Colours Black And White Quotes

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I saw the world in black and white instead of the vibrant colours and shades I knew existed.
Katie McGarry (Pushing the Limits (Pushing the Limits, #1))
At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.
Vincent van Gogh
Life's a choice: you can live in black and white, or you can live in colour. I'll take every shade of the rainbow and the gazillion in between!
Karen Marie Moning (Iced (Fever, #6))
I'll understand if you don't want me. But I will be heartbroken. You are all I ever dreamed of and hoped for. You are much, much more. Please know that I didn't think I was mean-minded. But I realize I am. I don't want you to put your arms around me and say it's all right, that you forgive me. I want you to be sure that you do, and my love for you will last as long as I live. I can see no lightness, no humour, no joke to make. I just hope that we will be able to go back to when we had laughter, and the world was coloured, not black and white and grey. I am so sorry for hurting you. I could inflict all kinds of pain on myself, but it would not take back any I gave to you. - David Power
Maeve Binchy (Echoes)
Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
Moments of divine love transform the black-and-white of existence into a living palette of infinite colours.
Raz Mihal (Just Love Her)
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man)
Life is indeed colourful. We can feel in the pink one day, with our bank balances comfortably in the black, and the grass seemingly no greener on the other side of the fence. Then out of the blue, something tiresome happens that makes us see red, turn ashen white, even purple with rage. Maybe controlling our varying emotions is just 'colour management' by another name.
Alex Morritt (Impromptu Scribe)
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness and the memories of pleasure their pain.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Seems once was enough to infect me. From then on you've been lying dormant, like a virus. Or an incurable chronic condition that flares up from time to time.' A long pause, where life transforms from black-and-white to colour. 'I'm eczema?' Ben beams. 'Eczema of the heart. That's it. Psoriasis of the soul.
Mhairi McFarlane (You Had Me At Hello (You Had Me At Hello, #1))
For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.
Christopher Hitchens
Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?
Steven Pinker (The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature)
It's like I dreamed of kissing him in black-and-white, and now I'm kissing him in colour.
Rainbow Rowell (Any Way the Wind Blows (Simon Snow, #3))
Black drinks the sun and draws all colours into it. I am bleached white, my truant love. Come back, and stain me with the intensity of black.
Robert Graves (Love Respelt)
The ignorance of the world often makes people believe that life should be black and white – that you must choose sides – and so the world of colourful gradients goes unadmired.
A.J. Darkholme (Rise of the Morningstar (The Morningstar Chronicles, #1))
The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'. 'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'. 'But it's a very good one. You can almost see colours.
Mohsin Hamid (Moth Smoke)
We go through our lives trying so hard to keep things black and white that we forget that the rainbow of love is actually colourful.
Minakhi Misra (To Die of a Name)
What is a colour when death comes to call upon the black man and also pays a visit to his neighbour who is white? Can either by his hue keep alive his mortal soul? What is a colour?
Eugenie Laverne Mitchell
In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…
Egon Schiele
Black Is The Most Beautiful colour because it does not reflect it absorbs all into itself.
Amit Abraham
A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They're on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority's blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options – neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there's cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I'm easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I'll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome drugs.
Ian McEwan (Nutshell)
A game at which the liberals have become masters is that of deliberate evasiveness. The question often comes up `what can you do?`. If you ask him to do something like stopping to use segregated facilities or dropping out of varsity to work at menial jobs like all blacks or defying and denouncing all provisions that make him privileged, you always get the answer - `but that's unrealistic!' While this may be true, it only serves to illustrate the fact that no matter what a white man does, the colour of his skin - his passport to privilege- will always put him miles ahead of the black men. Thus in the ultimate analysis, no white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp.
Steve Biko (I Write What I Like: Selected Writings)
But I really thought that me and her had something. Then I thought about how a lot of people, black and white don't like the idea of a white geezer and a black bird getting it on. One day it won't matter a fuck, we'll all be coffee-coloured with a tint of yellow. Till then we got a load of grief tae get through.
Irvine Welsh (Skagboys (Mark Renton, #1))
I’d known letting her into my world would cause irrevocable damage. When you live your life in black and white, it’s impossible to not be tainted by someone who exists in full colour.
Monty Jay (The Blood We Crave: Part Two (The Hollow Boys, #4))
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.
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
Some people do not really hate aging; they merely love the colour black.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
We live in a corrupted little world where people see everything in black and white. But I see it all. In bright and vibrant colours.
Kassi Jo
Within, stood a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
The arbitrary and meaningless tests to decide black from Coloured or Coloured from white often resulted in tragic cases where members of the same family were classified differently, all depending on whether one child had a lighter or darker complexion. Where one was allowed to live and work could rest on such absurd distinctions as the curl of one’s hair or the size of one’s lips.
Nelson Mandela (Long Walk to Freedom)
As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad--since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal. When the Negro dives--in other words, goes under--something remarkable occurs.
Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
What is the colour of Christmas? Red? The red of the toyshops on a dark winter’s afternoon, Of Father Christmas and the robin’s breast? Or green? Green of holly and spruce and mistletoe in the house, dark shadow of summer in leafless winter? One might plainly add a romance of white, fields of frost and snow; thus white, green, red- reducing the event to the level of a Chianti bottle. But many will say that the significant colour is gold, gold of fire and treasure, of light in the winter dark; and this gets closer, For the true colour of Christmas is Black. Black of winter, black of night, black of frost and of the east wind, black of dangerous shadows beyond the firelight. I am not sure who wrote this. I got it from page nine of “A Book of Christmas” by William Sansom. Google didn’t help. It is rather true I think, that the true color of Christmas is black. For like the author said in succeeding sentences “The table yellow with electric light, the fire by which stories are told, the bright spangle of the tree- they all blazé out of shadow and out of a darkness of winter
William Sansom
Travis nursed his beer silently, looking out over the water. “What are you thinking about?” Laird asked. “It’s not important.” “What is it?” Travis turned toward him. “Did you ever notice how some colours are used for people’s names but others aren’t?” “What are you talking about?” “White and Black. Like Mr. White, the guy who owns the tire store. And Mr. Black, our third-grade teacher. Or even Mr. Green from the game Clue. But you never hear of someone named Mr. Orange or Mr. Yellow. It’s like some colours make good names, but other colours just sound stupid. You know what I mean?” “I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.” “Me neither. Not until just a minute ago, I mean. But it’s kind of strange, isn’t it?” “Sure,” Laird finally agreed. Both men were quiet for a moment. “I told you it wasn’t important.” “Yes, you did.” “Was I right?” “Yep.
Nicholas Sparks (The Choice)
Whatever is happening in SA is a lot of bullshit. You cannot have a problem with every colour; white, green, black, yellow and still not be the problem. It's time a leader emerged and taught folks something on prioritization.
Don Santo
Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
I’m blunt and sharp and full of black and white. She’s all my colour.
Fredrik Backman (Things My Son Needs to Know About The World: From the New York Times Bestselling Author of Anxious People and My Friends)
Colours started to seep into his black and white life
Jamie Scallion (Having It (The Rock 'n' Roll Diaries, #2))
We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second—compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait.
Aristotle (The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle)
Above his head at street level, he saw an angled aileron of a scarlet Porsche, its jaunty fin more or less at the upper edge of his window frame. A pair of very soft, clean glistening black shoes appeared, followed by impeccably creased matt charcoal pinstriped light woollen legs, followed by the beautifully cut lower hem of a jacket, its black vent revealing a scarlet silk lining, its open front revealing a flat muscular stomach under a finely-striped red and white shirt. Val’s legs followed, in powder-blue stockings and saxe-blue shoes, under the limp hem of a crêpey mustard-coloured dress, printed with blue moony flowers. The four feet advanced and retreated, retreated and advanced, the male feet insisting towards the basement stairs, the female feet resisting, parrying. Roland opened the door and went into the area, fired mostly by what always got him, pure curiosity as to what the top half looked like.
A.S. Byatt (Possession)
Books; what a jolly company they are, Standing so quiet and patient on their shelves, Dressed in dim brown, and black, and white, and green And every kind of colour. Which will you read? Come on; O do read something; they're so wise. I tell you all the wisdom of the world Is waiting for you on those shelves; and yet You sit and gnaw your nails, and let your pipe out, And listen to the silence.
Siegfried Sassoon
The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars. Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting point on their south-eastern face.
H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)
Bran said, "Why should some of the Riders of the Dark be dressed all in white and the rest all in black?" "Without colour...." Will said reflectively. "I don't know. Maybe because the Dark can only reach people at extremes-- blinded by their own shining ideas, or locked up in the darkness of their own heads.
Susan Cooper (Silver on the Tree (The Dark is Rising, #5))
They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief. First, the pulse of colour flooded the bay with blue, and the heart expanded with it and the body swam, only the next instant to be checked and chilled by the prickly blackness on the ruffled waves. Then, up behind the great black rock, almost every evening spurted irregularly, so that one had to watch for it and it was a delight when it came, a fountain of white water; and then while one waited for that, one watched, on the pale semicircular beach, wave after wave shedding again and again smoothly, a film of mother-of-pearl.
Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse)
This is astounding, amazing, so incredibly thrilling. Only today a world travelling cabaret performing drag queen took me out for lunch and named me as his new best friend. The idea plunges my black and white world into a vibrant techni-colour rainbow.
L.H. Cosway (Painted Faces (Painted Faces, #1))
One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy mist obscured the distance, and the night was falling grey rather than black, stepping cautiously with its velvet feet upon the tops of the trees. A great swan plunged and replunged amorously its neck and shoulders into the smoking water of the river, and its whiteness made it show in the darkness like a great star of snow. It was the single living being that somewhat enlivened the lonely landscape.
Théophile Gautier (Mademoiselle de Maupin)
People think blood red, but blood don't got no colour. Not when blood wash the floor she lying on as she scream for that son of a bitch to come, the lone baby of 1785. Not when the baby wash in crimson and squealing like it just depart heaven to come to hell, another place of red. Not when the midwife know that the mother shed too much blood, and she who don't reach fourteen birthday yet speak curse 'pon the chile and the papa, and then she drop down dead like old horse. Not when blood spurt from the skin, on spring from the axe, the cat-o'-nine, the whip, the cane and the blackjack and every day in slave life is a day that colour red. It soon come to pass when red no different from white or blue or black or nothing. Two black legs spread wide and mother mouth screaming. A black baby wiggling in blood on the floor with skin darker than midnight but the greenest eyes anybody ever done seen. I goin' call her Lilith. You can call her what they call her.
