How could anybody confuse truth with beauty, I thought as I looked at him. Truth came with sunken eyes, bony or scarred, decayed. Its teeth were bad, its hair gray and unkempt. While beauty was empty as a gourd, vain as a parakeet. But it had power. It smelled of musk and oranges and made you close your eyes in a prayer.
Interpretation
The quote contrasts the harsh reality of truth with the alluring yet superficial nature of beauty.
In this quote, Janet Fitch explores the idea that truth and beauty are fundamentally different and often opposed. The imagery of truth is stark and unflattering, suggesting that facing reality can be challenging and unsettling, while beauty, though superficial and empty, holds a seductive power that can enchant and deceive. This juxtaposition raises questions about our perceptions and the values we assign to both truth and beauty in our lives.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion on the nature of reality and art in a philosophy class.
I nodded. A man's world. But what did it mean? That men whistled and stared and yelled things at you, and you had to take it, or you get raped or beat up? A man's world meant places men could go but not women. It meant they had more money,and didn't have kids, not the way women did, to look after every second. And it meant that women loved them more than they loved the women, that they could want something with all their hearts, and then not.
Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over echo park, stoppin to visit the lotus. Eating dreams and drinking blue sky.
Death like a lover, caressing him, promising him peace, running its fingers through his hair, its tongue in his ear. She put her own two fingers in her mouth. Im so sorry. And pulled the trigger
Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.
I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.
I wanted to hear what she was saying. I wanted to smell that burnt midnight again, I wanted to feel that wind. It was a secret wanting, like a song I couldn't stop humming, or loving someone I could never have. No matter where I went, my compass pointed west. I would always know what time it was in California.
No one can posses an afternoon of rain beating against the window, or the serenity of a sleeping child, or the magical moment when the waves break on the rocks. No one can posses the beautiful things of this Earth, but we can know them and love them. It is through such moments that God reveals himself to mankind.
The land is so much more than its analysis.
Why don't you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity... the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.
Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
If the land mechanism as a whole is good then every part is good, whether we understand it or not.
The act of thinking and interpreting is so central to Judaism that it makes more sense that we've become people like Woody Allen - thinkers and talkers and drafters of law.
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