Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other.

I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty and I wonder how the same can be both.

It is lovely to imagine that real divinity is the presence in which all beauty, unity, creativity, darkness, and negativity are harmonized.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both. (Death)

...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.

Among both the Northern and Eastern Hamites are to be found some of the most beautiful types of humanity.

I aim to capture the multifaceted nature of humanity—beautiful yet flawed

All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil.

There was much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.

The universal pervasion of ugliness, hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul language...everything. Unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside the dug outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth. In poetry we call them the most glorious.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, seas- a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world- no flower or stone- as a single hello from a human being.

Humans will not hesitate to lay down their own lives to rescue a child who had fallen onto the train tracks, yet are also perpetrators of appalling violence, like in Auschwitz. The broad spectrum of humanity, which runs from the sublime to the brutal, has for me been like a difficult homework problem ever since I was a child. You could say that my books are variations on this theme of human violence.

At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.