Elaine Scarry Quotes & Sayings

Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity. — Elaine Scarry

When we come upon beautiful things they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space. — Elaine Scarry

The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato's Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person. — Elaine Scarry

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things. — Elaine Scarry

Beauty always takes place in the particular. — Elaine Scarry

Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. "English," writes Virginia Woolf, "which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache." ... Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it. — Elaine Scarry

To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed. — Elaine Scarry

This willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky. — Elaine Scarry

Beauty brings copies of itself into being. — Elaine Scarry

To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt. — Elaine Scarry

The boy in war is, to an extent found in almost no other form of work, inextricably bound up with the men and materials of his labor. ... He is a fragment of American earth wedged into an open hillside in Korea and reworked by its unbearable sun and rain. ... He is a light brown vessel of red Australian blood that will soon be opened and emptied across the rocks and ridges of Gallipoli from which he can never again become distinguishable. — Elaine Scarry

What is striking about such unmediated juxtapositions, and relevant to the way in which at the end of war opened bodies and verbal issues are placed side by side, is that in most instances the verbal assertion has no source of substantiation other than the body. — Elaine Scarry

Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land. — Elaine Scarry