A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
Neil GaimanRead
She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote suggests that beauty can be fierce and destructive, much like a forest fire.
Neil Gaiman's quote emphasizes a type of beauty that is wild, powerful, and potentially dangerous. It draws a parallel between conventional beauty and the awe-inspiring yet fearsome beauty of a forest fire, suggesting that beauty can evoke complex emotions, including both admiration and caution.
Themes
BeautyNatureForest FireNeil GaimanWild
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about unconventional beauty, one could reference this quote to highlight the complexity of attractive but dangerous qualities.
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As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
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Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.
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I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.
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Similar quotes
The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.
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Nature is a mutable cloud which is always and never the same.
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It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men's hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.
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Look at a tree, a flower, a plant. Let your awareness rest upon it. How still they are, how deeply rooted in Being. Allow nature to teach you stillness.
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We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.
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