Quotes & Sayings About Broken Beauty

Only cowards and the broken in spirit surrendered the future as payment for the past. Love was the great and beautiful wonder - but surely one should not stay with it in the place where it found one. Why, loving should light the way! Far from engulfing all the rest of life it seemed now that love should open life to one. Whether one kept it or whether one lost it, it failed if it did not send one farther along the way. She had been afraid to think of her love changing because that had seemed to grant that it had failed. But now it seemed that it failed if it did not leave her bigger than it had found her. Her eyes filled in response to the stern beauty of that. Not that one should stay with love in the same place, but rather the meaning of it all was in just this: that it should send one on. — Susan Glaspell

The north wind has both mended hearts and broken them. It has brought both beauty and misfortune, restlessness and sleep. It has carried in babies but it has also taken lives and so the islanders worry when they hear the north wind blowing. They fear death - actual, physical, permanent death, but also the non-literal, where the heart has kept beating but its wish to keep doing so is small, very small if there at all. — Susan Fletcher

More than once, the broken moon would cast through the window a silver light and remind me of independent events yielding to their own momentum and interacting under natural laws while my mind would impose happiness, grief, beauty, ruin, justice and chaos. — Leonard Seet

She brings out the beauty in his broken soul. — N.R. Hart

People despite their struggles, flaws and faults are honestly the most beautiful creatures. We are wonderfully-broken pieces of art. — Alexander Pyles

The point is this. The arts are not the pretty but irrelevant bits around the border of reality. They are the highways into the center of a reality which cannot be glimpsed, let alone grasped, any other way. The present world is good, but broken and in any case incomplete; art of all kinds enables us to understand that paradox in its many dimensions. But the present world is also designed for something which has not yet happened. It is like a violin waiting to be played: beautiful to look at, graceful to hold-and yet if you'd never heard one in the hands of a musician, you wouldn't believe the new dimensions of beauty yet to be revealed. Perhaps art can show something of that, can glimpse the future possibilities pregnant within the present time. — N. T. Wright

Beauty is but a vain and doubtful good;
A shining gloss that vadeth suddenly;
A flower that dies when first it 'gins to bud;
A brittle that's broken presently;
A doubtful good, a gloss, a glass, a flower,
Lost, vaded, broken, dead within an hour.
And as goods lost are seld or never found,
As vaded gloss no rubbing will refresh,
As flowers dead lie withered on the ground,
As broken glass no cement can redress;
So beauty blemished once, for ever lost,
In spite of physic, painting, pain and cost. — William Shakespeare

I always appreciated the magnitude of my mother's imagination. She always saw beauty in what was broken, and she'd preserve it. — Blake Lively

Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and glory. On and on and on and on! — James Joyce

If we are at all sensitive to the life around us, to one another's pains and joys,
to the beauty and fragility of the Earth, it is all about being broken open, allowing ourselves to
step out from out hardened veneers and expose our core, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable in our emotional response to the world. And how can we not respond? This is what I mean by being 'broken open.' To engage. To love. Any one of these actions of the heart will lead to a personal transformation that bears collective gifts. — Terry Tempest Williams

- As you get older, you lose the wonder of youth. And when you find even a flicker of that old light, you're very nearly brought to tears - not by the beauty of what you see, it's more selfish than that, but by the fact that you can still see beauty. You aren't this rheumy broken thing. You have the capacity for wonder and beauty and light and are not yet dead. — Will Chancellor

Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is? My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music. — James Joyce

How do we create beauty in a broken world? How do we create a view of sustainability in an economy that is crashing? How do we reconfigure our lives, how do we pick up the pieces and create a meaningful life? So, yes, we have a different form of leadership but the questions remain the same. — Terry Tempest Williams

