and kisses so hot they melt into each other and best friends who hold your hand and stretching out underneath a sky draped with stars and everything else. There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive. I don't want to miss a second.

Jem said something then, in a language she didn’t understand. It sounded like “khalepa ta kala.” She frowned at him. “That isn’t Latin?” “Greek,” he said. “It has two meanings. It means that that which is worth having—the good, fine, honorable, and noble things—are difficult to attain.” He leaned forward, closer to her. She could smell the sweet scent of the drug on him, and the tang of his skin underneath. “It means something else as well.” Tessa swallowed. “What’s that?” “It means ‘beauty is harsh’.

Schuyler put a gentle hand on Abbadon's feathered extensions, feeling the majestic power underneath their silky weight. She had been frightened once, to see him in this light, but now that she saw his terrifying face, she found it beautiful.

For Sayonara, literally translated, 'Since it must be so,' of all the good-bys I have heard is the most beautiful. Unlike the Auf Wiedershens and Au revoirs, it does not try to cheat itself by any bravado 'Till we meet again,' any sedative to postpone the pain of separation. It does not evade the issue like the sturdy blinking Farewell. Farewell is a father's good-by. It is - 'Go out in the world and do well, my son.' It is encouragement and admonition. It is hope and faith. But it passes over the significance of the moment; of parting it says nothing. It hides its emotion. It says too little. While Good-by ('God be with you') and Adios say too much. They try to bridge the distance, almost to deny it. Good-by is a prayer, a ringing cry. 'You must not go - I cannot bear to have you go! But you shall not go alone, unwatched. God will be with you. God's hand will over you' and even - underneath, hidden, but it is there, incorrigible - 'I will be with you; I will watch you - always.' It is a mother's good-by. But Sayonara says neither too much nor too little. It is a simple acceptance of fact. All understanding of life lies in its limits. All emotion, smoldering, is banked up behind it. But it says nothing. It is really the unspoken good-by, the pressure of a hand, 'Sayonara.

If she were (looking into my eyes), she’d have seen how absolutely floored I was the first time I finally, truly saw her. The clouds moved at just the right moment, fully lighting her face by the moon. She was dazzlingly beautiful. Underneath thick lashes were eyes blue as ice, something cool to balance out the flames in her hair. I felt a strange flutter in my chest, like the glow of a fireplace or the warmth of the afternoon. It stayed there for a moment, playing with my pulse.

She's got mascara smeared underneath her eyes, some of which is still on my pillowcase. Her hair is in disarray. Her ponytail holder in on the sheet beside her. She looks like hell. A beautiful hell

There is no father,’ he said eventually, ‘And I believe you’re running away from something. You’re a lovely woman trying to hold it all together but it’s too much for you. You think I’m a stupid old man who doesn’t care what he looks like and sits here day after day with nothing to do. And doesn’t notice anything. But you don’t know what’s here inside …’ he laid his arm across his chest, ‘My soul and my heart and my mind. There is so much in here it’s bursting and roving around the world like a lost soul with no home, endlessly looking and searching. I feel the mystery, I sense the mysteries – and the endless joy and the wonder and incredible beauty of the world and the pain and the cruelty. You feel all this too Sarah, but you pretend you’re a shallow woman with some sort of story, and underneath you think about … many things. Which of my books are you itching to get your hands on, huh? And you’re carrying the pain around with you, and something has just happened, and you are worried and, something has happened in the last few minutes and it’s all more than you can bear, and you need to tell me, yes me, Samuel. I am so much more than you think I am, and I can understand, and I can help.’ Ruby looked up startled and their eyes met. ‘I am so tired,’ she said, ‘Yes, you are right. I am so very tired of it all.' 

I'd always thought that my awkwardness was a thin veil disguising the real me. The me that was funny and could write songs that touched people. The me that would one day find some beautiful, intelligent boy who'd recognize me as his soul mate. The me who was secretly pretty and stylish if only someone would lift the veil and see. But I was beginning to suspect that underneath the awkwardness there was just more awkwardness and not much else. And that would explain why I stood in a room full of people and felt like the loneliest girl in the world.

Grace: Outside, deep in the woods, I heard a long keening wail, and then another, as the wolves began to howl. More voices pitched in, some low and mournful, others high and short, an eerie and beautiful chorus. I knew my wolf's howl; his rich tone sang out above others as if begging me to hear it. My heart ached inside me, torn between wanting them to stop and wishing they would go on for ever. I imagined myself there among them in the golden woods, watching them tilt their heads back and howl underneath a sky of endless stars. I blinked a tear away, feeling foolish and miserable, but I didn't go to sleep until every wolf had fallen silent.

I just stood there and looked up at Rush. When I’d first laid eyes on him I’d been awed at his beauty. Never had I thought that the moody playboy could have a heart the size of his underneath all that swagger. “What changed you? You’re so completely different than that guy I met back in June,” I said, smiling at his confused face. Rush reached out and slipped his hand into my hair and tangled his fingers around the strands. “This sweet, determined, sexy-as-hell blonde walked into my life and gave me a reason to live.

London - beautiful, immortal London - has never been a 'city' in the simplest sense of the word. It was, and is, a living, breathing thing, a stone leviathan that harbours secrets underneath its scales. It guards them covetously, hiding them deep within its body; only the mad or the worthy can find them.

She strived for perfection. She loved setting herself tasks, sometimes impossible ones, to prove to her heart that underneath every seemingly ugly thing there was something beautiful inside.

Put me underneath God's sky and know me don't just look at me with your eyes Take away this mask of flesh and bone and see me for my soul alone

I went to this beautiful place where the ground moved underneath me and the air was a part of me, and where time stopped. It was amazing and wonderful. But God sent me back, back to my body, back to you. - Lindsey Water

I watched, enthralled, as he painted a large silver heart with flames edging one side. The whole design was Celtic in style. It was beautiful. "Where did you get that from?" I asked in awe. I'd seen a lot of his work but never anything like this. His eyes were on his heart, completely caught up in his work. "Just something kicking around in my head. Reminds me of you. Fiery and sweet, all at the same time. A flame in the dark, lighting my way." His voice... his words... I recognized one of his spirit-driven moments. It should've unnerved me, but there was something sensual about the way he spoke, something that made my breath catch. A flame in the dark. He swapped out the silver paintbrush for a black one. Before I could stop him, he wrote over the heart: AYE. Underneath it, in smaller letters, he added: HONORARY MEMBER.

There is a pain you can’t think your way out of. You can’t talk it away. If there was someone to talk to. You can walk. One foot the other foot. Breathe in breathe out. Drink from the stream. Piss. Eat the venison strips. And. You can’t metabolize the loss. It is in the cells of your face, your chest, behind the eyes, in the twists of the gut. Muscles, sinew, bone. It is all of you. When you walk you propel it forward. When you let the sled and sit on a fallen log and. You imagine him curling in the one patch of sun maybe lying over your feet. Then it sits with you, the Pain puts its arm over your shoulders. It is your closest friend. Steadfast. And at night you can’t bear to hear your own breath unaccompanied by another and underneath the big stillness like a score is the roaring of the cataract of everything being and being torn away. Then. The Pain is lying beside your side, close. Does not bother you with sound even of breathing.

I can feel the darkness inside him. There’s something wrong with him. His outer beauty hides something monstrous underneath.

Can you even understand what a beautiful life is? It isn’t about the perfect house and a keeping-up-with-the-Jones’s new car every two years and having the right landscaper and bragging at parties that you have a house cleaner. Not when all that stuff is shit. It’s surface. There’s nothing underneath.

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room. Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure. If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it.... It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me. I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun. We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the yard again. Marvel was what she did at all the flowers and herbs and budding weeds. Marveling was what she mostly did after she came back- at the twists life took. And my parents gave my leftover possessions to the Goodwill, along with Grandma Lynn's things. They kept sharing when they felt me. Being together, thinking and talking about the dead, became a perfectly normal part of their life. And I listened to my brother, Buckley, as he beat the drums. Ray became Dr. Singh... And he had more and more moments that he chose not to disbelieve. Even if surrounding him were the serious surgeons and scientists who ruled over a world of black and white, he maintained this possibility: that the ushering strangers that sometimes appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes, that he had called Ruth by my name, and that he had, indeed, made love to me. If he ever doubted, he called Ruth. Ruth, who graduated from a closet to a closet-sized studio on the Lower East Side. Ruth, who was still trying to find a way to write down whom she saw and what she had experienced. Ruth, who wanted everyone to believe what she knew: that the dead truly talk to us, that in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe. Now I am in the place I call this wide wide Heaven because it includes all my simplest desires but also the most humble and grand. The word my grandfather uses is comfort. So there are cakes and pillows and colors galore, but underneath this more obvious patchwork quilt are places like a quiet room where you can go and hold someone's hand and not have to say anything. Give no story. Make no claim. Where you can live at the edge of your skin for as long as you wish. This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.

Criticizing people, winding them up, making idiots of them or fooling them doesn't make people with autism laugh. What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory makes us laugh. This generally happens when there's nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet, or roar with later in an empty room ... When we don't need to think about other people or anything else, that's when we wear our aural expressions.

They were dismantling their habits and routines, and it was like pulling up floorboards and finding joy underneath.

...when things are very beautiful and comfortable on the surface, it can be harder to see the ugliness underneath.

People say that Kashmir was crafted by God’s own hand. He molded the high mountains and hills that stretch as far as the eye can see, purified the crystal blue rivers and lakes, and painted the grass with His brush. He’s kept its beauty fresh ever since, a slice of heaven on earth. I don’t believe that. I think God forgot about us a long time ago. The aesthetic countryside is nothing but a facade, an illusion. Underneath the land’s mirage of beauty lies the truth, and this truth is the one thing the people of Kashmir understand above all else: suffering.

I didn't know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up. The only think I could compare it to was the feeling I got one time when I walked from the peach stand and saw the sun spreading across the late afternoon, setting the top of the orchard on fire while darkness collected underneath. Silence had hovered over my head, beauty multiplying in the air, the trees so transparent I felt like I could see through t something pure inside them. My chest ached then, too, this very same way.

For a long time, when I was a little younger, I thought that was how every girl saw other girls— this mix between beauty and awe and curiosity, a thin layer of lust just underneath. Took until I was fourteen to realize that no, the way I thought about other girls was a little different.

When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again. So what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvellous promise of less than a three-day resurrection.

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in color, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colors of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword. She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light.

The moment you accept what troubles you've been given, the door will open. Welcome difficulty as a familiar comrade. Joke with torment brought by the friend. Sorrows are the rags of old clothes and jackets that serve to cover, then are taken off. That undressing and the beautiful naked body underneath is the sweetness that comes after grief. The hurt you embrace becomes joy.

What's underneath is everything. But that doesn't mean you can't enhance it. Beauty has its own kind of magic. And the appearance of something can have power too

At night, when we were little, we tented Bailey's covers, crawled underneath with our flashlights and played cards: Hearts, Whist, Crazy Eights, and our favourite: Bloody Knuckles. The competition was vicious, All day, every day, we were the Walker Girls - two peas in a pod thick as thieves - but when Gram closed the door for the night, we bared our teeth. We played for chores, for slave duty, for truths and dares and money. We played to be better, brighter, to be more beautiful, more, just more. But it was all a ruse - we played so we could fall asleep in the same bed without having to ask, so we could wrap together like a braid, so while we slept our dreams could switch bodies. (Found written on the inside cover of Wuthering Heights, Lennie's room)

Steam rising underneath a canopy of whispering, changing aspens; starlight in the clear, dark night, and wondrous beauty in every direction. If only all could feel this way, to be so captured and enthralled with autumn.

Listen, I know there were days you wanted to die when the sky was so clear you’d stand obnoxious underneath it begging for stars to shoot you just so you could feel at home. I know about the ways you misplaced all the right words, stockpiled every important social cue you ever missed from the first time you learned you were wrong, waited to make it right once everyone stopped watching. I know you let them beat up your beauty in bed because redemption was still alive in you, howling relentless, gathering strength. Felt like ecstasy when they pounded it out of you in the hard dark. Those days of dead weather got all strung together and they spoke for you, wore you down to telling everyone here it was a good life so you could run back into the wails of your windfight. I know the parts of your past that haunt you the most are the days you weren’t being yourself, and I know that’s why most of your past haunts you. There were so many who found you out, and they were right. You were good. So un- numb.

The soft rush of taxis by him, and laughter, laughters hoarse as a crow's, incessant and loud, with the rumble of the subways underneath - and over all, the revolutions of light, the growings and recedings of light - light dividing like pearls - forming and reforming in glittering bars and circles and monstrous grotesque figures cut amazingly on the sky.

The Windhover To Christ our Lord I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king- dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier! No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

I started to murmur my own spell, but I found myself thinking not of roses but of water, and thirsty ground; building underneath his magic instead of trying to overlay it.

I think I like this...being the only one here who knows the beautiful secret that lies underneath these little brown masks

What’s the point of you? Try this, for starters. And underneath there’s a long list. He’s written a long, long list, that fills the page. I’m so flustered, I can’t even read it properly, but as I scan down I catch beautiful smile and great taste in music (I sneaked a look at your iPod) and awesome Starbucks name. I give a sudden snort of laughter that almost turns to a sob and then turns to a smile, and then suddenly I’m wiping my eyes. I’m all over the place.

There was a very nice boy once who said, "Don't worry, Laura. I know you're really very sweet and gentle underneath." And another with, "You're strong, like an earth mother." And a third, "You're so beautiful when you're angry." My guts on the floor, you're so beautiful when you're angry. I want to be recognized.

You are my life.” Though his words were barely a whisper, they seemed to echo from somewhere deep within him, enveloping my body and infusing me with something unshakable. “There is nothing I would not do to make you happy. Before I met you, my world was a string of days that were gray and empty. I had nothing to look forward to, and I cannot tell you what it was like, facing down eternity alone. Every day I wished for you. Every day I held on in hopes that eventually we would meet. And when I finally found you...” He leaned in and kissed me again, astenderly as before. His hand slid underneath my shirt, splaying across my stomach, but the touch wasn’t sexual. It was as if he were trying to memorize me, just as I was trying to memorize him. “I have existed for more eons than I remember. I have seen the sun rise and fall so many times that the days lost all meaning. For so long, they passed me by in a blur. But that night we met by the river—the night you gave up yourself in order to save a virtual stranger—my heart began to beat again.” He took my hand and pressed it against his chest, and there it was—thump thump, thump thump, strong and beautiful. I would’ve given anything to keep his heart beating. The black abyss that had become my world in those hours I’d thought he was dead had faded, but it was a scar I would always bear. I couldn’t go back to that. Even if I had Milo, I would never have another Henry.

