BY JESSICA GROSS
Beauty, beauty everywhere. The latest quotes, for your reading pleasure:
- “When images of physical beauty serve to diminish the depth of a woman’s personhood, we should reject them. And when they seem to restore an appreciation of that which has been devalued, or to be attached to an open sense of expressiveness, play, and fun, then we should feel free to enjoy them. But in either case, our eyes must always be focused on actual lives, not just screens and pages in a magazine.” – Imani Perry in the Huffington Post
- “[M]y mother was extremely beautiful. She was one of the top Ford models of the nineteen-sixties, frequently appearing on the covers of Vogue, Elle, and all the other major fashion magazines. My father was very good-looking as well. My brother inherited their looks. I didn’t.” – Amanda Filipacchi in an essay on her relationship with her mother’s appearance, and her own, in The New Yorker. Her novel The Unfortunate Importance of Beauty meditates on the implications of our cultural obsession with people’s looks.
- “Love stars Gillian Jacobs (Community) and Paul Rust (Super Fun Night) in the lead roles, making it the latest entrant in a long line of a popular but sometimes frustrating television trope: the ‘ugly guy’ getting the ‘hot woman.'” – Pilot Viruet in Vulture
- “I think I can’t say the word ‘beauty’ without also equating it with the word ‘transcendence,’ because it seems like there’s so many different things that are beautiful to so many different people. But I think beauty is often an encapsulation of a lot of different things in a certain moment — a frame, let’s say. It could be music. It could be a poem. It could be an event. It could be in nature — and often, possibly most often, in nature. But when that encapsulated form is received, there’s a moment of reception and cognition of the thing that is, in some ways, startling. And the moment you solve an equation. The moment that something is revealed, either in your own head or physically, materially revealed. When that moment happens, when, in the Sistine Chapel, when you see the finger — Adam just about to touch — there’s that moment where something is being transferred. I think even when we observe nature — so if we are part of nature and we observe nature, but we’re part of the human realm, and there’s that moment which — essentially, there’s a transfer of life. So even if you think nature is inanimate, and therefore — but the beauty of nature, it’s the human cognition of that vastness, the awe and the wonder, something that’s, in a way, bigger than yourself.” – Yo-Yo Ma, interviewed on On Being
Image: “Spring Splendor” by artsaus