Quotes & Sayings About Black Beauty

His skin was a pretty colour, it made me jealous.
Jacob noticed my scrutiny.
What?" he asked, suddenly self-conscious.
"Nothing. I just hadn't realised before. Did you know, you're sort of beautiful?"
Once the words slipped out, I worried that he might take my implusive observation the wrong way.
But Jacob rolled his eyes. "You hit your head pretty hard, didn't you?"
"I'm serious."
Well, then, thanks. Sort of."
I grinned. "You're sort of welcome. — Stephenie Meyer

Dipped in chocolate, bronzed in elegance, enameled with grace, toasted with beauty. My lord, she's a black woman. — Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan

Then there were the people. Assamese, Jats, and Punjabis; people from Rajasthan, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu; from Pushkar, Cochin, and Konarak; warrior caste, Brahmin, and untouchable; Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Parsee, Jain, Animist; fair skin and dark, green eyes and golden brown and black; every different face and form of that extravagant variety, that incomparable beauty, India. — Gregory David Roberts

The white marble surface was inlaid with semiprecious stones in seamless floral designs and in chaste calligraphy, shaped stones, jeweled stones, delicate and free-figured. The surface ran cool and smooth. Traceries of black Koranic figures covered the longer sides of the tomb with a smaller group on top. My hand moved slowly over the words, feeling for breaks between the inlay and marble, not to fault the craftsmen, of course, but only to find the human labor, the individual, in the wholeness and beauty of the tomb. — Don DeLillo

As always, just the sight of him gave her a quick inner jolt. His face was like a painting, a depiction in perfect oils of some fallen angel. The sheer beauty of it, framed by all that rich black hair, was forever a surprise to her. — J.D. Robb

Somebody/ anybody sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself to know you but sing her rhythms carin/ struggle/ hard times sing her song of life she's been dead so long closed in silence so long she doesn't know the sound of her own voice her infinite beauty she's half-notes scattered without rhythm/ no tune sing her sighs sing the song of her possibilities sing a righteous gospel let her be born let her be born & handled warmly. — Ntozake Shange

He is wearing he same black pants from yesterday, but no shirt, his body is brown and hard, perfectly proportioned. He knows that he is beautiful and somehow his makes him ugly. — Damon Galgut

For a few moments he indulged his old joy in range and mountain, stretching, rising on his right, away into the purple distance. Something had heightened its beauty. How softly gray the rolling range land - how black the timbered slopes! The town before him sat like a hideous blotch on a fair landscape. It forced his gaze over and beyond toward the west, where the late afternoon sun had begun to mellow and redden, edging the clouds with exquisite light. To the southward lay Arizona, land of painted mesas and storied canyon walls, of thundering streams and wild pine forests, of purple-saged valleys and grassy parks, set like mosaics between the stark desert mountains. — Zane Grey

I'm strangely comforted when I hear from scientists that human beings are the most complex creatures we know of in the universe, still, by far. Black holes are in their way explicable; the simplest living being is not. I lean a bit more confidently into the experience that life is so endlessly perplexing. I love that word. Spiritual life is a way of dwelling with perplexity - taking it seriously, searching for its purpose as well as its perils, its beauty as well as its ravages. — Krista Tippett

The last man on the moon, Gene Cernan, had paused for a final look at the black beauty of the world about him. He had a message to send home before departing. "As I take these last steps from the surface for some time in the future to come, I'd just like to record that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow. And as we leave the moon and Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind." It's been nearly four decades since he spoke those words. No American, no earth being has yet returned to the moon. Sadly, no one will again for decades to come. — Alan Shepard

Blake studied the satisfied expression on Eliza's face. Like a cat just finished the last bowl of cream. His hand rose involuntarily - how he'd like to strike her! Elisa barely flinched. But Blake wasn't going to assault the woman. Instead he dropped his hand slightly and carefully traced his finger down her cheek until it rested above a strategically placed, heart-shaped beauty spot. He peeled off the tiny piece of black leather and held it between his index finger and thumb, studying it with apparent fascination.
"We have one thing in common, Aunt 'Lizzie'. We have both lost our hearts. But our likeness stops there. Unlike you, I wish to find mine." After flicking her beauty spot onto the floor, he stepped on it and strode out of her parlour. — Tanya Kaley

When and where there is repression, what a woman does when she gets dressed in the morning may be considered political. Wearing or not wearing a veil, disobeying laws that prohibit transgender dressing, or wearing a large Afro in an institution that seeks to diminish the formation of racial alliances are all actions that can serve as challenges to domination — Maxine Leeds Craig