Marlon James (The Book of Night Women)
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door
Bram Stoker (Dracula)
Life isn’t black and white, but you can’t call it colourful either. It is actually what you make of it, so how you look at it matters a lot.
Prem Jagyasi (Carve Your Life: Live a great life with carvism)
He was a man of black and white. And she was colour. All the colour he had.
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
he looked at her in black and white, she wanted to be seen in colour.
Rose Brik (My Father's Eyes, My Mother's Rage)
People said Ove saw the world in black and white. But she was colour. All the colour he had.
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
why she is calling her abroad peoples white and black when colours are for crayons and pencils and things. I know that not everybody is having the same colour of skin in Nigeria, even me and Kayus and Born-boy didn’t have same skin colour, but nobody is calling anybody black or white, everybody is just calling us by our name: Adunni. Kayus. Born-boy. That’s all.
Abi Daré (The Girl with the Louding Voice)
The colour of the magpie, her father was saying, was symbolic of creation. The void, the mystery of that which had not yet taken form. Black and white, he said. Presence and absence.
Kate Mosse (The Taxidermist's Daughter)
Children, who made your skin white? Was it not God? Who made mine black? Was it not the same God? Am I to blame, therefore, because my skin is black?...Does not God love coloured children as well as white children? And did not the same Saviour die to save the one as well as the other?
Sojourner Truth
The Mennonites did not intend to leave behind one site of oppression to build another in America. Mennonites therefore circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688. “There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are,” they wrote. “In Europe there are many oppressed” for their religion, and “here those are oppressed” for their “black colour.” Both oppressions were wrong. Actually, as an oppressor, America “surpass[ed] Holland and Germany.” Africans had the “right to fight for their freedom.” The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists. Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent self-interest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Every time the women appear, Snowman is astonished all over again. They're every known colour from the deepest black to whitest white, they're various heights, but each one of them is admirably proportioned. Each is sound of tooth, smooth of skin. No ripples of fat around their waists, no bulges, no dimpled orange-skin cellulite on their thighs. No body hair, no bushiness. They look like retouched fashion photos, or ads for a high priced workout program. Maybe this is the reason that these women arouse in Snowman not even the faintest stirrings of lust. It was the thumbprints of human imperfection that used to move him, the flaws in the design: the lopsided smile, the wart next to the navel, the mole, the bruise. These were the places he'd single out, putting his mouth on them. Was it consolation he'd had in mind, kissing the wound to make it better? There was always an element of melancholy involved in sex. After his indiscriminate adolescence he'd preferred sad women, delicate and breakable, women who'd been messed up and who needed him. He'd liked to comfort them, stroke them gently at first, reassure them. Make them happier, if only for a moment. Himself too, of course; that was the payoff. A grateful woman would go the extra mile. But these new women are neither lopsided nor sad: they're placid, like animated statues. They leave him chilled.
Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Crake (MaddAddam, #1))
Hush!’ said the Cabby. They all listened. In the darkness something was happening at last. A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it… ‘Gawd!’ said the Cabby. ‘Ain’t it lovely?’ Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn’t come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out – single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it , as Digory did, you would have felt quite certain that it was the stars themselves who were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made them appear and made them sing. ‘Glory be!’ said the Cabby. ‘I’d ha’ been a better man all my life if I’d known there were things like this.’ …Far away, and down near the horizon, the sky began to turn grey. A light wind, very fresh, began to stir. The sky, in that one place, grew slowly and steadily paler. You could see shapes of hills standing up dark against it. All the time the Voice went on singing…The eastern sky changed from white to pink and from pink to gold. The Voice rose and rose, till all the air was shaking with it. And just as it swelled to the mightiest and most glorious sound it had yet produced, the sun arose. Digory had never seen such a sun…You could imagine that it laughed for joy as it came up. And as its beams shot across the land the travellers could see for the first time what sort of place they were in. It was a valley through which a broad, swift river wound its way, flowing eastward towards the sun. Southward there were mountains, northward there were lower hills. But it was a valley of mere earth, rock and water; there was not a tree, not a bush, not a blade of grass to be seen. The earth was of many colours: they were fresh, hot and vivid. They made you feel excited; until you saw the Singer himself, and then you forgot everything else. It was a Lion. Huge, shaggy, and bright it stood facing the risen sun. Its mouth was wide open in song and it was about three hundred yards away.
C.S. Lewis (The Magician’s Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #6))
I paid the taxi driver, got out with my suitcase, surveyed my surroundings, and just as I was turning to ask the driver something or get back into the taxi and return forthwith to Chillán and then to Santiago, it sped off without warning, as if the somewhat ominous solitude of the place had unleashed atavistic fears in the driver's mind. For a moment I too was afraid. I must have been a sorry sight standing there helplessly with my suitcase from the seminary, holding a copy of Farewell's Anthology in one hand. Some birds flew out from behind a clump of trees. They seemed to be screaming the name of that forsaken village, Querquén, but they also seemed to be enquiring who: quién, quién, quién. I said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our Lady, do not abandon your servant, I murmured, while the black birds, about twenty-five centimetres in length, cried quién, quién, quién. Our Lady of Lourdes, do not abandon your poor priest, I murmured, while other birds, about ten centimetres long, brown in colour, or brownish, rather, with white breasts, called out, but not as loudly, quién, quién, quién, Our Lady of Suffering, Our Lady of Insight, Our Lady of Poetry, do not leave your devoted subject at the mercy of the elements, I murmured, while several tiny birds, magenta, black, fuchsia, yellow and blue in colour, wailed quién, quién, quién, at which point a cold wind sprang up suddenly, chilling me to the bone.
Roberto Bolaño (By Night in Chile)
Women come in many colours - black, white, brown, yellow, red when hot, blue when cold, green when sick, multicoloured when unwell and orange when on a night out. In some countries they even come in invisible.
Una Mullally (Repeal the 8th)
Water everywhere, falling in thundering cataracts, singular drops, and draping sheets. Kellhus paused next to one of the shining braziers, peered beneath the bronze visage that loomed orange and scowling over his father, watched him lean back into absolute shadow. “You came to the world,” unseen lips said, “and you saw that Men were like children.” Lines of radiance danced across the intervening waters. “It is their nature to believe as their fathers believed,” the darkness continued. “To desire as they desired … Men are like wax poured into moulds: their souls are cast by their circumstances. Why are no Fanim children born to Inrithi parents? Why are no Inrithi children born to Fanim parents? Because these truths are made, cast by the particularities of circumstance. Rear an infant among Fanim and he will become Fanim. Rear him among Inrithi and he will become Inrithi … “Split him in two, and he would murder himself.” Without warning, the face re-emerged, water-garbled, white save the black sockets beneath his brow. The action seemed random, as though his father merely changed posture to relieve some vagrant ache, but it was not. Everything, Kellhus knew, had been premeditated. For all the changes wrought by thirty years in the Wilderness, his father remained Dûnyain … Which meant that Kellhus stood on conditioned ground. “But as obvious as this is,” the blurred face continued, “it escapes them. Because they cannot see what comes before them, they assume nothing comes before them. Nothing. They are numb to the hammers of circumstance, blind to their conditioning. What is branded into them, they think freely chosen. So they thoughtlessly cleave to their intuitions, and curse those who dare question. They make ignorance their foundation. They confuse their narrow conditioning for absolute truth.” He raised a cloth, pressed it into the pits of his eyes. When he withdrew it, two rose-coloured stains marked the pale fabric. The face slipped back into the impenetrable black. “And yet part of them fears. For even unbelievers share the depth of their conviction. Everywhere, all about them, they see examples of their own self-deception … ‘Me!’ everyone cries. ‘I am chosen!’ How could they not fear when they so resemble children stamping their feet in the dust? So they encircle themselves with yea-sayers, and look to the horizon for confirmation, for some higher sign that they are as central to the world as they are to themselves.” He waved his hand out, brought his palm to his bare breast. “And they pay with the coin of their devotion.
R. Scott Bakker (The Thousandfold Thought (The Prince of Nothing, #3))
There were fat cats and skinny cats. The long-tailed and the bobbed. The daring young leapers, and the old windowsill sleepers. Balls of waddling fluff, smooth-coated prowlers, and hairless ones that looked fragile and wise. The tiger-striped, the ring-tailed, and the ones with matching coloured socks and mittens. There were tabbies and calicos. Manx and Persians. Siamese and Bombay. Ragdolls and Birmans. Maine Coons and Russian Blues. There were Snowshoes and Somalis, Tonkinese and Turkish, and many, many more. Brown and beige and orange and grey and black and white and silver cats, each with gleaming eyes of emerald, or sapphire, or amber. A rainbow of precious stones.
Brooke Burgess (The Cat's Maw (The Shadowland Saga, #1))
Hustler vs dynasty; Women vs men; straight vs crooked; white vs black; left vs right; youth vs old; are forms of separatist business enterprises I don't subscribe to. They drain your energy chasing what we can't change when we can be the best we wanna be.
Don Santo
The Southern whites are not yet living quite in the present age; many of their general ideas hark back to a former century, some of them to the Dark Ages. In the light of other days they are sometimes magnificent. Today they are often cruel and ludicrous.
James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man)
God's wisdom is like the rainbow, in symmetry, beauty, and variety. He does not paint scenes merely in black and white, but uses a riot of colour from the heavenly palette in order to show the wonder of His wise dealings with His people. - Sinclair Ferguson
John F. MacArthur Jr. (Our Awesome God)
The house was decorated in unrelieved white and black. The people were, too. If it were up to me, I would carry a great big paintbrush around with me all the time, splashing color everywhere, decorating the world with peach and mauve, pink and lavender, orange and aquamarine. These folks seemed to think leeching the world of all color was cool. I decided they all must be deeply depressed.
