As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.

And I said, 'A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?' And he said, 'Because when he sings ... even the birds stop to listen.

Having an eye for beauty isn't the same thing as a weakness...except possibly when it comes to you.

Having an eye for beauty isn't the same thing as a weakness.

How does life become totally painful? By total retreat. Total noninspection becomes total pain.[…]But existence is basically composed of a very few truths onto which have hung a great many artificialities and which man has adorned with enormous numbers of lies. And man is prisoner of his own shadows. Now one of the things you can do with man is to get him to look up and find out that he can look through the shadows and look at the shadows and find out what they are.

He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought that the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.