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement. — Salman Rushdie

Sorcha took the elevator down to the basement of the fashion house. She glanced at her stunningly beautiful reflection in the mirror and smiled to herself. How fortunate she was to be a vampire - no gray hairs, no wrinkles, no broken nails, no weight problems, and no PMT. What bliss! And how fortunate it was that all the legends about vampires were not true. She could not imagine an existence where she could not see and admire her own likeness - such a life to her would be intolerable and tedious. How could any female, even a vampire, survive without being able to see their own reflection? How could they do their hair and makeup? The very idea was totally preposterous. — Alan Kinross

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions."
"I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray. — Oscar Wilde

And since beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful, and he is static, his life stagnates in a china sea. — Virginia Woolf

The magic beauty of simultaneity, to see the loved one rushing toward you at the same moment you are rushing toward him, the magic power of meeting, exactly at midnight to achieve union, the illusion of one common rhythm achieved by overcoming obstacles, deserting friends, breaking other bonds - all this was soon dissolved by his laziness, by his habit of missing every moment, of never keeping his word, of living perversely in a state of chaos, of swimming more naturally in a sea of failed intentions, broken promises, and aborted wishes — Anais Nin

War, my friends, is a thing of beauty. — Mark Lawrence

Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty. — Annie Dillard

The storm is out there and every one of us must eventually face the storm. When the storm comes, pray that it will shake you to your roots and break you wide-open. Being broken open by the storm is your only hope. When you are broken open you get to discover for the first time what is inside you. Some people never get to see what is inside them; what beauty, what strength, what truth and love. They were never broken open by the storm. So, don't run from your pain - run into your pain. Let life's storm shatter you. — Bryant McGill

When beauty breathes life back into the broken — A.L. Jackson

I always gravitate towards things that are not beautiful, but broken and weird and fascinating — Kate McKinnon

The pain is stronger than ever. I've seen bit of lost Paradises and I know I'll be hopelessly tryng tu return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I'm thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I'm going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and sintaxes of the countries I've passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I've never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me.
(from "As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty", 2000) — Jonas Mekas

Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or dark images you hold about yourself. They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your purpose when you are confused. — Alan Cohen

God is not willing for this broken-down world to stay in its sorry condition. As Creator, he is able to look at it and see promise, the promise of a total restoration of its beauty. And he has asked you to move in with him to be one of his tools of restoration.
While it is hard to live in a house that needs to be restored in some ways it is even harder to live there while the restoration takes place. — Paul David Tripp

My world today is raw, it is a world of great vital difficulty. Because, more than a star, today I want the thick and black root of the stars, I want the source that always seems dirty, and is dirty, and that is always incomprehensible.
It is with pain that I bid farewell even to the beauty of a child - I want the adult who is more primitive and ugly and drier and more difficult, and who became a child-seed that cannot be broken between the teeth. — Clarice Lispector

(speaking of insecurity)
"It's broken greater spirits than ours, and robbed the world of God knows how much beauty. I've seen it happen more times than I like to think about."
"$10,000 A Year, Easy — Kurt Vonnegut

Capturing the beauty of the conversion of the water into wine, the poet Alexander Pope said, "The conscious water saw its Master and blushed." That sublime description could be reworked to explain each one of these miracles. Was it any different in principle for a broken body to mend at the command of its Maker? Was it far-fetched for the Creator of the universe, who fashioned matter out of nothing, to multiply bread for the crowd? Was it not within the power of the One who called all the molecules into existence to interlock them that they might bear His footsteps? — Ravi Zacharias

I was crazy. I was broken. I was dead.
And then, one day I wasn't. It took months and it took grace and it took some unexpected slight shift of sadness that slipped just enough, just barely enough to make room for beauty. — Lynne Branard

She's probably so mesmerized by her own beauty she can't move away from the mirror," I hear Wilbur stage-whisper. "It's why I'm always late." Then he knocks on the door as well. "Look away from the reflection, baby," he shouts through the wood. "Just look away and the spell will be broken. — Holly Smale

There are many ways that we grow, but there are two major ways: We shed what no longer works, or we're broken open. If we're unwilling to shed, then we will be broken open. Through shedding, we are worn down, just as nature is eroded to its beauty. I think that through suffering, human beings are eroded to our beauty. — Mark Nepo

