Beguiling Quotes & Sayings

It was remarkable, but every time he kissed her, her lips seemed to grow sweeter, her scent more beguiling. And his need grew, too. His blood was racing with desire, and it was taking his every last shred of restraint not to push her back onto the sofa and tear her clothes from her body.
That would come later, he thought with a secret smile. But this - surely her first time - would be slow and tender and everything a young girl dreamed.
Well, maybe not. His smile turned into an outright grin. Half the things he was going to do to her, she wouldn't have even thought to dream about. — Julia Quinn

The explanation for her absence had been staring him in the face all the while, but he hadn't wanted to acknowledge it: The affair meant nothing to her. He'd been the only one bewitched body and soul. For her, he'd been but a temporary source of entertainment, a way to pass the otherwise tedious hours in the middle of an ocean.
He'd been the one to press for a continuation of their affair beyond the voyage. He'd been the one to offer his heart, his hand, his every last secret. She never even gave her real name.
And, of course, never showed her face. — Sherry Thomas

The spring's already at the gate With looks my care beguiling; The country round appeareth straight A flower-garden smiling. — Heinrich Heine

I wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. — Anonymous

There is a sight all hearts beguiling
A youthful mother to her infant smiling,
Who with spread arms and dancing feet,
A cooing voice, returns its answer sweet. — Joanna Baillie

Listen to me," he said, his voice even and intense, "and listen well, because I'm only going to say this once. I desire you. I burn for you. I can't sleep at night for wanting you. Even when I didn't like you, I lusted for you. It's the most maddening, beguiling, damnable thing, but there it is. And if I hear one more word of nonsense from your lips, I'm going to have to tie you to the bloody bed and have my way with you a hundred different ways, until you finally get it through your silly skull that you are the most beautiful and desirable woman in England, and if everyone else doesn't see that, then they're all bloody fools. — Julia Quinn

Staring at life's cryptogram, we either see His name unmistakably resplendent or we see the confusion of religions with no single message, just garbled beliefs that plague our existence, each justified by the voice of culture. That may be the tragedy of the beguiling sentiment we call tolerance, which has become a euphemism for contradiction. — Ravi Zacharias

She didn't realize how beguiling she was in her innocent gestures. — Melanie Dickerson

I am in love with you', I responded. He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh. 'Of course you are,' he replied. 'I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.' It was my turn to laugh. — Anne Rice

I didn't know the comic at all, which is really funny because I grew up here and I had friends who worked at all of the places. Like The Beguiling, which is a store here, and Suspect Video and one of my friends actually worked at Suspect and The Beguiling. So it's kind of crazy that I'd never known the books before. — Alison Pill

Fantasy is storytelling with the beguiling power to transform the impossible into the imaginable, and to reveal our own "real" world in a fresh and truth-bearing light. — Leonard S. Marcus

Holy Mary Mother of God, what am I to do? There is always the easy way out, although I am loath to use it. I have no children, I do not watch television and I do not believe in God - all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier. Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them. Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning. — Muriel Barbery

There are surprisingly few real students of the game in baseball; partly because everybody, my eighty-three year old grandmother included, thinks they learned all there was to know about it at puberty. Baseball is very beguiling that way. — Alvin Dark

That's quite all right, I said. Sfumato, that was what the painters called it; a blurring or elision of the lines, the kind Leonardo had used to give his Mona Lisa her beguiling flux. — Paul Murray

Here come and sit, where never serpent hisses;
And being set, I 'll smother thee with kisses;
And yet not cloy thy lips with loath'd satiety,
But rather famish them amid their plenty,
Making them red and pale with fresh variety

Ten kisses short as one, one long as twenty:
A summer's day will seem an hour but short,
Being wasted in such time-beguiling sport. — William Shakespeare

...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 — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A long time later, after the bath had cooled, Lottie dressed in a fresh white nightgown and approached the bedroom table, where Nick was standing. She felt herself color as he stared at her with a half-smile. "I like the way you look in this," he said, brushing his fingers over the high-necked bodice of the gown. "Very innocent."
"Not any longer," Lottie said with an abashed smile.
He lifted her against his body, his face rubbing into the cool dampness of her hair. His beguiling mouth found her neck. "Oh, yes, you are," he said. "It's going to require a great deal of time and effort to debauch you completely."
"I have every faith you'll succeed," she said, and sat before a plate loaded with ham, vegetable pudding, potatoes, and open-faced tarts.
-Nick & Lottie — Lisa Kleypas

