Faces

(32 votes)   Our masks, always in peril of smearing or cracking, in need of continuous check in the mirror or silverware, keep us in thrall to ourselves, concerned with our surfaces.

Carolyn Kizer

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(257 votes)   A man finds room in the few square inches of the face for the traits of all his ancestors; for the expression of all his history, and his wants.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(192 votes)   My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(188 votes)   I am the family face; flesh perishes, I live on, projecting trait and trace through time to times anon, and leaping from place to place over oblivion.

Thomas Hardy
1840-1928, British Novelist, Poet

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(162 votes)   Every European visitor to the United States is struck by the comparative rarity of what he would call a face, by the frequency of men and women who look like elderly babies. If he stays in the States for any length of time, he will learn that this cannot be put down to a lack of sensibility -- the American feels the joys and sufferings of human life as keenly as anybody else. The only plausible explanation I can find lies in his different attitude to the past. To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must not only enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.

W. H. Auden
1907-1973, Anglo-American Poet

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(108 votes)   The tartness of his face sours ripe grapes.

William Shakespeare
1564-1616, British Poet, Playwright, Actor

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(105 votes)   Tom's great yellow bronze mask all draped upon an iron framework. An inhibited, nerve-drawn; dropped face -- as if hung on a scaffold of heavy private brooding; and thought.

Virginia Woolf
1882-1941, British Novelist, Essayist

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(84 votes)   The face of a child can say it all, especially the mouth part of the face.

Jack Handy

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(81 votes)   A face is too slight a foundation for happiness.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
1689-1762, British Society Figure, Letter Writer

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(76 votes)   Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn.

William Shakespeare
1564-1616, British Poet, Playwright, Actor

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(69 votes)   A strange and somewhat impassive physiognomy is often, perhaps, an advantage to an orator, or leader of any sort, because it helps to fix the eye and fascinate the mind.

Charles Horton Cooley
1864-1929, American Sociologist

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(66 votes)   Every man over forty is responsible for his face.

Abraham Lincoln
1809-1865, Sixteenth President of the USA

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(64 votes)   I never forget a face, but in your case I'll make an exception.

Groucho Marx
1895-1977, American Comic Actor

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(60 votes)   It has to be displayed, this face, on a more or less horizontal plane. Imagine a man wearing a mask, and imagine that the elastic which holds the mask on has just broken, so that the man (rather than let the mask slip off) has to tilt his head back and balance the mask on his real face. This is the kind of tyranny which Lawson's face exerts over the rest of his body as he cruises along the corridors. He doesn't look down his nose at you, he looks along his nose.

James Fenton
1949-, British Poet, Critic

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(59 votes)   That the public can grow accustomed to any face is proved by the increasing prevalence of Keith's ruined physiognomy on TV documentaries and chat shows, as familiar and homely a horror as Grandpa in The Munsters.

Philip Norman

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