Walt Whitman (1819–1892). Leaves of Grass. 1900. To You WHOEVER you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams, I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands; Even now, your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you, Your true Soul and Body appear before me, They stand forth out of affairs—out of commerce, shops, law, science, work, forms, clothes, the house, medicine, print, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying. Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem; I whisper with my lips close to your ear, I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you. O I have been dilatory and dumb; I should have made my way straight to you long ago; I should have blabb’d nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you. I will leave all, and come and make the hymns of you; None have understood you, but I understand you; None have done justice to you—you have not done justice to yourself; None but have found you imperfect—I only find no imperfection in you; None but would subordinate you—I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you; I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself. Painters have painted their swarming groups, and the centre figure of all; From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color’d light; But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color’d light; From my hand, from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you! You have not known what you are—you have slumber’d upon yourself all your life; Your eye-lids have been the same as closed most of the time; What you have done returns already in mockeries; (Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?) The mockeries are not you; Underneath them, and within them, I see you lurk; I pursue you where none else has pursued you; Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom’d routine, if these conceal you from others, or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me; The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others, they do not balk me, The pert apparel, the deform’d attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside. There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you; There is no virtue, no beauty, in man or woman, but as good is in you; No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you; No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you. As for me, I give nothing to any one, except I give the like carefully to you; I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you. Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! These shows of the east and west are tame, compared to you; These immense meadows—these interminable rivers—you are immense and interminable as they; These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution—you are he or she who is master or mistress over them, Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution. The hopples fall from your ankles—you find an unfailing sufficiency; Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself; Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted; Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

I do remember that as a young girl I prayed for beauty. I'd lie in bed, squeeze my eyes shut, and concentrate so hard that I broke out in a sweat underneath the covers. I believed that for God to take you seriously, you had to make your mind as blank as possible and then focus on the expanding spots of light behind your eyelids and think only of the one thing you desperately wished for.

Michael, this is an order from your mistress. Tell me what you want. Now.” “I want Griffin.” The words came out immediately. She had trained him too well. “I want Griffin so much it hurts. I love him, Nora. I have never felt anything like this before. And it’s absolutely stupid because he’s rich and he’s perfect and amazing and I’m a nobody. I’m a nobody, and I’m in love with someone I can’t be with. He’s so beautiful. I can’t stop looking at him, I can’t stop thinking about him. I dream about him at night. And he’s the first thing I think about when I wake up. And I want to touch him so much. I want to touch his face and that fucking perfect hair of his. And his lips and his chest and his arms— and I think about those arms around me, and it’s humiliating how much I want that. And, God, I want to live in his bed. I want to spend the rest of my life underneath him. I want to feel him on top of me and inside me. And I want submit to him. I want to go down on my knees in front of him. I want to call him sir and wear his collar and kiss his fucking feet if he told me to. And I want to walk down the busiest street in New York with him holding hands so the entire world can see us together and know that I belong to him. I love Griffin, Nora. I’m in love with him. And I can’t be with him. But that’s… that’s it.” Michael turned his head and buried it a little deeper into the cleft of Nora’s neck and shoulder. He wanted to stay there so he wouldn’t have to look her or anyone in the eyes ever again. “You won’t tell him, will you?” “She doesn’t have to.

You feel ugly, you feel used, you feel broken you feel bruised. Ahh but me, I can see all the beauty underneath. You've been robbed of love and pride. Been ignored and cast aside. Even so, I still know there is beauty underneath. Diamonds never sparkled bright, if they are they are set just right. Beauty sometimes goes unseen. -Phantom

I curled into a ball underneath my thick comforter, and inhaled through my nose; Travis’ scent still lingered on my skin. The bed felt cold and foreign, a sharp contrast to the warmth of Travis’ mattress. I had spent thirty days in a cramped apartment with Eastern’s most infamous tramp, and after all the bickering and late-night houseguests, it was the only place I wanted to be.

every experience will fill with immediacy. Because I love this, I am never bored. Beauty constantly wells up like the noise of springwater in my ear. Tree limbs rise and fall like ecstatic arms. Leaf sounds talk together like poets making fresh metaphors. The green felt cover slips; we get a flash of the mirror underneath. The conventional opinion of this poetry is that it shows great optimism for the future. But Father Reason says, No need to announce the future. This now is it. Your deepest need and desire is satisfied by this moment’s energy here in your hand.

Lingerie is my next love after clothing; I think it is what is worn underneath that really inspires a woman to feel beautiful in her clothes - that inner, secret glamour.

All I see in hindsight is the chaos of history repeated, over and over, re-enacted, reinterpreted, the world, it’s fucked-up heart palpitating underneath us, failing, messing up again and again as it wound its way around a sun, and in the middle of it all, tribes, families, people, all beautiful things falling apart, debris, dust, erasure.

The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason, but the blue at the horizon, the blue of land that seems to be dissolving into the sky, is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. For many years, I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that color of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The color of that distance is the color of an emotion, the color of solitude and of desire, the color of there seen from here, the color of where you are not. And the color of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.

So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together -if and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.

Let me begin with a caveat to any and all who find these pages. Do not trust large bodies of water, and do not cross them. If you, dear reader, have an African hue and find yourself led toward water with vanishing shores, seize your freedom by any means necessary. And cultivate distrust of the colour pink. Pink is taken as the colour of innocence, the colour of childhood, but as it spills across the water in the light of the dying sun, do not fall into its pretty path. There, right underneath, lies a bottomless graveyard of children, mothers and men. I shudder to imagine all the Africans rocking in the deep. Every time I have sailed the seas, I have had the sense of gliding over the unburied. Some people call the sunset a creation of extraordinary beauty, and proof of God's existence. But what benevolent force would bewitch the human spirit by choosing pink to light the path of a slave vessel? Do not be fooled by the pretty colour, and do not submit to its beckoning.

We have been tarnished by the views of generations, painted on with society's standards, but if we wipe away the dust, and polish the heart within, you will discover that the surface underneath is lustrous.

The sun is beautiful, long and low on the horizon like it’s stretching itself, like it’s shaking off a nap, and I know underneath this weak winter light is the promise of days that last until eight P.M. and pool parties and the smell of chlorine and burgers on the grill; and underneath that is the promise of trees lit up in red and orange like flames and spiced cider, and frost that melts away by noon – layers upon layers of life, always something more, new, deeper.

Underneath it, he had snuck out of the house wearing a T-shirt that said I’M WITH STUPID, with arrows pointing in all different directions. It pretty much summed up how I was feeling today, too. Surrounded by stupid.

Mira moved into the light like a sleepwalker, leaving Blue behind in the dust, the unused room, the past. She thought of the fabled hundred years that cursed girls like her had slept, and how, after that much time, everything would be covered by a thick blanket of dust, including the princess. The intrepid prince would have to trust that something beautiful was hidden underneath. He'd kiss her and the first color to be revealed would be the chapped pink of her lips. Her eyes went to Freddie, playing his guitar and lit by the sun. She couldn't picture him kissing a girl coated by dust - he was too alive for that. He was golden. And she ... she was covered with death, with her grief over her parents. She'd tried to replace them with dreams, and she'd drifted through life in a haze, her eyes seeking ghosts instead of the world around her. She was already asleep. She had been for a long time.

If you could imagine the color of anger, it had been splashed over every wall. Rage, something dense and seething, was hanging from every chandelier, resentment woven into thick carpets padding the room, hatred flickering underneath every lampshade. The floor was bathed in a creeping shadow, a particular darkness that had seeped up into the walls.......

He drew in a breath and all the seasons were in it; spring greenness in the grass, and somewhere a dog-rose blooming; the secretive scent of fungus clinging to the oak, and underneath it all something sharper waiting in a promise of winter.

Rowing is like a beautiful duck. On the surface it is all grace, but underneath the bastard’s paddling like mad!

It certainly was a most beautiful insect. It was pale blue underneath; but its back was glossy black with huge red spots on it.

Trav knew the real boy underneath, and he was three times as beautiful as the image.

The streets were quiet and dark, and the air was oddly warm and still, and on the quays the office buildings were all lit up inside, and empty, and underneath everything, beneath the surface of everything, I began to feel it all over again--the nearness, the possibility of beauty, like a light radiating softly from behind the visible world, illuminating everything.

Edward stood, motionless as a statue, just a few feet from the mouth of the alley. His eyes were closed, the rings underneath them deep purple, his arms relaxed at his sides, his palms turned forward. His expression was very peaceful, like he was dreaming pleasant things. The marble skin of his chest was bare―there was a small pile of white fabric at his feet. The light reflecting from the pavement of the square gleamed dimly from his skin. I'd never seen anything more beautiful―even as I ran, gasping and screaming, I could appreciate that. And the last seven months meant nothing. And his words in the forest meant nothing. And it did not matter if he did not want me. I would never want anything but him, no matter how long I lived.

My dad was waiting for us in baggage claim, standing amid all the limo drivers in suits holding signs printed with the last names of their passengers: JOHNSON, BARRINGTON, CARMICHAEL. Dad had a sign of his own. MY BEAUTIFUL FAMILY, it read, and then underneath that (AND GUS).

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible – the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green.

But Daniel wouldn't kiss her the way she wanted.The closer she pressed to him, the farther back he leaned. Finally he pushed her away completely. He held on only to her hands, as if the rest of her were dangerous. "Lady." He kissed the very tips of her fingers, making her shiver. "Would I be too bold to say your love makes you unmannerly?" "Unmannerly?" Luce blushed. Daniel took her back into his arms, slowly, a bit nervously. "Good Lucinda, you must not find yourself in this place dressed as you are." His eyes kept returning to her dress. "What clothes are these? WHere is your costume?" He reached into a wardrobe and flicked through the clothes pegs. Quickly,Daniel began to unlace his boots, tossing them on the floor with two thuds. Luce tried not to gape when he dropped his trousers.He wore short gray pantaloons underneath that left very little to the imagination. Her cheeks burned as Daniel briskly unbuttoned his white shirt. He yanked it off,exposing the full beauty of his chest.Luce sucked in her breath. The only things missing were his unfurled wings. Daniel was so impeccably gorgeous-and he seemed to have no idea of the effect he was having on her by standing there in his underwear. She gulped,fanning herself. "Is it hot in here?

The world kept slipping out from underneath Chaol's feet, so much so that he grabbed a handful of dirt just to remember where he was and that this was real, not some nightmare. Dorian. His friend; unharmed, but--but not Dorian. Not even close to Dorian, as the prince smirked at that beautiful, white-haired witch. The face was the same, but the soul gazing out of those sapphire eyes had not been created in this world. Chaol squeezed the dirt harder. He had run. He had run from Dorian, and let this happen. It hadn't been hope that he carried when he fled, but stupidity. Aelin had been right. It would be a mercy to kill him.

Umm,” he moaned, as he started his rhythmic movements underneath me; raising me up and down with his hands at the speed and tempo he wanted. I leaned forward a bit so that my breasts were brushing against his chest; my hands gripped his shoulders as the heat of our lovemaking increased. He raised me up and down; up and down; my hips gyrated in a circular motion making sure the head of his beautiful cock was hitting my magic spot over and over again. My whimpers of pleasure were getting louder; his breathing was coming faster…

You guys…your family really is its own world.” He slid his hand up her side, underneath the sweater. “You know what?” “What?” Her hand landed on his chest. Lucian guided her back until she was lying on the couch as he rose above her. Those beautiful whiskey-colored eyes met his. “I want you in this world – my world.

I want to do for every aspect of the human world a little bit of what Charles Darwin did for biology, and get you to see past the illusion of design, to see the emergent, unplanned, inexorable and beautiful process of change that lies underneath.

Christian’s expression remained polite, almost disinterested, while Luisa talked, but there was nothing disinterested about the way his eyes held mine. Dark and knowing, like they could strip away every mask I showed the world and find the broken pieces of the girl hiding underneath. Like they thought the brokenness was beautiful anyway.

This time, the seat went over quicker than usual and I hurtled backwards, coming to rest with my head among some Wellingtons and my knees tucked underneath my chin. A row of surprised faces peered in at me through the back window, but soon, willing hands were helping me up and the trick seat was placed upright on its rockers again. I wondered how long it had been like that and if my employer had ever thought of having it fixed. We

He was dangerous. Dangerous like water. He could seem calm and glassy on top but underneath he was all dark silt and weed.

Find what is beautiful in a person and appreciate it. Ignore what is wrong. Everyone has divine beauty but underneath can be a hidden diabolical ego.

we are all flowers underneath the same sun we bloom in an array of colors. shapes. sizes. -this is what makes the garden so beautiful

Beauty always fades, but it lasts so much longer if you lay a thick layer of intelligence and integrity underneath it.

If you're trying to find a dating partner, then if you don't put too much focus on looks, neither will they, and you'll find someone who's a good person and who’ll appreciate the good person in you. You will find someone who thinks you're beautiful and it doesn't matter what people who don't see that think and who can't see the real person underneath your skin suit.

It is so tenuous, so fragile, the life of the playhouses. He often thinks that, more than anything, it is like the embroidery on his father's gloves: only the beautiful shows, only the smallest part, while underneath is a cross-hatching of labour and skill and frustration and sweat.

In the dynamics of the main family of the story, a rising socialist in England's postwar government expects his grandparents to be pleased that the local aristocrat's garden is commandeered to allow the people to get coal underneath. Instead, the grandparents grieve because the garden represents something more than a resource to be divided. It is a symbol of community and beauty.

What makes us smile from the inside is seeing something beautiful, or a memory that makes us laugh. This generally happens when there’s nobody watching us. And at night, on our own, we might burst out laughing underneath the duvet, or roar with laughter in an empty room … when we don’t need to think about other people or anything else, that’s when we wear our natural expressions.

I want to come down," Nic said suddenly. "It's OK, Nic. You're fine. Just take it slowly." "I can't," he called. "I'm stuck." "You can," I said. "You can do it." "I can't get down." He began crying. "Take your time," I said. "Find one foothold at a time. Go slowly." "I can't." "You can." He wrapped his gangly legs and arms tighter around the branch. "I'll fall." "You won't." "I will." I stood directly underneath and yelled up to him, "You're fine. Take your time." I said it, but I was thinking, I'll catch you if you fall.

