Coloured Paper Quotes

The sun,--the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man--burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.

Multiple times he has tried writing his thoughts about Marianne down on paper in an effort to make sense of them. He's moved by a desire to describe in words exactly how she looks and speaks. Her hair and clothing. The copy of Swann's Way she reads at lunchtime in the school cafeteria, with a dark French painting on the cover and a mint-coloured spine. Her long fingers turning the pages. She's not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works... He writes these things down, long run-on sentences with too many dependent clauses, sometimes connected with breathless semicolons, as if he wants to recreate a precise copy of Marianne in print, as if he can preserve her completely for future review.

Those of you who are more than casually familiar with books -- those of you who spend your free afternoons in fusty bookshops, who offer furtive, kindly strokes along the spines of familiar titles -- understand that page riffling is an essential element in the process of introducing oneself to a new book. It isn't about reading the words; it's about reading the smell, which wafts from the pages in a cloud of dust and wood pulp. It might smell expensive and well bound, or it might smell of tissue-thin paper and blurred two-colour prints, or of fifty years unread in the home of a tobacco-smoking old man. Books can smell of cheap thrills or painstaking scholarship, or literary weight or unsolved mysteries.

By now you know: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, "Take me to your leaders." Even I--unused to your ways though I am--would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, "Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths." These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

At the end of the street was a large glass box with a female mannequin inside it, dressed as a gypsy fortune teller. “Now,” said Wednesday, “at the start of any quest or enterprise it behooves us to consult the Norns.” He dropped a coin into the slot. With jagged, mechanical motions, the gypsy lifted her arm and lowered it once more. A slip of paper chunked out of the slot. Wednesday took it, read it, grunted, folded it up and put it in his pocket. “Aren’t you going to show it to me? I’ll show you mine,” said Shadow. “A man’s fortune is his own affair,” said Wednesday, stiffly. “I would not ask to see yours.” Shadow put his own coin into the slot. He took his slip of paper. He read it. EVERY ENDING IS A NEW BEGINNING. YOUR LUCKY NUMBER IS NONE. YOUR LUCKY COLOUR IS DEAD. Motto: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON. Shadow made a face. He folded the fortune up and put it inside his pocket.

I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn't quite fit. I worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.

Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space.

She preferred the quiet solitary atmosphere, to create in her own world of paint and colour, the thrill of anticipating how her works would turn out as she eyed the blank sheets of paper or canvas before starting her next masterpiece. How satisfying it was to mess around in paint gear, without having to worry about spills, starch or frills, that was the life!

There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper. . . . In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face.

I'll see the color of your money, my lord." My lord folded the paper. He was still smiling. "It would disappoint you, my friend. It is just the same colour as everyone else's.

1. What is Gilderoy Lockhart's favorite colour? 2. What is Gilderoy Lockhart's secret ambition? 3. What, in you opinion, is Gilderoy Lockhart's greatest achievement to date? On and on it went, over three sides of paper, right down to: 54. When is Gilderoy Lockhart's birthday, and what would his ideal gift be?

You sound jealous.' 'If you think I'm jealous because someone else got to stab you, then you're right.' 'Prove it.' She heard the slump of his dagger as it fell at her feet. It was the jeweled one he carried everywhere. So many of the gems were missing, but the knife's hilt still glittered in the torchlight, pulsing blue and purple, the colour of blood before it was spilled. 'What am I supposed to do with this?' 'You might want to use it, Little Fox.' The corner of his mouth twitched as he slowly slid his pale hands through the bars of the gate and broke the lock in half. It could have been a twig, a piece of paper, or her.

As any reader knows, a printed page creates its own reading space, its own physical landscape in which the texture of the paper, the colour of the ink, the view of the whole ensemble acquire in the reader’s hands specific meanings that lend tone and context to the words.

When we first came here We were cold and we were clear with no colours on our skin We were light and paper thin. And when we first came here We were cold and we were clear With no colours on our skin 'Till you let the Spectrum in. --Spectrum

He built her a bookshelf and she filled it with books by people who wrote page after page about their feelings. Ove understood things he could see and touch. Cement and concrete. Glass and steel. Tools. Things one could figure out. He understood right angles and clear instruction manuals. Assembly models and drawings. Things one could draw on paper. He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had.

By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, Take me to your leaders. Even I - unused to your ways though I am - would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, Take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

Liberty On my notebooks from school On my desk and the trees On the sand, on the snow I write your name On every page read On all the white sheets Stone blood paper or ash I write your name On the golden images On the soldier’s weapons On the crowns of kings I write your name On the jungle, the desert The nests and the bushes On the echo of childhood I write your name On the wonder of nights On the white bread of days On the seasons engaged I write your name On all my blue rags On the pond mildewed sun On the lake living moon I write your name On the fields, the horizon The wings of the birds On the windmill of shadows I write your name On the foam of the clouds On the sweat of the storm On dark insipid rain I write your name On the glittering forms On the bells of colour On physical truth I write your name On the wakened paths On the opened ways On the scattered places I write your name On the lamp that gives light On the lamp that is drowned On my house reunited I write your name On the bisected fruit Of my mirror and room On my bed’s empty shell I write your name On my dog greedy tender On his listening ears On his awkward paws I write your name On the sill of my door On familiar things On the fire’s sacred stream I write your name On all flesh that’s in tune On the brows of my friends On each hand that extends I write your name On the glass of surprises On lips that attend High over the silence I write your name On my ravaged refuges On my fallen lighthouses On the walls of my boredom I write your name On passionless absence On naked solitude On the marches of death I write your name On health that’s regained On danger that’s past On hope without memories I write your name By the power of the word I regain my life I was born to know you And to name you LIBERTY

People have seemed to her like coloured paper shapes, not real at all. At times a person will make eye contact with Marianne, a bus conductor or someone looking for change, and she’ll be shocked briefly into the realisation that this is in fact her life, that she is actually visible to other people. This feeling opens her to certain longings [...] But these fade away again quickly.

I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ‘I’ve no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s just why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!’ Now in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

Men had sought beauty in many forms—in sequences of sound, in lines upon paper, in surfaces of stone, in the movements of the human body, in colours ranged through space. All these media still survived in Diaspar and down the ages others had been added to them. No one was yet certain if all the possibilities of art had been discovered, or if it had any meaning outside the mind of Man. And the same was true of love.

Celebrate life through the music through the spoken word through the splatter of colour on paper or wood or iron or canvas But celebrate your life Celebrate your ability to feel joy and sadness Celebrate your ability to feel! Only then will we be free to feel

That’s always seemed so ridiculous to me, that people would want to be around someone because they’re pretty. It’s like picking your breakfast cereals based on colour instead of taste.

I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn’t quite fit. I worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.

... the new high-class lively evening paper which was expected to meet a want felt in circles increasingly conscious that Conservatism must be made amusing, and unconvinced when assured by those of another political colour that it was already amusing enough.

Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or two you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness.

