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“We'd not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, not gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we'd not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we'd been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“throughout all this, I was acutely aware of how quickly the experience of beauty dissipates and is replaced by boredom and the dullness of obligation.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“You could have made me come home," I say.
"No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“so tenderhearted, so sensitive to life—his same receptors that were open to beauty were as open to suffering.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“We are meant to understand the scope of the suffering while we also know we can't understand the scope of the suffering. I might shut down. I might feel numb, unable to hold it all at once.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm... a one; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure..."
Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insights endurance, and our capacity or attention. In difficult beauty, one often encourages intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness - the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle - that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“We seek beauty, but our understanding of its nature is limited. We find it primarily in easy-to-appreciate human forms. As we grow older and learn more, we journey closer to the truth of beauty. We begin to perceive it more powerfully in minds than in bodies. We stay on our quest, ascending, going higher and higher in our conception of beauty. As we do, our capacity to recognize beauty grows larger. We can take in more. Our eyes adjust to the bright light of the true nature of beauty until, at last, we may be able to behold it - perfect beauty, which is "pure, clean, unmixed, and not infected with human flesh, colors, or morality." Glimpsing to at last, we become part of a bigger sum, something vast and immortal.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“It is a deft act of erasure to be told how to process a situation by a person who would never experience it.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“The way words stay, the way sentences stay, the way memories invade my present, the way a stranger looks at me and speaks: shards that become a mirror.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“You could have made me come home,â€� I say. “No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Do you remember who you were? We’ve both changed, but the difference is that I didn’t know who I wanted to become, and you did, that was clear, and so I knew I needed to stay out of your way and just let you become the version of yourself you wanted to be, which I knew was, at its core, good. I knew you wanted to be good.â€� “How did you know that, and I didn’t?â€� “I can see you,â€� he says.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I knew you were on your way toward the person you wanted to be, and you’d get there if I just let you get there.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“No matter what you’ve been through, your story is one among many. Try focusing on that,â€� she says. “Focus on the feeling of the world getting wider.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“But I’m not helpless, I’m struggling. People don’t always recognize the difference.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“is a deft act of erasure to be told how to process a situation by a person who would never experience it.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I care if you are happy. I'm in love with your happiness. My focus is on how you feel not what you do.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“If love is the name of the pursuit of the whole, what is the name given to finding it?
I close my eyes and focus on the feeling of the world getting a little wider.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Beauty is what we're told is beautiful and what we're told becomes the truth.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I was acutely aware of how quickly the experience of beauty dissipates and is replaced by boredom and the dullness of obligation.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Philosophy, by its very nature, required uncertainty. It was, wrote Maria Popova, “the art of remaining in doubt.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“other emotions, like ambivalence, fear, devotion, obligation, resentment, excitement, and on and on. These feelings are not in opposition to love, but are love’s texture.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My father understood a good story is a circle that finds the hero back where they started, but with new knowledge. He wanted this to be true. He also knew a good story ended with the hero realizing the world was bigger than he thought, bigger than himself. But the hero can't realize this until he returns home, and my father didn't have a model in his life for the return, only the quest, so he couldn't write the story because he could never get to the ending.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“We saw our authentic selves residing only in the abstract realms of art, creation, and beauty--an interior space of thought and private feeling.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: 'A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm...a rose; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all of these afford a plain straightforward pleasure...'
Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet, required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insight, endurance, and our capacity for attention. In difficult beauty, one often encounters intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“I've learned not to share these experiences, especially with able bodies people who can be quick to tell me how I should feel, that I should just ignore it or learn to laugh it off or that I'm being too sensitive and it's not a big deal . . . Often these statements are made with good intentions . . .but they always have the opposite effect, leaving me feeling chastened and misunderstood. It is a deft act of erasure to be told how to process a situation by a person who would never experience it.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“My disability is obvious, but its details are unclear, to look at me is to feel information both shown and withheld. These ideas in opposition create cognitive dissonance and this makes people uncomfortable in a way not reducible to prejudice alone.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Newness invites the eye and I am always a new thing.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“We’d not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, nor gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we’d not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we’d been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Pedantism, he thought, came from the human tendency to sequester the past from the present in order to draw from it a model. But for animals, “The past absorbed into the present carries on; it presses forward.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“He fell in love with me quickly, which I took as a sign of weakness. But then I fell in love with him quickly, too.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty