“Death is the mother of beauty,” said Henry. “And what is beauty?” “Terror.”

“Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”

“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”

“A particularly beautiful woman is a source of terror. As a rule, a beautiful woman is a terrible disappointment.”

“Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.”

“Ah, ah,
Beautiful is the mother.
Ah, ah,
Beautiful is her son.”

“There’s always a sunrise and always a sunset and it’s up to you to choose to be there for it,’ said my mother. 'Put yourself in the way of beauty.”

“Beautiful. He'd called her beautiful. Nobody had ever called her that before, except her mother, which didn't count. Mothers were required to think you were beautiful.”

“The underlying theme of Western poetry is mortality. The theme of carpe diem asks us to seize the day because we have only a limited number of them. To see life through the lens of death is to approach the condition of gratitude for the gift (or simply the fact) of our existence. And as Wallace Stevens said, Death is the mother of beauty. Only the perishable can be beautiful, which is why we are unmoved by artificial flowers.”

“Landscapes are about beauty and death. The only way you can define beauty.... is to know that death is hiding behind it. This is what haunts you when you’re doing a so-called landscape painting.”