The world, that is, of earthquake and cataclysm, cyclone and devastation; the violent matrix, the real world of unmastered, unmasterable physical stress that is entirely inimical to man because of its indifference. Ocean, forest, mountain, weather - these are the inflexible institutions of that world of unquestionable reality which is so far removed from the social institutions which make up our own world that we men must always, whatever our difference, conspire to ignore them. For otherwise we would be forced to acknowledge our incomparable insignificance and the insignificance of those desires that might be the pyrotechnic tigers of our world and yet, under the cold moon and the frigid round dance of the unspeakably alien planets, are nothing but toy animals cut from coloured paper.

…….one horizon always hides another and it goes on like that into infinity, to the unspeakable beauty of renewal, to intangible rapture. As for me, it is true all the way to the possibility of this book, to the moment when my words glide across the curve of your lips, to the sheets of white paper that put up with my trail, or rather the trail of those who have walked before me, for me. I moved forward in the trace of their footsteps as in a waking dream where the scent of a newly blown poppy is no longer a perfume but a blossoming: where the deep red of a maple leaf in autumn is no longer a colour but a grace; where a country is no longer a place but a lullaby.

...burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour'. High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots .concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar of the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain...

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind.

Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted.

They had brought him in during the war, the professional civil servant from an orthodox department, a man to handle paper and integrate the brilliance of his staff with the cumbersome machine of bureaucracy. It comforted the Great to deal with a man they knew, a man who could reduce any colour to grey, who knew his masters and could walk among them. And he did it so well. They liked his diffidence when he apologized for the company he kept, his insincerity when he defended the vagaries of his subordinates, his flexibility when formulating new commitments. Nor did he let go the advantages of a cloak and dagger man malgré lui, wearing the cloak for his masters and preserving the dagger for his servants.

The sun draws back the curtain of inky black to reveal a palette of colours more gorgeous than even the greatest masters could conjure.

Simpkin, with the last penny of our fourpence buy me one penn'orth of cherry-coloured silk. But do not lose the last penny of the fourpence, Simpkin, or I am undone and worn to a thread-paper, for I have NO MORE TWIST.

The problem of an ideal kitchen grows more complex as I ponder on it. There are many small things I am sure about: no shelf-papers; no sharp edges or protruding hooks or wires; no ruffled curtains; and no cheap-coloured stove, mauve or green or opalescent like a modern toilet seat. Instead of these things I would have smooth shelves of some material like ebony or structural glass, shelves open or protected by sliding transparent doors. I would have curved and rounded edges, even to the floor, for the sake of cleanliness, and because I hate the decayed colours of a bruise. Instead of curtains I would have Venetian blinds, of four different colours for the seasons of the year. They would be, somehow, on the outside of the glass. And the stove would be black, with copper and earthenware utensils to put on it. It would be a wood stove, or perhaps (of this I am doubtful, unless I am the charwoman and janitor as well as the cook) electrical with place for a charcoal grill.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct.

High up on the branches, like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree, which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking

But where should he begin? - Well, then, the trouble with the English was their: Their: In a word, Gibreel solemnly pronounced, their weather. Gibreel Farishta floating on his cloud formed the opinion that the moral fuzziness of the English was meteorologically induced. 'When the day is not warmer than the night,' he reasoned, 'when the light is not brighter than the dark, when the land is not drier than the sea, then clearly a people will lose the power to make distinctions, and commence to see everything - from political parties to sexual partners to religious beliefs - as much-the-same, nothing-to-choose, give-or-take. What folly! For truth is extreme, it is so and not thus, it is him and not her; a partisan matter, not a spectator sport. It is, in brief, heated. City,' he cried, and his voice rolled over the metropolis like thunder, 'I am going to tropicalize you.' Gibreel enumerated the benefits of the proposed metamorphosis of London into a tropical city: increased moral definition, institution of a national siesta, development of vivid and expansive patterns of behaviour among the populace, higher-quality popular music, new birds in the trees (macaws, peacocks, cockatoos), new trees under the birds (coco-palms, tamarind, banyans with hanging beards). Improved street-life, outrageously coloured flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks. A new mass market for domestic air-conditioning units, ceiling fans, anti-mosquito coils and sprays. A coir and copra industry. Increased appeal of London as a centre for conferences, etc.: better cricketeers; higher emphasis on ball-control among professional footballers, the traditional and soulless English commitment to 'high workrate' having been rendered obsolete by the heat. Religious fervour, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intellegentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the foetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old-folks' homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier foods; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon. Disadvantages: cholera, typhoid, legionnaires' disease, cockroaches, dust, noise, a culture of excess. Standing upon the horizon, spreading his arms to fill the sky, Gibreel cried: 'Let it be.

A man can be beautiful, I see that now. It’s not just a woman’s term, not a word reserved for romantic, virtuous, elegant things. I don’t think beauty is neat anymore. It’s unordered. It’s unbrushed hair and a torn back pocket. It’s bright and strange and lovely, and if I were to paint him, I’d use all the warm colours - ochre, gold, plum, terracotta, scarlet, burnt orange. I want him to see me as I saw him then, I want him to find me alone at the end of the day with the sun in my hair. I want his heart to buckle, too. I want him to stop someone out in the square and say, who’s that? Do you know her? Where is she from?” — - from Eve Green’s mother’s account. “It is written on a piece of thin, yellow paper, and is folded in half. I like this account. I like it because it’s true, she’s right. We all want out lovers to see us that way - unaware, natural, serene. We want to change their world with one glance, to stop their breath at the sight of us.

I opened it. At first sight it appeared to contain nothing except thin white paper, but when I lifted the paper I found a pair of shoes. They were made of canvas of a blue-green colour that reminded me of the Tides of the Southern Halls. The rubber soles were thick and white and they had white laces. I removed them from the box and put them on. They fitted perfectly. I tried walking about in them. My feet felt beautifully cushioned and bouncible. All day long I have been running and dancing for the sheer pleasure of feeling my feet in their new shoes. ‘Look!’ I said to the crows in the First Northern Hall when they flew down from the High Statues to see what I was doing, ‘I have new shoes!’ But the crows only cawed and flew back to their perches.

Adolph Knipe moved his feet on the carpet, and he watched the two small white hands of his chief, the nervous fingers playing with a paper clip, unbending it, straightening out the hairpin curves. He didn’t like the man’s hands. He didn’t like his face either, with the tiny mouth and the narrow purple-coloured lips. It was unpleasant the way only the lower lip moved when he talked.

before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way.

At length the colour on her cheeks resumed its stability and it seemed as if the spirit of the age—if such indeed it were—lay dormant for a time. Then Orlando felt in the bosom of her shirt as if for some locket or relic of lost affection, and drew out no such thing, but a roll of paper, sea-stained, blood-stained, travel-stained—the manuscript of her poem, 'The Oak Tree'. She had carried this about with her for so many years now, and in such hazardous circumstances, that many of the pages were stained, some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when with the gipsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most conscientiously carried out. She turned back to the first page and read the date, 1586, written in her own boyish hand. She had been working at it for close three hundred years now. It was time to make an end. Meanwhile she began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read, how very little she had changed all these years. She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet through all these changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same.