This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life- that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind! — Elizabeth Gilbert

When you give your heart away, you usually get it back in pieces, fragments. And often, a great deal of time passes before you realize that every piece wasn't returned to you - and probably never will be. You crave nothing more than to get those small - but vital - fragments back; to return to the unbroken, undamaged version of yourself. But what's been broken cannot be unbroken, and so all you can do is learn to live with the void of the missing pieces, to somehow find beauty in the wreckage.
And so I did.
Sophie Lenon — Krystal McLean

Like a carpenter with two broken legs at the bottom of a beautiful staircase. Maybe I can't climb the stairs, ma'am, but at least let me admire the workmanship. — James Anderson

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

-Phantom — Andrew Lloyd Webber

This is what I know: God can make something beautiful out of anything, out of darkness and trash and broken bones. He can shine light into even the blackest night, and he leaves glimpses of hope all around us. An oyster, a sliver of moon, one new bud on a black branch, a perfect tender shoot of asparagus, fighting up through the dirt for the spring sun. New life and new beauty are all around us, waiting to be discovered, waiting to be seen. — Shauna Niequist

Even an ordinary broken chord is made to disclose rare beauties; we are reminded of the fairies' hazelnuts in which diamonds were concealed but you could break the shell only if your hands were blessed. — Neville Cardus

I learned you must always accept love when it's offered, always give it when it's needed. There might not be a second chance. And I know, too, that until your heart's been broken, you never know the full beauty of love. — Nora Roberts

Endings are abstruse, mystic and unreal. They are but depleted beginnings purposed to be substituted with newer ones.A transition of outlook and time, similar to our differing moods before and after slumber. Before the act we witness an exhaustion, a sulkiness but on gaining consciousness, we're rejuvenated and good humored. The wakefulness is the new beginning whereas the tension the disturbance we perceive each night is the weariness of the beginnings, of each day. So there never really is an end, all that there are are beginnings.Beginnings which are promising, which offer hope, which have a new leash on life, which neither denounce nor belittle rather soothe and console by reconstructing the broken pieces of yesterday, mending them and reinforcing them with courage and beauty like never before. — Chirag Tulsiani

I am afraid to speak or move for the fear all this wonderful beauty will vanish just like a broken silence — L.M. Montgomery

We are designed to dance. To use our bodies as weapons of grace, beauty and intrigue. We are designed to stretch until we master growth. To replace old dead cells and be physically renewed each moment. So challenges don't destroy us, they just should make us dance more swiftly and passionately. For when we dance we please God. Especially when we dance in brokenness. — Phindiwe Nkosi

He saw the kind of beauty yellow flowers have growing over a carpet of dead leaves. The beauty of cracks forming a mosaic in a dry riverbed, of emerald-green algae at the base of a seawall, of a broken shard from a blue bottle. The beauty of a window smudged with tiny prints. The beauty of wild weeds. — Michelle Cuevas

But we can never forget that at the end of time, the world will have such a Happily Ever After that even the mountains will sing of it. Until then, we give people hope, we help them feel, and we create broken, beautiful things because we live in a broken, beautiful world and we should give people a glimpse of heaven amid the fragments. — Mirriam Neal

Aging in women is 'unbeautiful' since women grow more powerful with time, and since the links between generations of women must always be broken. — Naomi Wolf

Each time Nate saw her, Elisa's beauty struck him anew, as if in the interval the memory of what she actually looked like had been distorted by the tortured emotions she elicited since they'd broken up: in his mind, she took on the dimensions of an abject creature. What a shock when she opened the door, bursting with vibrant, almost aggressive good health. The power of her beauty, Nate had once decided, came from its ability to constantly reconfigure itself. When he thought he'd accounted for it, filed it away as a dead fact - pretty girl - she turned her head or bit her lip, and like a children's toy you shake to reset, her prettiness changed shape, its coordinates altered: now it flashed from the elegant contours of her sloping brow and flaring cheekbone, now from her shyly smiling lips. — Adelle Waldman