I’m sure you remember our first encounter, the morning in the kitchen in North Carolina, and what a disaster it turned out to be,” Carmine said. “What you don’t know, though, is that as we sat like idiots in that puddle of juice, all I could think about was how beautiful you were. How beautiful you are. You were scared and confused, and I know I wasn’t helping that, but underneath it all you were just beautiful, Haven. You had me the very first time I laid eyes on you. I remember thinking later that morning you were going to complicate my life.” He paused as he laughed to himself. “And complicate it you did. Everything I knew, everything I believed . . . all of it went out the window. You turned me upside down and made me feel again. You saved my life, even though I didn’t realize it needed to be saved. I thought I was fine, that I didn’t need anyone else, but I was wrong, because I do. I need you. Christ, I—” He grasped her chin gently and leaned forward, her eyes drifting closed as their lips came together. His kiss was sweet but there was passion behind it . . . passion she looked forward to feeling for the rest of her life.

I can’t think of anything to write, I’m just walking around here between the lines, underneath the light of your eyes, in the breath of your mouth like in some beautiful happy day, which stays beautiful and happy even if my head is sick, tired.

My fairest Daphne, Treasure of my eyes, Pearl of my heart, Whose beauty is as lovely, As a blooming laurel tree in spring, With eyes as green as sparkling emeralds, And hair as bright as a burning fire, At first sight, this fair maiden captured my heart, As she silently sat there, Reading underneath a laurel tree, While patiently waiting for her prince to come, One glimpse at her and I knew, That I was lost to her forever, Even in my curious green state, With nothing else to hold, But my lily pad floating above the pond, Alas, I understood, That she was the one, The owner of my beating heart, If only she but knew.

The Perfectionist pushed Tom onto her bed. She took off his shirt. She took off his shoes and his socks. She took off his pants. She took off his boxers. With most guys the Perfectionist would stop there. She didn’t. She was still feeling reckless. She took off his skin. She took off his nervous system. She lifted up his rib cage. His heart beat in her hand. And there, underneath it, she found a rusted tin box. She opened it. Inside she found his hopes, his dreams and his fears. She stared at them. She was surprised to find them there and surprised at how beautiful they were. At that exact moment, the Perfectionist fell in love with Tom.

There was a whole, sprawling world underneath us, filled with ugly, vicious, beautiful people. The line between the two places was thin, hardly a separation, and both ran on pain and blood and fear and death and joy and music. But for now, the sunset was enough.

My childhood was elegant homes, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building backyard forts, droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees. Middle America as it’s supposed to be. But on the cherry tree, there’s this pitch oozing out – some black, some yellow – and millions of red ants crawling all over it. I discovered that if one looks a little closer at this beautiful world, there are always red ants underneath.

Rea­sons Why I Loved Be­ing With Jen I love what a good friend you are. You’re re­ally en­gaged with the lives of the peo­ple you love. You or­ga­nize lovely ex­pe­ri­ences for them. You make an ef­fort with them, you’re pa­tient with them, even when they’re side­tracked by their chil­dren and can’t pri­or­i­tize you in the way you pri­or­i­tize them. You’ve got a gen­er­ous heart and it ex­tends to peo­ple you’ve never even met, whereas I think that ev­ery­one is out to get me. I used to say you were naive, but re­ally I was jeal­ous that you al­ways thought the best of peo­ple. You are a bit too anx­ious about be­ing seen to be a good per­son and you def­i­nitely go a bit over­board with your left-wing pol­i­tics to prove a point to ev­ery­one. But I know you re­ally do care. I know you’d sign pe­ti­tions and help peo­ple in need and vol­un­teer at the home­less shel­ter at Christ­mas even if no one knew about it. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of us. I love how quickly you read books and how ab­sorbed you get in a good story. I love watch­ing you lie on the sofa read­ing one from cover-to-cover. It’s like I’m in the room with you but you’re in a whole other gal­axy. I love that you’re al­ways try­ing to im­prove your­self. Whether it’s running marathons or set­ting your­self chal­lenges on an app to learn French or the fact you go to ther­apy ev­ery week. You work hard to be­come a bet­ter ver­sion of your­self. I think I prob­a­bly didn’t make my ad­mi­ra­tion for this known and in­stead it came off as ir­ri­ta­tion, which I don’t re­ally feel at all. I love how ded­i­cated you are to your fam­ily, even when they’re an­noy­ing you. Your loy­alty to them wound me up some­times, but it’s only be­cause I wish I came from a big fam­ily. I love that you al­ways know what to say in con­ver­sa­tion. You ask the right ques­tions and you know ex­actly when to talk and when to lis­ten. Ev­ery­one loves talk­ing to you be­cause you make ev­ery­one feel im­por­tant. I love your style. I know you think I prob­a­bly never no­ticed what you were wear­ing or how you did your hair, but I loved see­ing how you get ready, sit­ting in front of the full-length mir­ror in our bed­room while you did your make-up, even though there was a mir­ror on the dress­ing ta­ble. I love that you’re mad enough to swim in the English sea in No­vem­ber and that you’d pick up spi­ders in the bath with your bare hands. You’re brave in a way that I’m not. I love how free you are. You’re a very free per­son, and I never gave you the sat­is­fac­tion of say­ing it, which I should have done. No one knows it about you be­cause of your bor­ing, high-pres­sure job and your stuffy up­bring­ing, but I know what an ad­ven­turer you are un­der­neath all that. I love that you got drunk at Jack­son’s chris­ten­ing and you al­ways wanted to have one more drink at the pub and you never com­plained about get­ting up early to go to work with a hang­over. Other than Avi, you are the per­son I’ve had the most fun with in my life. And even though I gave you a hard time for al­ways try­ing to for al­ways try­ing to im­press your dad, I ac­tu­ally found it very adorable be­cause it made me see the child in you and the teenager in you, and if I could time-travel to any­where in his­tory, I swear, Jen, the only place I’d want to go is to the house where you grew up and hug you and tell you how beau­ti­ful and clever and funny you are. That you are spec­tac­u­lar even with­out all your sports trophies and mu­sic cer­tifi­cates and in­cred­i­ble grades and Ox­ford ac­cep­tance. I’m sorry that I loved you so much more than I liked my­self, that must have been a lot to carry. I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you the way you took care of me. And I’m sorry I didn’t take care of my­self, ei­ther. I need to work on it. I’m pleased that our break-up taught me that. I’m sorry I went so mental. I love you. I always will. I'm glad we met.

Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors they passed the headmistress's study. The door was wide open, the room was empty. 'Little girls,' said Miss Brodie, 'come and observe this.' They clustered round the open door while she pointed to a large poster pinned with drawing-pins on the opposite wall within the room. It depicted a man's big face. Underneath were the words 'Safety First'. 'This is Stanley Baldwin who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long,' said Miss Brodie. 'Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First". But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow me.

After dinner, I went upstairs and found Ren standing on the veranda again, looking at the sunset. I approached him shyly and stood behind him. “Hello, Ren.” He turned and openly studied my appearance. His gaze drifted ever so slowly down my body. The longer he looked, the wider his smile got. Eventually, his eyes worked their way back up to my bright red face. He sighed and bowed deeply. “Sundari. I was standing here thinking nothing could be more beautiful than this sunset tonight, but I was mistaken. You standing here in the setting sun with your hair and skin aglow is almost more than a man can…fully appreciate.” I tried to change the subject. “What does sundari mean?” “It means ‘most beautiful.’” I blushed again, which made him laugh. He took my hand, tucked it under his arm, and led me to the patio chairs. Just then, the sun dipped below the trees leaving its tangerine glow in the sky for just a few more moments. We sat again, but this time he sat next to me on the swinging patio seat and kept my hand in his. I ventured shyly, “I hope you don’t mind, but I explored your house today, including your room.” “I don’t mind. I’m sure you found my room the least interesting.” “Actually, I was curious about the note I found. Did you write it?” “A note? Ah, yes. I just scribbled a few notes to help me remember what Phet had said. It just says seek Durga’s prophecy, the Cave of Kanheri, Kelsey is Durga’s favored one, that sort of thing.” “Oh. I…also noticed a ribbon. Is it mine?” “Yes. If you’d like it back, you can take it.” “Why would you want it?” He shrugged, looking embarrassed. “I wanted a memento, a token from the girl who saved my life.” “A token? Like a fair maiden giving her handkerchief to a knight in shining armor?” He grinned. “Exactly.” I jested wryly, “Too bad you didn’t wait for Cathleen to get a little older. She’s going to be very pretty.” He frowned. “Cathleen from the circus?” He shook his head. “You were the chosen one, Kelsey. And if I had the option of choosing the girl to save me, I still would have picked you.” “Why?” “A number of reasons. I liked you. You are interesting. I enjoyed listening to your voice. I felt like you saw through the tiger skin to the person underneath. When you spoke, it felt like you were saying exactly the things I needed to hear. You’re smart. You like poetry, and you’re very pretty.” I laughed at his statement. Me, pretty? He can’t be serious. I was average in so many ways. I didn’t really concern myself with current makeup, hairstyles, or fashionable, but uncomfortable, clothes like other teenagers. My complexion was pale, and my eyes were so brown that they were almost black. By far, my best feature was my smile, which my parents paid dearly for and so did I-with three years of metal braces. Still, I was flattered. “Okay, Prince Charming, you can keep your memento.” I hesitated, and then said softly, “I wear those ribbons in memory of my mom. She used to brush out my hair and braid ribbons through it while we talked.” Ren smiled understandingly. “Then it means even more to me.

It was a color I didn't realize the earth could make without the help of human beings. I knew the water would be blue, but I had in mind a tamer, more pastel blue: a light color through which all the sand and fish underneath would be clearly visible. This water was like super-wavy, lit up turquoise, and so beautiful I could hardly take my eyes off it. The moment I was spellbound by the color of the water was the moment I knew I had been in New York for to long and my decision to leave was a good one.

Our garden was large and beautiful as that garden in the Bible - the tree of life grew there. But it had gone wild. The paths were overgrown and a smell of dead flowers mixed with the fresh living smell. Underneath the tree ferns, tall as forest tree ferns, the light was green. Orchids flourished out of reach or for some reason not to be touched. One was snaky looking, another like an octopus with long thing brown tentacles bare of leaves hanging from a twisted root. Twice a year the octopus orchid flowered - then not an inch of tentacle showed. It was a bell-shaped mass of white, mauve, deep purples, wonderful to see. The sent was very sweet and strong. I never went near it.

The devil took on a very beautiful form, but underneath he was still a horrible, evil creature.

When the corals underneath are so beautiful... who wants to go back to the shore...

Nothing spoils the sight of a beautiful Christmas tree more than two dead bodies lying underneath it.

What is it we call life anyway? The lights that flash within us from time to time. Those lit moments, these tiny dots, one by one, added on from one end to the other, intermingling with each other sometimes, one on top of the other, or slipped underneath; this combination of dots that moves forward, constantly changing places and directions, creates very beautiful music.

Dark and knowing, like they could strip away every mask I showed the world and find the broken pieces of the girl hiding underneath. Like they thought the brokenness was beautiful anyway.

Total fucking perfect beauty. After a second orgasm brought her shuddering underneath my tongue, she pressed a hand to the top of my head.  I knew what that meant.  She was ready for some cock.

To me, and I passed this on to my students, the restored devices demonstrated not only how quickly anything on Earth runs down without steady infusions of energy. They reminded us, too, of the craftsmanship no longer practiced in the town below. Nobody down there in our time could make things that cunning and beautiful. Yes, and we took the 10 machines we agreed were the most beguiling, and we put them on permanent exhibit in the foyer of this library underneath a sign whose words can surely be applied to this whole ruined planet nowadays. THE COMPLICATED FUTILITY OF IGNORANCE

I only feel, rightly or wrongly, that there is something underneath everything. When one person kills or harms another person, then there is 'something'--isn't there? Not simply atoms flying around in various configurations through empty space. I don't know how to explain myself, really. But I feel that it does matter--not to hurt other people, even in one's own self-interest. Felix of course agrees with this sentiment as far as it goes, and he points out (quite reasonably) that nobody goes around committing mass murders just because they don't believe in God. But increasingly I think it's because, in one way or another, they do believe in God--they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know. If that's God, then Felix says fine, it's just a word, it means nothing. And of course it doesn't mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ--but maybe those things can help in some way to put us in touch with what it does mean. That most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains--beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died. And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth.

The girl lives in a beautiful dollhouse made of stone, I wrote one time in my diary when I was young, my handwriting shaky but sure. But underneath her shining plastic smile, there are only screams.

He looks up. Our eyes lock,and he breaks into a slow smile. My heart beats faster and faster. Almost there.He sets down his book and stands.And then this-the moment he calls my name-is the real moment everything changes. He is no longer St. Clair, everyone's pal, everyone's friend. He is Etienne. Etienne,like the night we met. He is Etienne,he is my friend. He is so much more. Etienne.My feet trip in three syllables. E-ti-enne. E-ti-enne, E-ti-enne. His name coats my tongue like melting chocolate. He is so beautiful, so perfect. My throat catches as he opens his arms and wraps me in a hug.My heart pounds furiously,and I'm embarrassed,because I know he feels it. We break apart, and I stagger backward. He catches me before I fall down the stairs. "Whoa," he says. But I don't think he means me falling. I blush and blame it on clumsiness. "Yeesh,that could've been bad." Phew.A steady voice. He looks dazed. "Are you all right?" I realize his hands are still on my shoulders,and my entire body stiffens underneath his touch. "Yeah.Great. Super!" "Hey,Anna. How was your break?" John.I forget he was here.Etienne lets go of me carefully as I acknowledge Josh,but the whole time we're chatting, I wish he'd return to drawing and leave us alone. After a minute, he glances behind me-to where Etienne is standing-and gets a funny expression on hs face. His speech trails off,and he buries his nose in his sketchbook. I look back, but Etienne's own face has been wiped blank. We sit on the steps together. I haven't been this nervous around him since the first week of school. My mind is tangled, my tongue tied,my stomach in knots. "Well," he says, after an excruciating minute. "Did we use up all our conversation over the holiday?" The pressure inside me eases enough to speak. "Guess I'll go back to the dorm." I pretend to stand, and he laughs. "I have something for you." He pulls me back down by my sleeve. "A late Christmas present." "For me? But I didn't get you anything!" He reaches into a coat pocket and brings out his hand in a fist, closed around something very small. "It's not much,so don't get excited." "Ooo,what is it?" "I saw it when I was out with Mum, and it made me think of you-" "Etienne! Come on!" He blinks at hearing his first name. My face turns red, and I'm filled with the overwhelming sensation that he knows exactly what I'm thinking. His expression turns to amazement as he says, "Close your eyes and hold out your hand." Still blushing,I hold one out. His fingers brush against my palm, and my hand jerks back as if he were electrified. Something goes flying and lands with a faith dink behind us. I open my eyes. He's staring at me, equally stunned. "Whoops," I say. He tilts his head at me. "I think...I think it landed back here." I scramble to my feet, but I don't even know what I'm looking for. I never felt what he placed in my hands. I only felt him. "I don't see anything! Just pebbles and pigeon droppings," I add,trying to act normal. Where is it? What is it? "Here." He plucks something tiny and yellow from the steps above him. I fumble back and hold out my hand again, bracing myself for the contact. Etienne pauses and then drops it from a few inches above my hand.As if he's avoiding me,too. It's a glass bead.A banana. He clears his throat. "I know you said Bridgette was the only one who could call you "Banana," but Mum was feeling better last weekend,so I took her to her favorite bead shop. I saw that and thought of you.I hope you don't mind someone else adding to your collection. Especially since you and Bridgette...you know..." I close my hand around the bead. "Thank you." "Mum wondered why I wanted it." "What did you tell her?" "That it was for you,of course." He says this like, duh. I beam.The bead is so lightweight I hardly feel it, except for the teeny cold patch it leaves in my palm.

