She laughed a bit at the simple beauty of it all - the white paper, the elegant arc, the soft green grass; and, beside her, the purple backpack, Grandad's golden straw hat, the sky a pale-blue umbrella embracing the whole town

Attitude gives your work a good finishing beauty. You may be successful in what you do, but when you are not humble enough, nobody may get time to stop by to see what you have to show the world!

THEY WILL TRY TO TELL YOU THAT YOU’RE MADE UP OF ATOMS AND MOLECULES.THEY DON’T KNOW A DAMN THING ABOUT YOU. YOU’RE MADE UP OF POETRY, LOVE AND SOLACE AND ALL THOSE BEAUTIFUL LONELY THINGS THAT MAKE THIS WHOLE UNIVERSE.

I have seen so many lands vanish in my wake, torn down like stage sets. What survives of them? An image as fleeting as a dream: whatever beauties I discovered, I already knew by heart.

The tragedy of preparedness has scarcely been handled, save by the Greeks. Life is indeed dangerous, but not in the way morality would have us believe. It is indeed unmanageable, but the essence of it is not a battle. It is unmanageable because it is a romance, and its essence is romantic beauty.

The glass candle is meant to represent truth and learning, rare and beautiful and fragile things. It is made in the shape of a candle to remind us that a maester must cast light wherever he serve, and it is a sharp to remind us that knowledge can be dangerous.

The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.

People do terrible things. People do beautiful things. It's against the black backdrop of evil that the shining light of good shows the brightest. We can't just focus on the darkness of the night, or we'll miss out on the stars.

Women not only bear the brunt of the equation of beauty with youth, we perpetuate it—every time we dye our hair to cover the gray or lie about our age, not to mention have plastic surgery to cover the signs of aging.

Feel-good books were ones you could put down with a smile on your face, books that made you think the world was a little crazier, stranger, and more beautiful when you looked up from them.