I think people just see cinematography as being about photography and innovative shots and beautiful lighting. We all want our movies to look great visually, to be beguiling and enticing, but I think that what really defines a great cinematographer is one who loves story. — Seamus McGarvey

The notion that inventors are anorak-wearing crackpots with glasses held together with Sellotape is beguiling but wrong. — Trevor Baylis

On that golden summer day, the young woman had just finished her morning run. She had sprinted the last half mile, then stopped abruptly to catch her breath. She was bent at the waist, hands on her knees, eyes on the ground, her mind a world away, perhaps in Barcelona or Tuscany or Rome, exulting in the enchanting sights she would soon see, the splendid life she would have.

It was then that the train hit her.

Unaware, unthinking, oblivious to everything but the beguiling visions in her head, she had ended her run on the railroad tracks that wound through the center of her small Oregon town, one moment in the fullest expectancy of her glorious youth, adrenaline and endorphins coursing through her body, sugarplum visions dancing in her head, the next moment gone, the transition instantaneous, irrevocable, complete.

If I'd had to die young, hers is the death I would have chosen. — Lionel Fisher

What's your name, lad?"
"Newton. Newton Pulsifer."
"LUCIFER? What's that you say? Are ye of the Spawn of Darkness, a tempting beguiling creature from the pit, wanton limbs steaming from the fleshpots of Hades, in tortured and lubricious thrall to your Stygian and hellish masters?"
"That's Pulsifer," explained Newton. "With a P. I don't know about the other stuff, but we come from Surrey."
The voice on the phone sounded vaguely disappointed. — Neil Gaiman

Many fantasy novels - 'Lord of the Rings', for instance, or 'Lavondyss' by Robert Holdstock - are beautifully written. Geoff Ryman's 'The Child Garden' is exquisite and utterly beguiling. Mervyn Peake's 'Gormenghast' trilogy is an astonishing piece of multi-faceted storytelling. So quality of writing does not condemn the genre. — David Gemmell

He was full of ironical admiration of his childishness and innocence in letting a wandering and characterless and scandalous American load him up with deceptions of so transparent a character that they ought not to have deceived the housecat. On the other hand, he was remorselessly severe upon me for beguiling him, by studied and discreditable artifice, into bragging and boasting about his poor game in the presence of a professional expert disguised in lies and frauds, who could empty more balls in billiard pockets in an hour than he could empty into a basket in a day. — Mark Twain

The only bright spot in the entire evening was the presence of Kevin "Tubby" Matchwell, the eleven-year-old porker who tackled the role of Santa with a beguiling authenticity. The false beard tended to muffle his speech, but they could hear his chafing thighs all the way to the North Pole. — David Sedaris

Oh, I see. I'm the wicked Grisha seductress. I have beguiled you with my Grisha wiles!"
She poked him in the chest.
"Stop that."
"No. I'm beguiling you. — Leigh Bardugo

It was beguiling to live in a country, Scotland, that didn't look enough like itself to be a location for its own movies ... I remember consulting a film book and discovering that Arthur Freed decided to shoot Brigadoon in Hollywood because nowhere in Scotland looked Scottish enough. — Andrew O'Hagan

Thousands of uninstructed Christians are being deceived today.
False teachers use high-sounding words
that seem like the epitome of scholarship and culture. They are intellectually clever and crafty ... adept at beguiling thoughtless, untaught men and women. — Billy Graham

Satan didn't lose any of his beguiling ways when he became the fallen prince. He took his charm, his subtleties, and his clever plots to use on us. — Billy Graham

Your first film is always your best film, in a way. There's something about your first film that you never ever get back to, but you should always try. It's that slight sense of not knowing what you're doing, because the technical skills you learn - especially if you have a film that works, that has some kind of success - are beguiling. The temptation is to use them again, and they're not necessarily good storytelling techniques. — Danny Boyle