Often, we try to repair broken things in such a way as to conceal the repair and make it "good as new." But the tea masters understood that by repairing the broken bowl with the distinct beauty of radiant gold, they could create an alternative to "good as new" and instead employ a "better than new" aesthetic. They understood that a conspicuous, artful repair actually adds value. Because after mending, the bowl's unique fault lines were transformed into little rivers of gold that post repair were even more special because the bowl could then resemble nothing but itself. — Teresita Fernandez

Christ is building His kingdom with earth's broken things. Men want only the strong, the successful, the victorious, the unbroken, in building their kingdoms; but God is the God of the unsuccessful, of those who have failed. Heaven is filling with earth's broken lives, and there is no bruised reed that Christ cannot take and restore to glorious blessedness and beauty. He can take the life crushed by pain or sorrow and make it into a harp whose music shall be all praise. He can lift earth's saddest failure up to heaven's glory. — J.R. Miller

It's not love at first sight, it's having the sight, to distinguish true love, from just mere beauty. — Anthony Liccione

The beauty of having nothing to lose, is you learn the beauty of having everything to gain.
This is where hope lives.
Hope can't be taken.
Hope can't be lost.
Hope can't be broken.
When we are boiled down to what we are as people. We are not love, because we hope to love, we are not money or who we hold, because we hope to have and to hold. We are not religion or God, because we enter into belief in the hope we get something back for ourselves. We are not a soul.
We are hope. — Craig Stone

A song that wrenches the heart finds a knowing ear and a liking heart. — Auliq Ice

When we are true to ourselves, and follow these impulses that sweat from our compressed and broken souls we may just find the beauty, and the oh-so amazing way life can sneak up and smash us in the face! — Danielle Rohr

Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find. — Terry Tempest Williams

God makes it clear that his image bearers must live in dynamic communion with one another, thereby discovering and celebrating the good gift of one's own gender and that of the other. With a cross-shaped lens, we behold the beauty of man for woman and woman for man. None of us has ever lost that original design. No matter how broken we have become, we have never lost the potential to be good gifts for others! — Andrew Comiskey

If we really believe the gospel we proclaim, we'll be honest about our own beauty and brokenness, and the beautiful broken One will make himself known to our neighbors through the chinks in our armor - and in theirs. — Fil Anderson

but God is the God of the unsuccessful - the God of those who have failed. Heaven is being filled with earth's broken lives, and there is no "bruised reed" (Isa. 42:3) that Christ cannot take and restore to a glorious place of blessing and beauty. He can take a life crushed by pain or sorrow and make it a harp whose music will be total praise. He can lift earth's saddest failure up to heaven's glory. J. R. Miller — Lettie B. Cowman

But beauty must be broken daily to remain beautiful ... — Virginia Woolf

here i am. there i was, broken. broken heart, broken dreams, broken soul. and there i was, stumbling down an endless road, my face tattooed in ashes, stained with tears, my clothes tattered, my feet tired of wandering. and there You were. standing at the end of the road, with your heart and arms open wide, and my tired feet ran, they ran to You, to your arms, to your heart. and here i am. slowly being put back together. here i am, no longer in tatters, but clothed in mercy, wrapped in grace. here i am, with a heart with open doors, a soul free to love and free to dream and free to be. with a crown of wildflowers instead of a crown of thorns, and a face of light and beauty instead of ashes. here i am. — Gaby Compres

Broken people find beauty in chaos. It's a perk, and it's landed you me so be grateful of all my brokenness. — R.J. Lewis

The point is that something I thought was perfect has been broken, and I'm having to find the beauty in what is there instead of what I thought was there. Like this shell. I can either spend all my time wishing it were perfect, trying to imagine it the way it was or might have been, or I can see how beautiful it is just like this. — James Howe

I see the fragmented beauty of grace in their lives despite continued struggles. Beautiful mosaics formed by broken pieces. — Cindy McCormick Martinusen