Karen Marie Moning (Darkfever (Fever, #1))
We'd never seen anything as green as these rice paddies. It was not just the paddies themselves: the surrounding vegetation - foliage so dense the trees lost track of whose leaves were whose - was a rainbow coalition of one colour: green. There was an infinity of greens, rendered all the greener by splashes of red hibiscus and the herons floating past, so white and big it seemed as if sheets hung out to dry had suddenly taken wing. All other colours - even purple and black - were shades of green. Light and shade were degrees of green. Greenness, here, was less a colour than a colonising impulse. Everything was either already green - like a snake, bright as a blade of grass, sidling across the footpath - or in the process of becoming so. Statues of the Buddha were mossy, furred with green.
Geoff Dyer (Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It: Essays)
Most kids who don't feel enough love and nurturance carry around this kind of inner rage- a rage that often lasts throughout adulthood. The people who should have cared for them didn't. The lesson to take away: All people are shit. This is why troubled youth walk around with chips on their shoulders and why they are so hard to help. Early on they learn that people can't be trusted. They often spend the rest of their lives embracing this damaging belief. Seeing the world through shit-coloured glasses, they are hypersensitive to every possible slight or judgement, and they believe anyone friendly or kind must have an ulterior motive. Despite all this, wounded people desperately want and need love. But, terrified to trust, they constantly do thing to test and sabotage their relationships. This push-pull dance is well-known to anyone who's ever been close to a victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Those who suffer from BPD are hypersensitive to perceived slights from others and can grow notoriously hostile when they feel dissed.... For survivors of abuse, who you trust is a matter of survival. Its black and white. There can be no apologies. There can be no gray. There are no exceptions.-Scared Selfless
Michelle Stevens
Now let me tell you something. I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers. I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. I have felt winds straight from the South Pole, bleak and wailing like a lost child; winds as tender and warm as a lover’s breath; winds that carried the astringent smell of salt and the death of seaweeds; winds that carried the moist rich smell of a forest floor, the smell of a million flowers. Fierce winds that churned and moved the sea like yeast, or winds that made the waters lap at the shore like a kitten. I have known silence: the cold, earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends. I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. I have heard tree frogs in an orchestration as complicated as Bach singing in a forest lit by a million emerald fireflies. I have heard the Keas calling over grey glaciers that groaned to themselves like old people as they inched their way to the sea. I have heard the hoarse street vendor cries of the mating Fur seals as they sang to their sleek golden wives, the crisp staccato admonishment of the Rattlesnake, the cobweb squeak of the Bat and the belling roar of the Red deer knee-deep in purple heather. I have heard Wolves baying at a winter’s moon, Red howlers making the forest vibrate with their roaring cries. I have heard the squeak, purr and grunt of a hundred multi-coloured reef fishes. I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills flying home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their wings smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things. But— All this I did without you. This was my loss. All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain. All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever-surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.
Gerald Durrell
Structural racism is never a case of innocent and pure, persecuted people of colour versus white people intent on evil and malice. Rather, it is about how Britain's relationship with race infects and distorts equal opportunity. I think that we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we just don't see race. This makes us feel progressive. But this claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation. My blackness has been politicised against my will, but I don't want it willfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony. And, though many placate themselves with the colour-blindness lie, the aforementioned drastic differences in life chances along race lines show that while it might be being preached by our institutions, it's not being practised.
Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
THE WEEPING WILLOW Flowing was the water showing in its mirror the willow trees. The weeping willows in the water were washing their hair! Striking the willows with their sparkling, bare swords the red horsemen were running to where the sun sets! Suddenly like a bird as if struck in the wing a wounded horseman rolled down from his horse! He didn't shout, he did'nt call back those who go along, he just looked with brimming eyes at the shining horseshoes of departing riders! O what a pity! What a pity for him that no more he shall lie on the foaming necks of galloping horses, no more he shall play his sword behind the white armies! The sounds of the horseshoes fades away slowly, the horsemen vanish at where the sun sets! Horsemen horsemen red horsemen, their horses winged with wind! Their horses winged with... Their horses winged... Their horses... Horse... Life has passed like the wind winged horsemen! The voice of the flowing water ceased. The shadows shadowed the colours wiped off. Black coverings came down over his blue eyes, the weeping willows hung down over his yellow hair! Weep not weeping willow weep not, in the mirror of the black water clasp not your hands! clasp not your hands! weep not!
Nâzım Hikmet
THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond.
Patrick Ness (The New World (Chaos Walking, #1.5))
One of the things that people who don't know anything about white rhinoceroses find most interesting about them is their colour. It isn't white. Not even remotely. It's a rather handsome dark grey. Not even a sort of pale grey that might arguably pass as an off-white, just plain dark grey. People therefore assume that zoologists are either perverse or colour-blind, but it's not that, it's that they are illiterate. "White" is a mistranslation of the Afrikaans word "weit" meaning "wide", and it refers to the animal's mouth, which is wider than that of the black rhino.
Douglas Adams (Last Chance to See)
The women of colour on that show made it clear to Dolezal that trans-racialism was not acceptable because a person who had grown up white could not understand what a person who had grown up black could feel like. They could not have had the same experiences.7 This was the point that the second-wave feminists were making at the same time about the transsexuals. But an argument that had worked with race had not worked for women.
Douglas Murray (The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity)
Naturalness?’ I said, loudly. ‘This lot’ll tell you anything is natural; they’ll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who’s another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that’s natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks . . . Shit, they’re so convinced about what’s natural it’s the more sophisticated ones that’ll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can’t have pleasure and goodness. They’ll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what’s natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and fuck everybody else. They’re no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it’s cruder.
Iain M. Banks (The State of the Art (Culture, #4))
The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No colour at all, save for the neighbouring trees and grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colourless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.
Erin Morgenstern
Towards four o'clock the dew fell, and she smelled a gust of sweetness from the roses and a paleness showed in the sky to the East. It was cold; the wetness was cold on her hands and she felt her skirt dragging around her ankles... the light spread, there were long lines of cloud in the sky and presently above them the outline of the snow peaks appeared, cold and hard as if they were made of iron; they turned from black to grey to white while the hills were still in darkness. Then the forest came, mysteriously out of the darkness, and the light moved down, turning the trees dark blue and green, and the terrace was full of a swimming light that was colourless and confusing... Then she looked up and saw that the Himalayas were showing in their full range, and were coloured in ash and orange and precious Chinese pink, deeper in the east, paler in the west. The people called it 'the flowering of the snows
Rumer Godden (Black Narcissus)
An astrological placement describes an arrow which points somewhere, a creative energy which gradually layers flesh onto the bare bones of archetypal patterning, an intelligent movement which, over time, fills in the stark black-and-white outlines of the essential life-myth with the subtle colours of experience and individual choice.
Liz Greene (The Luminaries: The Psychology of the Sun and Moon in the Horoscope, Vol 3 (Seminars in Psychological Astrology) (Volume 3))
He sees his world in black and white: Filthy snow, a hollow sky, the gray cement of the walls - water stains, like giant ink spills, eating into them - and his own skin, an ashy patina enveloping his body. Even the wounds on his feet, hardened and crusted, have lost their red. He has come to think of colour as something fantastic that exists only in his mind - the red of a tomato sliced and salted at the lunch table, the deep blue of a lapis lazuli on Farnaz's finger, the honey hue of his daughter's hair in the sun.
Dalia Sofer (The Septembers of Shiraz)
Sitting inside the mind-box of just black and white, we are blind to the beautiful spectrum of life’s possibilities.
Premlatha Rajkumar (BE INSPIRED: 365 Inspiring Thoughts)
There is no black or white. It also exist as colours.
Lailah Gifty Akita
He was a man of black and white. She was colour. All the colour he had.
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
Everyone belongs to God. Rather black or white there is no colour for God. He loves all.
Saira Hafeez
No one asks to be born, to be black or white or any colour in between, and yet the identity a person is born into becomes the hardest to explain to the world.
A. Igoni Barrett (Blackass: A Novel)
Meaning is also a colour and that’s why there are many colours in the black and white photos!
Mehmet Murat ildan
But you alone are always only you, endless, entire, unique; not blonde, nor dark, nor black, nor white; but like the midday sun all light, all colours hidden inside one.
Jaxy Mono (thirty-three)
Frankly, you've helped me to see colour in a world I believed to be entirely black and white.
Tom Prater (Grimm's Puppets)
Self-pity produces only black and white film. It removes all colour from the imagination.
Glenn Haybittle (The War in Venice)
For me, black and white is more realistic than colour. Black and white can be colourful, and colour can be very black and white.
Wim Wenders
There are more colours to life than just Black and White
Sonal Bharija Singh (Iridescent Life)
Flowers differ in color, just as humans do.
Michael Bassey Johnson (Night of a Thousand Thoughts)
Whenever I hear protests from the South that it should be left alone to deal with the Negro question, my thoughts go back to that scene of brutality and savagery. I do not see how a people that can find in its conscience any excuse whatever for slowly burning to death a human being, or for tolerating such an act, can be entrusted with the salvation of a race.
James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man)
I stood still an hour or thereabouts without trespassing on our orders (for so long the caravan was in passing the gate), to look at it on every side, near and far off; I mean what was within my view: and the guide, who had been extolling it for the wonder of the world, was mighty eager to hear my opinion of it. I told him it was a most excellent thing to keep out the Tartars; which he happened not to understand as I meant it and so took it for a compliment; but the old pilot laughed! "Oh, Seignior Inglese," says he, "you speak in colours." "In colours!" said I; "what do you mean by that?" "Why, you speak what looks white this way and black that way - gay one way and dull another. You tell him it is a good wall to keep out Tartars; you tell me by that it is good for nothing but to keep out Tartars. I understand you, Seignior Inglese, I understand you; but Seignior Chinese understood you his own way.
Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe)
And when I'd realised that I'd been wrong, ridiculously, embarrassingly, shamingly wrong... quite quickly the world went from colour to black and white and the magic seemed to drain away and the only thing left for me to do was gather up my personal pride and try to look like the hope I'd had never existed. I acted as if I wan't destroyed of defeated. I acted as if I didn't care.
Sarah Moore Fitzgerald (The Apple Tart of Hope)
The colour of fear is never dark or black; it has the colour of thunderbolt; usually white, but can appear in different hues depending on how the fear travels through to get inside your heart
Munia Khan
He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent.