He'd never encountered beauty of such magnitude and intensity. It was not allure, but grace, like the sight of land to a shipwrecked man. And he, who hadn't been on a capsized vessel since he was six - and that had only been an overturned canoe - suddenly felt as if he'd been adrift in the open ocean his entire life.
Someone spoke to him. He couldn't make out a single word.
There was something elemental to her beauty, like a mile-high thunderhead, a gathering avalanche, or a Bengal tiger prowling the darkness of the jungle. A phenomenon of inherent danger and overwhelming perfection.
He felt a sharp, sweet ache in his chest: His life would never again be complete without her. But he felt no fear, only excitement, wonder, and desire.
Christian's thoughts upon seeing Venetia for the first time (Beguiling the Beauty, Fitzhugh Trilogy 1, by Sherry Thomas) — Sherry Thomas

It was if the charming theatrical curtain had dropped away and I saw him for the first time as he really was: not the benign old sage, the indulgent and protective good-parent of my dreams, but ambiguous, a moral neutral, whose beguiling trappings concealed a being watchful, capricious, and heartless. — Donna Tartt

All zoos are both beguiling and repellent. — Thomas French

The bloody red head emerged.
The white sheet turned crimson.
The infant sat up.
Unfurling soft, white feathered wings, the newborn demigoddess regarded the world around her with large, beguiling blue eyes. As if satisfied with what she saw, she seized her own umbilical cord between her small, sharp teeth and severed her tie with her mother with one, quick bite. — Georgina Anne Taylor

Never mistake complacence for the illusion of control. She is like wildfire, at once utterly beguiling and wholly untameable. — Lisa Mantchev

For a well-made cup of coffee is the proper beginning to an idle day. Its aroma is beguiling, its taste is sweet; yet it leaves behind only bitterness and regret. In that, it resembles, surely, the pleasures of love. — Anthony Capella

Beguiling voices in the world cry out for 'alternative lifestyles' for women. They maintain that some women are better suited for careers than for marriage and motherhood. — Ezra Taft Benson

A beguiling lady doesn't take after the swarm. She is herself. — Loretta Young

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was "charm", that intoxicating, beguiling and occasionally lethal English quality. — Ben Macintyre

Wounds can sing a beguiling song. — Bill Clegg

Or are "being" and "having" thoroughly inaccurate verbs in the twisted skein of desire, where having someone's body to touch and being that someone we're longing to touch are one and the same, just opposite banks on a river that passes from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we want, is a twisted staircase designed with the impish cruelty of M. C. Escher. — Andre Aciman

Vengeance, retaliation, retribution, revenge are deceitful brothers - vile, beguiling demons promising justifiable compensation to a pained soul for his losses. Yet in truth they craftily fester away all else of worth remaining. — Richelle E. Goodrich

The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she'd caught him staring.
For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman's beauty.
She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.
He could have lived with this if only he'd kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew. — Sherry Thomas

The lyric abstrusities of Auden ring mystically down the circular canals of my ear and it begins to look like snow. The good gray conservative obliterating snow. Smoothing (in one white lacy euphemism after another) out all the black bleak angular unangelic nauseous ugliness of the blasted sterile world: dry buds, shrunken stone houses, dead vertical moving people all all all go under the great white beguiling wave. And come out transformed. Lose yourself in a numb dumb snow-daubed lattice of crystal and come out pure with the white virginal veneer you never had. — Sylvia Plath

There is something powerfully beguiling about the excited eyes of a young woman. They can pull all manner of nonsense out of a foolish young man, and I was no exception to this rule. — Patrick Rothfuss

For the next three seconds, he still dared to let himself hope.
Perhaps she was making a grand entrance. Perhaps she would be carried in like Cleopatra, hidden in a roll of fine carpet.
Perhaps
Three porters, grunting, pulled in a handcart.
A crevasse opened before him and in fell his heart. No need to remove the tarpaulin wrapping. He recognized the stone slab
by its size and weight.
She had returned his present. She would have nothing more to do with him. — Sherry Thomas

To the stern student of affairs, Beirut is a phenomenon, beguiling perhaps, but quite, quite impossible. — Jan Morris