Indira was surrounded by people who had given up hope, who blamed their own misery on the influence of Christianity and western cultures, and yet, literally in the midst of squalor, her family had created a place of real beauty. It really makes you stop and think. Uncle Google should be spitting out eight hundred million things American schools have done right. The fact things are so screwed up makes no sense. If you believe Uncle Google, then we've done the exact opposite from Indira's family - in the land of hope and plenty we've created a place that's ugly. We have so much. Can things really be so bad? Maybe we can't fix our schools because as individuals we've never truly been broken. Or maybe Chinese lanterns make everyone wax philosophical. — Tucker Elliot

How is destruction beautiful?" He asked in a challenging tone.
"You may think that a broken egg is ugly and messy," she answered, "but the cake it goes into is beautiful and won't hold together without it."
"Eggs don't get blown up. They get broken."
"You've never seen me bake," she replied with a smirk. — Amy Neftzger

Some curses fade and leave nothing but the faintest mark, a tea stain on watered silk. There are those that are so malevolent that, upon defeat, explode in a fiery burst of sulfurous flames, burning everything they touch as they die. Others dissolve like morning mist in the brightness of the midday sun. Some cannot be defeated at all, but feed upon the energy spent trying to vanquish it, growing more and more potent with each failed attempt.
And then there are those ancient curses with deceptively simple antidotes that shatter like jagged shards of a vast mirror.
These curses may be broken, but never completely destroyed, sharp slivers of light distorted. — Ava Zavora

The mercy bullet
I envy horses: if they break a leg and feel humiliated because they can no longer charge back and forth in the wind, they are cured by a mercy bullet. So if something in me gets broken, physically or spiritually, I would do well to look for a proficient killer, even if he is one of my enemies. I will pay him a fee and the price of the bullet, kiss his hand and his revolver, and if I am able to write, extol him in a poem of rare beauty, for which he can choose the metre and rhyme. — Mahmoud Darwish

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Young Sathian was flirtatious, titillating, quick-witted, and brilliant. He left a trail of broken hearts across the land as he teased and taunted his victims with his beauty and charm. Both women and men succumbed to his joie de vivre and panache as he was an untypical Ange'el that carried the sunshine in his smile and in his eyes. — Jamie Le Fay

The more legal and material hindrances women have broken through, the more strictly and heavily and cruelly images of female beauty have come to weigh upon us ... During the past decade, women breached the power structure; meanwhile, eating disorders rose exponentially and cosmetic surgery became the fastest-growing specialty ... pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than achieve any other goal ... More women have more money and power and scope and legal recognition than we have ever had before; but in terms of how we feel about ourselves physically, we may actually be worse off than our unliberated grandmothers. — Naomi Wolf

As they came out from the shelter of the trees and the Great Meadows stretched out before them, Kit caught her breath. She had not expected anything like this. From that first moment, in a way she could never explain, the Meadows claimed her and made her their own. As far as she could see they stretched on either side, a great level sea of green, broken here and there by a solitary graceful elm. Was it the fields of sugar cane they brought to mind, or the endless reach of the ocean to meet the sky? Or was it simply the sense of freedom and space and light that spoke to her of home? — Elizabeth George Speare

Enough for me that you are beautiful: Beauty possessed diminishes. Better a dream of love Than love's dream broken; Better a look exchanged Than love's word spoken. Enough for me that you walk past, A firefly flashing in the dark. — Ruskin Bond

Living in Manhattan opened me to whole new sets of things to envy, study, gather and imagine stealing. A full-size 1809 German harp, beautifully painted with three goddesses, covered in a pea-green coat of great silvery refinement: mine for $180. Though all its strings were broken, its beauty let it claim a quarter of my one - bedroom. — Allan Gurganus

Become broken in your flesh so that your spirit may receive the true love that was always meant to be in your life. His love will heal the ugly, bitter, painful brokenness and replace it with the beauty of real love. — Mandy Fender

