Richard H. Stoddard Quotes

As we hang beneath the heavens, and we hover over hell, our hearts become the instruments we learn to play so well.

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

I am the epitome of a walking contradiction for various reasons, only one of which being that I feel my existence is of heaven and hell.

The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.

Beauty and the devil are the same thing.

In my mind, we live in Heaven, and we live in Hell.

The more conscious I was of goodness and of all that was 'sublime and beautiful,'the more deeply I sank into my mire and the more ready I was to sink in it altogether.

Do you know how an ugly woman feels? Do you know what it is to be ugly all your life and inside to feel that you are beautiful? It is very rare.

The mind is its own beautiful prisoner. Mind looked long at the sticky moon opening in dusk her new wings then decently hanged himself,one afternoon. The last thing he saw was you naked amid unnaked things.

I want to be pure in heart -- but I like to wear my purple dress.

We both believe in monsters. But all the ghosts and demons are you. And all the angels and genies are you. All the kings, queens, Buddhas, beautiful boys. Inside you. No one can take them away. (Missing Angel Juan.)

You could not be filled with hate and be beautiful. Like any other girl, I wanted to be beautiful. But I was filled with hate.

I think the Bhagavad Gita is about both the forces of light and the forces of darkness that exist within our own self, within our own soul; that our deepest nature is one of ambiguity. We have evolutionary forces there - forces of creativity, and love, and compassion, and understanding. But we also have darkness inside us - the diabolical forces of separation, fear and delusion. And in most of our lives, there is a battle going on within ourselves.

Anger, lust and such other evil passions raging in the heart are the real untouchables.

Two things, almost incompatible, are united in me in a manner which I am unable to understand: a very ardent temperament, lively and tumultuous passions, and, at the same time, slowly developed and confused ideas, which never present themselves until it is too late. One might say that my heart and my mind do not belong to the same person.

Gore Vidal said "Nixon is us, we are Nixon." I think we have to acknowledge that combination of idealism and sleaze; we want to be better than we are, and we sometimes don't face up to the real questions.

You are at once both the quiet and the confusion of my heart.

You may have orthodox heads, and yet you may have the devil in your hearts.

There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.

But when the self speaks to the self, who is speaking? The entombed soul, the spirit driven in, in, in to the central catacomb; the self that took the veil and left the world -- a coward perhaps, yet somehow beautiful, as it flits with its lantern restlessly up and down the dark corridors.

You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares.

She stood in front of the mirror a long time, and finally decided she either looked like a sap or else she looked very beautiful. One or the other.

I felt beautiful but also interrupted. I wasn't used to being so complicated.