Her eyes drift up and away, enlarging them, a beautiful copper color. It makes her look even younger. Less of the hardened image she’s trying to project and more the scared kid she must be, underneath it all.

If a choreographer had been underneath the plastic sheet on a rainy day or night, he would certainly have reproduced the scene: twenty-five people, short and tall, on their feet, each holding a tin can to collect the water that dripped off the roof, sometimes in torrents, sometimes drop by drop. If a musician had been there, he would have heard the orchestration of all that water striking the sides of the tins. If a filmmaker had been there, he would have captured the beauty of the silent and spontaneous complicity between wretched people. But there was only us, standing on a floor that was slowly sinking into the clay.

Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world – packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together – if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.

What I want is to open up. I want to know what’s inside me. I want everybody to open up. I’m like an imbecile with a can-opener in his hand, wondering where to begin – to open up the earth. I know that underneath the mess everything is marvelous. I’m sure of it. I know it because I feel so marvelous myself most of the time. And when I feel that way everybody seems marvelous… everybody and everything… even pebbles and pieces of cardboard… a match stick lying in the gutter… anything… a goat’s beard, if you like. That’s what I want to write about… and then we’re all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is.

Boys are found everywhere- on top of, underneath, inside of, climbing on, swinging from, running around or jumping to. Mothers love them, little girls hate them, older sisters and brothers tolerated them, adults ignore them and Heaven protects them. A boy is Truth with dirt on its face, Beauty with a cut on its finger, Wisdom with bubble gum in its hair and the Hope of the future with a frog in its pocket. A boy is a magical creature- you can lock out of your workshop, but you can't lock him out of your heart. You can get him out of your study, but you can't get him out of your mind. Might as well give up- he is your captor, your jailor, your boss and your master- a freckled-faced, pint-sized, cat-chasing bundle of noise. But when you come home at night with only the shattered pieces of your hopes and dreams, he can mend them like new with two magic words- 'Hi, Dad!

The face of a woman people see as a prize, have always see as a prize. They only care about the surface until what's underneath inconveniences them, and then they drop me like yesterday's trash. Or, worse, try to change me.

You will spend your life trying to get underneath the hate, and later discover that it has entirely robbed you of joy, of pleasure, of many precious moments where you could have chosen instead to look for something beautiful.

I missed out on a big part of your life, Gabi. You look absolutely beautiful in this picture. I have to tell you something before I lose my nerve.” He turned. “I’ve loved-” The .22 glistened underneath the florescent lighting.

Tony stood up and began pacing the room. “Jack,” he confessed, “my life that I defined as a success is actually a total shambles, and yet you’re suggesting that underneath it all, there is an unimaginable beauty? Are you telling me that I matter? That even though I am this ugly, ordinary-looking root, that I was designed and intended to express a unique and extraordinary flower? That’s what you are telling me… right?” Jack nodded, again removing his pipe for a puff. “And I assume,” Tony continued, “this is true about every human being, each person born—” “Conceived!” interrupted Jack. “Each person ‘conceived’ on the planet, each one living in life-before, each one is a root in which a flower is waiting? Right?” Again Jack nodded

The sun is beautiful, long and low on the horizon like it’s stretching itself, like it’s shaking off a nap, and I know underneath this weak winter light is the promise of days that last until eight P.M. and pool parties and the smell of chlorine and burgers on the grill; and underneath that is the promise of trees lit up in red and orange like flames and spiced cider, and frost that melts away by noon—layers upon layers of life, always something more, new, deeper. It makes me feel like crying,

Jem said something then, in a language she didn’t understand. It sounded like “khalepa ta kala.” She frowned at him. “That isn’t Latin?” “Greek,” he said. “It has two meanings. It means that that which is worth having—the good, fine, honorable, and noble things—are difficult to attain.” He leaned forward, closer to her. She could smell the sweet scent of the drug on him, and the tang of his skin underneath. “It means something else as well.” Tessa swallowed. “What’s that?” “It means ‘beauty is harsh.

I like the disaster of the night sky, stars spilling this way and that as if they were upturned from a glass. I like the way good madness feels. I like the way laughter always spills. That's the word for it. It never just comes, it spills. I like the word 'again'. Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. I like the quiet sound a coffee cup makes when it's set down on a wooden table. So hushed. So inviting. Like morning light yawning through the window and stretching out onto the kitchen floor. I like the way girls' lips look like they're stained with berries. I like the way morning light breaks like a prism through the empty wine bottles on our dusty apartment floor. Glasses empty except for the midnight hour. I like the way blueberries stain my fingers during the summer. I like the way light hits your eyes and turns it into a color that doesn't exist anywhere else other than in this moment. I want it all. I want the breeze to call my name as it rushes down my street, looking for me. I want to feel grass underneath my bare feet and I want to feel the sun kiss freckles onto my cheeks. I want to hear you yell hello as you make your way towards me, not goodbye as you have to go. That's just a little bit about me.

The language of cancer is grammatical, methodical, and even—I hesitate to write—quite beautiful. Genes talk to genes and pathways to pathways in perfect pitch, producing a familiar yet foreign music that rolls faster and faster into a lethal rhythm. Underneath what might seem like overwhelming diversity is a deep genetic unity. Cancers that look vastly unlike each other superficially often have the same or similar pathways unhinged. “Cancer,” as one scientist recently put it, “really is a pathway disease.

Dirt was my first hypothesis. It had its way of going where nothing else would go, and I kept seeing it, on surfaces, in corners, underneath furniture and long nails. I always noticed it, which is not unusual, because I noticed many things, beautiful things too. I saw colors, birds moving in trees. I had been gifted with the pleasure of all of these, together with my suffering of all of these, and especially the dirt. Everywhere. And in New York, so much of it. Stubborn and full of the promise of disease.

Qian Meng smiled, wide and blinding. It seemed to take the cultivator before him aback, Lei Hua's face going slack and his ruby lips parting. It was the first time the prince had shown such easy joy, and it revealed just how beautiful he was underneath his pain.

And perhaps there was: when I look at my female students now, even the messiest, the sloppiest, the ones who drink Pepsi Max at 9 a.m., I see in them the beauty of youth—the beauty of their plumpness, their half-formed-ness, that skin that’s lit from underneath.

the dephness of my skin is heriditory. the hugh of my skin is what defines me. the color of my skin is what God gave me. for the radience of my skin, I am not ashamed. yes, i am black, dark and beautiful. and underneath this mask, i feel comfortable in my own skin.

Despite our battered exterior and in spite of the festering scars and rank filth that overlays it, there is underneath it all the pristine likeness of God Himself. And we would be wise to cast an eye not on the marred exterior, but to be fixed on the glorious interior.

Jake was right--I'm strong in a way June never was. Because I know that I want to be here. Even with the pain. Even with the ugliness. I've seen the other side--marching side by side down city streets with people who all believe they can change the world and the view of the sunset from Fridgehenge and Tom Waits lyrics and doing the waltz and kisses so hot they melt into each other and best friends who hold your hand and stretching out underneath a sky draped with stars and everything else. There is so much beauty in just existing. In being alive. I don't want to miss a second.

In build and coat and brush he was a huge timber-wolf; but the lie was given to his wolf-hood by his color and marking. There the dog unmistakably advertised itself. No wolf was ever colored like him. He was brown, deep brown, red-brown, an orgy of browns. Back and shoulders were a warm brown that paled on the sides and underneath to a yellow that was dingy because of the brown that lingered in it. The white of the throat and paws and the spots over the eyes was dirty because of the persistent and ineradicable brown, while the eyes themselves were twin topazes, golden and brown.

I thought love was meant to be an easy, peaceful thing, Lillias. But it's like life itself. It's maddening. And beautiful. And changeable and funny and passionate. It's...like a Hudson River Valley sunset. Underneath all that fire and glory the sky is ever constant. It's like you. For me, it is you.

Embracing this beautiful morning, I open up my eyes with lucid dream A promise to be with joy forever Vividly in my heart, I say with loud scream! Sun shines brightly touching my feet Says if I reach you, why can’t you fleet Underneath my lips, now there is a big smile A simple message though depths in pile! Holding my life to a distinct side, I sing and dance with just love inside Nothing to say, nothing to hope for Just being happy and all fears aside! Amazing start of this enthralling day Resonating birds all over the place Embracing this morning again, I would love to be who I am today!

In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed. Underneath this chaos and clutter lies a longing for more elemental things--love, beauty, comfort, a short spell of oblivion once in a while.

When white people envision their perfect home, it always has hardwood floors. In fact, most white people would prefer a dirt floor over wall-to-wall carpeting, because to them it would have the same level of cleanliness and probably fewer germs. White people are petrified of germs, and when they look at a carpet all they can see is everything that has ever been spilled, tracked in, or shaken loose into the carpet fibers. But more disgusting to white people is that wall-to-wall carpeting reminds them of suburban homes, motel rooms, and the horrible apartments that they have visited or lived in over the years. It has no soul. Only germs. Hardwood floors, on the other hand, are easily cleaned and give a sense of character to a place, since they are often the original flooring in older buildings. It is a well-known white fantasy to purchase a home or apartment that has disgusting carpet and then to pull it up to reveal a beautiful hardwood floor underneath.

My friend opened a small box which Lestrade had produced. Inside lay a beautiful silver cigarette case monogrammed with Holmes's initials, underneath which ran the words, "With the Respects of Scotland Yard, November 1888." Sherlock Holmes sat with his lips parted, but no sound emerged. "Thank you," he managed at length.

Truly  yI have sinned against the LORD God of Israel, and this is what I did: 21when I saw among the spoil a beautiful cloak from Shinar, and 200 shekels of silver, and a bar of gold weighing 50 shekels, [3] then I coveted them and took them. And see, they are hidden in the earth inside my tent, with the silver underneath.

the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world – packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together – if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.

Just beyond the opening the cave was higher, and as the boat floated into the dim interior they found themselves on quite an extensive branch of the sea. For a time neither of them spoke and only the soft lapping of the water against the sides of the boat was heard. A beautiful sight met the eyes of the two adventurers and held them dumb with wonder and delight. It was not dark in this vast cave, yet the light seemed to come from underneath the water, which all around them glowed with an exquisite sapphire color. Where the little waves crept up the sides of the rocks they shone like brilliant jewels, and every drop of spray seemed a gem fit to deck a queen.

Impressive, isn't it?" "No," Zach said. "It's appalling." "Really? Such a strong word to describe sensual activities shared between consenting adults." "Hurting people for pleasure? For sexual pleasure?" "Holding Eleanor down while she struggled underneath me and begged me to stop...that was beautiful." "Rape isn't beautiful." "But you see, it wasn't rape," Søren said, his tone light and conversational. "She enjoyed the struggle, enjoyed feeling overpowered and taken. I take rape very seriously, Zachary. My mother was a rape victim." Zach turned and looked at Søren in shocked sympathy. His distrust of the man wavered. "I'm sorry," he said with sincerity. "That must have been traumatic. For you and her." "It was." "May I ask how old you were when it happened?" Zach asked, trying to find the origin of Søren's violent sexual proclivities. "It happened roughly nine months before I was born. But that's neither here nor there. You seem uncomfortable with women fully owning their sexuality.

Two Songs For The World's End I Bombs ripen on the leafless tree under which the children play. And there my darling all alone dances in the spying day. I gave her nerves to feel her pain, I put her mortal beauty on. I taught her love that hate might find, its black work the easier done. I sent her out alone to play; and I must watch, and I must hear, how underneath the leafless tree, the children dance and sing with Fear. II Lighted by the rage of time where the blind and dying weep, in my shadow take your sleep, though wakeful I. Sleep unhearing while I pray - Should the red tent of the sky fall to fold your time away, wake to weep before you die. Die believing all is true that love your maker said to you Still believe that had you lived you would have found love, world, sight, sound, sorrow, beauty - all true. Grieve for death your moment - grieve. The world, the lover you must take, is the murderer you will meet. But if you die before you wake never think death sweet.

The crypt underneath the manor was beautiful and in perfect preservation. Paul made a drawing. Miriam stayed with him. She was thinking of Mary Queen of Scots looking with her strained hopeless eyes, that could not understand misery, over the hills where no help came, or sitting in this crypt being told of a God as cold as the place she sat in.

What treasures lay inside! Yes, here were the colors that she had asked for: red, pink, yellow, blue, green, black- all in powder form, of course, not like the one or two bottles of liquid food color that were available at the Lebanese supermarket in town; those were not at all modern- some big blocks of marzipan, and, as always, June had included some new things for Angel to try. This time there were three tubes that looked rather like thick pens. She picked one upend examined it: written along its length were the words 'Gateau Graffito,' and underneath, written in uppercase letters, was the word 'red.' Reaching for the other two pens- one marked 'green' and the other 'black'- she saw a small printed sheet lying at the bottom of the bubblewrap nest. It explained that these pens were filled with food color, and offered a picture showing how they could be used to write fine lines or thick lines, depending on how you held them. It also guaranteed that the contents were kosher. Eh, now her cakes were going to be more beautiful than ever!

Even though Clover City feels like one big joke sometimes, it's my joke. My charming joke of a town that thrives on beauty pageants and dance teams and a football team that couldn't figure out how to win a game if the other team had forfeited, but underneath it all, it's more than that small-town stereotype. It's a shithole. But it's my little shithole.