Big don't mean ugly, and thin sho don't mean pretty. If a person wants to be pretty, they gotta walk pretty, talk pretty and act pretty. Can't nobody take pretty from you. — Daniel Black

Viktor was swinging a leather duffle and wearing a black Adidas tracksuit and his favorite brown UGG slippers with a hole in the toe.
"Worn and old, just like Viv," he'd say when Frankie made fun of them, and then his wife would swat him on the arm. But Frankie knew he was just joking, because Viveka was the type of woman you wished was in a magazine just so you could stare at her violet-colored eyes and shiny black hair without being called a stalker or a freak. — Lisi Harrison

I see the eight of us in the Annexe as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We're surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other. We look at the fighting down below and the peace and beauty up above. In the meantime, we've been cut off by the dark mass of clouds, so that we can go neither up nor down. It looms before us like an impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. I can only cry out and implore, 'Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us out!' Yours, Anne — Anne Frank

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. — Barry Lopez

From scarlet to powdered gold, to blazing yellow, to the rare ashen emerald, to the orange and black velvet of your shimmering corselet, out to the tip that like an amber thorn begins you, small, superlative being, you are a miracle, and you blaze — Pablo Neruda

I am so very proud of you - your openness, your ambition, your aggression, your intelligence. My job, in the little time we have left together, is to match that intelligence with wisdom. Part of that wisdom is understanding what you were given - a city where gay bars are unremarkable, a soccer team on which half the players speak some other language. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Oh, her beauty
the tender maid! Its brilliance gives light like lamps to one travelling in the dark.
She is a pearl hidden in a shell of hair as black as jet,
A pearl for which Thought dives and remains unceasingly in the deeps of that ocean.
He who looks upon her deems her to be a gazelle of the sand-hills, because of her shapely neck and the loveliness of her gestures. — Ibn Arabi

Each time I glanced into the rearview mirror, the black around my eyes was bigger and darker. Every once in a while Tom and I would look at each other with a silent acknowledgement that we had just worked our greatest match. When I think of it now, a quote from Georges Braque comes to mind: "Art is a wound turned to light." To my mind, that is also the beauty of pro wrestling. — Bret Hart

I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens ... what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined. — Barry Lopez

Kieran glanced at her with shimmering eyes. Neither looked quite human: The black eye was too dark, the silver too metallic. And yet the overall effect was haunting, inhumanly beautiful. — Cassandra Clare

Packy watched her walk away, her perfect heart-shaped rear end testing the confines of her tight black dress. There was a God. Packy was now certain of it. How else could such heart-stopping beauty be accounted for? Such a thing could not be the product of a random universe. A flower, maybe. A rainbow, perhaps. But not Venus Versailles. — Quentin R. Bufogle

In some sense, list-making is to mind-mapping as black and white photography is to color photography. Both are good, both are useful. One gives you precision and clarity; the other gives you a broader spectrum of potential beauty, as well as access to otherwise-unseen features. — Anonymous

The beauty of when you watch good television or films is that, yes, you may have a multi-cultural cast but those roles could be anybody - they could be white, they could be black. To show the world that we have more in common than we have different with each other is to me the ultimate goal of all of that. It does help unite in people's mind the thought that people are the same. Yes, there's going to be cultural differences, but for the most part, we are all in the same gang as human beings. — Mekhi Phifer

She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth. Lips look like black plum. Eyes big, glossy. Feverish. And mean. Like, sick as she is, if a snake cross her path, she kill it — Alice Walker

I just hope that one day, in one gloriously farcical moment I will be taken completely by surprise. I hope that I trip and fall. And when that day comes I hope that all of the doom and gloom that fill my black balloon will burst and ignite something so beautiful, so overwhelming that I find myself seeing beauty in the ugliest of places. — Kendal Rob

Dantes had entered the Chateau d'If with the round, open, smiling face of a young and happy man, with whom the early
paths of life have been smooth. and who anticipates a future corresponding with his past. This was now all changed. The oval face was lengthened, his smiling mouth had assumed the firm and marked
lines which betoken resolution; his eyebrows were arched beneath a brow furrowed with thought; his eyes were full of melancholy, and from their depths occasionally sparkled gloomy fires of misanthropy and hatred; his complexion, so long kept from the sun, had now that pale color which produces, when the features are encircled with black hair, the aristocratic beauty of the man of the north; the profound learning he had acquired had besides diffused over his features a refined intellectual expression; and he had also acquired, being naturally of a goodly stature, that vigor which a frame possesses which has so long concentrated all its force within itself. — Alexandre Dumas

