appearances Quotes

“He had one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced, or seemed to face, the whole external world for an instant and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself.”

“The truth was that Jay Gatsby, of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He was a son of God—a phrase which, if it means anything, means just that—and he must be about His Father’s business, the service of a vast, vulgar, and meretricious beauty. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen year old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

“You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.”

“She was dazzling-- alight; it was agony to comprehend her beauty in a glance.”

“When a girl feels that she’s perfectly groomed and dressed she can forget that part of her. That’s charm”

“I think it was the first time in my life I ever felt like I looked ‘good.‘”

“Oh! No mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then, but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.”

“Of my creation and creator I was absolutely ignorant, but I knew that I possessed no money, no friends, no kind of property. I was, besides, endued with a figure hideously deformed and loathsome; I was not even of the same nature as man. I was more agile than they and could subsist upon coarser diet; I bore the extremes of heat and cold with less injury to my frame; my stature far exceeded theirs. When I looked around I saw and heard of none like me. Was I, then, a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled and whom all men disowned?”

“Justine has just returned to us; and I assure you I love her tenderly. She is very clever and gentle, and extremely pretty; as I mentioned before, her mein and her expression continually remind me of my dear aunt.”

“A fiendish rage animated him as he said this; his face was wrinkled into contortions too horrible for human eyes to behold; but presently he calmed himself and proceeded.”

“Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair. There was something in his face that made one trust him at once. All the candour of youth was there, as well as all youth’s passionate purity. One felt that he had kept himself unspotted from the world. No wonder Basil Hallward worshipped him.”

“And beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won’t smile...”

“People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.”

“Ah! realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing. . . . A new Hedonism -- that is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol.”

“I know, now, that when one loses one’s good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that. Lord Henry Wotton is perfectly right. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself.”

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day -- mock me horribly!”

“Life has everything in store for you, Dorian. There is nothing that you, with your extraordinary good looks, will not be able to do.”

“It was his beauty that had ruined him, his beauty and the youth that he had prayed for. But for those two things, his life might have been free from stain. His beauty had been to him but a mask, his youth but a mockery. What was youth at best? A green, an unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him.”

“People are more than just the way they look.”

“I wish I was a woman of about thirty-six dressed in black satin with a string of pearls.”

“Heresy is the foe of countenance.”

There was a long pause, and slowly Snape regained control of himself, mastered his own breathing. At last he said, ‘Very well. Very well. But never – never tell, Dumbledore! This must be between us! Swear it! I cannot bear… especially Potter’s son… I want your word!’ ‘My word, Severus, that I shall never reveal the best of you?’ Dumbledore sighed, looking down into Snape’s ferocious, anguished face. ‘If you insist …’

“We look like Sunday every day now; Heidi did not go abroad for nothing.”

A ridiculous-looking little man. The sort of little man one could never take seriously.

“...no cat out of its first fur can ever be deceived by appearances. Unlike human beings, who enjoy them.”

“Don’t try too hard to be cool. It always shows, and that’s uncool.”

“Every one sees what you appear to be, few really know what you are.”

“Growing up with only one parent—especially in a place where everyone goes to such great lengths to present a picture-perfect family—really sets you apart.”

“Why is it so … important for us to look picture-perfect every time we walk out the door? Who exactly are you trying to impress? ... You really care so much about them that you’d rather hit your own son over an accident that you caused in the first place by screaming at him for wearing the wrong cummerbund?”

“She knew that there was no point making a scene, demanding an explanation. Any sort of explanation that could cause even the tiniest scratch on their picture-perfect life.”

Never Appear Too Perfect

“While clothes do not, as the saying would sometimes have it, make the man, and fine feathers do not make fine birds, sometimes they can add a certain spice to a recipe. And Tristran Thorn in crimson and canary was not the same man that Tristran Thorn in his overcoat and Sunday suit had been.”

“There was something in her attitude, in her whole appearance when she leaned her head against the high-backed chair and spread her arms, which suggested the regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone.”

“Don’t be confused by what looks like luck to you. Lucky people don’t make successful people; people who completely commit themselves to success seem to get lucky in life.”