Those who saw the true beauty, complexity and the very nature of Nature are [all] incapable of using their intelligence for conciously evil acts, furthermore, the eyes will see violence buried underneath millions of other viable solutions. Rational good radiates, and inspires more rational good. As each ray of the sun harmless [but] in great numbers.

You believe there is something? she asks. I try to, yeah, Ivan answers. Some kind of order in the universe, at least. I do feel that sometimes. Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It's like the order if so deep, and it's so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it's just chaos, and there's nothing. Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognise patterns when there are no patterns. I don't know. I'm not explaining myself very well. But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there's meaning to everything.

She's probably just tired of seeing you miserable.Like we all are," I add. "I'm sure...I'm sure she's as crazy about you as ever." "Hmm." He watches me put away my own shoes and empty the contents of my pockets. "What about you?" he asks, after a minute. "What about me?" St. Clair examines his watch. "Sideburns. You'll be seeing him next month." He's reestablishing...what? The boundary line? That he's taken, and I'm spoken for? Except I'm not. Not really. But I can't bear to say this now that he's mentioned Ellie. "Yeah,I can't wait to see him again. He's a funny guy, you'd like him.I'm gonna see his band play at Christmas. Toph's a great guy, you'd really like him. Oh. I already said that,didn't I? But you would. He's really...funny." Shut up,Anna. Shut.Up. St. Clair unbuckles and rebuckles and unbuckles his watchband. "I'm beat," I say. And it's the truth. As always, our conversation has exhausted me. I crawl into bed and wonder what he'll do.Lie on my floor? Go back to his room? But he places his watch on my desk and climbs onto my bed. He slides up next to me. He's on top of the covers, and I'm underneath. We're still fully dressed,minus our shoes, and the whole situation is beyond awkward. He hops up.I'm sure he's about to leave,and I don't know whether to be relieved or disappointed,but...he flips off my light.My room is pitch-black. He shuffles back toward my bed and smacks into it. "Oof," he says. "Hey,there's a bed there." "Thanks for the warning." "No problem." "It's freezing in here.Do you have a fan on or something?" "It's the wind.My window won't shut all the way.I have a towel stuffed under it, but it doesn't really help." He pats his way around the bed and slides back in. "Ow," he says. "Yes?" "My belt.Would it be weird..." I'm thankful he can't see my blush. "Of course not." And I listen to the slap of leather as he pulls it out of his belt loops.He lays it gently on my hardwood floor. "Um," he says. "Would it be weird-" "Yes." "Oh,piss off.I'm not talking trousers. I only want under the blankets. That breeze is horrible." He slides underneath,and now we're lying side by side. In my narrow bed. Funny,but I never imagined my first sleepover with a guy being,well,a sleepover. "All we need now are Sixteen Candles and a game of Truth or Dare." He coughs. "Wh-what?" "The movie,pervert.I was just thinking it's been a while since I've had a sleepover." A pause. "Oh." "..." "..." "St. Clair?" "Yeah?" "Your elbow is murdering my back." "Bollocks.Sorry." He shifts,and then shifts again,and then again,until we're comfortable.One of his legs rests against mine.Despite the two layers of pants between us,I feel naked and vulnerable. He shifts again and now my entire leg, from calf to thigh, rests against his. I smell his hair. Mmm. NO! I swallow,and it's so loud.He coughs again. I'm trying not to squirm. After what feels like hours but is surely only minutes,his breath slows and his body relaxes.I finally begin to relax, too. I want to memorize his scent and the touch of his skin-one of his arms, now against mine-and the solidness os his body.No matter what happens,I'll remember this for the rest of my life. I study his profile.His lips,his nose, his eyelashes.He's so beautiful.

Rage, or something as equally dense and seething, was hanging from every chandelier, resentment woven into thick carpets padding the room, hatred flickering underneath every lampshade. The floor bathed in a creepy shadow, a particular darkness that had seeped into the walls, and right now was rolling across my converse so I couldn't see them. Absolute darkness.

I feel bad for being attracted to you.” I cup his face and add, “But know it’s who you are underneath this incredibly sexy body and face that won my heart.” “You wouldn’t feel bad if you knew all the things I’ve imagined doing with you, to you, and that sweet body of yours. Trust me, none of them included that beautiful brain of yours. A lot had to do with that mouth, though.

How do you know when you should do it?” “How do you know you’re thirsty? How do you know you’re hungry? How do you know you’re alive? You just know, man.” He pokes me in the chest. “You just know.” A ring on a spinning display platform glistens underneath the glass. It’s a beautiful ring. It really is. But… “I can’t ask her with a Costco diamond,” I tell him. “Fuck no, you can’t.

She had seen Southern men, soft voiced and dangerous in the days before the war, reckless and hard in the last despairing days of the fighting. But in the faces of the two men who stared at each other across the candle flame so short a while ago there had been something that was different, something that heartened her but frightened her — fury which could find no words, determination which would stop at nothing. For the first time, she felt a kinship with the people about her, felt one with them in their fears, their bitterness, their determination. No, it wasn’t to be borne! The South was too beautiful a place to be let go without a struggle, too loved to be trampled by Yankees who hated Southerners enough to enjoy grinding them into the dirt, too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant people drunk with whisky and freedom. As she thought of Tony’s sudden entrance and swift exit, she felt herself akin to him, for she remembered the old story how her father had left Ireland, left hastily and by night, after a murder which was no murder to him or to his family. Gerald’s blood was in her, violent blood. She remembered her hot joy in shooting the marauding Yankee. Violent blood was in them all, perilously close to the surface, lurking just beneath the kindly courteous exteriors. All of them, all the men she knew, even the drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath — murderous, violent if the need arose. Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a man for being “uppity to a lady.

The villager led me to an open area with a big table and chair. Underneath the table and chair was a cool looking circular rug. It had a red and white pattern of circles within circles. “What a beautiful rug!” I exclaimed. “Errr…yes…very beautiful. We worked very hard on it just for you,” a villager chimed in. The villagers brought over a bunch of food to my table. “Please enjoy yourself, o’ mighty warrior.

When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a while that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again.

Today, take a moment to celebrate you. Your beauty. Your style. Your sense of inner mischief. The way you glow in the sunlight. Your strut in those badass boots. The way the dress hugs your soft curves. The gleam in your eye. The curve of your irrepressible smile. The line of your collarbone. The way you know, underneath all the doubts and insecurities and demons that you are, in fact, magic. And what’s more? You always have been. You don’t need someone else to say so. This isn’t for likes or comments. You don’t need to book a photoshoot for this celebration. This is between you and you. For you to take the time to see yourself. To smile at your own beauty. Find a spot where you feel the energy. Where the sun hits just so. Where the colors or textures make you feel more alive, more you. Find somewhere to prop your phone and set the timer on your camera. You don’t need special equipment. And then just see what happens. Be open and curious about what wants to be seen. If someone sees you and stares or laughs or has the nerve to judge, you just ground down and rise up even more. They are just missing out on how good it can feel to see and know your own magic and beauty. And yes. If you want, and it feels good, you should share it. Because we want to see you and celebrate you too.

The garden is incredible. It's really overgrown, but underneath the brambles all kinds of plants have survived. There are paths, garden seats, bird feeders." "Like Sleeping Beauty, fast asleep until the enchantment is broken." "That's the thing, though; it hasn't been asleep. The trees kept growing, bearing fruit, even though there's been no one there to appreciate it. You should see the apple tree, it looks to be a hundred years old.

I find beauty in sadness, and peace... and a mystery waiting to be solved.. the more you unfold the mystery, the more you are mesmerized by the layers of mystery lying underneath.. and solitude becomes the perfect company for sadness.. but again, the feeling you get when you realize you're not alone gives you inexplicable happiness.. and there's satisfaction in happiness,, and another mystery which is unknotted yet difficult to penetrate

Ashamed to avow my sins, A burden mine alone to bear, Broken beyond repair, Baptized in gold to fill the cracks, Restless nights, Velour gowns turning to sacks No amount of gold brings relief, Debased by lies and deceit, Beg for forgiveness, And you shall be forgiven, He, who knows all, saw underneath my veneer, A pain, a woe played for deaf ears, I beseech my lord to forgive my misdeeds abhorred, Let my midnight scribble turn into beautiful word.

Mom! Look. This one is my favorite," Devin said, pulling out a faded pink dress with a red plaid sash. The crinoline petticoat underneath was so old and stiff it made snapping sounds, like beads or fire embers. She dropped the dress over her head, over her clothes. It brushed the floor. "When I'm old enough for it to fit me, I'm going to wear it with purple shoes," she said. "A bold choice," Kate said as Devin dove back into the trunk. The attic in Kate's mother's house had always fascinated Devin with its promise of hidden treasures. When Kate's mother had been alive, she had let Devin eat Baby Ruth candy bars and drink grape soda and play in this old trunk full of dresses that generations of Morris women had worn to try entice rich men to marry them. Most of the clothes had belonged to Kate's grandmother Marilee, a renowned beauty who, like all the rest, had fallen in love with a poor man instead.

Accepting who we are is a practice of non-harming. Sadly, much self-help literature contains seeds of harm: We are urged to remake ourselves into someone who will be spiritually or psychologically acceptable, and that acceptance is conditional on our performance in the areas of therapy, growth, or meditation. We are still not accepting ourselves unconditionally, just as we are in this moment, with a full and joyful heart. A more merciful practice begins with acceptance. It begins with the assumption that we were never broken, never defective. By surrendering into a deep acceptance of our own nature—rather than by tearing apart who we are—we actually make more room for genuine, rich, merciful, playful growth and change. If we feel our fundamental strength, creativity, and wisdom, then change is not frightening at all. Things simply fall away when they are ready, making room for the rich harvest underneath.

A song is not a tool for changing a human heart in the way that a wrench is a tool for changing a bolt, but it was the tool I had, and I was the tool the OSP had. The cansos in "Songs from Underneath" were not really as subtle as a wrench. Their primary trope was the ancient trick of making the viewpoint character a victim of oppression, because people identify passionately with a strong viewpoint character, and there is intense pleasure in identifying with the narrator of a sad story or song. In "Black Beauty" that trick had made people begin to think that beating horses was bad; it was the trope that make privileged white children burn with outrage at "Native Son" and prudes weep over prostitutes in "Elle frequentait la rue Pigalle" and "My Name is Not Bitch." They also received, at no extra cost, the delicious smug superiority of sympathizing with an underdog, unlike their less-enlightened neighbors. Their primary

All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword. She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light. Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her. A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair. Far out in the bay a cluster of almost motionless fishing boats hovered like a flock of white birds on the tranquil sea. How beautiful, how beautiful. Not to have died before this . . . to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this . 

Order Out of Chaos ... At the right temperature ... two peptide molecules will stay together long enough on average to find a third. Then the little trio finds a fourth peptide to attract into the little huddle, just through the random side-stepping and tumbling induced by all the rolling water molecules. Something extraordinary is happening: a larger structure is emerging from a finer system, not in spite of the chaotic and random motion of that system but because of it. Without the chaotic exploration of possibilities, the rare peptide molecules would never find each other, would never investigate all possible ways of aggregating so that the tape-like polymers emerge as the most likely assemblies. It is because of the random motion of all the fine degrees of freedom that the emergent, larger structures can assume the form they do. Even more is true when the number of molecules present becomes truly enormous, as is automatically the case for any amount of matter big enough to see. Out of the disorder emerges a ... pattern of emergent structure from a substrate of chaos.... The exact pressure of a gas, the emergence of fibrillar structures, the height in the atmosphere at which clouds condense, the temperature at which ice forms, even the formation of the delicate membranes surrounding every living cell in the realm of biology -- all this beauty and order becomes both possible and predictable because of the chaotic world underneath them.... Even the structures and phenomena that we find most beautiful of all, those that make life itself possible, grow up from roots in a chaotic underworld. Were the chaos to cease, they would wither and collapse, frozen rigid and lifeless at the temperatures of intergalactic space. This creative tension between the chaotic and the ordered lies within the foundations of science today, but it is a narrative theme of human culture that is as old as any. We saw it depicted in the ancient biblical creation narratives of the last chapter, building through the wisdom, poetic and prophetic literature. It is now time to return to those foundational narratives as they attain their climax in a text shot through with the storm, the flood and the earthquake, and our terrifying ignorance in the face of a cosmos apparently out of control. It is one of the greatest nature writings of the ancient world: the book of Job.

His face was glistening with cold. He was beautiful, the snow in his eyelashes like diamonds, the cool pink of his cheeks, the wet red of his lips. He was staggering toward her. "I have to leave you." His breath came in uneven bursts. "You won't be safe with me." Whatever he was, he could not be bad. An amazing and terrible thought entered Valerie's mind, clearing away all others. "Peter..." She stepped toward him, arms out. They gave in to each other, finally, their bodies fitting together. Her fingers warmed his cheek, and his arms slipped underneath her crimson cloak as her long blond hair blew around them. Enveloped in a shelter of white, standing out in black and red, were just the two of them. Nothing else anywhere. Valerie knew that she could never be apart from him, that she was what he was and that she would be his always. She didn't care if he was the Wolf or not. And if he was a Wolf, then she would be one, too. She made he choice and brought her lips to his.

When I feel comfortable enough that he is not going to trip me, I manage to look down, and see that his feet are gliding gracefully on the floor in his bloack loafers. He's even doing this very hot rhythmitic figure eight with his hips. Maybe it's the music that's growing on me, or it's that I'm giddy from not having had anything to eat except half a miniquiche, but after a moment or so, I start to move my hips, too. And suddenly, I'm breathless again, but in a good way. Once Pip gets into the groove, he stops looking at the instructor and his eyes fasten on me. So close like this, they're shocking in their brilliance, so light blue as to be almost white. Like silver medallions moving back and forth on a chain, they're hypnotizing. Where did they come from? I swear they weren't so beautiful a day ago, when we were sitting in the food court, talking about ewl and popping stag mints. " Where did you learn to do this?" I whisper in his ear, still unable to break from his gaze. " Faries love to dance. This is similar to one of theirs," he explains as he slows to near a stop. His eyes focous on Fit Lady again, and before I can ask what he's doing, he expertly glides his leg out from underneath his body, dragging his foot on the ground. " Yours should follow him," Fit Lady says, watching my legs. ...then I feel her hand on my leg, pulling it up into the air. I toddle about on one leg like a top that's about to fall, so Pip steadies me, and I hold on so tight to his arms with my sweaty hands as to cut off his circualtion. But he doesn't seem to mind. I watch as she grips my leg at the knee and pulls it, higher, higher … almost to Pip's hip level, then force me to extend and curve it around him. Ow, I am not a pretzel. " What are you doing?" " Gancho," she says. " Just take your leg up and wrap it around his body." " Wait. Wh- wh-at?" He's still staring at me with those amazing eyes as I push him away, falling back onto my elbows with a deafening crack.

we elevate what we deem beautiful, endeavor to create spheres of pristine beauty, and perhaps rightly so, for “whatever is good, pure, lovely, think on these things.” But I wonder if maybe in the upside-down kingdom of God, what we regard as unlovely is, in Jesus, lovely. Because somewhere, underneath the grime of this broken world, everything has the radiant fingerprints of God on it. Seeing the world with Jesus’ eyes, we have the astonishing opportunity to daily love the unlovely into loveliness.