The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence. — Cornel West

What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness.
I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and the changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of the half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadows I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. ("Man Size In Marble") — E. Nesbit

There's no winning or losing in this game, only playing, endless playing, you want your adversary to be strong not weak, smart not dumb, you're delighted to trick him and delighted to be tricked by him, boy learns from girl, white learns from black, old learns from young, the teaching is the doing is the beauty is the grace is the humor, endlessly you go on learning, smiling, moving, feinting, never missing a beat. Gingare, the dance of life: the controlled, prolonged, sustained, ineffable excitement of capoeira is like an endless climax. — Nancy Huston

Graff was floating on his back in the pool when George Wall and I went outside. His brown belly swelled above its surface like the humpback of a Galapagos tortoise. Mrs. Graff, fully clothed, was sitting by herself in a sunny corner. Her black dress and black hair seemed to annul the sunlight. Her face and body had the distinction that takes the place of beauty in people who have suffered long and hard. — Ross Macdonald

But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me - the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Sonnet 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare. — William Shakespeare

On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage. — Meg Rosoff

But in the end, black can never be white, one plus one must always equal two, and Mara Lynn was a normal little girl. — Jake Vander Ark

Beyond the typhoon shelters, ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping finger of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins; the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley. They — John Le Carre

Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about 18, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour. — Thomas Hardy

Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dream
Is laid upon thee, golden from the fire.
Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleam
The black forge-hammers fall on thy desire.

Demoniac giants round thee seem to loom.
'Tis but the world-smiths heaving to and fro.
Stand like a beaten anvil. Take the doom
Their ponderous weapons deal thee, blow on blow.

Needful to truth as dew-fall to the flower
Is this wild wrath and this implacable scorn.
For every pang, new beauty, and new power,
Burning blood-red shall on thy heart be born.

Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrong
Beat on that iron and ring back in song. — Alfred Noyes

How old are you?'
The question startled him. 'Earth and Air. There are times you are no more comfortable a companion than I am. The answer to that serves no conceivable purpose, and I refuse to give it to you.'
When I was a kid I read Black Beauty. There were horse-drawn cabs in that. Are you that old?'
Older, older, older. I shall not tell you, so you may as well leave off, my primrose.'
She snorted. 'I think that means I should give up. You've started sweet-talking.'
I am torn,' the phouka said, grinning, 'between responding, 'Oh, absolutely!' and 'What do you mean, started?' He grabbed her hand, dropped a kiss on the knuckles, and loped across the street. Eddi felt the touch of his mouth on her hand for an inexplicably long time. — Emma Bull

What a magnificent body, how I should like to see it on the dissecting table. — Ivan Turgenev

When asked why I am single, my reply is simply; I consider myself a black pearl rare in my authenticity, adding a mysterious beauty to the select few who can recognize & even fewer who appreciate my worth. So instead of dating, I throw myself into working in the field. If my Boaz recognizes me amongst the black rocks ... great! If not, the magnificence of my rarity will simply radiate onto those working the fields as well in the form of teaching, which is what I do. — Sanjo Jendayi

What did you have in you? - some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance. — Jack London

When Black and White are colors and not races, people will still fall in love and discriminate between partners and feel sad and bad and need art that breaks your heart and takes you to those places where pain becomes beauty. — Marlene Dumas

For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. — William Shakespeare

So much wanting and longing, clutching, desiring, passion and hatred and terrible need. Here, death was suitable, there was room for it, the grip of life's relentless urges slackened, replaced by this icy simplicity. This wasnt her death. It was his. That was the sad and honest truth. Though it would stay with her, it would be more like a black onyx heart on a silver chain, worn privately, under her clothes, close to her body, all her life. The guilt, the beauty, everything. It wasnt over, it had only begun. Well ok then, Okay. — Janet Fitch

And as to being quick, why, bless you! That is only a matter of habit; if you get into the habit of being quick, it is just as easy as being slow; easier, I should say; in fact, it don't agree with my health to be hulking about over a job twice as long as it need take. Bless you! I couldn't whistle if I crawled over my work as some folks do! — Anna Sewell

Ink black hair, dark smoldering eyes with eyelashes so enviably long they cast shadows upon his cheekbones, a dimpled smile and broad shoulders and a height a little over six feet was all that comprised of Logan Jackson. Basically, he looked like he had just stepped out of the cover of GQ magazine and belonged in Milan and not Haven Falls.
He looked the same but completely different all at once. His pretty boyish features had hardened. He was still handsome but in a rougher more masculine way. Gone was the slightly mischievous innocent child. Now there only remained a devilishly handsome young man — Ali Harper