“Weeks passed, and the little Rabbit grew very old and shabby, but the Boy loved him just as much. He loved him so hard that he loved all his whiskers off, and the pink lining to his ears turned grey, and his brown spots faded. He even began to lose his shape, and he scarcely looked like a rabbit any more, except to the Boy. To him he was always beautiful, and that was all that the little Rabbit cared about. He didn’t mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn’t matter.”

“The fact is, I was sick, but not in an easily explained flu kind of way. It’s my experience that people are a lot more sympathetic if they can see you hurting, and for the millionth time in my life I wish for measles or smallpox or some other recognizable disease just to make it simple for me and also for them.”

The temptation of the age is to look good without being good.

″[The King] was quite alone, like an ordinary person. True, he sat with one leg thrust out in a kingly sort of manner, and he was handsome in a plump, slightly vague way, but to Sophie he seemed quite youthful and just a touch too proud of being a king. She felt he ought, with that face, to have been more unsure of himself. He said, “Well, what does the Wizard Howl’s mother want to see me about?” And Sophie was suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that she was standing talking to the King. It was, she thought dizzily, as if the man sitting there and the huge important thing which was the kingship were two separate things that just happened to occupy the same chair.”

“There was a time when everyone seemed to be telling me [that Sophie is under a spell]. Even Calcifer did—when I asked him. But do you honestly think I don’t know my own business well enough not to spot a strong spell like that when I see it? I had several goes at taking it off you when you weren’t looking. But nothing seems to work. I took you to Mrs. Pentstemmon, hoping she could do something, but she evidently couldn’t. I came to the conclusion that you liked being in disguise.”

“Not just new—but big and awkward. With crazy hair, bright red on top of curly. And she was dressed like… like she wanted people to look at her. Or maybe like she didn’t get what a mess she was… Like something that wouldn’t survive in the wild.”

“When Eleanor was a little girl, she’d thought her mom looked like a queen, like the star of some fairy tale […] You’d look at Eleanor’s mom and think she must be carved into the prow of a Viking ship somewhere or maybe painted on the side of a plane […]”

″ ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t call yourself The Misfit because I know you’re a good man at heart. I can just look at you and tell.’ ”

″‘If you don’t want people to look at you,’ Park had thought at the time, ‘don’t wear fishing lures in your hair.‘”

“Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray! Jesus, you ought not to shoot a lady. I’ll give you all the money I’ve got!”

″‘And you look like a protagonist.’ She was talking as fast as she could think. ‘You look like a person who wins in the end. You’re so pretty, and so good. You have magic eyes,’ she whispered.”

“Eleanor was right: She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“He did have really cute hair. Really, really… It was completely straight and almost completely black, which, on Park, seemed like a lifestyle choice. He always wore black, practically head to toe.”

“We understand how dangerous a mask can be. We all become what we pretend to be.”

“They both wore clean work shirts, light blue with faded elbows. Esperanza had on a worn denim skirt and flat loafers. I had asked them please not to wear their very best for this occasion, not their Immigration-fooling clothes. It had to look like Turtle was going to be better off with me. When they came out that morning dressed as refugees I had wanted to cry out, No! I was wrong. Don’t sacrifice your pride for me. But this is how badly they wanted to make it work.”

“The really bad monsters never look like monsters.”

“The image was so strange, and yet it was nothing like my grandfather’s pictures. There were no tricks here. It was just a woman—a woman smoking a pipe.”

“Except that’s how it must have looked from a distance, because they never knew it was Freak who rescued me—or his genius brain and my big dumb body.”

“All you got from him is your looks and your size. You’ve got your mother’s heart, and that’s what counts.”

“Wu Wei doesn’t try. It doesn’t think about it. It just does it. And when it does, it doesn’t appear to do much of anything. But Things Get Done.”

“Fine words and an insinuating appearance are seldom associated with true virtue.”

“We don’t have to look like everyone else, Tally, and act like everyone else. We’ve got a choice. We can grow up any way we want.”

“Grown-ups don’t look like grown-ups on the inside.”

“I’m sure I looked no more elegant than a guest at an inn looks wearing a robe on the way to the bath. But I’d never before worn anything nearly so glamorous on my body.”

“…If I can’t be beautiful, I want to be invisible…”

″ ‘I don’t care to be pretty,’ Blue shot back hotly, ‘I care to look on the outside like I look on the inside.’ ”

“Some people look like they sound better than they actually sound, because they look confident and have good posture.”

