“Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused”

“I would warn you that I do not attribute to nature either beauty or deformity, order or confusion. Only in relation to our imagination can things be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.”

“...often a thing that is ugly is ugly in itself, and often a thing that is ugly is only a thing that is forgotten, kept from view and kept from memory, and often a thing that is ugly is not only a definition of beauty itself but also renders beauty as something beyond words or beyond any kind of description.”

“She taught me not to block out ugliness by giving imagined beauty false dominion: but that on the other hand, in the midst of hatred and ugliness there is color, there is life, and there is ...personal usefullness... as well.”

“Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order; knowing ourselves, we are beautiful; in self-ignorance, we are ugly.”

“The child must have a valuable thing which Is called imagination. The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, she can reach back and live in her imagination.... Only by having these things in my mind can I live beyond what I have to live for.”