Whether he chooses a 'scholarly' or a 'popular' edition the modern reader is likely to have his judgement influenced in advance. Almost invariably he will be offered an assisted passage. Footnotes, Forewords, Afterwords serve notice that a given text is intellectually taxing - that he is likely to need help. Such apparatus is likely to
be a positive disincentive to casual reading. But a cheaper edition may offer interference of another kind. Reminders, in words or pictures, of Julie Christie's Bathsheba Everdene or Michael York's Pip can perhaps create a beguiling sense of accessibility. But they
may also pre-empt the imaginative responses of the reader. — Ian Gregor

Until we can comprehend the beguiling beauty of a single flower, we are woefully unable to grasp the meaning and potential of life itself. — Virginia Woolf

Moral beauty existed as clearly as any other form of beauty and perhaps that was where we could find the God who was so vividly, and sometimes bizarrely, described in our noisy religious explanations. It was an intriguing thought, as it meant that a concert could be a spiritual experience, a secular painting a religious icon, a beguiling face a passing angel. — Alexander McCall Smith

You are not going to waltz in here and distract me with a clever phrase and a beguiling smile."
"You think my smile is beguiling? — Julia Quinn

Tanya Ward Goodman, writing with a big heart, clear eyes, and a light touch, allows us a privileged glimpse into the shabby, enchanted world of traveling carnivals, roadside attractions, and a beloved, eccentric father's descent into Alzheimers. Just as her dad animated the handcarved, miniature western world of Tinkertown from coat hangers, inner tubes and old sewing machine motors, Tanya Ward Goodman has fashioned her complex and often hilarious memories into a beguiling, wry, and moving work of art. — Michelle Huneven

Sick I am of idle words, past all reconciling, Words that weary and perplex and pander and conceal, Wake the sounds that cannot lie, for all their sweet beguiling; The language one need fathom not, but only hear and feel. — George Du Maurier

She recognized the signs of danger. When she'd said to the duke that she had a certain effect on men, she hadn't been exaggerating. It was not every man and it was not all the time, but when the effect happened, proposals flew like confetti and all parties involved usually ended up feeling quite mortified. — Sherry Thomas

Cyphel knew exactly how he felt about her as well - it was there in her expression whenever they spoke that beguiling combination of amusement and haughtiness that she carried off so well. It was a look that expressed disdain at Campion's guarded advances but also a kind of measured probationary respect as well. It was a look that said You dare to think that I will find you as interesting as you obviously find me Well perhaps in that very act of daring you become interesting to me if only fleetingly. — Alastair Reynolds

They ended every speech with the word hiro, which means: like I said. Thus each man took responsibility for intruding into the inarticulate murmur of the spheres. To hiro they added the word koue, a cry of joy or distress, according to whether it was sung or howled. Thus they essayed to piece the mysterious curtain which hangs between all talking men: at the end of every utterance a man stepped back, so to speak, and attempted to interpret his words to the listener, attempted to subvert the beguiling intellect with the noise of true emotion. — Leonard Cohen

Despite popular theories, I believe people fall in love based not on good looks or fate but on knowledge. Either they are amazed by something a beloved knows that they themselves do not know; or they discover a common rare knowledge; or they can supply knowledge to someone who's lacking. Hasn't everyone found a strange ignorance in someone beguiling? ... Nowadays, trendy librarians, wanting to be important, say, Knowledge is power. I know better. Knowledge is love. — Elizabeth McCracken

As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions - society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative. — Tim Hetherington

I've seen the smiling of Fortune beguiling, I've felt all its favours and found its decay; Sweet was its blessing, kind its caressing, But now it is fled, fled far, far away. — Richard Cobden

The character of the monkey just grew from something out of his face and my granddad's personality. They fused, and that's what I ended up with! The monkey belonged to a friend of mine, and I saw that it had such a little beguiling face and it grew from there. — Nina Conti

Marie Houzelle is a master of the first-person narrative. In Tita she has created a strange, utterly original child whose deadpan certainties are a beguiling invitation to readers of all ages. — Katharine Weber

