Il faut souffrir pour être belle…To be born as blonde and blue-eyed and beautiful as she was can be as much of a handicap in its way as to be born with a cleft palate because if you are beautiful enough you don’t really have to be anything much else to make people love you and want to be near you.
– Buechner, Telling Secrets, 15
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful…
— Yeats, Prayer for My Daughter
And now Psyche must go down into the dead-lands to get beauty in a casket from the Queen of the Deadlands, from death herself; and bring it back to give it to Ungit so that Ungit will become beautiful…
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Two figures, reflections, their feet to Psyche’s feet and mine, stood head downward in the water. But whose were they? Two Psyches, the one clothed, the other naked? Yes, both Psyches, both beautiful (if that mattered now) beyond all imagining, yet not exactly the same. “You also are Psyche,” came a great voice.
— Lewis, Till We Have Faces