Jonathan Swift
But that's the thing about mourning; it isolates you from the nuanced colours of the world and strips it to straight black and white. I saw nothing but the face of the man who had refused my love.
Giana Darling (Inked in Lies (The Fallen Men, #5))
The sky is blue,’ came us. ‘What colour else can it be?’ Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, two more, but why should any of us admit to that? I myself have never admitted it. Not even the week before when I experienced my first sunset with maybe-boyfriend did I admit it. Even then, even though there were more colours than the acceptable three in the sky – blue (the day sky), black (the night sky) and white (clouds) – that evening still I kept my mouth shut. And now the others in this class – all older than me, some as old as thirty – also weren’t admitting it. It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the colour for our sky to be.
Anna Burns (Milkman)
If doubt is near neighbor to the heart, that may turn sour on the soul. There is both scorning and adorning when a man’s undaunted mind turns pied like the magpie’s hue. Yet he may still enjoy bliss, for both have a share in him, Heaven and Hell. Inconstancy’s companion holds entirely to the black colour and will, indeed, take on darkness’s hue, while he who is constant in his thoughts will hold to the white.
Wolfram von Eschenbach (Parzival)
an Underground train roared and rattled, driving a ghost-wind along the platform, which scattered a copy of the tabloid Sun into its component pages, four-colour breasts and black and white invective scurrying
Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere)
I had made my mind up that since I was not going to be a Negro, I would avail myself of every possible opportunity to make a white man's success; and that, if it can be summed up in any one word, means "money.
James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man)
It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that -- well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been -- or, more precisely, being about to be -- hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap -- the crater -- that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers.
Tom McCarthy (Remainder)
Even in pictures of their youth, old people look old. He watched as the pictures moved to crisp black-and-white and then to the bland colour of Polaroids, watched as children were born and then grew up, as hair fell out and was replaced by wrinkles. And all the while Starnes and Mary stayed in the pictures together, from their wedding to their fiftieth anniversary. I will have that, Colin thought. I will have it. I will.
John Green (An Abundance of Katherines)
I had woken into a metal world. The smooth unflawed slopes of snow on the mountain across the valley were iron. The deeper moonshadows had a tinge of steel blue to them. Otherwise, there was no true colour. Everything was greys, black, sharp silver-white. Inclined sheets of ice gleamed like tin. The hailstones lay about like shot, millions of them, grouped up against each rock and clustered in snow hollows. The air smelt of minerals and frost.
Robert Macfarlane (The Wild Places)
Coloured people don't like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don't feel good about Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it. Someone's written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
Coloured people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, into the incinerator. Funerals are unhappy and pagan? Eliminate them, too. Five minutes after a person is dead he’s on his way to the Big Flue, the Incinerators serviced by helicopters all over the country. Ten minutes after death a man’s a speck of black dust. Let’s not quibble over individuals with memoriams. Forget them. Burn them all, burn everything. Fire is bright and fire is clean.
Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)
Imagine the world as a crayon box, and it took every colour to draw each of us. Adding a shade lighter and darker with each interaction. None would be black or white, either purely absorbing all, or reflecting each. #ColourMeSpotless
Nikhil Sharda (Sans Destination)
His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
That the desert was, in its own way, very much alive: a gargantuan sentient being whose shifting colours – one minute soft yellow, the next livid red, here blinding white, there sombre black – were curiously suggestive of changing moods and thought patterns. Its varied shapes and textures – dunes slumping into gravel flats, salt pans rearing into rock hills – likewise gave the unnerving impression that the landscape was moving, bunching and stretching itself, flexing its muscles
Paul Sussman (The Hidden Oasis)
The Desire To Paint" Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this desire. I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her. She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness. I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happiness. But it is the moon that she makes one dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified grass. Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the smile of a large mouth ; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic land. There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.
Charles Baudelaire (The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire)
— If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills, with warm blood and cold. With feathers and scales. Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy you’ll want to breathe with the spiral calls of birds, while your lashing tail still gropes for the waes. You’ll try to haul your weight from simple sea to gravity of land. Caught by the tide, in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments suffocating in both water and air. If love wants you, suddently your past is obsolete science. Old maps, disproved theories, a diorama. The moment our bodies are set to spring open. The immanence that reassembles matter passes through us then disperses into time and place: the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons. The mother who hears her child crying upstairs and suddenly feels her dress wet with milk. Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew before we were loved there, the places left fallow when we’re born, waiting for experience to find its way into us. The night crossing, on deck in the dark car. On the beach wehre night reshaped your face. In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet, moss like velvet spread over splintered forms. The instant spray freezes in air above the falls, a gasp of ice. We rise, hearing our names called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon an escutcheon on the shield of sky. The current that passes through us, radio waves, electric lick. The billions of photons that pass through film emulsion every second, the single submicroscopic crystal struck that becomes the phograph. We look and suddenly the world looks back. A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky. — But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate by the rear-view mirror of the moon; if we continue to reach both for salt and for the sweet white nibs of grass growing closest to earth; if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we’re also driving through the canyon at night, all around us the hidden glow of limestone erased by darkness; if still we sish we’d waited for morning, we will know ourselves nowhere. Not in the mirrors of waves or in the corrading stream, not in the wavering glass of an apartment building, not in the looming light of night lobbies or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen or in the motel where we watched meteors from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open, turned stars to rain. We will become indigestible. Afraid of choking on fur and armour, animals will refuse the divided longings in our foreing blue flesh. — In your hands, all you’ve lost, all you’ve touched. In the angle of your head, every vow and broken vow. In your skin, every time you were disregarded, every time you were received. Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field, mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem. The branch that’s released when the bird lifts or lands. In a summer kitchen. On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.
Anne Michaels
Grey is… such a mean word. I don’t remember a time when I thought grey was anything but… pain. No matter how many clothes I’ve designed, I’ve always avoided that one colour. It’s a colour that is undecided. A colour that is full of heartache, confusion and misunderstanding. Yet it seems… Everyone else chose to be grey. Left all other colours. Left black and it’s darkness. Left white and it’s lightness. And just, hold on to all shades of grey. To me… Grey is not a colour no a feeling. Grey is… you and me.
dee Juusan (Grey is... (Grey is, #1))
THUNDERCLAN LEADER FIRESTAR—ginger tom with a flame-coloured pelt DEPUTY GREYSTRIPE—long-haired grey tom MEDICINE CAT CINDERPELT—dark grey she-cat APPRENTICE, LEAFPAW WARRIORS (toms, and she-cats without kits)   MOUSEFUR—small dusky brown she-cat APPRENTICE, SPIDERPAW   DUSTPELT—dark brown tabby tom APPRENTICE, SQUIRRELPAW   SANDSTORM—pale ginger she-cat APPRENTICE, SORRELPAW   CLOUDTAIL—long-haired white tom   BRACKENFUR—golden brown tabby tom APPRENTICE, WHITEPAW   THORNCLAW—golden brown tabby tom APPRENTICE, SHREWPAW   BRIGHTHEART—white she-cat with ginger patches   BRAMBLECLAW—dark brown tabby tom with amber eyes   ASHFUR—pale grey (with darker flecks) tom, dark blue eyes   RAINWHISKER—dark grey tom with blue eyes   SOOTFUR—lighter grey tom with amber eyes APPRENTICES (more than six moons old, in training to become warriors)   SORRELPAW—tortoiseshell and white shecat with amber eyes   SQUIRRELPAW—dark ginger she-cat with green eyes   LEAFPAW—light brown tabby she-cat with amber eyes and white paws   SPIDERPAW—long-limbed black tom with brown underbelly and amber eyes   SHREWPAW—small dark brown tom with amber eyes   WHITEPAW—white she-cat with green eyes QUEENS (she-cats expecting or nursing kits)   GOLDENFLOWER—pale ginger coat, the oldest nursery queen
Erin Hunter (Midnight (Warriors: The New Prophecy, #1))
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. ‘I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down to gether at the table of brotherhood – I have a dream. ‘That one day even the state of Mississippi – a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of op pression – will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream.’ He had hit a rhythm, and two hundred thousand people felt it sway their souls. It was more than a speech: it was a poem and a canticle and a prayer as deep as the grave. The heartbreaking phrase ‘I have a dream’ came like an amen at the end of each ringing sentence. ‘. . . That my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character – I have a dream today. ‘I have a dream that one day down in Alabama – with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification – one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers – I have a dream today. ‘With this faith we will be able to hew, out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope. ‘With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. ‘With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.’ Looking around, Jasper saw that black and white faces alike were running with tears. Even he felt moved, and he had thought himself immune to this kind of thing. ‘And when this happens; when we allow freedom to ring; when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city; we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands . . .’ Here he slowed down, and the crowd was almost silent. King’s voice trembled with the earthquake force of his passion. ‘. . . and sing, in the words of the old Negro spiritual: ‘Free at last! ‘Free at last! ‘Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!
Ken Follett (Edge of Eternity (The Century Trilogy, #3))
There are no lower orders. There are no lesbians or transgender people or fill in the blank. There is only people, a wild mix of energy, different abilities, colours ranging from ebony to bleached white. We’re everything and everybody. I don’t even believe in male and female, it’s a sliding scale and we are hag-ridden by a binary culture: male-female, black-white, straight-gay, rich-poor and so it goes. The gradations are infinite and the silliest mistake of all is to define people by their material possessions. It’s even worse if people define themselves by money.
Rita Mae Brown (Rubyfruit Jungle)
…It was this white garment of mourning which he still wore, the white mourning of surgical gowns so much more significant than black, since white is the colour of obliteration whereas black, far from being the colour of emptiness and nothingness, is much more the active shade which makes the deep and therefore dark substance of all things stand out, from the flight of despair whose magical blackness animates the blank parchment of the soul, to the supposedly sinister flight of the raven, whose croakings and cadaverous meals are but the joyful signs of physical metamorphoses, black as congelead blood or charred wood, but much less lugubrious than the deathly restfulness of white. Yet this desert whiteness did not rule out all subsequent possibilities, when it too would coagulate to form directions in blood and when it too would know the three congruences of putrefaction.