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. — Truman Capote

An enchanting harmony of fuchsia, purple and pink undertones, Radiant Orchid inspires confidence and emanates great joy, love and health. It is a captivating purple, one that draws you in with its beguiling charm. — Leatrice Eiseman

Now that our marriage is over, I know what love is. It's a trick on the brain, the adrenal glands releasing endorphins. It floods the cells that transmit worry and better sense, drowns them with biochemical bliss. You can know all these things about love, yet it remains irresistible, as beguiling as the floating arms of long sleep. — Amy Tan

wanted to be puzzled and charmed, to experience the endless, beguiling variety of a continent where you can board a train and an hour later be somewhere where the inhabitants speak a different language, eat different foods, work different hours, live lives that are at once so different and yet so oddly similar. I wanted to be a tourist. But — Bill Bryson

In his writings, Patton was shameless about his ambition to woo Lena to be his bride. He detailed the gradual progress he made, playing music for her on his violin, writing her poems, beguiling her with stories, engaging her in conversation. It was clear that he obsessed over her. He knew what he wanted and never relented until she was his. — Brandon Mull

Very close, I want to hear your voice; and then I'll lose myself in the maelstrom of your eyes, your lips and your hair - you know it very well, you my beguiling siren and you rob me, mercilessly, of my thinking. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Desmond Coolwater is a well dressed, young prestigious ivy league gentleman and dabbling misogynist with a key to the metropolitan Denver nightlife as well as a job with a local, yet well known magazine as an entertainment / advertising executive.

He knows how to make money marketing and beguiling women, but he is about take losses on a level that he's not accustomed to and in order to overcome losing his job, nearly losing his father and the possibility for love with the right woman he will have to reinvent cool. — Keylend Wright

Beautifully Bleak. I likened the hills encircling Canberra to the sea. They, like the sea, could be a sunny beguiling blue, or deep and inky. They could be distant and mysterious, or beautifully bleak as the wind tore across the plains from their snowy peaks. The hills were ever changing like the sea. — Hazel Hawke

Natives dislike speed, as we dislike noise, it is to them, at the best, hard to bear. They are also on friendly terms with time, and the plan of beguiling or killing it does not come into their heads. In fact the more time you can give them, the happier they are, and if you commission a Kikuyu to hold your horse while you make a visit, you can see by his face that he hopes you will be a long, long time about it. He does not try to pass the time then, but sits down and lives. — Isak Dinesen

I once asked Lady Moseley what she found so beguiling about Hitler's conversation. 'Oh, the jokes', she said at once. — A. N. Wilson

So far I have restrained myself. For how much longer, I do not know.
I have never known such happiness, shot through with such misery. Only four days have passed, they tell me. But that is not true. It has been decades since I saw
you last.
You will find me a stooped old man when we meet again. Perhaps I might even need a pair of spectacles to recognize your veil.
But I remain always,
Your servant,
C.
One of Christian's onesided letters to the Baroness — Sherry Thomas

I understand what lies hidden beneath beguiling words. I understand the trap beneath extravagant words. I understand the deceit beneath depraved words. And I understand the weariness beneath evasive words. — Mencius

Turn from that road's beguiling ease; return
to your hunger's turret. Enter, climb the stair
chill with disuse, where the croaking toad of time
regards from shimmering eyes your slow ascent
and the drip, drip, of darkness glimmers on the stone
to show you how your longing waits alone.
What alchemy shines from under that shut door,
spinning out gold from the hollow of the heart?
("The Sea's Wash In The Hollow Of The Heart") — Denise Levertov

Maturity/experience: the beguiling texture of stones subjected to years of furious seas. — Alain De Botton

A Gift for You
I send you ...
A cottage retreat on a hill in Ireland. This cottage is filled with fresh flowers, art supplies, and a double-wide chaise lounge in front of a wood-burning fireplace. There is a cabinet near the front door, where your favorite meals appear, several times a day. Desserts are plentiful and calorie free. The closet is stocked with colorful robes and pajamas, and a painting in the bedroom slides aside to reveal a plasma television screen with every movie you've ever wanted to watch. A wooden mailbox at the end of the lane is filled daily with beguiling invitations to tea parties, horse-and-carriage rides, theatrical performances, and violin concerts. There is no obligation or need to respond.
You sleep deeply and peacefully each night, and feel profoundly healthy. This cottage is yours to return to at any time. — SARK

