The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.
Elaine ScarryHow one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things.
Elaine ScarryThis willingness continually to revise one's own location in order to place oneself in the path of beauty is the basic impulse underlying education. One submits oneself to other minds (teachers) in order to increase the chance that one will be looking in the right direction when a comet makes its sweep through a certain patch of sky.
Elaine ScarryTo misstate, or even merely understate, the relation of the universities to beauty is one kind of error that can be made. A university is among the precious things that can be destroyed.
Elaine ScarryInjury is the thing every exhausting piece of strategy and every single weapon is designed to bring into being: it is not something inadvertently produced on the way to producing something else but is the relentless object of all military activity.
Elaine ScarryBeauty always takes place in the particular, and if there are no particulars, the chances of seeing it go down
Elaine Scarry