Wanting to communicate the paradox of how we minister to others through our brokenness, he took a cardboard box and asked his students to “beat it up.” They punctured holes in the box, kicked it around and tore pieces off of it. Then he placed the box on a table in front of them all. Underneath the box was a light. He dimmed the house lights, and then turned on the light inside the box. He didn’t need to say any more. They all understood. The light of Jesus shines clearly through our broken places.

It was a sad story, and nothing like the paintings, which were so witty and joyous and full of unexpected colour and juxtapositions that Elisabeth, flicking through the catalogue, realized that she was smiling. The painter’s last painting had been of a huge and beautiful female arse, nothing else, famed by a jovial proscenium arch like it was filling the whole stage of a theatre. Underneath, in bright red, was a word in huge and rambunctious looking capitals. BUM. Elisabeth laughed out loud. What a way to go.

I asked myself, What is true about a person? Would I change in the same way the river changes color but still be the same person? And then I saw the curtains blowing wildly, and outside the rain was falling harder, causing everyone to scurry and shout. I smiled. And then I realized it was the first time I could see the power of the wind. I couldn't see the wind itself, but I could see it carried the water that filled the rivers and shaped the countryside. It caused me to yelp and dance. I wiped my eyes and looked in the mirror. I was surprised at what I saw. I had on a beautiful red dress, but what I saw was even more valuable. I was strong. I was pure. I had genuine thoughts inside that no one could see, that no one could ever take away from me. I was like the wind. I threw my head back and smiled proudly to myself. And then I draped the large embroidered red scarf over my face and covered those thoughts up. But underneath the scarf I still knew who I was. I made a promise to myself. I would always remember my parent's wishes, but I would never forget myself

the narcissistic personality disorder are: Grandiosity, extreme self-involvement, and lack of interest and empathy for others, in spite of the pursuit of others to obtain admiration and approval. The narcissist is endlessly motivated to seek perfection in everything he does. Such a personality is driven to the acquisition of wealth, power and beauty and the need to find others who will mirror and admire his grandiosity. Underneath this external facade there is an emptiness filled with envy and rage. The core of this emptiness is internalized shame.

You did not leave Crazytown for Boo-hooville. Boo-hooville is a layover. It is a temporary stop. It is the dismal Greyhound bus station in the first leg of your trip to Kauai. It is a place you must visit on your way to peace and calm. It is a rough stone that you will use to scrape away the old skin so that you can be made new again. And yes, that scraping hurts. And yes, you look terrible while it’s happening. Everything is dropping off, wrinkling, sagging, and flaking; it’s dull-colored. But underneath? On the other side of that? It’s beautiful.

he points out (quite reasonably) that nobody goes around committing mass murders just because they don’t believe in God. But increasingly I think it’s because, in one way or another, they do believe in God—they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know. If that’s God, then Felix says fine, it’s just a word, it means nothing. And of course it doesn’t mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ

All right,” he said slowly, as if he’d only just made up his mind about something. “You win. I’ve decided to help you.” Serilda’s heart lifted, filling fast with untethered hope. “In exchange,” he continued, “for this.” He pointed a finger at her. His sleeve slipped back toward his elbow, revealing a ghastly knot of scar tissue above his wrist. Serilda gaped at his extended arm, momentarily speechless. He was pointing at her heart. She stepped back and placed a protective hand to her chest, where she could feel her heartbeat thudding underneath. Her gaze lingered on his hand, as if he might reach into her chest and tear out the beating organ at any moment. He didn’t exactly look like one of the dark ones, with their majestic figures and flawless beauty, but he didn’t look half-faded like a ghost either. He seemed harmless enough, but she couldn’t trust anyone in this castle. The boy frowned, confused at her reaction. Then understanding hit him and he dropped his hand with a roll of his eyes. “Not your heart”, he said, exasperated. “That locket.” Oh. That. Her hand shifted to the chain around her neck. She gripped the locket, still hanging open, in her fist. “It will hardly suit you.” “Strongly disagree. Besides, there’s something familiar about her.

So, one take-away from this story is this: what if you could not even think the recurring thoughts that distress and afflict you? What if suddenly they were gone, lost in that true nature of joy that she describes? What if you were not capable of even thinking your favorite negative, fearful thoughts? Who would you be? How would you be? Would you not be liberated, fearless, your true, beautiful self? We have the power to come to live in the moment without the past. When all the negative stuff that we cling to so tenaciously is taken out, what is left? Only love and joy—that’s what’s underneath it all. We can begin fresh now, this very moment.

The things that kept them awake in the middle of the night, the things they did underneath the cover of darkness, both dreadful and beautiful, both attractive and repulsive, were revealed in stark clarity to their minds. A harsh reality that intensified sensations with each gust of wind. They shrank from it with frightened whimpers. The setting in each house would have fit perfectly into a post-apocalyptic tale of nuclear holocausts. Shell-shocked expressions gazed into the nothingness. Blankets over faces, silent prayers to the heavens. No curious eyes at the windows, or storm watchers dared to partake. The mere thought of looking out was too much to be borne.

Outside, the floorboards creaked from the weight of a person walking, as if complete silence were a cloak the enemy could wear and discard at will. The treading of heavy boots came closer and closer. The doorway filled, blacking out the faint light from the hall, and a tall, incredibly tall, figure stepped inside. A thin line of blood trickled from its throat, as if it had been beheaded and glued back together. A dress of green silk billowed underneath the wound. Its face was a white mask, and its eyes were monstrous streaks of red. Trembling, Kuji raised his blade. He moved so slowly it felt like he was swimming through mud. The creature watched him swing his sword, its eyes on the metal, and somehow, he knew it was fully capable of putting a stop to the action. If it cared to. The edge of the dao bit into his opponent’s shoulder. There was a snapping noise, and a sudden pain lashed his cheek. The sword had broken, the top half bouncing back in Kuji’s face. It was a spirit. It had to be. It was a spirit that could pass through walls, a ghost that could float over floors, a beast impervious to blades. Kuji dropped the handle of the useless sword. His mother had told him once that invoking the Avatar could safeguard him from evil. He’d known as a child she was making up stories. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t decide to believe them right now. Right now, he believed harder than he believed anything in his life. “The Avatar protect me,” he whispered while he could still speak. He fell on his behind and scrambled to the corner of the room, blanketed completely by the spirit’s long shadow. “Yangchen protect me!” The spirit woman followed him and lowered her red-and-white face to his. A human would have passed some kind of judgment on Kuji as he cowered like this. The cold disregard in her eyes was worse than any pity or sadistic amusement. “Yangchen isn’t here right now,” she said in a rich, commanding voice that would have been beautiful had she not held such clear indifference for his life. “I am.

She denied everything, not to convince him, for he had seen them, but from expediency and good taste, and to avoid painful explanations. Hippolyte Ceres suffered all the tortures of jealousy. He admitted it to himself, he kept saying inwardly, “I am a strong man; I am clad in armour; but the wound is underneath, it is in my heart,” and turning towards his wife, who looked beautiful in her guilt, he would say: “It ought not to have been with him.” He was right — Eveline ought not to have loved in government circles. He suffered so much that he took up his revolver, exclaiming: “I will go and kill him!” But he remembered that a Minister of Commerce cannot kill his own Prime Minister, and he put his revolver back into his drawer.

A movement caught his attention. A flash of white, a dash of color, dusty red against the gray-green of the leaves. Dragon lizards skittered into hiding behind the rocks as he stepped out of the trees into the clearing. A girl, hair dangling down her back in disarray, homespun skirt hitched up underneath a heavy leather apron, her brown feet bare, crouched beside a pool, hand outstretched to a pure white animal with large powerful hind legs and a long muscular tail. He'd read about these strange quadrupeds in the baron's notes. Kangaroos, the New Hollanders called them, and they were plentiful, reds and browns and grays, but white? And the girl like some Valkyrie. Hair the color of warm chestnut settling around her sculptured face.

My hair floated out around me with the evening breeze, and Romeo caught a strand of it before he opened the door to the car. “You really do look beautiful,” he murmured, dipping his head low. “Thanks,” I said against his lips. His kiss ignited instant desire inside me. Even though I spent last night with him, and the night before, I missed him terribly. I felt like we hadn’t had enough alone time. I wanted more. I wanted so much more. He groaned and pulled back. “Let’s get this dinner over with,” he said grumpily. “I want to spend some time alone with you.” “You read my mind.” “Now that the season is over, we’ll have more time together.” “Want to just go to Taco Bell and hide at your place?” I asked when he slid into the driver’s seat. He laughed. The sound filled the interior of the car. “Why, Rimmel,”— he pressed a hand to his chest like he was scandalized—“ are you suggesting we stand up my mother?” I giggled. “I knew it,” he drawled. “Underneath that sweet exterior lies the heart of a baddie baddie.” I laughed out loud. “A baddie baddie?” “Like totally,” he said in a valley girl voice and pretended to flip the long hair he didn’t have. God, I loved him. “So what do you say?” I taunted as I smiled. “Want to play hookie?” He groaned. “I’d love to, baby, but we can’t.” I stuck out my tongue. “Watch what you do with that thing, baby girl.” “Yeah? Or what?” I challenged. “Or we might be late and I might mess up the perfect hair and makeup you got going on.” His eyes twinkled and he fake gasped as he put the car in gear. “Just what would mother say?

If I had known all the things you didnt want me to I would have worried more about you but I would not have walked away Beautiful man with the freckles underneath the tan Understanding underneath the grin I would not have walked away You couldnt have got rid of me back then Not even if you tried Cause I couldnt wait to really be your friend I always thought that wed have time Now I look up, I think I see you in a silvery cup Trying to tell us that weve cried enough but I dont want to walk away Youre with me in a way that you will always be And I hope that you feel free I know this world is never gonna be the same Im gonna keep saying your name I dont want to walk away You cant get rid of me that fast Ill come and find you in my dreams Youre a part of all things that last All the way to eternity

Look, now, in the distance, a person, closer, it's two people, hand in hand, ankle deep in the froth. Sunrise in hair, blonde, green bikini, tall, shining. They kiss. Handsy things happening underneath hist trunks, her tongue. Who wouldn't envy such youth, who wouldn't grieve what has been lost in watching. They come up the dune, she pushing him backward, up. Study them from the balcony, holding your breath while the couple stops in a smooth bowl of sand, protected by the dunes. She pushes down his trunks, he takes off her bathing suit, top and bottom. Oh yes, you would return to your wife on hands and knees, crawl the distance of the eastern seaboard to feel her fingers once more in your hair. You are unworthy of her. Yes. No. Even as you think of flight, you're transfixed by the lovers, wouldn't dare move for fear of making them flap like birds into the blistered sky. They step into each other, and it's hard to tell where one begins and one ends. Hands in hair and warmth on warmth, into the sand her red knees raised, his body moving. It is time. Something odd happening though you are not ready for it. There is an overlap. You have seen this before, felt her breath on your nape, the heat of her beneath, and the cold damp of day on your back, the helpless overwhelm, a sense of crossing. The sex reaching it's culmination. Come. Lip bitten to blood and finish with a roar and birds shoot up and crumbles in the pink folds of an ear. Serrated coin of sun on water. Face turns skyward. Is this drizzle? It is. Sound of small sheers closing. Barely time to register the staggering beauty and here it is, the separation.

The great self-limitation practiced by man for ten centuries yielded, between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the whole flower of the so-called "Renaissance." The root, usually, does not resemble the fruit in appearance, but there is an undeniable connection between the root's strength and juiciness and the beauty and taste of the fruit. The Middle Ages, it seems, have nothing in common with the Renaissance and are opposite to it in every way; nonetheless, all the abundance and ebullience of human energies during the Renaissance were based not at all on the supposedly "renascent" classical world, nor on the imitated Plato and Virgil, nor on manuscripts torn from the basements of old monasteries, but precisely on those monasteries, on those stern Franciscians and cruel Dominicans, on Saints Bonaventure, Anselm of Canterbury, and Bernard of Clairvaux. The Middle Ages were a great repository of human energies: in the medieval man's asceticism, self-abnegation, and contempt for his own beauty, his own energies, and his own mind, these energies, this heart, and this mind were stored up until the right time. The Renaissance was the epoch of the discovery of this trove: the thin layer of soil covering it was suddenly thrown aside, and to the amazement of following centuries dazzling, incalculable treasures glittered there; yesterday's pauper and wretched beggar, who only knew how to stand on crossroads and bellow psalms in an inharmonious voice, suddenly started to bloom with poetry, strength, beauty, and intelligence. Whence came all this? From the ancient world, which had exhausted its vital powers? From moldy parchments? But did Plato really write his dialogues with the same keen enjoyment with which Marsilio Ficino annotated them? And did the Romans, when reading the Greeks, really experience the same emotions as Petrarch, when, for ignorance of Greek, he could only move his precious manuscripts from place to place, kiss them now and then, and gaze sadly at their incomprehensible text? All these manuscripts, in convenient and accurate editions, lie before us too: why don't they lead us to a "renascence" among us? Why didn't the Greeks bring about a "renascence" in Rome? And why didn't Greco-Roman literature produce anything similar to the Italian Renaissance in Gaul and Africa from the second to the fourth century? The secret of the Renaissance of the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries does not lie in ancient literature: this literature was only the spade that threw the soil off the treasures buried underneath; the secret lies in the treasures themselves; in the fact that between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, under the influence of the strict ascetic ideal of mortifying the flesh and restraining the impulses of his spirit, man only stored up his energies and expended nothing. During this great thousand-year silence his soul matured for The Divine Comedy; during this forced closing of eyes to the world - an interesting, albeit sinful world-Galileo was maturing, Copernicus, and the school of careful experimentation founded by Bacon; during the struggle with the Moors the talents of Velasquez and Murillo were forged; and in the prayers of the thousand years leading up to the sixteenth century the Madonna images of that century were drawn, images to which we are able to pray but which no one is able to imitate. ("On Symbolists And Decadents")

But increasingly I think it’s because, in one way or another, they do believe in God – they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know. If that’s God, then Felix says fine, it’s just a word, it means nothing.…. That most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains – beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died. And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth.