Even they would think you a monster were you to
orchestrate a divorce right after my confinement."
"How long do you recommend I wait, then?"
"A long time. I know what happens when a divorce is granted:
The woman never gets anything. And I will not be parted from my child."
"So you will contest the divorce?"
"To my last penny. And then I'll borrow from Fitz and Millie."
"So we'll be married 'til the end of time?"
"The sooner you accept it, the sooner we are all better off."
His ancestors would have appreciated her hauteur: a fit wife for a de Montfort. "Now if you'll excuse me, I must have enough rest."
He gazed at her retreating back. Foolish woman, did she not realize that he'd already accepted it from the moment he'd said "I do"? — Sherry Thomas

I have never looked into my sister's eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to the beguiling moon. I've never used an airplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that. I've never driven a car. Or slept through the night. Never a private talk. Or a solo walk. I've never climbed a tree. Or faded into a crowd. So many things I've never done, but oh, how I've been loved. And, if such things were to be, I'd live a thousand lives as me, to be loved so exponentially. — Lori Lansens

The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit - how it grows! what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies - oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together that we can't quite tell which is which, anymore. — Mark Twain

Amazon may be the most beguiling company that ever existed, and it is just getting started. It is both missionary and mercenary ... That has always been a potent combination. — Brad Stone

Wolf Boy is absolutely beguiling. Evan Kuhlman has boundless empathy for all his characters, and his wonderful protagonist Stephen is, in turn, boundlessly inventive ... This is an auspicious debut. — Valerie Sayers

From the flames she rises, a bold, resplendent warrior ready to bring the world to its knees and cast away those who do not revere their Goddess. Enrapturing all those whom she favours there is no escaping her beguiling sensuality. Enfolding him to her breast, she enslaves his tumescence within her warm embrace and he is lost, within her passion, for eternity... — Virginia Alison

After all, the butt of Fashion's dirtiest jokes is the public. The present American boast, that all women can be beautifully dressed if they choose, has been so clearly stated in so many ways for so long a time, that a large number of American women believe themselves to be beautifully dressed who are actually horrors to behold. Take those $10.75 copies of the dresses worn by the Duchess of Windsor in the summer of 1937. You could tell by the look on the faces of the American girls who wore them that they really felt beguiling enough to snatch off a Duke because they had a modified silhouette corresponding to that of a Duchess. The actual dress, stinted on material, cheaply imitated as to print design, bad in color and ill-fitting, was a horror to behold. You may say, if the girl feels like a Duchess, what more do you ask? I say, she looks to me like the worst mass-pro- duced imitation of a Duchess I can imagine, and it just isn't pretty. — Elizabeth Hawes

Beware the beguiled, they do their own beguiling. — Lucille Kallen

Beguiling, without doubt; the month of May scatters flowers - electrifying attributes, demanding and longing for the smell of love. — Kristian Goldmund Aumann

Do you think I should be paying my addresses to Mrs. Martin, my dear Miss Fitzhugh?" he whispered. "Martin doesn't
look the sort to have enough stamina to service two women.
And goodness knows you could probably exhaust Casanova himself."
Again this insinuation that she must be a sufferer of nymphomania. Behind her fan, she put her lips very close to his ear. "You've no idea, my Lord Hastings, the heated yearnings
that singe me at night, when I cannot have a man. My skin burns to be touched, my lips kissed, and my entire body passionately fondled."
Hastings was mute, for once. He stared at her with something halfway between amusement and arousal.
She snapped shut her fan and rapped his fingers as hard as she could, watching with great satisfaction as he choked back a
yelp of pain.
"By anyone but you," she said, and turned on her heels. — Sherry Thomas

A hakawati is a teller of tales, myths, and fables. A storyteller, and entertainer. A troubadour of sorts, someone who earns his keep by beguiling an audience with yarns. Like the word "hekayah" story, fable, news, hakawati is derived from the Lebanese word "haki", which means talk or conversation. This suggests that in Lebanese the mere act of talking is storytelling. — Rabih Alameddine