Mostly, though, he made people laugh, with wicked impersonations of everyone around him: clients, lawyers, clerks, even the cleaning woman. When Pickwick Papers came out, his former colleagues realized that half of them had turned up in its pages. His eyes - eyes that everyone who ever met him, to the day he died, remarked on - beautiful, animated, warm, dreamy, flashing, sparkling - though no two people ever agreed on their colour - were they grey, green, blue, brown? - those eyes missed nothing, any more than did his ears. He could imitate anyone. Brimming over with an all but uncontainable energy, which the twenty-first century might suspiciously describe as manic, he discharged his superplus of vitality by incessantly walking the streets, learning London as he went, mastering it, memorizing the names of the roads, the local accents, noting the characteristic topographies of the many villages of which the city still consisted.

That’s why you need to go to collage, Daniel said. You’re using the wrong word, Elisabeth said. The word you’re using is for when you cut out pictures of things or coloured shapes and stick them on paper. I disagree, Daniel said. Collage is an institute of education where all the rules can be thrown up into the air, and size and space and time and foreground and background all become relative, and because of these skills everything you think you know gets made into something new and strange.

I can see it in your eyes. If it weren’t for this I would have stopped trying long ago, to communicate with you in this halfway language which is so difficult for both of us, which exhausts the throat and fills the mouth with sand; if it weren’t for this I would have gone away, gone back. It’s this knowledge of death, which we share, where we overlap. Death is our common ground. Together, on it, we can walk forward. By now you must have guessed: I come from another planet. But I will never say to you, take me to your leaders. Even I – unused to your ways though I am – would never make that mistake. We ourselves have such beings among us, made of cogs, pieces of paper, small disks of shiny metal, scraps of coloured cloth. I do not need to encounter more of them. Instead I will say, take me to your trees. Take me to your breakfasts, your sunsets, your bad dreams, your shoes, your nouns. Take me to your fingers; take me to your deaths. These are worth it. These are what I have come for.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

Anyway, I have a new theory. Would you like to hear it? Ignore this paragraph if not. My theory is that human beings lost the instinct for beauty in 1976, when plastics became the most widespread material in existence. You can actually see the change in process if you look at street photography from before and after 1976. I know we have good reason to be sceptical of aesthetic nostalgia, but the fact remains that before the 1970s, people wore durable clothes of wool and cotton, stored drinks in glass bottles, wrapped food produce in paper, and filled their houses with sturdy wooden furniture. Now a majority of objects in our visual environment are made of plastic, the ugliest substance on earth, a material which when dyed does not take on colour but actually exudes colour, in an inimitably ugly way. One thing a government could do with my approval (and there aren’t many) would be to prohibit the production of each and every form of plastic not urgently necessary for the maintenance of human life. What do you think?

The rooms I occupied were on the ground floor. The parlour was papered with an old marbled paper and on the walls were water colours of romantic scenes, cavaliers bidding good-bye to their ladies and knights of old banqueting in stately halls; there were large ferns in pots, and the armchairs were covered with faded leather. There was about the room an amusing air of the eighteen eighties, and when I looked out of the window I expected to see a private hansom rather than a Chrysler. The curtains were of a heavy red rep.

It [the charcuterie] was almost on the corner of the Rue Pirouette and was a joy to behold. It was bright and inviting, with touches of brilliant colour standing out amidst white marble. The signboard, on which the name QUENU-GRADELLE glittered in fat gilt letter encircled by leaves and branches painted on a soft-hued background, was protected by a sheet of glass. On the two side panels of the shop front, similarly painted and under glass, were chubby little Cupids playing in the midst of boars' heads, pork chops, and strings of sausages; and these still lifes, adorned with scrolls and rosettes, had been designed in so pretty and tender a style that the raw meat lying there assumed the reddish tint of raspberry jam. Within this delightful frame, the window display was arranged. It was set out on a bed of fine shavings of blue paper; a few cleverly positioned fern leaves transformed some of the plates into bouquets of flowers fringed with foliage. There were vast quantities of rich, succulent things, things that melted in the mouth. Down below, quite close to the window, jars of rillettes were interspersed with pots of mustard. Above these were some boned hams, nicely rounded, golden with breadcrumbs, and adorned at the knuckles with green rosettes. Then came the larger dishes--stuffed Strasbourg tongues, with their red, varnished look, the colour of blood next to the pallor of the sausages and pigs' trotters; strings of black pudding coiled like harmless snakes; andouilles piled up in twos and bursting with health; saucissons in little silver copes that made them look like choristers; pies, hot from the oven, with little banner-like tickets stuck in them; big hams, and great cuts of veal and pork, whose jelly was as limpid as crystallized sugar. Towards the back were large tureens in which the meats and minces lay asleep in lakes of solidified fat. Strewn between the various plates and sishes, on the bed of blue shavings, were bottles of relish, sauce, and preserved truffles, pots of foie gras, and tins of sardines and tuna fish. A box of creamy cheeses and one full of snails stuffed with butter and parsley had been dropped in each corner. Finally, at the very top of the display, falling from a bar with sharp prongs, strings of sausages and saveloys hung down symmetrically like the cords and tassels of some opulent tapestry, while behind, threads of caul were stretched out like white lacework. There, on the highest tier of this temple of gluttony, amid the caul and between two bunches of purple gladioli, the alter display was crowned by a small, square fish tank with a little ornamental rockery, in which two goldfish swam in endless circles.

And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny streak of flame creeping along the edge of the newspaper. It was like that now. For a second after Aslan had breathed upon him the stone lion looked just the same. Then a tiny streak of gold began to run along his white marble back then it spread—then the colour seemed to lick all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper—then, while his hindquarters were still obviously stone, the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stone folds rippled into living hair.

A learned priest is also, needless to say, a splendid thing. An Empress taking part in an imperial procession during daylight hours. A formal expedition by the Regent, or his official pilgrimage to Kasuga Shrine.5 Grape-coloured figured silk. Violet is a splendid colour wherever it’s found – in flowers, in fabric or in paper. Snow lying thick in a garden. The Regent. The water iris is rather less fine than other violet-coloured flowers. The reason the sight of a sixth-rank Chamberlain on night watch is so delightful is because of the violet in his clothes.

The Book Lover:- See how I have come up in the World, because of my books. I pull the covers agape, pages release their cargo and words fly like birds each with its own song. Listen, and vowels will breathe like flutes in your head, Consonants tick-tack like woodpeckers, and sibilants, sly as asps, bite the plosives that pop from our pressed lips. A picture worth a thousand words? You paint a score of trees, dark needled, stippled and stroked across your canvas: My book say ‘’forrest’’ (Feel that Pine green touch) You wash your paper with azures and turquoise, set ship after ship, sails wind-pregnant, As far as the daubed horizon: my books say ‘’armada’’. (Smell that sea-green scent) Art’s shape is their noun, its colour their objective, Its tone their adverb; my books match the grammar of landscapes. This book may say ‘Socrates’ secrets, Freud’s autopsy of actions or Heaney’s verses; Every idea dreamed by man caught, black stamped for all time, within its cardboard confines. Here the past speaks to us, as the future will, in the language of our senses. Step up book by book- In time, you will reach the stars.