I am not interested in whether you've stood with the great. I am interested in whether you've sat broken. — Unknown

We don't look at the stars in the universe and say how tragic they are, how bruised they are, even though that is what they are. We look at them and speak of the beauty they contain. The inspiration they give us. Even though stars are the scars of the universe we don't see them as these broken pieces of gaseous matter, we see them as these majestic astrological blessings that give hope to billions. What if you saw yourself in that same light, or better yet what if you saw others in a similar way. — Ricky Maye

For (strange as it may sound to many people, who tend to think of critics as being motivated by the lower emotions: envy, disdain, contempt even) critics are, above all, people who are in love with beautiful things, and who worry that those things will get broken. What motivates so many of us to write in the first place is, to begin with, a great passion for a subject (Tennessee Williams, Balanchine, jazz, the twentieth-century novel, whatever) that we find beautiful; and, then, a kind of corresponding anxiety about the fragility of that beauty. — Daniel Mendelsohn

When a sudden ray of sun or a moonbeam falls on a dreary street, it makes no difference what it illumines-a broken bottle on the ground, a fading flower in a field, or the flaxen blonde hair of a child's head. The object is transformed and the viewer is transfixed. Celebrate that moment of beauty and take it with you in your memory. It is God's gift to you. — Luci Swindoll

In this life, we reap the results of everything that we do; even if the things that we do and the things that we become, are the direct results of circumstances that we could have never controlled, in the first place. They say we are never given more than we can handle; but I don't believe that. We are often given more than we can handle, and that's why so many of us are so broken. The jar breaks when there's too much to handle. The only beauty in all of this, is that jars can be repaired with gold; and because of that, they can become even more beautiful than they were before. — C. JoyBell C.

God can turn a life that is broken into a thing of beauty. — Mandy Fender

I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me. — Jenim Dibie

In all things there is beauty. In the glint of dew clinging to the strands of a spider's web; in the way the setting sun winks off shards of broken glass; in the rainbow forming in the soap suds in a sink full of dirty dishes; in a blade of grass which manages to force its way, with patience and time, through the all too willing grasp of sidewalk cement. It is in the faded brown of leaves, turning, twisting against their fate, as they fall to the ground, light and dry as brittle bones, and in the bare, thin-tipped branches, denuded by a change in season. It is in the way a stranger's laughter cradles you if you let it. It is in the intricate scars of a lover's back and in our upturned eyes when we ask for forgiveness. — Marta Curti

The moment i saw you my eyes became a poet describing your flawless beauty, dreaming of you in the boulevard of broken dreams — Manoj Kumar Duppala

It was beautiful not despite but because of the friction it has had to endure. It had been thrashed around, but instead of being destroyed, it was improved with every scratch and scrape, sculpted. In fact, the scuffs themselves are what gave it its quiet splendor; they are responsible for turning a simple piece of glass (which could have just as easily been trash) into a gem. It wouldn't be the same without the wear and tear; it wouldn't be something pretty enough to be turned into jewelry if it hadn't been damn near broken. I closed my fist around this tear-shaped gem and thought about my own uneven edges, my own abrasions, and things I have endured that have, instead of breaking me, completed me, prepared me for the next tumble. Its odd beauty was hard-won. It came from reinventing itself. From having risen to the top of the discard pile. Like a phoenix, from victim to victor. (325) — Wendy Blackburn

...but beautiful mosaics are made of broken pieces. — Lori Jenessa Nelson

Envoi"

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone. — Ezra Pound

Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain - the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed - then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood. — Vladimir Nabokov

If he could learn to love another, and earn her love in return by the time the last petal fell, then the spell would be broken. If not, he would be doomed to remain a beast for all time. As the years passed, he fell into despair and lost all hope. For who could ever learn to love a beast? -Beauty & the Beast — Walt Disney Company