“They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or to convince themselves that their aberration does not exist. These are true freaks, who appear, almost always, conventional and dull.”

“Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations.”

“You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.”

“He, the young man carbuncular arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”

“I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest— I too awaited the expected guest.”

“The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne.”

“You can’t let the little pricks generation-gap you.”

“Why did no one warn me that being thin sucked? If this is what real life is then give me back my blubber suit and shove a romance novel in my chubby fingers. I’m going back to friends I can count on like cupcakes, mashed potatoes and chocolate shakes.”

“A man wears his pants around his waist.”

“Lust, I suspect, wears repatent stilettos, that feather boa and not much else. Maybe glossy red lipstick.”

“I would go there with a pretty young woman, a strange woman, a quiet woman.”

“Miss Kelly, you know, when you wear my flower you make it beautiful.”

“So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs.”

“She didn’t want to miss the first day of school, but she was afraid of what the other kids would say. And she had no idea what to wear with those crazy stripes.”

“Angela could not be the bomber, not that sweet, pretty thing. Thing? Is that how she regarded that young woman, as a thing? And what had she ever said to her except ‘I hear you’re getting married, Angela’ or ‘How pretty you look, Angela.’ Had anyone asked her about her ideas, her hopes, her plans? If I had been treated like that I’d have used dynamite, not fireworks; no, I would have just walked out and kept right on going. But Angela was different.”

″‘After all, he does look a good deal like a mouse,’ said Mr. Little to his wife. ‘And I’ve never seen a mouse yet that didn’t like to go into a hole.‘”

“When Mrs. Frederick C. Little’s second son arrived, everybody noticed that he was not much bigger than a mouse. The truth of the matter was, the baby looked very much like a mouse in every way. He was only about two inches high; and he had a mouse’s sharp nose, a mouse’s tail, a mouse’s whiskers, and the pleasant, shy manner of a mouse.”

“DannyBoy always said people looked better in black-and-white and he was right.”

“Outside, she was composed, independent, not very much liked. The girls at school said she was a weirdie, and there was no doubt she was an outsider.”

″‘They don’t look like geniuses,’ Jack thought, not for the first time. ‘Just like anybody else’s brother and sisters they look.‘”

“You mustn’t be taken in by the moonlight and magnolias. There’s more to Savannah than that. Things can get very murky.”

“No; there’s nothing more humiliating than to look poor among other women who are rich.”

“I am so glad dear Susie- that our hearts are always clean, and always neat and lovely, so not to be ashamed.”

“Maria was one of your true aristocrats; the perfection of the hidden things was even more important to her than the outward show.”

“Your outside is all that’s worth while, while I, for all my plain and humble garb, can sing with such sweet melody...”

“The artificiality of his smile belies his good looks, however, indicating the depth of his isolation and rendering him unpleasant to look at.”

“Emira, I don’t care what you look like. I’ll pay for your cab here and your cab home.”

“Not all royals are alike. Some are furnished in fine clothes, unbearably heavy jewels so large that they drown twice as fast. Others are sparsely dressed, with only one or two rings and bronze crowns painted gold. Not that it matters to me. A prince is a prince, after all.”

“Something is rare and desirable when it is made to seem so.”

Jimmy, too, looked very well when he was dressed and, as he stood in the hall giving a last equation to the bows of his dress tie, his father may have felt even commercially satisfied at having secured for his son qualities often unpurchaseable.

“Well, well,” said Monte Cristo, “such an innocent looking person as you are to do those things, M. Bertuccio, and to a king’s attorney at that!”

“In my opinion, a withdrawal from Paris is absolutely necessary after the double catastrophe of Mademoiselle Danglars’ broken contract and M. Danglars’ disappearance. The world will think you abandoned and poor, for the wife of a bankrupt would never be forgiven, were she to keep up an appearance of opulence. You have only to remain in Paris for about a fortnight, telling the world you are abandoned, and relating the details of this desertion to your best friends, who will soon spread the report. Then you can quit your house, leaving your jewels and giving up your jointure, and everyone’s mouth will be filled with praises of your disinterestedness. They will know you are deserted, and think you also poor, for I alone know your real financial position, and am quite ready to give up my accounts as an honest partner.”