Harriet turned round, and we both saw a girl walking towards us. She was dark-skinned and thin, not veiled but dressed in a sitara, a brightly coloured robe of greens and pinks, and she wore a headscarf of a deep rose colour. In that barren place the vividness of her dress was all the more striking. On her head she balanced a pitcher and in her hand she carried something. As we watched her approach, I saw that she had come from a small house, not much more than a cave, which had been built into the side of the mountain wall that formed the far boundary of the gravel plateau we were standing on. I now saw that the side of the mountain had been terraced in places and that there were a few rows of crops growing on the terraces. Small black and brown goats stepped up and down amongst the rocks with acrobatic grace, chewing the tops of the thorn bushes. As the girl approached she gave a shy smile and said, ‘Salaam alaikum, ’ and we replied, ‘Wa alaikum as salaam, ’ as the sheikh had taught us. She took the pitcher from where it was balanced on her head, kneeled on the ground, and gestured to us to sit. She poured water from the pitcher into two small tin cups, and handed them to us. Then she reached into her robe and drew out a flat package of greaseproof paper from which she withdrew a thin, round piece of bread, almost like a large flat biscuit. She broke off two pieces, and handed one to each of us, and gestured to us to eat and drink. The water and the bread were both delicious. We smiled and mimed our thanks until I remembered the Arabic word, ‘Shukran.’ So we sat together for a while, strangers who could speak no word of each other’s languages, and I marvelled at her simple act. She had seen two people walking in the heat, and so she laid down whatever she had been doing and came to render us a service. Because it was the custom, because her faith told her it was right to do so, because her action was as natural to her as the water that she poured for us. When we declined any further refreshment after a second cup of water she rose to her feet, murmured some word of farewell, and turned and went back to the house she had come from. Harriet and I looked at each other as the girl walked back to her house. ‘That was so…biblical,’ said Harriet. ‘Can you imagine that ever happening at home?’ I asked. She shook her head. ‘That was charity. Giving water to strangers in the desert, where water is so scarce. That was true charity, the charity of poor people giving to the rich.’ In Britain a stranger offering a drink to a thirsty man in a lonely place would be regarded with suspicion. If someone had approached us like that at home, we would probably have assumed they were a little touched or we were going to be asked for money. We might have protected ourselves by being stiff and unfriendly, evasive or even rude.

What was the value of a man? Her friends couldn’t see why she woke up every morning and voluntarily decided to share the whole day with him. He couldn’t either. He built her a bookshelf and she filled it with books by people who wrote page after page about their feelings. Ove understood things he could see and touch. Cement and concrete. Glass and steel. Tools. Things one could figure out. He understood right angles and clear instruction manuals. Assembly models and drawings. Things one could draw on paper. He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

float before I could swim. Ellis never believed it was called Dead-Man’s Float, thought I’d made it up. I told him it was a survival position after a long exhausting journey. How apt. All I see below is blue light. Peaceful and eternal. I’m holding my breath until my body throbs as one pulse. I roll over and suck in a deep lungful of warm air. I look up at the starry starry night. The sound of water in and out of my ears, and beyond this human shell, the sound of cicadas fills the night. I dreamt of my mother. It was an image, that’s all, and a fleeting one, at that. She was faded with age, like a discarded offcut on the studio floor. In this dream, she didn’t speak, just stepped out of the shadows, a reminder that we are the same, her and me, cut from the same bruised cloth. I understand how she got up one day and left, how instinctively she trusted the compulsion to flee. The rightness of that action. We are the same, her and me. She walked out when I was eight. Never came back. I remember being collected from school by our neighbour Mrs Deakin, who bought me sweets on the way home and let me play with a dog for as long as I wanted. Inside the house, my father was sitting at the table, drinking. He was holding a sheet of blue writing paper covered in black words, and he said, Your mother’s gone. She said she’s sorry. A sheet of writing paper covered in words and just two for me. How was that possible? Her remnant life was put in bags and stored in the spare room at the earliest opportunity. Stuffed in, not folded – clothes brushes, cosmetics all thrown in together, awaiting collection from the Church. My mother had taken only what she could carry. One rainy afternoon, when my father had gone next door to fix a pipe, I emptied the bags on to the floor and saw my mother in every jumper and blouse and skirt I held up. I used to watch her dress and she let me. Sometimes, she asked my opinion about colours or what suited her more, this blouse or that blouse? And she’d follow my advice and tell me how right I was. I took off my clothes and put on a skirt first, then a blouse, a cardigan, and slowly I became her in miniature. She’d taken her good shoes, so I slipped on a pair of mid-height heels many sizes too big, of course, and placed a handbag on my arm. I stood in front of the mirror, and saw the infinite possibilities of play. I strutted, I

Sometimes we'd sit on that bench for hours, talking about nothing much and blowing smoke rings into the air, and we'd see them teetering past, stumble-drunk after closing time with their brown paper bags and late night vinegar running down their arms and the lack of kindness everywhere. And the girls, panda-eyed and lonely, hitching their bravado to their short skirts, were telling themselves that this was living. We said we would never be them. But there was one boy who had kind eyes. His hair was the colour of the sand and his smile promised everything. I told you he wasn't like the rest, but you didn't want to hear it.

And as soon as I had recognised the taste of the piece of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-blossom which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set to attach itself to the little pavilion opening on to the garden which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated segment which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann's park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

March 1898 What a strange dream I had last night! I wandered in the warm streets of a port, in the low quarter of some Barcelona or Marseille. The streets were noisome, with their freshly-heaped piles of ordure outside the doors, in the blue shadows of their high roofs. They all led down towards the sea. The gold-spangled sea, seeming as if it had been polished by the sun, could be seen at the end of each thoroughfare, bristling with yard-arms and luminous masts. The implacable blue of the sky shone brilliantly overhead as I wandered through the long, cool and sombre corridors in the emptiness of a deserted district: a quarter which might almost have been dead, abruptly abandoned by seamen and foreigners. I was alone, subjected to the stares of prostitutes seated at their windows or in the doorways, whose eyes seemed to ransack my very soul. They did not speak to me. Leaning on the sides of tall bay-windows or huddled in doorways, they were silent. Their breasts and arms were bare, bizarrely made up in pink, their eyebrows were darkened, they wore their hair in corkscrew-curls, decorated with paper flowers and metal birds. And they were all exactly alike! They might have been huge marionettes, or tall mannequin dolls left behind in panic - for I divined that some plague, some frightful epidemic brought from the Orient by sailors, had swept through the town and emptied it of its inhabitants. I was alone with these simulacra of love, abandoned by the men on the doorsteps of the brothels. I had already been wandering for hours without being able to find a way out of that miserable quarter, obsessed by the fixed and varnished eyes of all those automata, when I was seized by the sudden thought that all these girls were dead, plague-stricken and putrefied by cholera where they stood, in the solitude, beneath their carmine plaster masks... and my entrails were liquefied by cold. In spite of that harrowing chill, I was drawn closer to a motionless girl. I saw that she was indeed wearing a mask... and the girl in the next doorway was also masked... and all of them were horribly alike under their identical crude colouring... I was alone with the masks, with the masked corpses, worse than the masks... when, all of a sudden, I perceived that beneath the false faces of plaster and cardboard, the eyes of these dead women were alive. Their vitreous eyes were looking at me... I woke up with a cry, for in that moment I had recognised all the women. They all had the eyes of Kranile and Willie, of Willie the mime and Kranile the dancer. Every one of the dead women had Kranile's left eye and Willie's right eye... so that every one of them appeared to be squinting. Am I to be haunted by masks now?