In due course I would learn how to cover up for this event, but on that awful day I knew of nothing to say but: 'Well, I guess they aren't going to do that either, heh, heh." FINALLY Hoku and Kiko stopped staring suspiciously through the glass long enough to go over the six bars, gracefully arcing in and out of the water against the glass, making the beautiful picture they were supposed to. I waved frantically at Chris to stop right there, to quit while we were ahead. I thanked the politely clapping audience and suggested they come back in a month and see what Hoku and Kiko could really do (I didn't have the courage to order them to KEEP clapping, and louder, please, so that Hoku and Kiko would do the applause jump). Then I yanked out the mike plug, raced down the ladder into the trainers' little sitting room underneath the stage, and took up smoking again.

It was a heady, overwhelming veil of scent. At first it developed almost hypnotically into a floral, fruit bouquet; languid and sensual with a musky, almost dusty depth. But then a sharpness emerged, beautiful, icy, unexpected. There was something almost overwhelming about the lush complexity of the formulation, the sheer unbridled eroticism which came across in wave after wave of contrasting notes. ‘This is floral, earthy, and there’s the clean overlay of aldehydic waxiness and soft flowers,’ Madame explained. ‘And then, underneath, a whiff of more feral, impolite essences. Under the clean, innocent exterior there’s a carnal presence. It’s not without ulterior motive.’ Grace stared hopelessly. Here was a language she definitely didn’t understand. ‘I’m sorry?’ Madame Zed looked across at her. ‘This, Mrs Munroe, is the scent of intoxication and desire. The perfume of seduction.

There once was a town. It was a quaint little town, in a quiet valley, where life moved at the pace of snails and the only road in was the only way out, too. There was a candy store that sold the sweetest honey taffy you ever tasted, and a garden store that grew exotic, beautiful blooms year-round. The local café was named after a possum that tormented its owner for years, and the chef there made the best honey French toast in the Northeast. There was a bar where the bartender always knew your name, and always served your burgers slightly burnt, though the local hot sauce always disguised the taste. If you wanted to stay the weekend, you could check-in at the new bed-and-breakfast in town--- just as soon as its renovations were finished, and just a pleasant hike up Honeybee Trail was a waterfall there, rumor had it, if you made a wish underneath it, the wish would come true. There was a drugstore, a grocer, a jewelry store that was open only when Mercury was in of retrograde--- And, oh, there was a bookstore. It was tucked into an unassuming corner of an old brick building fitted with a labyrinthine maze of shelves stocked with hundreds of books. In the back corner was a reading space with a fireplace, and chairs so cozy you could sink into them for hours while you read. The rafters were filled with glass chimes that, when the sunlight came in through the top windows, would send dapples of colors flooding across the stacks of books, painting them in rainbows. A family of starlings roosted in the eaves, and sang different songs every morning, in time with the tolls of the clock tower. The town was quiet in that cozy, sleepy way that if you closed your eyes, you could almost hear the valley breathe as wind crept through it, between the buildings, and was sighed out again.

earnestly. Drab to Desirable? What am I? A chuffing living room? Sonja reaches from underneath the desk and hands me a starchy white gown. It looks like a hospital nightie, a fact that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence. I’m not really an expert on beauty salons, having only been to one three times in my life, but I’m pretty sure there is supposed to be champagne. And why is there no soothing music playing in the background? Where’s the friendly lady who will chat to me about her children while doing my nails in pretty pearly pink? ‘I don’t know if I can afford all this,’ I whisper to Dionne, as Sonja types my details into an expensive-looking computer. ‘Oh, no worries. Bull knows someone. It’s on the house.’ ‘Oh.’ A gangster salon! ‘We are ready!’ Sonja says brightly, clapping her hands. ‘Natalie, if you could leave your belongings right here, I vill put them in the safe.’ I hand over my coat and handbag. ‘Now, if

Lalla Ruk Dearest dream, my soul's enchantment Lovely guest from heav'n above, Most benevolent attender To the earthly realm below, You gave me blissful satisfaction Momentary but complete: Bringing with you happy tidings - Like a herald from the skies. I dreamed dreams of life eternal In that Promised Land of peace; I dreamed dreams of fragrant regions, Of a tranquil, sweet Kashmir; I could witness celebrations, Festivals of roses vernal Honoring that lovely maiden From lands strange and far away. And, with glistening enchantment Like an angel from above, - This untainted, youthful vision Came before my dreaming eyes; Like a veil, a shining shroud Screened her lovely face from view, Tenderly she did incline Her shy gazes toward the earth. All her traits - her timid shyness Underneath her shining crown, Childlike her animation, And her face's noble beauty - Glowing with a depth of feeling, Sweet serenity and peace - All of these completely artless Indescribably sublime! As I watched, the apparition (Captivating me in passing) Never to return, flew by; I pursued - but it had gone! T'was a vision merely fleeting, Transient illumination Leaving nothing but a legend Of its passing through my life! T'is not ours to harbor Beauty's spirit - Ah, so pure! It comes nigh but for a moment From its heavenly abode; Like a dream, it slips away, Like an airy dream of morning: But in sacred reminiscence It is married with the heart! Only in the purest instants Of our life does it appear Bringing with it revelations Beneficial to our hearts; That our hearts may know of heaven In this earthly shadow realm, It allows us momentary Glimpses through the earthly veil. And through all that here is lovely, All that animates our lives, To our souls it speaks a language Reassuring and distinct; When it quits our earthly region It bestows a gift of love Glowing in our evening heaven: "Tis a farewell star for all to see.

I tell you, I know what it is.” “What is it? What is it? Is it hard or soft? Harry. Is it blue? Is it red? Does it have polka dots?” It hits Rabbit depressingly that he really wants to be told. Underneath all this I-know-more-about-it-than-you heresies-of-the-early-Church business he really wants to be told about it, wants to be told that it is there, that he’s not lying to all those people every Sunday. As if it’s not enough to be trying to get some sense out of this crazy game you have to carry around this madman trying to swallow your soul. The hot strap of the bag gnaws at his shoulder. “The truth is,” Eccles tells him with womanish excitement, in a voice embarrassed but determined, “you’re monstrously selfish. You’re a coward. You don’t care about right or wrong; you worship nothing except your own worst instincts.” They reach the tee, a platform of turf beside a hunchbacked fruit tree offering fists of taut ivory-colored buds. “Let me go first,” Rabbit says. “ ’Til you calm down.” His heart is hushed, held in mid-beat, by anger. He doesn’t care about anything except getting out of this tangle. He wants it to rain. In avoiding looking at Eccles he looks at the ball, which sits high on the tee and already seems free of the ground. Very simply he brings the clubhead around his shoulder into it. The sound has a hollowness, a singleness he hasn’t heard before. His arms force his head up and his ball is hung way out, lunarly pale against the beautiful black blue of storm clouds, his grandfather’s color stretched dense across the north. It recedes along a line straight as a ruler-edge. Stricken; sphere, star, speck. It hesitates, and Rabbit thinks it will die, but he’s fooled, for the ball makes its hesitation the ground of a final leap: with a kind of visible sob takes a last bite of space before vanishing in falling. “That’s it!” he cries and, turning to Eccles with a grin of aggrandizement, repeats, “That’s it.

But increasingly I think it's because, in on way or another, they do believe in God-- they believe in the God that is the deep buried principle of goodness and love underneath everything. Goodness regardless of reward, regardless of our own desires, regardless of whether anyone is watching or anyone will know. If that's God, then Felix says fine, it's just a word, it means nothing. And of course it doesn't mean heaven and angels and the resurrection of Christ--but maybe those things can help in some way to put us in touch with what it does mean. That most of our attempts throughout human history to describe the difference between right and wrong have been feeble and cruel and unjust, but that the difference still remains--beyond ourselves, beyond each specific culture, beyond every individual person who has ever lived or died. And we spend our lives trying to know that difference and to live by it, trying to love other people instead of hating them, and there is nothing else that matters on the earth.

The problem with the contemporary Euro-American novel is that it relies for its structural integrity on suppressing the lived realities of most human beings on earth. To confront the poverty and misery in which millions of people are forced to live, to put the fact of that poverty, that misery, side by side with the lives of the ‘main characters’ of a novel, would be deemed either tasteless or simply artistically unsuccessful. Who can care, in short, what happens to the novel’s protagonists, when it’s happening in the context of the increasingly fast, increasingly brutal exploitation of a majority of the human species? Do the protagonists break up or stay together? In this world, what does it matter? So the novel works by suppressing the truth of the world—packing it tightly down underneath the glittering surface of the text. And we can care once again, as we do in real life, whether people break up or stay together—if, and only if, we have successfully forgotten about all the things more important than that, i.e. everything.

Though metaphors are omnipresent in language, many of them are effectively dead in the minds of today’s speakers, and the living ones could never be learned, understood, or used as a reasoning tool unless they were built out of more abstract concepts that capture the similarities and differences between the symbol and the symbolised. For this reason, conceptual metaphors do not render truth and objectivity obsolete, nor do they reduce philosophical, legal, and political discourse to a beauty contest between rival frames. // Still, I think that metaphor really is a key to explaining thought and language. The human mind comes equipped with an ability to penetrate the cladding of sensory appearance and discern the abstract construction underneath – not always on demand, and not infallibly, but often enough and insightfully enough to shape the human condition. Our powers of analogy allow us to apply ancient neural structures to newfound subject matter, to discover hidden laws and systems in nature, and not least, to amplify the expressive power of language itself.

For about 48 weeks of the year an asparagus plant is unrecognizable to anyone except an asparagus grower. Plenty of summer visitors to our garden have stood in the middle of the bed and asked, 'What is this stuff? It's beautiful!' We tell them its the asparagus patch, and they reply, 'No this, these feathery little trees.' An asparagus spear only looks like its picture for one day of its life, usually in April, give or take a month as you travel from the Mason-Dixon Line. The shoot emerges from the ground like a snub nose green snake headed for sunshine, rising so rapidly you can just about see it grow. If it doesn't get it's neck cut off at ground level as it emerges, it will keep growing. Each triangular scale on the spear rolls out into a branch until the snake becomes a four foot tree with delicate needles. Contrary to lore, fat spears are no more tender or mature than thin ones. Each shoot begins life with its own particular girth. In the hours after emergence, it lengthens but does not appreciably fatten. To step into another raging asparagus controversy, white spears are botanically no different from their green colleagues. White shoots have been deprived of sunlight by a heavy mulch pulled up over the plant's crown. European growers go to this trouble for consumers who prefer the stalks before they've had their first blush of photosynthesis. Most Americans prefer the more developed taste of green. Uncharacteristically, we're opting for the better nutritional deal here also. The same plant could produce white or green spears in alternate years, depending on how it is treated. If the spears are allowed to proceed beyond their first exploratory six inches, they'll green out and grow tall and feathery like the house plant known as asparagus fern, which is the next of kin. Older, healthier asparagus plants produce chunkier, more multiple shoots. Underneath lies an octopus-shaped affair of chubby roots called a crown that stores enough starch through the winter to arrange the phallic send-up when winter starts to break. The effect is rather sexy, if you're the type to see things that way. Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac and the church banned it from nunneries.

Memory Finally Memory’s finally found what it was after. My mother has turned up, my father has been spotted. I dreamed up a table and two chairs. They sat. They were mine again, alive again for me. The two lamps of their faces gleamed at dusk as if for Rembrandt. Only now can I begin to tell in how many dreams they’ve wandered, in how many crowds I dragged them out from underneath the wheels, in how many deathbeds they moaned with me at their side. Cut off, they grew back, but never straight. The absurdity drove them to disguises. So what if they felt no pain outside me, they still ached within me. In my dreams, gawking crowds heard me call out Mom to a bouncing, chirping thing up on a branch. They made fun of my father’s hair in pigtails. I woke up ashamed. So, finally. One ordinary Friday night they suddenly came back exactly as I wanted. In a dream, but somehow freed from dreams, obeying just themselves and nothing else. In the picture’s background possibilities grew dim, accidents lacked the necessary shape. Only they shone, beautiful because just like themselves. They appeared to me for a long, long, happy time. I woke up. I opened my eyes. I touched the world, a chiseled picture frame.

Guilt isn’t an emotion. It’s a living, breathing organism. It’s another man living deep inside you, screaming so loud sometimes that you wish you could tear off your skin and let him escape. But you can’t. And there’s nothing you can do to silence him. Nothing at all. There are things that you think will help you. Wicked, beautiful things. Sex. Narcotics. Alcohol. They all sing their sweet siren songs to you, hoping you don’t recognize the evil underneath. They are a temptress, promising to alleviate your pain, promising you a soft, warm hug. They promise you the world. And they deliver. They always keep their promise. Maybe for a moment, maybe for a few hours, they let you be taken by the undertow. That’s why you keep going back. Because they don’t lie. And because the next day the guilt has multiplied. You’re an even worse person than you were before, as if that was even possible. As if the hate inside you for yourself could ever deepen. But it does. Again and again. Day in and day out. And there’s only one way to get through it. To dull the pain. Mask the sorrow. Numb the hate. You do it to yourself again. Until it’s the rest of your life. But I don’t want it to be the rest of my life. Because

The salmon is perfectly cooked. The trace amounts of sugar contained in the wheat flour have combined with the butter in a chemical reaction that's creating a wonderful fragrance. It was all fried together for precisely the right amount of time to create a superb Meunière." "The squid liver was quickly sautéed in a dollop of butter as well, taking a bite of that with the Meunière is sublime! The butter's flavor gently wraps around the salty and pleasantly bitter taste of the liver, giving it a beautifully mellow body." "He added pomegranate seeds and tonburi to the soy sauce marinated roe! Those three completely disparate flavors meld into a seamless whole thanks to butter! Not only does it have an amusing texture, the roe doesn't have its typical greasiness either!" *Tonburi, also called land caviar, is the seeds of the summer cypress plant. It's texture is similar to caviar.* He's used mounds of butter in so many different facets of the dish, but it somehow hasn't made the flavor heavy at all. The secret to that lies in the bed of special sushi rice hidden underneath the seafood! "This sushi rice was made not with vinegar but with orange juice and lemon juice!" "So that's why he was squeezing that mountain of oranges!"