Michel Leiris (Aurora)
Black and white images often benefit from higher levels of contrast than the same image in colour. Our brains tend to perceive contrast between colours as well as differences in light and dark tones. When we remove the colour from an image we can also inadvertently reduce the perceived contrast.
Robin Whalley (Dramatic Black & White Photography Using Nik Silver Efex Pro 2)
The two other members of Dain's spy troupe also have code names. There's the lean, handsome faerie that looks at least part human, who winks and tells me to call him the Ghost. He has sandy-coloured hair, which is normal for a mortal, but is unusual for a faerie, and ears that come to very subtle points. The other is a tiny, delicate girl, her skin the dappled brown of a doe, her hair a cloud of white around her head, and a miniature pair of blue-grey butterfly wings on her back. She's got at least some pixie in her, if not some imp. ... 'I'm the Bomb,' she says. 'I like blowing things up.
Holly Black (The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air, #1))
Most kids who don't feel enough love and nurturance carry around this kind of inner rage- a rage that often lasts throughout adulthood. The people who should have cared for them didn't. The lesson to take away: All people are shit. This is why troubled youth walk around with chips on their shoulders and why they are so hard to help. Early on they learn that people can't be trusted. They often spend the rest of their lives embracing this damaging belief. Seeing the world through shit-coloured glasses, they are hypersensitive to every possible slight or judgement, and they believe anyone friendly or kind must have an ulterior motive. Despite all this, wounded people desperately want and need love. But, terrified to trust, they constantly do things to test and sabotage their relationships. This push-pull dance is well-known to anyone who's ever been close to a victim of abuse, neglect, or abandonment. Those who suffer from BPD are hypersensitive to perceived slights from others and can grow notoriously hostile when they feel dissed.... For survivors of abuse, who you trust is a matter of survival. Its black and white. There can be no apologies. There can be no gray. There are no exceptions.-Scared Selfless
Michelle Stevens
Life is a River" Life is a river zig zag it goes on flowing myriad memories quench thirst in the swirling waves of life! Life has its own colour a mingling of blue, green, black and white sweeping away all happiness and sadness in the cascading bubbles of tears and delight Life shares its own wisdom to keep on flowing is its only zeal whether it be summer or winter life will keep on flowing but never still Life is a river it flows at its own pace sometimes it may have no direction and this is life's story and grace! - Poet Manjushree Mohanty Translated from Odiya to English by Poet Avijeet Das
Manjushree Mohanty
see how the white womens goin’ look and hear how white womens laugh in the colonies. She think of white flesh and black flesh, that really be brown flesh by blood and the two flesh melt into one flesh that don’t know colour. Then Lilith wonder if she dreaming because dreaming is one thing God never allow negro to do.
Marlon James (The Book of Night Women)
Mostly, though, he looked at the girl, with her red hair and bare white arms. There was something about the whiteness of those arms that made them seem more naked than the bare arms of other women in church. A lot of red heads had freckles, but she looked as if she had been carved from a block of soap…She was very pretty, about his age, her hair braided into a silky rope the colour of black cherries. She was fingering a delicate gold cross around her throat, and she turned it just so, into the sunlight, and it shone, became a cruciform flame. She lingered on the gesture, making it a kind of confession, then turned the cross away.
Joe Hill (Horns)
But most unsettling is how this time I notice my own fairness. I notice that while I might be a person of colour among the diaspora back home, or in any white-majority country, here I am the white person. Kashmiris are notable because there are so few of us left, and because we've taken up a privileged space in India. In Toronto, some Indian cab drivers will ask me where my family is from, and when I tell them, they think they're bonding with me when they talk about how much they hate Muslims. Or, in the case that the driver is Muslim, he'll try to bond with me over the trouble with 'the blacks.' All of us struggle towards whiteness.
Scaachi Koul (One Day We'll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter)
Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
With no one but blacks around him, other than his own son, Thornhill saw that their skins were not black, no more than his own was white. They were simply skins, with the same pores and hairs, the same shadings of colour as his own. If black skin was all there was to see, it was amazing how quickly it became the colour that skin was.
Kate Grenville (The Secret River)
And what was she like?” “Tall, fine bust, sloping shoulders; long, graceful neck: olive complexion, dark and clear; noble features; eyes rather like Mr. Rochester’s: large and black, and as brilliant as her jewels.  And then she had such a fine head of hair; raven-black and so becomingly arranged: a crown of thick plaits behind, and in front the longest, the glossiest curls I ever saw.  She was dressed in pure white; an amber-coloured scarf was passed over her shoulder and across her breast, tied at the side, and descending in long, fringed ends below her knee.  She wore an amber-coloured flower, too, in her hair: it contrasted well with the jetty mass of her curls.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
Lynchings aren't a vile,inhuman footnote of white history. Lynchings occur every day on the streets of Western countries. Every time the neck of a black man,woman or child is pinned to the ground by the knee of a police officer, every time a black man,woman or child is chased down in the street and shot simply for being there, every time a black man woman or child is judged purely because of colour,every time a white individual crosses the street to avoid walking past a black man,woman or child, avoids sitting beside a black man woman or child on public transport or says or does nothing when a black man,woman or child is being subjected to abuse is, in itself, a modern day lynching.
R.Patient
Why classify by skin color at all, unless you plan to invoke it in some way. If one group oppresses another, inadvertently or on purpose, you’d want good data on who’s oppressing whom so that you can redress the problem. With the same data, however, nefarious people in power might want to magnify inequality, which is just what happened in apartheid South Africa. The 1950 Population Registration Act codified skin color into White and Black, with multiple subcategories of Coloured, which included mixed race and Asian, enabling the White minority in power to establish laws that prescribed and stratified the social, political, educational, and economic freedoms of each population differently.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
This first act of the new gods took place in three colours, the first that humans see and name, black, white and red. The Gap was black, many shades of black, thick and fine, glossy and tenebrous. The great snowman was white, except where his own parts cast white-violet shadows, in the pits of his arms, in his monstrous nostrils, under his knees. The new gods hacked and laughed. Blood spurted from the wounds they made, poured from his neck over his shoulders, slid like a hot garment over his chest and flanks, flowed, flowed, filled the glass ball with running crimson, and drowned the world. It was unquenchable, it was the life that had been in him, under the clay and ice, it drained away into death.
A.S. Byatt (Ragnarok)
I snapped. The anger, I can still feel it now, rose through me like a wave and I drowned in it. I was reborn in it. You know what it is like, Zhou. The world lost its colour, everything turned to black and white. There were shades of grey, but no colour. Even time seemed to slow down, the pain was there and I drew on it. I made it part of me and I threw it at them.
G.R. Matthews (The Red Plains (The Forbidden List, #3))
When the Sunrise clutches my soul, I often wonder what if our souls are made in grayscale, only to soak in the colours of the day, every single day walking through every single moment of each passing day. What if every ray that paints the horizon is but a bunch of souls ornate in different shades of white only to find the different shades of black to melt away in a Sunset Sky, in a Smile of embracing a day anew or in a mellow cry of a day's passing by. Perhaps the Dawn has the answer, or perhaps there's a whisper in the Dusk! All while, let me search away for the pieces of my soul in the grayscale of Time's hue. And I know, Life will put the colours back again, one more time, at Time's cue. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee
Debatrayee Banerjee
It was extraordinary that after thirty years of marriage his wife could not be ready in time on Sunday morning. At last she came, in black satin; the Vicar did not like colours in a clergyman’s wife at any time, but on Sundays he was determined that she should wear black; now and then, in conspiracy with Miss Graves, she ventured a white feather or a pink rose in her bonnet,
W. Somerset Maugham (Collected Works of W. Somerset Maugham)
Sometimes I really can't express how much I feel, but I can tell for a fact that some past years have been a victorious rollercoaster ride with God in it. Some days colourful, some days black and white, some days faith bigger than a mustard seed, other days I'm filled with blind doubt about what tomorrow holds. But in all of this, I'm beautifully me and constantly running the race through the father's grace.
Temi O'Sola
The war takes place in black and white. For those on the sidelines that is. For those who are actually in it there are many different colours, excessive colours, too bright, too red and orange, too liquid and incandescent, but for the others the war is like a newsreel- grainy, smeared, with bursts of staccato noise and large numbers of grey-skinned people rushing or plodding or falling down, everything elsewhere.
Margaret Atwood (The Blind Assassin)
There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?
Charlotte Brontë (Shirley)
Close your eyes and stare into the dark. My father's advice when I couldn't sleep as a little girl. He wouldn't want me to do that now but I've set my mind to the task regardless. I'm staring beyond my closed eyelids. Though I lie still on the ground, I feel perched at the highest point I could possibly be; clutching at a star in the night sky with my legs dangling above cold black nothingness. I take one last look at my fingers wrapped around the light and let go. Down I go, falling, then floating, and, falling again, I wait for the land of my life. I know now, as I knew as that little girl fighting sleep, that behind her gauzed screen of shut-eye, lies colour. It taunts me, dares me to open my eyes and lose sleep. Flashes of red and amber, yellow and white speckle my darkness. I refuse to open them. I rebel and I squeeze my eyelids together tighter to block out the grains of light, mere distractions that keep us awake but a sign that there's life beyond. But there's no life in me. None that I can feel, from where I lie at the bottom of the staircase. My heart beats quicker now, the lone fighter left standing in the ring, a red boxing glove pumping victoriously into the air, refusing to give up. It's the only part of me that cares, the only part that ever cared. It fights to pump the blood around to heal, to replace what I'm losing. But it's all leaving my body as quickly as it's sent; forming a deep black ocean of its own around me where I've fallen. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Never have enough time here, always trying to make our way there. Need to have left here five minutes ago, need to be there now. The phone rings again and I acknowledge the irony. I could have taken my time and answered it now. Now, not then. I could have taken all the time in the world on each of those steps. But we're always rushing. All, but my heart. That slows now. I don't mind so much. I place my hand on my belly. If my child is gone, and I suspect this is so, I'll join it there. There.....where? Wherever. It; a heartless word. He or she so young; who it was to become, still a question. But there, I will mother it. There, not here. I'll tell it; I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm sorry I ruined your chances - our chances of a life together.But close your eyes and stare into the darkness now, like Mummy is doing, and we'll find our way together. There's a noise in the room and I feel a presence. 'Oh God, Joyce, oh God. Can you hear me, love? Oh God. Oh God, please no, Hold on love, I'm here. Dad is here.' I don't want to hold on and I feel like telling him so. I hear myself groan, an animal-like whimper and it shocks me, scares me. I have a plan, I want to tell him. I want to go, only then can I be with my baby. Then, not now. He's stopped me from falling but I haven't landed yet. Instead he helps me balance on nothing, hover while I'm forced to make the decision. I want to keep falling but he's calling the ambulance and he's gripping my hand with such ferocity it's as though I'm all he has. He's brushing the hair from my forehead and weeping loudly. I've never heard him weep. Not even when Mum died. He clings to my hand with all of his strength I never knew his old body had and I remember that I am all he has and that he, once again just like before, is my whole world. The blood continues to rush through me. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Maybe I'm rushing again. Maybe it's not my time to go. I feel the rough skin of old hands squeezing mine, and their intensity and their familiarity force me to open my eyes. Lights fills them and I glimpse his face, a look I never want to see again. He clings to his baby. I know I lost mind; I can't let him lose his. In making my decision I already begin to grieve. I've landed now, the land of my life. And still my heart pumps on. Even when broken it still works.