Well, it’s only to you I’m talking. I did him just as well as I knew how, making allowance for the slickness of oils. Then the art-manager of that abandoned paper said that his subscribers wouldn’t like it. It was brutal and coarse and violent,—man being naturally gentle when he’s fighting for his life. They wanted something more restful, with a little more colour. I could have said a good deal, but you might as well talk to a sheep as an art-manager. I took my “Last Shot” back. Behold the result! I put him into a lovely red coat without a speck on it. That is Art. I polished his boots,—observe the high light on the toe. That is Art. I cleaned his rifle,—rifles are always clean on service,—because that is Art.

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine. Her situation in life, the character of her father and mother, her own person and disposition, were all equally against her. Her father was a clergyman, without being neglected, or poor, and a very respectable man, though his name was Richard — and he had never been handsome. He had a considerable independence besides two good livings — and he was not in the least addicted to locking up his daughters. Her mother was a woman of useful plain sense, with a good temper, and, what is more remarkable, with a good constitution. She had three sons before Catherine was born; and instead of dying in bringing the latter into the world, as anybody might expect, she still lived on — lived to have six children more — to see them growing up around her, and to enjoy excellent health herself. A family of ten children will be always called a fine family, where there are heads and arms and legs enough for the number; but the Morlands had little other right to the word, for they were in general very plain, and Catherine, for many years of her life, as plain as any. She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without colour, dark lank hair, and strong features — so much for her person; and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boy's plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief — at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take. Such were her propensities — her abilities were quite as extraordinary. She never could learn or understand anything before she was taught; and sometimes not even then, for she was often inattentive, and occasionally stupid. Her mother was three months in teaching her only to repeat the "Beggar's Petition"; and after all, her next sister, Sally, could say it better than she did. Not that Catherine was always stupid — by no means; she learnt the fable of "The Hare and Many Friends" as quickly as any girl in England. Her mother wished her to learn music; and Catherine was sure she should like it, for she was very fond of tinkling the keys of the old forlorn spinner; so, at eight years old she began. She learnt a year, and could not bear it; and Mrs. Morland, who did not insist on her daughters being accomplished in spite of incapacity or distaste, allowed her to leave off. The day which dismissed the music-master was one of the happiest of Catherine's life. Her taste for drawing was not superior; though whenever she could obtain the outside of a letter from her mother or seize upon any other odd piece of paper, she did what she could in that way, by drawing houses and trees, hens and chickens, all very much like one another. Writing and accounts she was taught by her father; French by her mother: her proficiency in either was not remarkable, and she shirked her lessons in both whenever she could. What a strange, unaccountable character! — for with all these symptoms of profligacy at ten years old, she had neither a bad heart nor a bad temper, was seldom stubborn, scarcely ever quarrelsome, and very kind to the little ones, with few interruptions of tyranny; she was moreover noisy and wild, hated confinement and cleanliness, and loved nothing so well in the world as rolling down the green slope at the back of the house.

Dick laughed. ‘Well, it’s only to you I’m talking. I did him just as well as I knew how, making allowance for the slickness of oils. Then the art-manager of that abandoned paper said that his subscribers wouldn’t like it. It was brutal and coarse and violent, — man being naturally gentle when he’s fighting for his life. They wanted something more restful, with a little more colour. I could have said a good deal, but you might as well talk to a sheep as an art-manager. I took my “Last Shot” back. Behold the result! I put him into a lovely red coat without a speck on it. That is Art. I polished his boots, — observe the high light on the toe. That is Art. I cleaned his rifle, — rifles are always clean on service, — because that is Art.

He was saved not by the sky but by writing. He had written a number of books during his time in the re-education camp—always on the one piece of paper he possessed, page by page, chapter by chapter, an unending story. Without writing, he wouldn’t have heard the snow melting or leaves growing or clouds sailing through the sky. Nor would he have seen the dead end of a thought, the remains of a star or the texture of a comma. Nights when he was in his kitchen painting wooden ducks, Canada geese, loons, mallards, following the colour scheme provided by his other employer, he would recite for me the words in his personal dictionary: nummular, moan, quadraphony, in extremis, sacculina, logarithmic, hemorrhage—like a mantra, like a march towards the void.

Bleecker Street, Summer" Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin! When I press summer dusks together, it is a month of street accordions and sprinklers laying the dust, small shadows running from me. It is music opening and closing, Italia mia, on Bleecker, ciao, Antonio, and the water-cries of children tearing the rose-coloured sky in streams of paper; it is dusk in the nostrils and the smell of water down littered streets that lead you to no water, and gathering islands and lemons in the mind. There is the Hudson, like the sea aflame. I would undress you in the summer heat, and laugh and dry your damp flesh if you came.

This is a political age. War, Fascism, concentration camps, rubber truncheons, atomic bombs, etc., are what we daily think about, and therefore to a great extent what we write about, even when we do not name them openly. We cannot help this. When you are on a sinking ship, your thoughts will be about sinking ships. But not only is our subject-matter narrowed, but our whole attitude towards literature is coloured by loyalties which we at least intermittently realise to be non-literary. I often have the feeling that even at the best of times literary criticism is fraudulent, since in the absence of any accepted standards whatever—any external reference which can give meaning to the statement that such and such a book is “good” or “bad”—every literary judgement consists in trumping up a set of rules to justify an instinctive preference. One’s real reaction to a book, when one has a reaction at all, is usually “I like this book” or “I don’t like it,” and what follows is a rationalisation. But “I like this book” is not, I think, a non-literary reaction; the non-literary reaction is “This book is on my side, and therefore I must discover merits in it.” Of course, when one praises a book for political reasons one may be emotionally sincere, in the sense that one does feel strong approval of it, but also it often happens that party solidarity demands a plain lie. Anyone used to reviewing books for political periodicals is well aware of this. In general, if you are writing for a paper that you are in agreement with, you sin by commission, and if for a paper of the opposite stamp, by omission.

Once it had been second nature to savour the contrast of new grass against dark, tilled soil, or an amethyst brooch nestled in folds of emerald silk; once I'd dreamed and breathed and thought in colour and light and shape. Sometimes I would even indulge in envisioning a day when my sisters were married and it was only me and Father, with enough food to go around, enough money to buy some paint, and enough time to put those colours and shapes down on paper and canvas or the cottage walls. Not likely to happen anytime soon- perhaps ever. So I was left with moments like this, admiring the glint of pale winter light on snow. I couldn't remember the last time I'd done it- bothered to notice anything lovely or interesting. Stolen hours in a decrepit barn with Issac Hale didn't count; those times were hungry and empty and sometimes cruel, but never lovely.

