She knew only too well that the song was a beautiful lie. As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power and becoming as touching as any other human weakness. For none among us is superman enough to escape kitsch completely. No matter how we scorn it, kitsch is an integral part of the human condition.

For he was aware of the great secret of life: Women don't look for handsome men. Women look for men who have had beautiful women. Having an ugly mistress is therefore a fatal mistake.

She blushed. It is a beautiful thing when a woman blushes; at that instant her body no longer belongs to her; she doesn't control it; she is at its mercy; oh, can there be anything more beautiful than the sight of a woman violated by her own body!

Her beauty, which struck him at the time, did not make her look younger than her age; he might sooner have said that her age made her beauty more eloquent.

Before beauty disappears entirely from the earth, it will go on existing for a while as a mistake.

A mismatched outfit, a slightly defective denture, an exquisite mediocrity of the soul-those are the details that make a woman real, alive. The women you see on posters or in fashion magazines-the ones all the women try to imitate nowadays-how can they be attractive? They have no reality of their own; they're just the sum of a set of abstract rules. They aren't born of human bodies; they hatch ready-made from the computers." ~The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

What we have not chosen we cannot consider either our merit or our failure.

Właśnie takie detale: źle dobrany strój, drobna wada uzębienia, czarująca przeciętność duszy, czynią kobietę prawdziwą i żywą. Kobiety z plakatów czy z rewii mody, do których wszystkie starają się dziś upodobnić, nie są pociągające, ponieważ są nierzeczywiste, ponieważ są tylko sumą abstrakcyjnych reguł. Zrodziła je maszyna cybernetyczna, a nie ludzkie ciała!

In the world of highways, a beautiful landscape means: an island of beauty connected by a long line with other islands of beauty.