I don’t play games to get women naked.” My heart thumps harder in my chest. I take a breath. “What do you do to get them naked?” He stares at me so long; I forget to draw breath. Everything grows fuzzy as the room blurs until I can’t see anything but his face. With an animalistic growl, he pulls me into his arms and kisses me so hard the floor shifts underneath me. I moan softly as his hands travel up my back until he’s gripping the back of my head. Bliss surges through my body as I slide my hands over his muscled arms, and feel his skin rise at my touch. He shifts his weight and pulls back, looking flustered as he stares at me. “I shouldn’t have done that. Sorry,” he says. But I’m not. I’m not sorry at all. When he moves, I grip his shoulders so he can’t move. “If you hadn’t done it, I would have,” I whisper. My stomach flutters as I wrap my arms around his neck and pull him towards me. “Do it again.” There may be hell to pay if we get caught, but if he keeps kissing me like I’m his, I really don’t give a damn. Just for the weekend, I can be someone else. Someone without a care. Someone who lives in the moment and forgets about all the work waiting for me. Inside this cabin, in this beautiful place, with a man who sets my skin aflame, I can be as raw and as honest as I want.

It was also then that the women of Ak&‌ccedil;ah started a new custom. Underneath their garments they wrapped cloth bands around their waists to squeeze them tight. They were so awed by Zekiye's thin waist that, for a while, they ignored Atiye when she reminded them that this waist-thinning method wouldn't work unless they had started very young. But the women kept their waistbands on until the sheep-mating season to see what would happeend. Then they all began to wheeze. They found that in their zeal for having thin waists they had afflicted themselves with shortness of breath, coughing, flushes and sweating. A few had sores on their hands, faces and other parts of their bodies. Three women had problems with their eyes and speech. And when their waists started to swell up like logs, they all took off the cloth bands. "We're well past the age of waist-thinning," they said. All the same, they considered it their duty as mothers to raise their daughters to be as slender as Zekiye. They took lessons in the art of waist-thinning from Atiye and soon discovered that plastic bags were more effective than cloth bands. Thereafter, whenever they had girl babies, they would wash them with three bowls of water as soon as the umbilical cord was cut and then wrap plastic bags around their waists, blowing prayers on them all the while.

We took the long way back toward his house and drove past the northernmost point of the ranch just as the sun was beginning to set. “That’s so pretty,” I exclaimed as I beheld the beauty of the sky. Marlboro Man slowed to a stop and put his pickup in park. “It is, isn’t it?” he replied, looking over the land on which he’d grown up. He’d lived there since he was four days old, had worked there as a child, had learned how to be a rancher from his dad and grandfather and great-grandfather. He’d learned how to build fences and handle animals and extinguish prairie fires and raise cattle of all colors, shapes, and sizes. He’d helped bury his older brother in the family cemetery near his house, and he’d learned to pick up and go on in the face of unspeakable tragedy and sadness. This ranch was a part of him. His love for it was tangible. We got out of the pickup and sat on the back, holding hands and watching every second of the magenta sunset as it slowly dissipated into the blackness underneath. The night was warm and perfectly still--so still we could hear each other breathing. And well after the sun finally dipped below the horizon and the sky grew dark, we stayed on the back of the pickup, hugging and kissing as if we hadn’t seen each other in ages. The passion I felt was immeasurable. “I have something to tell you,” I said as the butterflies in my gut kicked into overdrive.

Then he began plucking the pins from her hair, carefully, without touching her anywhere else, and Eve began to wonder if 'hair' could possibly be erotic. She found herself holding her breath, listening to his deep, even exhalations as he worked, her hair loosening and beginning to slide. It fell all at once, uncoiling heavily over her shoulders. She turned her head to look at him, suddenly shy. He was staring at her hair. "It's beautiful," he murmured, burying his fingers in the long tresses, gently working apart the strands, lifting and spreading them. "Like liquid gold." He suddenly lifted the mass to his face. "And perfumed. Like flowers." "Lily of the valley." He made her feel exotic, still dressed in her sensible gray frock, only her hair loose about her shoulders. "Lily of the valley," he murmured. "I'll remember that scent forever now, and whenever I smell it again I'll think of you, Eve Dinwoody. You'll be haunting my tomorrows evermore." She gasped and turned, looking up at him. She'd thought that he'd be smiling teasingly at his words, but he looked quite serious and she stared at him in wonder. Had he always carried this part of himself inside? This wild poetic lover? If so, he'd hidden it well underneath the aggressive, foulmouthed theater manager. She had a secret fondness for the crass theater manager, but the poet... She swallowed, suddenly nervous. She might come to love a wild poet.

I turned the shower off and, instead of toweling and dressing before the steam on the door mirror cleared, like I normally would, I waited. It was an accident, my beauty revealed to me. I was daydreaming, thinking about the day before, of Trevor and me behind the Chevy, and had stood in the tub with the water off for too long. By the time I stepped out, the boy before the mirror stunned me. Who was he? I touched the face, its sallow cheeks. I felt my neck, the braid of muscles sloped to collarbones that jutted into stark ridges. The scraped-out ribs sunken as the skin tried to fill its irregular gaps, the sad little heart rippling underneath like a trapped fish. The eyes that wouldn’t match, one too open, the other dazed, slightly lidded, cautious of whatever light was given it. It was everything I hid from, everything that made me want to be a sun, the only thing I knew that had no shadow. And yet, I stayed. I let the mirror hold those flaws—because for once, drying, they were not wrong to me but something that was wanted, that was sought and found among a landscape as enormous as the one I had been lost in all this time. Because the thing about beauty is that it’s only beautiful outside of itself. Seen through a mirror, I viewed my body as another, a boy a few feet away, his expression unmoved, daring the skin to remain as it was, as if the sun, setting, was not already elsewhere, was not in Ohio.

So now I was a beauty editor. In some ways, I looked the part of Condé Nast hotshot—or at least I tried to. I wore fab Dior slap bracelets and yellow plastic Marni dresses, and I carried a three-thousand-dollar black patent leather Lanvin tote that Jean had plunked down on my desk one afternoon. (“This is . . . too shiny for me,” she’d explained.) My highlights were by Marie Robinson at Sally Hershberger Salon in the Meatpacking District; I had a chic lavender pedicure—Versace Heat Nail Lacquer V2008—and I smelled obscure and expensive, like Susanne Lang Midnight Orchid and Colette Black Musk Oil. But look closer. I was five-four and ninety-seven pounds. The aforementioned Lanvin tote was full of orange plastic bottles from Rite Aid; if you looked at my hands digging for them, you’d see that my fingernails were dirty, and that the knuckle on my right hand was split from scraping against my front teeth. My chin was broken out from the vomiting. My self-tanner was uneven because I always applied it when I was strung out and exhausted—to conceal the exhaustion, you see—and my skin underneath the faux-glow was full-on Corpse Bride. A stylist had snipped out golf-ball-size knots that had formed at the back of my neck when I was blotto on tranquilizers for months and stopped combing my hair. My under-eye bags were big enough to send down the runway at Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week: I hadn’t slept in days. I hadn’t slept for more than a few hours at a time in months. And I hadn’t slept without pills in years. So even though I wrote articles about how to take care of yourself—your hair, your skin, your nails—I was falling apart.

You should be kissed and often, and by someone who knows how.’ Let me introduce myself. I’m River. I’m your current boyfriend. Cross my heart and hope to die—not really, but you know what I mean. There are three things about you that caught my attention: First, you’re smart, too smart for me, but for some reason, you don’t care. Two, if you had wings, they’d be the colors of the rainbow. Three, you touch me, and I have peace. You’re a River-whisperer. Dad told me to take care of Mom, be a good brother to Rae, and wait for Anastasia. He somehow knew you were mine. Where are you from? Apparently, everywhere. Do you know how cool I think you are? Growing up moving around must have been hard, but it created a woman who looks at someone and sees underneath to the parts others don’t. What are you doing after this? I hope after this night, in the future, we’ll be together, in some city, crazy in love. Please tell me you’re single. You aren’t single, Anastasia. You’re mine. Also… I’m not a serial killer. True. Or an alien. (People in Walker really dig that stuff.) True. Or a player. I had my moments. Or a douchebag. Again, had some moments. Or a dick. Okay…maybe once or twice. I’m just the guy in front of you on a snow-covered mountain, baring his soul to the most beautiful girl in the world. You have dreams and I get it. I’ll wait for you forever. No matter how long it takes for us to come back to a place where we can be together for real. Your first reaction to this note may be to run as far as you can, but you only live once, and we can’t lose what we have. Fate has a way of bringing people together, and, baby girl, we’re meant to be. Kappa Boy AKA River Tate AKA Snake AKA Fake River AKA Anastasia’s Man

And then in a swift, calculating move, Rothbury sprang forward, covering her body with his own. For a second her breath felt trapped in her chest and she was instantly immobile underneath his weight. His warm, hard thigh sat heavy between hers. Panting from exertion, a shameful lick of heat ignited deep in her belly. Effortlessly, he joined her wrists together, holding them above her head with only one hand while the long, blunt-tipped fingers of the other trailed a silky path down her cheek. "Who are you?" he whispered. Her breath hitched at the explosion of feeling and thought thrumming through her. He looked so dominant above her, so beautiful, like he was created specifically for seduction. None of her wicked imaginings had prepared her for the plethora of sensations he sparked with only his fingertips upon her face. Belatedly, she realized her body refused to listen to her mind. She had quit squirming. In fact, she had begun to relish the intoxicating feel of his long, lean-muscled body atop hers. His warm, bare chest pressed onto her bodice, his solid thigh planted firmly against her sex. Her eyes dipped to his mouth, which was partially open, baring his straight white teeth. All she would have to do was arch her neck and her mouth would fasten to his. She shivered, surprised and ashamed at the way her body reacted to him. She needed to escape before he discovered her identity. But her mind warred between what was right and what felt wonderful. In the end, years of dire warnings from her pious father about the sins of the flesh returned at least some of her good sense. "Get off of me," she demanded, albeit weakly. "Absolutely not," he growled, his breath feathering hotly against her mouth, her cheek, her neck. "I'll not let you get away now. Not before I find out who you are. Wanted a taste, did you?

You're a taffy-puller." "I'm a what?" "A taffy-puller. They hypnotize me. Didn't you ever see one? " I don't think so," she breathed. " But - " " You see them on the boardwalk. Beautifully machined little rigs, all chrome-plated eccentrics and cams. There are two cranks set near each other so that the 'handle' of each passes the axle of the other. They stick a big mass of taffy on one `handle' and start the machine. Before that sticky, homogeneous mass has a chance to droop and drip off, the other crank has swung up and taken most of it. As the crank handles move away from each other the taffy is pulled out, and then as they move together again it loops and sags; and at the last possible moment the loop is shoved together. The taffy welds itself and is pulled apart again." Robin's eyes were shining and his voice was rapt. "Underneath the taffy is a stainless steel tray. There isn't a speck of taffy on it, not a drop, not a smidgen. You stand there, and you look at it, and you wait for that lump of guff to slap itself all over those roller bearings and burnished cam rods, but it never does. You wait for it to get tired of thar fantastic juggling, and it never does. Sometimes gooey little bubbles get in the taffy and get carried around and squashed flat, and when they break they do it slowly, leaving little soft craters that take a long time to fill up; and they're being mauled around the way the bubbles were." He sighed. "There's almost too much contrast - that competent, beautiful machinist's dream handling - what? Taffy - no definition, no boundaries, no predictable tensile strength. I feel somehow as if there ought to be an intermediate stage somewhere. I'd feel better if the machine handled one of Dali's limp watches, and the watch handled the mud. But that doesn't matter. How I feel, I mean. The taffy gets pulled. You're a taffy-puller. You've never done a wasteful or incompetent thing in your life, no matter what you were working with.

Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!” I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened. We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks. I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back. “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?” …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo… “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know. “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.” …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip… “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy. “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—” Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street. “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished. “What?” “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.” “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…” What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied. It would have to do. …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd… I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.

Today I had a lively discussion with a merchant in Fez with a view to finding out what the Moors think of European civilization.... He was a fine man, about forty years old, with an honest and serious face, who had made business visits to the most important cities in Western Europe and had lived for a long time in Tangier, where he learnt Spanish.... I asked him therefore what kind of impression the large cities of Europe had made on him.... He looked hard at me and answered coldly: “Large streets, fine shops, beautiful palaces, good workshops, everything clean.” He gave the impression that with these words, he had mentioned everything in our countries that was worthy of praise. “Have you not found anything else in Europe that is beautiful and good?” I asked. He looked at me questioningly. “Is it possible,” I went on, “that an intelligent man like you, who has visited several countries so marvelously superior to your own can speak about them without astonishment, or at least without the emotion of a country boy who has seen the pasha’s palace? What can you possibly admire in the world? What sort of people are you? Who can possibly understand you?” “Perdone Usted”, he answered coldly, “it is for me to say that I cannot understand you. I have told you all the things which I consider to be better in Europe. What more can I say? Have I to say something that I do not believe to be true? I repeat that your streets are larger than ours, your shops finer, that you have workshops such as we do not have, and also rich palaces. That is all. I can only add one more thing: that you know more than we do, because you have many books, and read more.” I became impatient. “Do not lose patience, Caballero,” he said, “let us speak together calmly. Is not a man’s first duty honesty? Is it not honesty more than anything else that makes a man worthy of respect, and one country superior to another? Very well, then. As far as honesty is concerned, your countries are certainly not better than ours. That much I can say right away.” “Gently, gently!” I said, “Tell me first what you mean by honesty!” “Honesty in business, Caballero. The Moors, for example, sometimes cheat the Europeans in trade, but you Europeans cheat the Moors much more often.” “There must be a few cases,” I replied, in order to say something. “Casos raros?” he exclaimed angrily. “It happens every day! Proof: I go to Marseilles. I buy cotton. I choose a particular thread, give the exact reference number and brand-name, as well as the amount required. I ask for it to be sent, I pay, and I return home. Back in Morocco, I receive the cotton. I open the consignment, and take a look. I find the same number, the same brand-name, and a thread that is of one third the thickness! This is anything but good, and I lose thousands of francs! I rush to the consulate, but in vain. Another case: A merchant from Fez places an order in Europe for blue cloth, so many pieces, of such and such a length and breadth. He pays for it when the bargain is made. In due course he receives the cloth, opens the package, and checks the measurements. The first pieces are all right, those underneath are shorter, and those lowest down are half a meter too short! The cloth cannot be used for cloaks, and the merchant is ruined. . . . And so on and so on!