As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae … Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera. “Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.” “Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays—then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.

This unfinished play follows Myrrhina, an Alexandrian noblewoman, who travels to the mountains to tempt Honorius, a Christian hermit, away from goodness with her beauty and wealth. After they talk, he decides to return to sin in Alexandria, while she discovers religion and chooses to remain in the desert. Wilde had begun work on the play in 1894, between writing Salomé and The Importance of Being Earnest, but he was unable to complete it before his trial and imprisonment. He considered revisiting the play in 1897 after his release from prison, but he then lacked motivation for literary work, although during his imprisonment, it was much on his mind and he had described it in a letter to a friend as one among his “beautiful coloured, musical things”. Before his imprisonment, the fragments had been entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on purpose to restore the manuscript to the author. However, Wilde accidently left the papers in a taxi cab and now only a portion of a first draft survives.

This is a classic New Labour document, being printed on glossy paper and illustrated with colour pictures of the Elysium that is the new Britain. Happy people, many from ethnic minorities, gaze productively at computer screens. Pensioners get off a gleaming, streamlined tram which has just delivered them promptly and inexpensively to their grandchildren … The prose has the same unreal quality. Nothing actually happens. Nothing tangible is planned. But we are promised there will be ‘innovative developments’, ‘local strategic partnerships’ and ‘urban policy units’. Town councils will have new powers to ‘promote well-being’ … and, just in case we think this will never happen, we are promised that ‘visions for the future will be developed’. There will be a ‘key focus’ here and a ‘co-ordinated effort’ there. The government in its wisdom has ‘established a framework’. The whole thing resembles those fantastical architect’s drawings in which slim, well-dressed figures stroll across tree-festooned piazzas with no mention of empty burger boxes or gangs of glowering youths.

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings-- they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper. Rain is when the earth is television. It has the properites of making colours darker. Model T is a room with the lock inside -- a key is turned to free the world for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed. But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves -- in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Jamie guessed he wasn’t sure if calling it a homeless shelter when it was filled with homeless people was somehow offensive. He’d had two complaints lodged against him in the last twelve months alone for the use of ‘inappropriate’ language. Roper was a fossil, stuck in a by-gone age, struggling to stay afloat. He of course wouldn’t have this problem if he bothered to read any of the sensitivity emails HR pinged out. But he didn’t. And now he was on his final warning. Jamie left him to flounder and scanned the crowd and the room for anything amiss.  People were watching them. But not maliciously. Mostly out of a lack of anything else to do. They’d been there overnight by the look of it. Places like this popped up all over the city to let them stay inside on cold nights. The problem was finding a space that would house them. ‘No, not the owner,’ Mary said, sighing. ‘I just rent the space from the council. The ceiling is asbestos, and they can’t use it for anything, won’t get it replaced.’ She shrugged her shoulders so high that they touched the earrings. ‘But these people don’t mind. We’re not eating the stuff, so…’ She laughed a little. Jamie thought it sounded sad. It sort of was. The council wouldn’t let children play in there, wouldn’t let groups rent it, but they were happy to take payment and let the homeless in. It was safe enough for them. She pushed her teeth together and started studying the faded posters on the walls that encouraged conversations about domestic abuse, about drug addiction. From when this place was used. They looked like they were at least a decade old, maybe two. Bits of tape clung to the paint around them, scraps of coloured paper frozen in time, preserving images of long-past birthday parties. There was a meagre stage behind the coffee dispenser, and to the right, a door led into another room. ‘Do you know this boy?’ Roper asked, holding up his phone, showing Mary a photo of Oliver Hammond taken that morning. The officers who arrived on scene had taken it and attached it to the central case file. Roper was just accessing it from there. It showed Oliver’s face at an angle, greyed and bloated from the water.  ‘My God,’ Mary said, throwing a weathered hand to her mouth. It wasn’t easy for people who weren’t exposed to death regularly to stomach seeing something like that.  ‘Ms Cartwright,’ Roper said, leaning a little to his left to look in her eyes as she turned away. ‘Can you identify this person? I know it’s hard—’ ‘Oliver — Ollie, he preferred. Hammond, I think. I can check my files…’ She turned and pointed towards the back room Jamie had spotted. ‘If you want—’ Roper put the phone away.

Why Roses are Red......      (a poem on a little artist girl, who lived with her mother on a remote Hill)    A little girl painted...  with the brush of imagination...  and with the colours borrowed from Spring...  on the paper of time  a picture  a picture of a tiny glittering star  and gave it the name... innocence    next hour  with the brush of imagination  with artificial colours  she painted... a picture  a picture of sharp edged knife  and gave it the name... experience    she picked both the pictures  and hung them on a rope  in the middle of her rose garden  And left the garden to attend her ailing mother    As the wind of fate blew  and the element of chance entered  from the door of cruelty  the knife attacked the tiny star  and the innocent star bled, bled, and bled    the drops of blood fell on...fell on...and fell on...  the roses beneath  And....................  the roses turned red    when little girl came back  she looked ,looked and looked...  at both...  the tiny star and the red roses    Benumbed and shocked  she dressed the little, the beautiful star  and threw it high in the sky  and it got fixed there  and it gave direction to humanity  and we call it pole star    with anger she threw the picture of knife  down the hill...  and there was...                          strife,                          conspiracy                          violence                         murders                          and revolts                          in the plains    Today when I look at  red roses in someone's hands  they remind me of the....    Two ideas of a single artist  which gave the world  direction and destruction           The

He closes his eyes. What does God see? Cromwell in the fifty-fourth year of his age, in all his weight and gravitas, his bulk wrapped in wool and fur? Or a mere flicker, an illusion, a spark beneath a shoe, a spit in the ocean, a feather in a desert, a wisp, a phantom, a needle in a haystack? If Henry is the mirror, he is the pale actor who sheds no lustre of his own, but spins in a reflected light. If the light moves he is gone. When I was in Italy, he thinks, I saw Virgins painted on every wall, I saw in every fresco the sponged blood-colour of Christ's robe. I saw the sinuous tempter that winds from a branch, and Adam's face as he was tempted. I saw that the serpent was a woman, and about her face were curls of silver-gilt; I saw her writhe about the green bough, saw it sway under her coils. I saw the lamentation of Heaven over Christ crucified, angels flying and crying at the same time. I saw torturers nimble as dancers hurling stones at St Stephen, and I saw the martyr's bored face as he waited for death. I saw a dead child cast in bronze, standing over its own corpse: and all these pictures, images, I took into myself, as some kind of prophecy or sign. But I have known men and women, better than me and closer to grace, who have meditated on every splinter of the cross, till they forget who and what they are, and observe the Saviour's blood, running in the soaked fibres of the wood. Till they believe themselves no longer captive to misfortune nor crime, nor in thrall to a useless sacrifice in an alien land. Till they see Christ's cross is the tree of life, and the truth breaks inside them, and they are saved. He sands his paper. Puts down his pen. I believe, but I do not believe enough. I said to Lambert, my prayers are with you, but in the end I only prayed for myself, that I might not suffer the same death.