There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won't go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor. — Keith Bellows

What right had they to make me suffer like that? — Anna Sewell

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. As — Jeff VanderMeer

What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. Perhaps — Ta-Nehisi Coates

His polish-black hair was so silky that my first impulse was to stroke it. That's what beauty does to us. Our first thought is that of the child. Touch it. Make it mine. But the child grows up and learns what happens when you reach for those bright balloons bursting with colour. — Bonnie Hearn Hill

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo. — Walter Mosley

When English author Anna Sewell wrote Black Beauty, in the late nineteenth century, she said that her aim was to "induce kindness, sympathy, and an understanding treatment of horses." Though now considered a children's classic, the book was originally intended for an adult audience. Narrated from the horse's point of view, the novel describes Black Beauty's life, from his earliest memory, of "a large pleasant meadow with a pond of clear water in it" to his wretched existence pulling a heavy load for a cruel peddler. The sentimental and emotionally wrenching book was wildly popular, quickly becoming a bestseller first in England and then in the United States, where it became a favorite of the progressive movement. Sewell's book was the first to popularize interest in the plight of the horse and to generate widespread concern about the beast of burden's treatment. — Elizabeth Letts

Ladies, stress shows on your face. Happiness is the true beauty weapon.
As quoted in The Black Book of Hollywood Beauty Secrets ( Kym Douglas / Cindy Pearlman, 2006) — Susan Sarandon

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds
nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. — Dorianne Laux

Then Wang Lung turned to the woman and looked at her for the first time. She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide as a gash in her face. Her eyes were small and of a dull black in color, and were filled with some sadness that was not clearly expressed. It was a face that seemed habitually silent and unspeaking, as though it could not speak if it would. She bore patiently Wang Lung's look, without embarrassment or response, simply waiting until he had seen her. He saw that it was true there was not beauty of any kind in her face - a brown, common, patient face. But there were no pock-marks on her dark skin, nor was her lip split. In her ears he saw his rings hanging, the gold-washed rings he had bought, and on her hands were the rings he had given her. He turned away with secret exultation. Well, he had his woman! — Pearl S. Buck

The Latin American photographer has the possibility, and the means, for naming the things of our world, for demonstrating that there is another kind of beauty, that the faces of the First World are not the only ones. These Indian, black, plundered white and mestizo faces are the first element defining the demographic content of our photography. — Edmundo Desnoes

Football is the only sport where you put people together, it doesn't matter if you are rich, or poor, or black, or white. It is one nation. This is the beauty of football. — Pele

In the history of science it happens not infrequently that a reductionist approach leads to a spectacular success. Frequently the understanding of a complicated system as a whole is impossible without an understanding of its component parts. And sometimes the understanding of a whole field of science is suddenly advanced by the discover of a single basic equation. Thus it happened that the Schrodinger equation in 1926 and the Dirac equation in 1927 brought a miraculous order into the previously mysterious processes of atomic physics. The equations of Erwin Schrodinger and Paul Dirac were triumphs of reductionism. Bewildering complexities of chemistry and physics were reduced to two lines of algebraic symbols. These triumphs were in Oppenheimer's mind when he belittled his own discovery of black holes. Compared with the abstract beauty and simplicity of the Dirac equation, the black hole solution seemed to him ugly, complicated, and lacking in fundamental significance. — Freeman Dyson

One night I'll be in Los Angeles and it'll be a Latin crowd, and then another night I'll go to Fresno and it'll be an all-black crowd. To me, that's the beauty of the music. — Pitbull

One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven't all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life.
Is that my work, to point to the world and say, See how darkly it sparkles? — Mark Doty

Crippled things are always more beautiful. It's the flaw that brings out beauty. — Holly Black

The way we value black beauty has changed. I'm single now, but back in the slave days, I would have never been single. I'm 6 feet tall and I'm strong. Look at me, I'm a Mandingo. — Leslie Jones

This book is dedicated to every woman who has ever felt self-conscious about her size. Outer beauty comes in all sizes, shapes, heights, ages, and colors. And inner beauty will always shine through, no matter what the packaging. — Raynetta Manees

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen, and they shall live, and he in them still green. — William Shakespeare