Cecelia Ahern (Thanks for the Memories)
It was suddenly clear to her that what mattered most was love—not necessarily romantic love, and that any pursuit would be hollow without it. Love gave a flat, black and white world colour, smell, taste, substance, and dimension. It was the antidote to the emotionless, goal-oriented rationality promoted by modern societies, where people planned, compartmentalised and manipulated their relationships. Love changed the motives and the intentions.
Sheila Matharu (Darkness)
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.
Émile Zola
We hit slavery through a great civil war. Did we destroy it? No, we only changed it into hatred between sections of the country: in the South, into political corruption and chicanery, the degradation of the blacks through peonage, unjust laws, unfair and cruel treatment; and the degradation of the whites by their resorting to these practices, the paralyzation of the public conscience, and the ever over-hanging dread of what the future may bring.
James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man)
The one place where a man ought to get a square deal is in a court-room, be he any colour of the rainbow, but people have a way of carrying their resentments right into a jury box. As you grow older, you‘ll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don‘t you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.
Harper Lee (Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird)
In outer aspect, Pip and Dough-Boy made a match, like a black pony and a white one, of equal developments, though of dissimilar colour, driven in one eccentric span. But while hapless Dough-Boy was by nature dull and torpid in his intellects, Pip, though over tender-hearted, was at bottom very bright, with that pleasant, genial, jolly brightness peculiar to his tribe; a tribe, which ever enjoy all holidays and festivities with finer, freer relish than any other race.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
..something like that make me feel what Rhonda, what Farrakhan, say - there is a god. But me when I think of it I'm more inclined to go with Shug in The Colour Purple. God ain' white, he ain' no Jew or Muslim, maybe he ain' even black, maybe he ain' even a 'he.' Even now I go downtown and see .. I see those men in vacant lot share one hot dog and they homeless, that's good as Jesus with his fish. I remember when I had my daughter, nurse nice to me too - all that is god.
Sapphire
All the radiance of April in Italy lay gathered together at her feet. The sun poured in on her. The sea lay asleep in it, hardly stirring. Across the bay the lovely mountains, exquisitely different in colour, were asleep too in the light; and underneath her window, at the bottom of the flower-starred grass slope from which the wall of the castle rose up, was a great cypress, cutting through the delicate blues and violets and rose-colours of the mountains and the sea like a great black sword. She stared. Such beauty; and she there to see it. Such beauty; and she alive to feel it. Her face was bathed in light. Lovely scents came up to the window and caressed her. A tiny breeze gently lifted her hair. Far out in the bay a cluster of almost motionless fishing boats hovered like a flock of white birds on the tranquil sea. How beautiful, how beautiful. Not to have died before this . . . to have been allowed to see, breathe, feel this . 
Elizabeth von Arnim (The Enchanted April)
Despite a seemingly pervasive belief that only people of colour ‘play the race card’, it does not take anything as dramatic as a slave revolution or Japanese imperialism to evoke white racial anxieties, something as trivial as the casting of non-white people in films or plays in which a character was ‘supposed’ to be white will do the trick. For example, the casting of Olivier award-winning actress Noma Dumezweni to play the role of Hermione in the debut West End production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child got bigots so riled up that J. K. Rowling felt the need to respond and give her blessing for a black actress to play the role. A similar but much larger controversy occurred when the character Rue in the film The Hunger Games was played by a black girl, Amandla Stenberg. Even though Rue is described as having brown skin in the original novel, ‘fans’ of the book were shocked and dismayed that the movie version cast a brown girl to play the role, and a Twitter storm of abuse about the ethnic casting of the role ensued. You have to read the responses to truly appreciate how angry and abusive they are.- As blogger Dodai Stewart pointed out at the time: All these . . . people . . . read The Hunger Games. Clearly, they all fell in love with and cared about Rue. Though what they really fell in love with was an image of Rue that they’d created in their minds. A girl that they knew they could love and adore and mourn at the thought of knowing that she’s been brutally killed. And then the casting is revealed (or they go see the movie) and they’re shocked to see that Rue is black. Now . . . this is so much more than, 'Oh, she’s bigger than I thought.’ The reactions are all based on feelings of disgust. These people are MAD that the girl that they cried over while reading the book was ‘some black girl’ all along. So now they’re angry. Wasted tears, wasted emotions. It’s sad to think that had they known that she was black all along, there would have been [no] sorrow or sadness over her death.
Akala (Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire)
How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say, and please attend, for the peroration is beginning, you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? It is all very blessings of civilisation. What is you excuse? it is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time. There is truth in what you say—I will not deny it. But at the same time may I remind you that there have been at least two colleges for women in existence in England since the year 1886; that after the year 1880 a married woman was allowed by the law to possess her own property; and that in 1919—which is a whole nine years ago—she was given a vote? May I also remind you that most of the professions have been open to you for close to ten years now? When you reflect upon these immense privileges and the length of time during which they have been enjoyed, and the fact that there must be at this moment some two thousand women capable of earning over five hundred a year in one way or another, you will agree that the excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure and money no longer holds good. Moreover, the economists are telling us that Mrs. Seton has had too many children. You must, of course, go on bearing children, but, so they say, in twos and threes, not in tens and twelves. Thus, with some time on your hands and with some book learning in your brains—you have had enough of the other kind, and are sent to college partly, I suspect, to be uneducated—surely you should embark upon another stage of your very long, very laborious and highly obscure career. A thousand pens are ready to suggest what you should do and what effect you will have. My own suggestion is a little fantastic, I admit; I prefer, therefore, to put it in the form of fiction.
Virginia Woolf (A Room of One’s Own)
Consciousness is imbued with the three qualities (gunas) of luminosity (sattva), vibrancy (rajas) and inertia (tamas). The gunas also colour our actions: white (sattva), grey (rajas) and black (tamas). Through the discipline of yoga, both actions and intelligence go beyond these qualities and the seer comes to experience his own soul with crystal clarity, free from the relative attributes of nature and actions. This state of purity is samadhi. Yoga is thus both the means and the goal. Yoga is samadhi and samadhi is yoga. There
B.K.S. Iyengar (Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: The Essential Handbook of Pranayama, Asana, and Hindu Meditation)
Meanwhile, in Genoa, the noons were getting hotter, the converging outer roads getting deeper with white dust, the oleanders in the tubs along the wayside gardens looking more and more like fatigued holiday-makers, and the sweet evening changing her office - scattering abroad those whom the mid-day had sent under shelter, and sowing all paths with happy social sounds, little tinklings of mule-bells and whirrings of thrumbed strings, light footsteps and voices, if not leisurely, then with the hurry of pleasure in them; while the encircling heights, crowned with forts, skirted with fine dwellings and gardens, seemed also to come forth and gaze in fulness of beauty after their long siesta, till all strong colour melted in the stream of moonlight which made the streets a new spectacle with shadows, both still and moving, on cathedral steps and against the facades of massive palaces; and then slowly with the descending moon all sank in deep night and silence, and nothing shone but the port lights of the great Lanterna in the blackness below, and the glimmering stars in the blackness above.
George Eliot (Daniel Deronda)
There were deep green faces, dipped in sea dye, with painted cockles for mouths and lichenous hair, sealed on the cheeks; red and purple, slate-grey, tide-marked, rat-brown and stickily white-washed, with violent-inked eyes or lips the colour of Stilton; pink chopped, pink lidded, pink as the belly of a newborn monkey, nicotine yellow with mustard flecked eyes, rust scraping through the bleach, black hairs axlegreased down among the peroxide; squashed fly stubbles, salt-cellared necks thick with pepper powder; carrotheads, yolkheads, blackheads, heads bald as sweetbreads.
Dylan Thomas
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.
Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
But this little bow & its ten harmless darts, once in the hands of the Godling, became a magic bow & a lethal weapon, since the Godling was Eros reborn. And its ten darts which were of the seven colours of the rainbow or spectrum, plus white, black & grey, when shot at Gods, Goddesses, Nymphs, Mortals & any others, could inspire the same feelings of love, hate & confusion as Aphrodite used to inspire in others with her girdle. As, indeed, as soon as Cupid was born, the Goddess of Love had lost her magic girdle. Since a Goddess of Love, who was already in her seventies, had no more use for such toys.
Nicholas Chong
Let’s say, Bruce Wayne, that you are a person living in a black-and-white world. You know that, somewhere, colour must exist. So you read every book about colour that you can find. You research it day and night until you can recite the wavelengths of blue and red and yellow light, that a blade of grass must logically be green, that when you look at the sky, it is logically blue. You can tell me everything there is to know about colour, even though you’ve never seen it yourself. And then, one day, you see colour. Would you know it? would you even recognise it? can you truly comprehend anything about something, or someone… unless you experience it for yourself?