Editing is the most obvious way of manipulating vision. And yet, the camera sometimes sees what you don’t - a person in the background, for example, or an object moving in the wind. I like these accidents. My first full-length film, Esperanza, was about a woman I befriended on the Lower East Side when I was a film student at NYU. Esperanza had hoarded nearly all the portable objects she had touched every day for thirty years: the Chock Full O’Nuts paper coffee cups, copies of the Daily News, magazines, gum wrappers, price tags, receipts, rubber bands, plastic bags from the 99-cent store where she did most of her shopping, piles of clothes, torn towels, and bric-a-brac she had found in the street. Esperanza’s apartment consisted of floor-to-ceiling stacks of stuff. At first sight, the crowded apartment appeared to be pure chaos, but Esperanza explained to me that her piles were not random. Her paper cups had their own corner. These crenellated towers of yellowing, disintegrating waxed cardboard stood next to piles of newspapers … One evening, however, while I was watching the footage from a day’s filming, I found myself scrutinizing a pile of rags beside Esperanza’s mattress. I noticed that there were objects carefully tucked in among the fraying bits of coloured cloth: rows of pencils, stones, matchbooks, business cards. It was this sighting that led to the “explanation.” She was keenly aware that the world at large disapproved of her “lifestyle,” and that there was little room left for her in the apartment, but when I asked her about the objects among the rags, she said that she wanted to “keep them safe and sound.” The rags were beds for the things. “Both the beds and the ones that lay down on them,” she told me, “are nice and comfy.” It turned out that Esperanza felt for each and every thing she saved, as if the tags and town sweaters and dishes and postcards and newspapers and toys and rags were imbued with thoughts and feelings. After she saw the film, my mother said that Esperanza appeared to believe in a form of “panpsychism.” Mother said that this meant that mind is a fundamental feature of the universe and exists in everything, from stones to people. She said Spinoza subscribed to this view, and “it was a perfectly legitimate philosophical position.” Esperanza didn’t know anything about Spinoza … My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more. I wanted my film about this lonely woman to break down visual and cultural cliches, to be an intimate portrait, not a piece of leering voyeurism about woman’s horrible accumulations.

Sometimes, Helena would use floral tissue paper to wrap the bouquets, reminding Tess of some of the beautiful books on her bookshelves at home, written in a time when etiquette was treated with the utmost importance. Tess always felt that she belonged in those eras — that she would have fit in perfectly.

You didn’t lift your head. I reached forward and scooped a clump of falling hair, tucked it behind your ear. Such soft, fine hair. Hairclips never stayed in place for long. ‘I’ll get some glue. When you’ve finished colouring, we’ll cut out together and I’ll show you how to stick tissue paper on the back so light shines through.

White mind, white hand, white pen, white paper, and white ink, illustrate and delineate only the White House; thus hereupon, capitulate to that since here lies the World Peace; otherwise, colours may become the victim.

Fingers steepled in front of him, Delaroche stared at the note. The card itself was useless. Delaroche had an entire drawer full of nothing but cream-coloured cards bearing the Gentian’s distinctive purple stamp. He had long ago traced the cards to a very exclusive stationer in London which boasted a wide clientele among the ton. If Delaroche were to go on the make of the paper alone, he could easily accuse anyone from the Prince of Wales to Lady Mary Wortley Montague. Inside – Delaroche did not need to release the card from the letter opener to look; he recalled the contents in painful detail – inside, that rogue had inscribed a bill for the accommodations. One shilling for stale bread, one shilling for rank water, two shillings for rats, three shillings for amusing insults from the guards, and so on, before signing it with the customary small purple flower. On top of the note had been a small pile of English coins, as per the reckoning. Damn him! The list was in Falconstone’s hand – Delaroche knew the hand-writing of every man whose correspondence he had ever intercepted. Delaroche could picture the Gentian standing there, dictating, in the middle of the most carefully guarded prison in Paris. The man’s cheek was unbelievable.

I’d thought she’d nixed the MAGA cap because it wasn’t funny. Turned out she didn’t want Todd stealing her thunder. She had dyed her hair the colour of listeria and she was wearing a terrible blue trouser suit and a long red paper-clipped tie. She’d bound her breasts and added a fake paunch.

Even the Sunflowers have lost their colour, aching for you.

Why paint at all? ... Do you like painting? Yes? Very well, then, that is a good enough reason. "But the results are rather laughable," you may say. All right, laugh. It will do you a lot of good. You find it impossible to say all that you want to say? So did Rembrandt and any other artist who ever lived. "My perspective drawing is weak." So it was in all art up to the Renaissance. "I can't get the colours as bright." Agreed - and here the position is worse than you think! Take a sheet of white paper or a piece of canvas painted with your whitest white. Hold it up against the light. It is a dirty grey. And your blackest black is not as dark as the absence of light in nature. Your keyboard, so to speak, is restricted. That is why it is stating the obvious to look at a landscape and say, "Look at that. No artist could paint it." He can paint much of what the speaker sees, however, and because the artist sees deeper, he may paint something more.

I often wondered what kind of slip I would be written on if I was a word. Something too long, certainly. Probably the wrong colour. A scrap of paper that didn't quite fit. I was worried that perhaps I would never find my place in the pigeon-holes at all.

There was the external world—office, friends, amusements—And then there was home—so real it seemed to have six dimensions, fundamental as the floor of the world. Nothing at all from the outside could penetrate. The outside was a place of coloured tissue paper where people went about not knowing about reality.

And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea.

One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is that, white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black.

Stamp-collectors are a strange, silent fish-like breed, of all ages, but only of the male sex; women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums.

WHAT MAKES A GOOD TEACHERS – As a Student and Teacher I realised Teaching continues to undefinable profession which has a great impact on many of people, our students they are more honest not prejudiced against any one, I was interacting with many of my students they say they do not remember what really we taught with seriousness that at the end of the day, it’s not about the lesson plan. It’s not about the fancy stuff, colourful Power points we teachers make — the crafts we do, the stories we read, the papers we value. No, that’s not really it. That’s not what matters most.. They won’t remember how organized your bulletin boards are. How straight and neat are the desk rows. Certainly they remember our selfless actions As Medical teachers we can contribute best of empathy to suffering of humanity. Our kindness. Our empathy our care and concern. They’ll remember that you took the time to listen to their problems. If we look with wisdom never forget our Students are the future care takers of the Profession, when they say Good bye when leaving the department or college I say Be KIND TO SOME ONE EVERY DAY THAT IS WHAT OUR TEACHERS TOLD AND I AM PROUD TO LIVE IN THE SYSTEM WITH MANY TURBULANCES. BE ATEACHER TO LIFE JUST NOT YOUR SPECALITY? Dr.T.V.Rao MD

