A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

— Naomi Wolf

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

— Naomi Wolf

A different and much deeper sort of beauty altogether. The thing and yet not the thing.

— Donna Tartt

Admire the efforts of a failure like you admire the beauty of a sunset.

— Amit Kalantri

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this, and it mattered to me.

— Alain de Botton

Adorn yourself with modest dressing.

— Lailah Gifty Akita

Adventure, like beauty, is very much in the eye of the beholder.

— Victoria Alexander

Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth.

— Søren Kierkegaard

A fantasy is nothing more than a dream you were too scared to chase.

— Shannon L. Alder

A far cicada rings high and clear over the river’s heavy wash. Morning glory, a lone dandelion, cassia, orchids. So far from the nearest sea, I am taken aback by the sight of a purple land crab, like a relict of the ancient days when the Indian subcontinent, adrift on the earth’s mantle, moved northward to collide with the Asian landmass, driving these marine rocks, inch by inch, five miles into the skies. The rise of the Himalaya, begun in the Eocene, some fifty million years ago, is still continuing: an earthquake in 1959 caused mountains to fall into the rivers and changed the course of the great Brahmaputra, which comes down out of Tibet through northeastern India to join the Ganges near its delta at the Bay of Bengal.

— Peter Matthiessen