Edmund Spenser Quotes

All blessings are mixed blessings.

In any work you do, you can be profound one minute, and then you be superficial the next, and you can be smart and insightful and then insipid. There can be room for all that.

Life is never free of contradictions.

There's a dark side to everything.

I'm full of contradictions.

We live in the best place on earth but at times the worst.

Really, life is full of contradictions. Life is messy.

In the midst of the fountain of wit there arises something bitter, which stings in the very flowers.

Perfection irritates as well as it attracts, in fiction as in life.

All of these mechanisms we have for celebrating are so double-edged. So much sorrow comes out of joy.

I'm trying to get at something a little transcendent between humans. But at the same time, there's all that baggage: What's beautiful about humans is what's balanced by what's kind of ugly and petty and depressing.

It's the murkiness of humanity that I find endlessly fascinating.

Humanity has both its beautiful and its ugly sides.

Quite often, and in fact more often, I would say, I'm struggling all the way through to think, "What is it I like about this? What is the personality of this thing I'm hearing that I like so much?" And it's nearly always a sort of mixed emotion, which is why I like it. It's something that I have mixed feelings about in the sense that it's both, say, placid and dangerous, or bitter and sweet, or dark and bright.

To talk about the need for perfection in man is to talk about the need for another species. The essence of man is imperfection. Imperfection and blazing contradictions-between mixed good and evil, altruism and selfishness, cooperativeness and combativeness, optimism and fatalism, affirmation and negation.

Is it good or bad?" she asked Issa. The wrong question, she knew. She just couldn't help herself. "It's both, sweet girl," said Issa. "like everything.

Life is a mixed blessing, which we vainly try to unmix.

I am inspired by so much. I am inspired by women, of course - beautiful women. I am also inspired by not so beautiful things in the world.

There is some good in the worst of us, and some evil in the best of us.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly.

Imperfection means perfection hid.

To say that man is a compound of strength and weakness, light and darkness, smallness and greatness, is not to indict him, it is to define him.

Sweetest nut hath sourest rind.

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

Roses grow on thorns and honey wears a sting.