Prettying Up Quotes & Sayings

You've gotta learn to love the falling, because it's all about falling. — David Levithan

He earned his love through discipline, a thundering velvet hand, his gentle means of sculpting souls took me years to understand. — Dan Fogelberg

Men are the sport of circumstances when it seems circumstances are the sport of men. — Lord Byron

Nobody's gonna convince me I can't do something till I try it." -- McMurphy — Ken Kesey

Their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form. who could just look at it as it is, without prettying it up or emphasizing its awfulness — Janet Fitch

Prettying you up for slaughter?" he suggests. "It's more complicated than that. I know them. They're not evil or cruel. They're not even smart. Hurting them, it's like hurting children. They don't see ... I mean, they don't know ... " I get knotted up in my words. "They don't know what, Katniss?" he says. "That tributes - who are the actual children involved — Suzanne Collins

Um," I asked, "isn't the whole point about being a slave that you don't have a choice to be anything else?" Prettying up the word slave with the adjective-noun constructions makes "enslaved African" sound nonchalant. As in "Those were the cabins of the jolly leprechauns. — Sarah Vowell

Acedia is not a relic of the fourth century or a hang-up of some weird Christian monks, but a force we ignore at our peril. Whenever we focus on the foibles of celebrities to the detriment of learning more about the real world- the emergence of fundamentalist religious and nationalist movements, the economic factors endangering our reefs and rain forests, the social and ecological damage caused by factory farming - acedia is at work. Wherever we run to escape it, acedia is there, propelling us to 'the next best thing,' another paradise to revel in and wantonly destroy. It also sends us backward, prettying the past with the gloss of nostalgia. Acedia has come so far with us that it easily attached to our hectic and overburdened schedules. We appear to be anything but slothful, yet that is exactly what we are, as we do more and care less, and feel pressured to do still more. — Kathleen Norris

A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door. — Edward M. Lerner

Books ought to have good endings.How would this do: and they all settled down and lived together happily ever after? — J.R.R. Tolkien

Pleasantry is never good on serious points, because it always regards subjects in that point of view in which it is not the purpose to consider them. — Voltaire