Elaine Scarry Quotes

#1. When we come upon beautiful things they act like small tears in the surface of the world that pull us through to some vaster space.

Elaine Scarry

#2. The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato's Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.

Elaine Scarry

#3. Beauty brings copies of itself into being.

Elaine Scarry

#4. Beauty always takes place in the particular.

Elaine Scarry

#5. Permitted to inhabit neither the realm of the ideal nor the realm of the real, to be neither aspiration nor companion, beauty comes to us like a fugitive bird unable to fly, unable to land.

Elaine Scarry

#6. How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.

Elaine Scarry

#7. To have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt.

Elaine Scarry

#8. To misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.

Elaine Scarry

#9. What is striking about such unmediated juxtapositions, and relevant to the way in which at the end of war opened bodies and verbal issues are placed side by side, is that in most instances the verbal assertion has no source of substantiation other than the body.

Elaine Scarry

#10. Injury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.

Elaine Scarry