“Now that all the beauty of my old life is gone, I crave it like good. A beautiful thing like this rose: I almost want to eat it, to swallow it whole to replace the beauty I've lost.”

“Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved - to be harvested carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty would be used like that...”

“ I've been taught that love is beautiful and kind, but it isn't like that at all. It is beautiful, but it's a terrible beauty, a ruthless one, and you fall-you fall, and the thing is- The thing is you want to. You don't care what's coming you just want who your heart beats for.”

“In stories like Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, they always say the heroine is 'as good as she is beautiful.' I wondered if people just wanted that to be true, wanted the beautiful to be good. I wondered if they wanted the ugly to be bad because then they wouldn't have to feel bad for them.”

“My mother... she is beautiful, softened at the edges and tempered with a spine of steel. I want to grow old and be like her.”

“The greatest beauty is organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe.”