Memories are strange things. Withough being something I can hold in my hand, they wield a beguiling power over me. Like a mirage in the noontime heat of summer, they dance before my inner eyes and beckon me to find water where there is not water. — Joy Sikorski

All zoos, even the most enlightened, are built upon the idea both beguiling and repellent - the notion that we can seek out the wildness of the world and behold its beauty, but that we must first contain that wildness. Zoos argue that they are fighting for the conservation of the Earth, that they educate the public and provide refuge and support for vanishing species. And they are right. Animal-rights groups argue that zoos traffic in living creatures, exploiting them for financial gain and amusement. And they are right. Caught inside this contradiction are the animals themselves, and the humans charged with their well-being. — Thomas French

I'd forgotten how that sort of craving felt, how it rose suddenly and loudly from the pit of my stomach like a flock of startle birds, then floated back down in the slow, beguiling way of feathers. — Sue Monk Kidd

It's a pervasive and beguiling myth that the people who design instruments of death end up being killed by them. There is almost no foundation in fact. Colonel Shrapnel wasn't blown up, M. Guillotin died with his head on, Colonel Gatling wasn't shot. If it hadn't been for the murder of cosh and blackjack maker Sir William Blunt-Instrument in an alleyway, the rumour would never have got started. — Terry Pratchett

The joy of joys is the person of light but unmalicious humor. If you know any one who is gay, beguiling and amusing, you will, if you are wise, do everything you can to make him prefer your house and your table to any other; for where he is, the successful party is also. — Emily Post

He will conclude that love can endure only when one is unfaithful to its beguiling opening ambitions; and that for his relationships to work he will need to give up on the feelings that got him into them in the first place. He will need to learn that love is a skill rather than an enthusiasm. — Alain De Botton

Does this mean that men evolve faster than women do, would we ever live in an integrated society where the sexes would be equal? The bewildered self is unchanging. Men are unchanging when it comes top sex. Inertia. That would be the first word to describe my personality. Frightened and confused when it comes to sex, sensuality and the sexual transaction. Men will give you money to go away. Men do not want you to make trouble for them. I poured myself into After Leaving Mr Mackenzie. I poured myself into Jean Rhys' novels and I saw more than sadness, suffering, losing youth there. I saw human rights. The men perhaps had all the power because they had the money but who was the greater, the woman or the man with her beguiling attractiveness, her youthful appeal, her attractiveness. — Abigail George

Photography is the recording of strangeness and beauty with beguiling precision. — Sebastian Smee

It was a kind of fire dance in which the stick was thrown and caught, and the flame, tossed and twirled, created sinuous shapes, circles and ever-moving patterns. Ancel's red hair created a pleasing aesthetic alongside the red and orange fire. And even without the hypnotic movement of the flame, the dance was beguiling, its difficulties made to look effortless, its physicality subtly erotic. Damen looked at Ancel with new respect. This performance required training, discipline and athleticism, which Damen admired. It was the first time that Damen had seen Veretian pets display skill in anything other than wearing clothes or climbing on top of one another. — C.S. Pacat

Far more beguiling than the idea that evil can be destroyed by throwing a piece of expensive jewelry into a volcano is the possibility that evil can be defused by talking. The fantasy of justice is more interesting than the fantasy of fairies, and more truly fantastic. — Terry Pratchett

...unlike Aretha, [Al Green's] only rival vocally, Al never sold himself short in the studio. Where the albums follow the vagaries of genius, the hits exploit Al's personal production line, every one a perfect soul record and a perfect pop record in whatever order suits your petty little values. Brashly feminine and seductively woman-friendly, he breaks free in a register that darts and floats and soars into falsetto with startling frequency and beguiling ease. He's so gorgeous, so sexy, so physically attractive that only masochists want to live without him. — Robert Christgau

Manet nonetheless seems to have been captivated by her appearance, or at least by the visual possibilities of dressing her in exotic costumes and placing her in beguiling poses. — Ross King

I'm in love with you," I responded. He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh. "Of course you are," he replied. "I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control. — Anne Rice