1. Give your toddler some large tubular pasta and a shoelace.  Show her how to thread the shoelace through the pasta. 2. Take an empty long wrapping paper tube and place one end on the edge of the sofa and the other end on the floor.  Give him a small ball such as a Ping Pong ball to roll down the tube.   3. Give her some individually wrapped toilet tissues, some boxes of facial tissue or some small tins of food such as tomato paste.  Then let her have fun stacking them.     4. Wrap a small toy and discuss what might be inside it.  Give it to him to unwrap. Then rewrap as he watches.  Have him unwrap it again.    5. Cut  such fruits as strawberries and bananas into chunks.  Show her how to slide the chunks onto a long plastic straw.  Then show her how you can take off one chunk at a time, dip it into some yogurt and eat it.   6. Place a paper towel over a water-filled glass.  Wrap a rubber band around the top of the glass to hold the towel in place.  Then place a penny on top of the paper towel in the centre of the glass.  Give your child a pencil to poke holes in the towel until the penny sinks to the bottom of the glass.   7. You will need a small sheet of coarse sandpaper and various lengths of chunky wool.  Show him how to place these lengths of wool on the sandpaper and how the strands stick to it.   8. Use a large photo or picture and laminate it or put it between the sheets of clear contact paper.  Cut it into several pieces to create a puzzle.   9. Give her two glasses, one empty and one filled with water.  Then show her how to use a large eyedropper in order to transfer some of the water into the empty glass.   10. Tie the ends/corners of several scarves together.  Stuff the scarf inside an empty baby wipes container and pull a small portion up through the lid and then close the lid.  Let your toddler enjoy pulling the scarf out of the container.   11. Give your child some magnets to put on a cookie sheet.  As your child puts the magnets on the cookie sheet and takes them off, talk about the magnets’ colours, sizes, etc.   12. Use two matching sets of stickers. Put a few in a line on a page and see if he can match the pattern.  Initially, you may need to lift an edge of the sticker off the page since that can be difficult to do.    13. You will need a piece of thin Styrofoam or craft foam and a few cookie cutters.  Cut out shapes in the Styrofoam with the cookie cutters and yet still keep the frame of the styrofoam intact.  See if your child can place the cookie cutters back into their appropriate holes.        14. Give her a collection of pompoms that vary in colour and size and see if she can sort them by colour or size into several small dishes. For younger toddlers, put a sample pompom colour in each dish.   15. Gather a selection of primary colour paint chips or cut squares of card stock or construction paper.  Make sure you have several of the same colour.  Choose primary colours.  See if he can match the colours.  Initially, he may be just content to play with the colored chips stacking them or making patterns with them.

ALLUMINOR  (ALLU'MINOR)   n.s.[allumer, Fr. to light.] One who colours or paints upon paper or parchment; because he gives graces, light an ornament, to the letters or figures coloured.Cowell. 

You'll find more emotions of words in those crumpled & rolled papers thrown in the dustbin than the edited script you jolted down last night in your folder. More splashes of paints lay scattered around your drawing paint-plate, the brushes equally messed up with their romance with the colours before the actual finishing of a fine portrait. Your draft box breathes more words than the real, grammatically -groomed post on your blog. The room smells more of the combined samples of vividly used tropical, musky, floral essences mixed in different ratios to get the exotic cologne at the end. Gist is spending that extra cent to obtain a perfect blend. That extra counts to the journey of a masterpiece which later finds itself an identity of an extra-ordinary creation. You're that 'extra' to me who glorifies my existence and makes me feel like a clone-sister of masterpiece or rather a mistress-piece!!! ❤ - Shonali Dey (Shon Alley)

a girl in a lemon-coloured shirt sat at a desk, with word processor, potted plant, mug of pencils, furry gonk, and wadges of orange paper.

Before they fade for ever from our sight, Sailing like ghostly ships into the night, Let there be one luxurious hour in which We pause awhile to contemplate the rich. Consider them once more before they pass Into a more fashionable class, Though it is true their loss shall be our gain, Weep, for we shall not see their like again. Let us be honest now, and testify That many of them pleased the outward eye, Their cars and yachts were lovely to behold, Beauty they bought, and colour, with their gold. And oh! Their houses, rising from the green Of peacocked lawns more smooth than velveteen. Palladian porticos, and warm pink towers Set in a scented sea of English flowers. Slandered so joyfully throughout the years, Unmourned they go, unwashed by any tears From eyes that once were strained to witness capers Cut for their benefit in weekly papers. Thus they depart into a strange new land, Speaking a tongue, they do not understand; So for a little moment, with regret, Let us remember them - and then forget. -Vale!

Suppose you could pick up a turtle, dip his tail into coloured ink, place him on a piece of paper and make him walk around so that his tail paints a spiral shape, a pentagon or a noughts and crosses grid? This adventure introduces you to different ways that you can create shapes or line drawings using code.

Beware of words—they are dangerous things. They change colour like the chameleon, and they return like a boomerang. THAYER WS. OSLER THE TEACHER, IN OSLER AND OTHER PAPERS,

It had been a long time since I’d seen the dawn. At one end of the sky a line of blue appeared, and like blue ink on a piece of paper it spread slowly across the horizon. If you gathered together all the shades of blue in the world and picked the bluest, the epitome of blue, this was the colour you would choose. I rested my elbows on the table and looked at that scene, my mind blank. When the sun showed itself over the horizon, that blue was swallowed up by ordinary sunlight… A new day had begun. But what this day would bring, I had no idea.

There is something strikingly different about the quality of photographs of that time. It has nothing to do with age or colour, or the feel of paper. . . . In modern family photographs the camera pretends to circulate like a friend, clicking its shutters at those moments when its subjects have disarranged themselves to present to it those postures which they would like to think of as informal. But in pictures of that time, the camera is still a public and alien eye, faced with which people feel bound either to challenge the intrusion by striking postures of defiant hilarity, or else to compose their faces, and straighten their shoulders, not always formally, but usually with just that hint of stiffness which suggests a public face.

Death may in some traditions be a vivid experience, but within much of the white tradition it is a blank that may be immateriality (pure spirit) or else just nothing at all. This is within the logics of whiteness even if it is not at the forefront of white identity. White people have a colour, but it is a colour that also signifies the absence of colour, itself a characteristic of life and presence. In the transparent representation of the culture of light, the white face has to be read in the blanks on the paper or screen. To be positioned as an over- seeing subject without properties may lead one to wonder if one is a subject at all. If it is spirit not body that makes a person white, then where does this leave the white body which is the vehicle for the reproduction of whiteness, of white power and possession, here on earth?

Hot Sauce,” she said timidly, “I don’t want you to be sad or mad if anything happens to me. Promise not to be sad—I don’t like it on your face.” There was a flicker of surprise across Hot Sauce’s eyelashes. But then the others ragged her at the idea that anyone would be sad if she died, and they got into an argument about who would inherit her share of fruit that day as it hadn’t been bagsed, which turned into another fight between Born in the Morning and Honesty, who had not forgiven each other for the rabbit punches and both of whom started promising their worldly goods to anyone who wasn’t each other. Honesty had recovered, although his eye looked even puffier and more multicoloured than it had the day before. The teacher had given him some painkillers to take but he had cunningly spat them out and dried them for resale, so he was entirely happy. Nona came away promised, on Born in the Morning’s death, a pen that wrote in three different colours, and on Honesty’s his collection of paper throwing stars.

eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The black-moustachio'd face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston's own. Down at street level another poster, torn at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows. The patrols