Elaine Scarry Quotes

#1. The philosopher Elaine Scarry has observed that "beauty always takes place in the particular." Cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#2. Beauty always takes place in the particular.

Elaine Scarry

#3. 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

#4. Everywhere I go, people love me, so I'm just blessed. Do you blame them?

Manny Ramirez

#5. When it came to the definition of genius, the ultimate measure could never really be the skull - the measure was always the writing, the music, the art itself.

Colin Dickey

#6. 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

#7. 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

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

Elaine Scarry

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

Elaine Scarry

#10. 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

#11. Beauty brings copies of itself into being.

Elaine Scarry

#12. 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

#13. I was raised in a really terrific, close family, and I've never needed to escape anything or to really let myself go by dancing on tables.

Blake Lively

#14. But all fires, of wood or grief, burn down to ashes eventually.

Robin Hobb

#15. By exercising your stomach muscles, you wring out the body, you don't catch colds, you don't get cancer, you don't get hernias. Do animals get hernias? Do animals go on diets?

Joseph Pilates

#16. I would say I have compassion.

Kim Delaney

#17. 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

#18. Falsehood often lurks upon the tongue of him, who, by self-praise, seeks to enhance his value in the eyes of others.

Arnold Bennett