I say that almost everywhere there is beauty enough to fill a person's life if one would only be sensitive to it. but Henry says No: that broken beauty is only a torment, that one must have a whole beauty with man living in relation to it to have a rich civilization and art ... Is it because I am a woman that I accept what crumbs I may have, accept the hot-dog stands and amusement parks if I must, if the blue is bright beyond them and the sunset flushes the breasts of sea birds? — Elizabeth Coatsworth

I'm afraid to speak or move for fear that all this wonderful beauty will just vanish ... like a broken silence. — L.M. Montgomery

The dark in soul see in the universe their own shadow; the shattered spirit can only reflect external beauty in form as untrue and broken as itself. — Thomas Binney

The field was carpeted with the most lustrous show of wildflowers she had ever seen - flowers by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions. Purple irises. White lilies. Pink daisies. Yellow buttercups and red columbines and many others she knew no names for. A breeze had arisen; the sun had broken through the clouds. She shrugged off her pack and walked slowly forward. It was as if she were wading into a sea of pure color. The tips of her fingers brushed the petals of the flowers as she passed. They seemed to bow their heads in salutation, welcoming her into their embrace. In a trance of beauty, Amy moved among them. Corridors of golden sunshine fell over the field; far away, across the sea, a new age had begun.
Here she would make her garden. She would make her garden, and wait. — Justin Cronin

I am not interested in whether you have stood with the great; I am interested in whether you have sat with the broken. — Unknown

For me it's really important that the work here displays an aesthetic of decay along with the sunken boat with the broken ceramic pieces. They form a unity in showing the power of destruction, the beauty of destruction, whether it's from nature- because the boat has sunk- or through other forces. It's really the beauty of decay and death that holds a power here. — Cai Guo-Qiang

There is beauty in what is broken. — K.K. Hendin

For me, when I think about Christ, I think about this iconoclastic man who lived and died for the broken. And the paramount underdog, which is basically turning the world on it's head. Blessed are the poor and blessed are the hungry, blessed are the broken, all these things that feel very backwards in our fame, power, beauty, riches hungry world. That's who Christ is to me. — Jon Foreman

Young men!" he snorted to Erak. "They think a pretty face can cure every ill."
"Some of us can remember back that far. Halt," Erak told him with a grin. "I suppose that's all far behind an old hack like you. Svengal told me you were settling down. Some plump, motherly widow seizing her last chance with a broken-down old gray bear, is she?"
Erak, of course, had been told by Svengal that Halt had recently married a great beauty. But he enjoyed getting a reaction from the smaller man. Halt's one-eyed stare locked onto the Oberjarl.
"When we get back, I'd advise you not to refer to Pauline as a 'plump, motherly widow' in her hearing. She's very good with that dagger she carries and you need your ears to keep that ridiculous helmet of yours in place. — John Flanagan

I am beauty, courage, honor, hope and modesty. They are my steady hold, my purity, confidence, pride, and safety. Apart, we are broken. But together, we are whole again. — Kristan Billups

Margrethe watched them paralyzed by the intensity of the emotions moving through her. So much pain and euphoria, a sense that even though her own heart was broken, the world could contain such beauty and magic she almost could not bear it? What did her own pain matter, in the face of that? — Carolyn Turgeon

The beautiful came to this city [Hollywood] in huge pathetic herds, to suffer, to be humiliated, to see the powerful currency of their beauty devalued like the Russian ruble or Argentine peso;to work as bellhops, as bar hostesses, as garbage collectors, as maids. The city was a cliff and they were its stampeding lemmings. At the foot of the cliff was the valley of the broken dolls. — Salman Rushdie

No problem worthy of the name is an indivisible unit, and may always be broken into smaller problems. The whole science of aesthetics is included in the simple question "What is beauty?", the science of ethics is merely the answer to "What is right conduct? — Henry Hazlitt

A burned-out face trying not to break open at the horror he has seen. The way they look at you, those poor broken men; it's not empty or terrified at all. It's as if you were the first sign of life, of beauty, after a long, long winter. Does love always form, like a pearl, around these hardened bits of life? — Andrew Sean Greer