Skye said when she looked at Lise, she saw a black mark, an aura. Just like the mark on Lise's thigh, it was a warming. Deenie thought of it now, of Lise and the stretch mark on her thigh. And how the fevered mind of her fevered friend might believe anything. But also, somewhere inside, it felt the smallest bit true. That the stretch mark was a kind of witch's mark, the blot of Lise's body that reminded you of what she had been -a plump, awkward girl- before the lithesome beauty took her place.
It was a kind of witchcraft, that transformation. — Megan Abbott

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not tempted to explore it,
to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad, and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the black Nile that concerns us. — Henry David Thoreau

B4 U,my life ws lyk a moonless night.Very dark, but der wer stars,points of light & reason.And den you shot
across my sky like a meteor.Suddenly everythng ws on fire;ter ws
brilliancy,der ws beauty.Wen u wer gone,wen d meteor had
fallen over d horizon,everythng went black.Nothing had changed,but
my eyes wer blinded by d light I cudn't c d stars anymore & ter was no more reason, for anything. — Stephanie Mayer

But I want her, I must have her, I shall die if I do not get her - false, proud, black-hearted daughter of a dog that she is! I cannot sleep and my food has no savor and my eyes are darkened because of her beauty. I must have the barbarian queen. — C.S. Lewis

Now that Karen has been resurrected, I can travel beyond the black mirror. I can discover who I have lost with the
floating hearts and severed heads of my medicine. I must now whisper my other friends back too. I'm sad they're gone ... sad and blue. — Nicholaus Patnaude

Seen under the microscope, Stegomyia is a creature of striking beauty. Its general color is dark gray, but the thorax is marked with a silvery-white lyre-shaped pattern; the abdomen is banded with silvery-white stripes and the six-jointed legs are striped alternately with black and pure white. Among mosquitoes Stegomyia is the height of elegance. — David McCullough

There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren't worth what a pig could spit
and it goes by the name of London.
At the top of the hole sit the privileged few
Making mock of the vermin in the lonely zoo
turning beauty to filth and greed ...
I too have sailed the world and seen its wonders,
for the cruelty of men is as wonderous as Peru
but there's no place like London! — Stephen Sondheim

Occasionally we glimpse the South Rim, four or five thousand feet above. From the rims the canyon seems oceanic; at the surface of the river the feeling is intimate. To someone up there with binoculars we seem utterly remote down here. It is this know dimension if distance and time and the perplexing question posed by the canyon itself- What is consequential? (in one's life, in the life of human beings, in the life of a planet)- that reverberate constantly, and make the human inclination to judge (another person, another kind of thought) seem so eerie ... Two kinds of time pass here: sitting at the edge of a sun-warmed pool watching blue dragonflies and black tadpoles. And the rapids: down the glassy-smooth tongue into a yawing trench, climb a ten-foot wall of standing water and fall into boiling, ferocious hydraulics ... — Barry Lopez

middle of the room, stands my stylist, Micah, beside a foldaway beauty chair, arranging cosmetics and other paraphernalia atop his portable vanity table, as he sings along with the music playing from his Tab. He's a good looking man, tall and broad shouldered, with dark chocolate skin, gaping flesh-holes in both ears, black dreadlocks pulled back into a thick ponytail and heavy eye make-up which makes his eyes appear to pop out of his face. Too bad he's gay. — M.L. Sparrow

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air -
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music - like the rain pelting the trees - like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds -
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? — Mary Oliver

I used to switch up my cologne every two to three months, get a new wave - Dolce, Versace, Burberry. But Black Orchid, that joint stayed. That's the smell of beauty that stays on you ... and girls love Tom Ford. — Wale

The fact that it's black transforms it. Has the same effect on women that black stockings have on men. — Daphne Du Maurier

If virtue no delighted beauty lack, Your son-in-law is far more fair than black. — William Shakespeare

You can muck around with different guitars for certain bits, but you have to have your own sound. That's your benchmark, that's your sound. I also play a Black Beauty. It sounds amazing. — Dan Hawkins

It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherst town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one-not at all. — Sylvia Plath

Her honey-coloured hair fell in heavy wavesbelow her shoulders and as she stared up at him her eyes, clear, speckled amber, seemed to tilt at the corners; her brows were black and swept up in arcs, and she had thick black lashesh. There was about her a kind of warm luxuriance, something immediately suggestive to the men of pleasurable fulfillment- something for which she was not responsible but of which she was acutely conscious. — Kathleen Winsor

I carry their beauty inside the very soul of my being. Dark with shades of grey. White with storm clouds in the distance. Because of dad and mom, I am not afraid to dream of dark victories and black beauty. I'm not afraid to be in love with the night — Diane Keaton

