Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.

Hanya Yanagihara
About This Quote

Henry James, the author of the quote above, wrote that "beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty." James may have been inspired by his friend Edith Wharton. When Wharton was a girl she was so upset when she read Rudyard Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden, which was about British imperialism in India, that she threw away all her books on India and refused to read anything about the country for years.

Source: The People In The Trees

Some Similar Quotes
  1. Do you think I'm pretty? I think you're beautiful Beautiful? You are so beautiful, it hurts sometimes. - Richelle Mead
  2. As if you were on fire from within. The moon lives in the lining of your skin. - Pablo Neruda
  3. To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else's heart was wild with the... - Unknown
  4. The power of finding beauty in the humblest things makes home happy and life lovely. - Louisa May Alcott
  5. A fit, healthy body–that is the best fashion statement - Jess C. Scott
More Quotes By Hanya Yanagihara
  1. He experienced the singular pleasure of watching people he loved fall in love with other people he loved.
  2. But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate? He couldn't remember being a child and being able to define happiness (...) "I think he's shy, " he finished
  3. Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all the things you want from a person -- sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty -- and you get to...
  4. He doesn't know this now, but in the years to come he will, again and again, test Harold's claims of devotion, will throw himself against his promises to see how steadfast they are. He won't even be conscious that he's doing this. But he will...
  5. When he had promised himself that he wouldn't try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.
Related Topics