Marie Lu (Batman: Nightwalker)
Charlotte was used to all the marks of war: the shabbiness of things, bad food, shop queues, posters about the war effort, people with worried faces, people dressed in black. She was used to seeing the wounded men from the hospital with their bright blue uniforms and bright red ties, the colours, she thought, if not the clothes of Arthur's soldiers. Such things did not disturb her, and the war seemed quite remote. But this disturbed her, the grotesque kind of circus that came now. It did not seem remote at all, nor did it fit with her vague ideas of war gained from those books of Arthur's she had read, with their flags and glory and brave drummer boys. How could you dare to become a soldier, knowing that you might end like this? There were men like clowns with white heads, white arms, white legs, men with crutches, slings, and bloodied bandages, and all so distressingly like men you would expect to see walking down the street, two armed, two legged, in hats instead of bandages and suits of black not battered khaki. Some came on stretchers borne by whole and ordinary men, some hobbled and leaned on whole ordinary arms. Most had mud dried thick across their clothes, and all came from the dark station's mouth with the spewings of trains behind, the clankings, thumpings, grindings, the sounds like great devils taking in breaths and blowing them out again.
Penelope Farmer (Charlotte Sometimes (Aviary Hall, #3))
When they spoke, the bear and the woman, it was often in questions. 'What are the shape of your dreams?' she asked him. 'What do you mean?' he replied. 'Many things in one question... what is the language of your dreams? and, when you dream, do you dream in words, images? and, when you dream, are your dreams colour, black and white, or colours only known to dreamers? are they visions, or something else?' He asked, 'something else?' 'Are they chemical, scent, touch? What shape do your dreams take? Do they have narrative, or are they abstract?' He closed his eyes, became lost in thought. For a while there was silence but for the sounds of birds, the soft breath of hares, a stir of winter leaves.
Jackie Morris (The Unwinding)
I know that a brighter view may be taken, and if the sadder has been emphasized in these letters, it is only because we feel you know less about it. For more has been written about the successes than about the failures, and it seems to us that it is more important that you should know about the reverses than about the successes of the war. We shall have all eternity to celebrate the victories, but we have only the few hours before sunset in which to win them. We are not winning them as we should, because the fact of the reverses is so little realized, and the needed reinforcements are not forthcoming, as they would be if the position were thoroughly understood. Reinforcements of men and women are needed, but, far above all, reinforcements of prayer. And so we have tried to tell you the truth the uninteresting, unromantic truth about the heathen as we find them, the work as it is. More workers are needed. No words can tell how much they are needed, how much they are wanted here. But we will never try to allure anyone to think of coming by painting coloured pictures, when the facts are in black and white. What if black and white will never attract like colours ? We care not for it ; our business is to tell the truth. The work is not a pretty thing, to be looked at and admired. It is a fight. And battlefields are not beautiful. But if one is truly called of God, all the difficulties and discouragements only intensify the Call. If things were easier there would be less need. The greater the need, the clearer the Call rings through one, the deeper the conviction grows: it was God s Call. And as one obeys it, there is the joy of obedience, quite apart from the joy of success. There is joy in being with Jesus in a place where His friends are few ; and sometimes, when one would least expect it, coming home tired out and disheartened after a day in an opposing or indifferent town, suddenly how, you can hardly tell such a wave of the joy of Jesus flows over you and through you, that you are stilled with the sense of utter joy. Then, when you see Him winning souls, or hear of your comrades victories, oh ! all that is within you sings, I have more than an overweight of joy !
Amy Carmichael (Things as They Are: Mission Work in Southern India)
Sometimes, when I'm having a sort-through or a clear-out, I find photos of my youth, and it's a shock to see everything on black and white. I think my granddaughter believes we were actually grey-skinned, with dull hair, always posing in a shadowed landscape. But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. I remember the deep blue of the sky and the dark green of the pines cutting through it, the bright red of the local brick houses and the orange carpet of pine needles under our feet. Nowadays - though I'm not sure the sky is still occasionally blue and most of the houses are still there, and the trees still drop their needles - nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph.
Emma Healey
Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray (Clydesdale Classics))
Senseless people name evil good, call good evil. As you are doing. You accuse Us of passing false judgement: you do Us injustice. We shall prove this to you. You ask who We are: We are God’s handle, Master Death, a truly effective reaper. Our scythe works its way. It cuts down white, black, red, brown, green, blue, grey, yellow, and all kinds of lustrous flowers in its path, irrespective of their splendour, their strength, their virtue. And the violet’s beautiful colour, rich perfume, and palatable sap, avail it nought. See: that is justice. Our justification was acknowledged by the Romans and the poets, for they knew Us better than you do. You ask what We are: We are nothing, and yet something. Nothing, because We have neither life, nor being, nor form, and We are no spirit, not visible, not tangible; something, because We are the end of life, the end of existence, the beginning of nullity, a cross between the two. We are a happening that fells all people. Huge giants must fall before Us; all living beings must be transformed by Us. You ask where We are: We are not ascertainable. But Our form was found in a temple in Rome*, painted on a wall, as a hoodwinked man sitting on an ox; this man wielded a hatchet in his right hand and a shovel in his left hand, with which he was beating the ox. A great crowd of all kinds of people was hitting him, fighting him, and making casts at him, each one with the tools of his trade: even the nun with her psalter was there. They struck and made casts at the man on the ox, he who signified Us; yet Death contested and buried them all. Pythagoras likens Us to a man’s form with the eyes of a basilisk: they wandered to the ends of the Earth, and every living creature had to die at their glance. You ask where We are: We are from the Earthly Paradise. God created Us there and gave Us Our true name, when he said: «The day that ye bite of this fruit, ye shall die the death.» And for that reason We call ourself: «We, Death, mighty ruler and master on Earth, in the air, and in the rivers of the sea.» You ask what good We do: you have already heard that We bring the world more advantage than harm. Now cease, rest content, and thank Us for the kindness we have done you!
Johannes von Saaz (Death and the Ploughman)
When I was a kid,'' she said. ``These sort of stories always start like this, don't they, `When I was a kid ...' Anyway. This is the bit where the girl suddenly says, `When I was a kid' and starts to unburden herself. We have got to that bit. When I was a kid I had this picture hanging over the foot of my bed ... What do you think of it so far?'' ``I like it. I think it's moving well. You're getting the bedroom interest in nice and early. We could probably do with some development with the picture.'' ``It was one of those pictures that children are supposed to like,'' she said, ``but don't. Full of endearing little animals doing endearing things, you know?'' ``I know. I was plagued with them too. Rabbits in waistcoats.'' ``Exactly. These rabbits were in fact on a raft, as were assorted rats and owls. There may even have been a reindeer.'' ``On the raft.'' ``On the raft. And a boy was sitting on the raft.'' ``Among the rabbits in waistcoats and the owls and the reindeer.'' ``Precisely there. A boy of the cheery gypsy ragamuffin variety.'' ``Ugh.'' ``The picture worried me, I must say. There was an otter swimming in front of the raft, and I used to lie awake at night worrying about this otter having to pull the raft, with all these wretched animals on it who shouldn't even be on a raft, and the otter had such a thin tail to pull it with I thought it must hurt pulling it all the time. Worried me. Not badly, but just vaguely, all the time. ``Then one day --- and remember I'd been looking at this picture every night for years --- I suddenly noticed that the raft had a sail. Never seen it before. The otter was fine, he was just swimming along.'' She shrugged. ``Good story?'' she said. ``Ends weakly,'' said Arthur, ``leaves the audience crying `Yes, but what of it?' Fine up till there, but needs a final sting before the credits.'' Fenchurch laughed and hugged her legs. ``It was just such a sudden revelation, years of almost unnoticed worry just dropping away, like taking off heavy weights, like black and white becoming colour, like a dry stick suddenly being watered. The sudden shift of perspective that says `Put away your worries, the world is a good and perfect place. It is in fact very easy.
Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4))
Some series teach us that ethnic features must be "fixed," by drastic means if necessary. Plastic surgeons with questionable ethics give insecure women of all ethnicities boob jobs, liposuction, and face-lifts on shows such as Extreme Makeover, The Swan, and Dr. 90210, ignoring medical risks and reinforcing problematic ideas about women's worth. Yet they don't make white surgical candidates feel like their cultural identity should also be on the chopping blocking - or that they'd be so much more attractive and fulfilled if only they didn't look so... Caucasian. In contrast, TV docs' scalpels reduce or remove racial markers on patients of colour. Black women's noses and lips are made smaller. In an increasingly common procedure targeting Asian women, creases are added to Asian women's eyelids.
Jennifer L. Pozner (Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV)
It was a cat of rather individual appearance, being black in its general colour scheme but with splashes of white about the ribs and also on the tip of its nose. I chirruped and twiddled my fingers, as is my custom on these occasions, and it advanced with its tail up and rubbed its nose against my leg in a manner that indicated clearly that in Bertram Wooster it was convinced that it had found a kindred soul and one of the boys. Nor had its intuition led it astray. One of the first poems I ever learned – I don't know who wrote it, probably Shakespeare – ran: I love little pussy; her coat is so warm; And if I don't hurt her, she'll do me no harm; and that is how I have been all my life. Ask any cat with whom I have had dealings what sort of a chap I am cat-wise, and it will tell you that I am a thoroughly good egg in whom complete confidence can safely be placed.
P.G. Wodehouse (Aunts Aren't Gentlemen (Jeeves, #15))
In the inner dark she saw a handsome bay horse with his clean ears pricked like daggers from his naked head as he swung handsomely round to stare at the open doorway. He had big, black, brilliant eyes, with a sharp questioning glint, and that air of tense, alert quietness which betrays an animal that can be dangerous... He was of such a lovely red-gold colour, and a dark, invisible fire seemed to come out of him .. . She looked at the glowing bay horse, that stood there with his ears back, his face averted, but attending as if he were some lightning conductor. He was a stallion . .. Dimly, in her weary young-woman's soul, an ancient understanding seemed to flood in . . . For some reason the sight of him, his power, his alive, alert intensity, his unyieldingness, made her want to cry. She never did cry ... But now, as if that mysterious fire of the horse's body had split some rock in her, she went home and hid herself in her room, and just cried. The wild, brilliant, alert head of St Mawr seemed to look at her out of another world. It was as if she had had a vision, as if the walls of her own world had suddenly melted away, leaving her in a great darkness, in the midst of which the large, brilliant eyes of that horse looked at her with demonish question, while his naked ears stood up like daggers from the naked lines of his inhuman head, and his great body glowed red with power. What was it? Almost like a god looking at her terribly out of the everlasting dark, she had felt the eyes of that horse; great, glowing, fearsome eyes, arched with a question, and containing a white blade of light like a threat. What was his non-human question, and his uncanny threat? She didn't know. He was some splendid demon, and she must worship him. (St Mawr)
D.H. Lawrence
He is still there, standing a few yards from where I passed him about an hour ago. He has been waiting for me, in the hope that I would return the way I came. He looks up as the bus approaches and his eyes meet mine again, but this time there is not hate, there is almost warmth. He smiles at me and shakes his head a little – Well played – and then he unzips his jacket, hooking his thumbs into its folds so that he can pull it apart and show me what is in there. His jacket is lined with a patchwork of colourful cotton squares, and each of them displays a swastika. They are various different colours and sizes: red, white and black; yellow, black and purple. The man grins up at me: Good work, you got me this time. The bus rolls up the hill and away, but that image will always stay with me, along with the thought of what might have happened if I hadn’t spotted the hate in time.