I would wear pink because I knew my future was anything but rosy. I would accessorize myself to the hilt, and I would wear flirty shoes because my world needed more beauty to counter all the ugliness in it. I would wear pink because I hated gray, I didn't deserve white, and I was sick of black. — Karen Marie Moning

I see the eight of us in the Annex as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we're standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter. We're surrounded by darkness and danger, and in our desperate search for a way out we keep bumping into each other. We look at the fighting down below and the peace and beauty up above. In the meantime, we've been cut off by the dark mass of clouds, so that we can go neither up nor down. It looms before us like an impenetrable wall, trying to crush us, but not yet able to. I can only cry out and implore, Oh, ring, ring, open wide and let us out! — Anne Frank

The desert at night was black and a strange madder-tinted silver; the sky was black, and the great contorted cliffs, and the vast expanses of sand that stretched out in all directions. But the red moon cast a pale crimson-tinged luminescence over everything, and far above the stars were glittering points of silver. — Rachel Neumeier

If I a fancy take
To black and blue,
That fancy doth it beauty make. — John Suckling

She emerged from the shadows like an apparition, and he was taken aback by her beauty. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected to chance upon such a vision of loveliness in those harsh and unforgiving mountains. Her beautiful face, long black hair, and slender figure enchanted him. — Alan Kinross

For many women, by the time they realize how beautiful they were, it is too late. — Robert Black

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty ... A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power. For the first time he honestly wished he could work miracles. — Toni Morrison

Clara smoked in the shallow pool as Lana del Rey poured from her phone. She shaded her eyes. She liked the shallow pool because she could lay out, half in the sun, half in the water, and not get her hair wet. She had black eyeliner smeared under her eyes from who-knows-when, and while she never bothered to fix it, she did apply more, so she looked permanently hung over. She liked that. — Lisa Martens

Lou stood at the kitchen sink, her eyes unfocused on her hazy reflection in the window. Outside the sky was fading from steely blue to indigo. The mountain range beyond was a solid sheet of black, cut out by a child's sloppy scissors. — Danika Stone

I was admittedly comfortable with Iman Cosmetics being identified as a beauty brand that filled the gap for black women because it was deeply personal for me. — Iman

Women think of all colors except the absence of color. I have said that black has it all. White too. Their beauty is absolute. It is the perfect harmony. — Coco Chanel

There is no religion without love,
and people may talk as much as
they like about their religion, but
if it does not teach them to be good
and kind to man and beast,
it is all a sham. — Anna Sewell

On the walk home he asks her, "How was training today, my angel?" As he looks down into her beautiful, ice blue eyes he marvels at her beauty. Her long, black hair, fair skin and eye color are a striking difference next to his tan skin, brown eyes and black hair. Elina heaves a huge sigh, "I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I do nothing right. Today, I was able to project farther than ever. It was amazing, Papi! — Lynn Landes

Anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon's charcoal neck. I thought of the vet, warming dinner over a can, and the old woman feeding her pigeons in the intersection behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken. And what about the ladybug man, the blue of his eyes over gray threaded black? There were me and Yvonne, Niki and Paul Trout, maybe even Sergei or Susan D. Valeris, why not? What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of four Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale Boulevard, making their moves with a greasy deck missing a queen and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces. Cezanne would have drawn them in charcoal. Van Gogh would have painted himself among them. — Janet Fitch

I'd like to sit there, I said softly to the girl sitting in front of the other mirror. She scampered.
I took over her abandoned make-up and painted my face. Red cheeks, to attract hungry vampyre glances. Black liquid eyeliner and mascara, to draw attention away from my bitter eyes. My silky-thin, raven hair, undone in waves over my bare shoulders. The magenta shade of apple gloss on my lips, to make them plump and inviting. Finally, a strapless golden dress that hugged my hips and not much lower. I stood up, feeling the cold air slide down the bare skin of my back like fingers, and panicked. I couldn't wear something like this! Not without a cardigan! A light dress jacket, at least!
I took a gulp of Amrit's wine and detached myself from the fretting child in my head. Then I strode from the sleeping chambers. — Heather Heffner

Finally, I say, "long dark hair, blue-violet eyes, slender, tall, she had a Liz Taylor in Black Beauty thing going on." Reluctance sets in. Do I really want to put this together for him? "Like you," he says. Pandora's Box opens. Chocolate anyone? An abundance of heartbreak. Rare happiness. Plenty of self-destruction. Take your pick. Julia's got everything in here. — Katherine Owen