Musa Okwonga (One of Them)
Oh don't be pompous and gloomy,darling," chided Amalfi. "There are thousands of places just as lovely as this. And as peaceful." "That's where you are wrong," said Tyson,leaning his elbows on the warm stone. "I've seen a lot of the world, A hell of a lot of it!But there's something special about this island Something that I haven't met anywhere else Do you know what is the most familiar sound in Zanzibar?-laughter! Walk through the streets of the little city almost any time of day or night, and you'll hear it. People laughing. There is a gaiety and good humour about them that is strangely warming to even such a corrugated, corroded and eroded heart as mine and this is the only place that I have hit upon where black and white and every shade in between 'em appear to able to live in complete friendliness and harmony, with no colour bar. It's living proof and a practical demonstration that it can be done.
M.M. Kaye (Death in Zanzibar)
How can I further encourage you to go about the business of life? Young women, I would say...you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not written by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you to say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught...the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are...at present in existences, and that...takes time.
Virginia Woolf (A Room Of One's Own)
Things can get out of hand quickly, especially with Sid around. I also decide never to wear heels again when I'm out with him. I go to Holt's in Camden Town and buy a pair of black Dr Martens. (You can get them in black, brown or maroon, the skinhead boys at school used to buy the brown ones and polish them with Kiwi Oxblood shoe polish — this gives them a deep reddish brown colour, much subtler than the flat red of the originals. They also keep them pristinely clean and polished at all times.) I wear my new boots with everything — dresses, tutus — it’s a great feeling to be able to run again. No other girl wears DMs with dresses, so I get a lot of funny looks. (Skinhead girls only wear DMs with Sta-Prest trousers. With their boring grey skirts, they west plain white or holey ecru tights and black patent brogues.) Bit I wear them all the time to clubs and pubs, it eventually catches on with other girls and I don’t look so odd.
Viv Albertine (Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys)
Our senses were assaulted with colours, smells and noise. We saw a million saris, and never once did I see the same pattern repeated twice. We saw poverty that both humbled and disturbed us. We bartered with street traders for Indian prices, not tourist prices. We stopped by the side of the road and watched an old man crushing sugar canes so that we could drink the juice. It was the most delectable and flavourful drink we have ever tasted. We walked barefoot around the Swaminarayan Akshardham, the largest Hindu house of worship in the world, and were absolutely awed. The whole temple echoes with spirituality and we could have spent an entire day there. I saw a village of dirty black bricks, no rendering, just filth and grime, and right in the middle an exquisite and elegant white temple, freshly painted and unblemished. We drove from Jaipur to Delhi. The previous day the road had been closed due to the Jat caste protests. Thirty people died, ten women reported being raped and buildings and cars were set on fire
Karl Wiggins (Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe)
Griff entered the cave, sword in hand. He had no desire to frighten Astelle, but he had to be prepared for anything. She jumped up from her fireside position with a small stifled scream at his entry, then continued to back fearfully towards the shadowed wall. She was quite alone. Griff could sense no other presence – only hers, and the wonder of it. He sheathed his sword, and gazed upon his long-lost love. Her hair had lost all trace of colour while still retaining the texture of youth, giving the appearance of white silk. There was a pulsating light of a blue-lilac shade which clung to the crown of her head, reflecting in the hair – a soul – a lost spirit – someone who had loved her. She was almost as pale as death, for Torking took far too much blood from her, too frequently. She was also much thinner than she should have been, but for all of this, she was still the most beautiful sight of his life. Her body was ravaged with Torking's bites and claw-marks. She was still wearing his old cloak which Griff instantly recognised, though it was little more than a rag, wrapped around her body and tied on one shoulder. Her beautiful dark eyes, those which had so haunted his dreams, seemed over-large in her pale face, as she stared at him with a mingling of shock, disbelief and joy. Griff took a few hesitant steps towards her, unsure of his reception. ‘Astelle?’ His voice grated with emotion. How often had she yearned to hear him speak her name exactly in that way? ‘Astelle – is it really you?’ He was just as divinely handsome as she remembered, and he looked so fine – he looked magnificent in Gremlen battledress. In the flickering torchlight, the blue krulmesh armour glittered over the black leather tunic. The emerald sheen in his raven hair was vivid as ever. Best of all, his dark forest-green eyes were shining with love, and she suddenly understood that Griff was a hundred times more beautiful than Torking, for his eyes held everything that was good, fine and noble. Astelle's heart almost stopped beating as she gazed at him. Her eyes filled with tears, and her lip trembled as she tried to whisper his name.
Bernie Morris (The Fury of the Fae)
The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does flipflops trying to imagine it, because I can't.I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultra-violet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can't possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I'm standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own.
Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
A strange mood has seized the almost-educated young. They’re on the march, angry at times, but mostly needful, longing for authority’s blessing, its validation of their chosen identities. The decline of the West in new guise perhaps. Or the exaltation and liberation of the self. A social-media site famously proposes seventy-one gender options—neutrois, two spirit, bigender…any colour you like, Mr. Ford. Biology is not destiny after all, and there’s cause for celebration. A shrimp is neither limiting nor stable. I declare my undeniable feeling for who I am. If I turn out to be white, I may identify as black. And vice versa. I may announce myself as disabled, or disabled in context. If my identity is that of a believer, I’m easily wounded, my flesh torn to bleeding by any questioning of my faith. Offended, I enter a state of grace. Should inconvenient opinions hover near me like fallen angels or evil djinn (a mile being too near), I’ll be in need of the special campus safe room equipped with Play-Doh and looped footage of gambolling puppies. Ah, the intellectual life! I may need advance warning if upsetting books or ideas threaten my very being by coming too close, breathing on my face, my brain, like unwholesome dogs.
Ian McEwan (Nutshell)
He played with the idea and grew wilful; tossed it into the air and transformed it; let it escape and recaptured it; made it iridescent with fancy and winged it with paradox. The praise of folly, as he went on, soared into a philosophy, and philosophy herself became young, and catching the mad music of pleasure, wearing, one might fancy, her wine-stained robe and wreath of ivy, danced like a Bacchante over the hills of life, and mocked the slow Silenus for being sober. Facts fled before her like frightened forest things. Her white feet trod the huge press at which wise Omar sits, till the seething grape-juice rose round her bare limbs in waves of purple bubbles, or crawled in red foam over the vat’s black, dripping, sloping sides. It was an extraordinary improvisation. He felt that the eyes of Dorian Gray were fixed on him, and the consciousness that amongst his audience there was one whose temperament he wished to fascinate seemed to give his wit keenness and to lend colour to his imagination. He was brilliant, fantastic, irresponsible. He charmed his listeners out of themselves, and they followed his pipe, laughing. Dorian Gray never took his gaze off him, but sat like one under a spell, smiles chasing each other over his lips and wonder growing grave in his darkening eyes.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
I consider myself a student of colours and shades and hues and tints. Crimson lake, burnt umber, ultramarine … I was too clumsy as a child to paint with my moistened brush the scenery that I would have liked to bring into being. I preferred to leave untouched in their white metallic surroundings my rows of powdery rectangles of water-colours, to read aloud one after another of the tiny printed names of the coloured rectangles, and to let each colour seem to soak into each word of its name or even into each syllable of each word of each name so that I could afterwards call to mind an exact shade or hue from an image of no more than black letters on a white ground. Deep cadmium, geranium lake, imperial purple, parchment … after the last of our children had found employment and had moved out of our home, my wife and I were able to buy for ourselves things that had previously been beyond our means. I bought my first such luxury, as I called it, in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I bought there a complete set of coloured pencils made by a famous maker of pencils in England: a hundred and twenty pencils, each stamped with gold lettering along its side and having at its end a perfectly tapered wick. The collection of pencils is behind me as I write these words. It rests near the jars of glass marbles and the kaleidoscope mentioned earlier. None of the pencils has ever been used in the way that most pencils are used, but I have sometimes used the many-striped collection in order to confirm my suspicion as a child that each of what I called my long-lost moods might be recollected and, perhaps, preserved if only I could look again at the precise shade or hue that had become connected with the mood – that had absorbed, as it were, or had been permeated with, one or more of the indefinable qualities that constitute what is called a mood or a state of feeling. During the weeks since I first wrote in the earlier pages of this report about the windows in the church of white stone, I have spent every day an increasing amount of time in moving my pencils to and fro among the hollow spaces allotted to them in their container. I seem to recall that I tried sometimes, many years ago, to move my glass marbles from place to place on the carpet near my desk with the vague hope that some or another chance arrangement of them would restore to me some previously irretrievable mood. The marbles, however, were too variously coloured, and each differed too markedly from the other. Their colours seemed to vie, to compete. Or, a single marble might suggest more than I was in search of: a whole afternoon in my childhood or a row of trees in a backyard when I had wanted back only a certain few moments when my face was brushed by a certain few leaves. Among the pencils are many differing only subtly from their neighbours. Six at least I might have called simply red if I had not learned long ago their true names. With these six, and with still others from each side of them, I often arrange one after another of many possible sequences, hoping to see in the conjectured space between some or another unlikely pair a certain tint that I have wanted for long to see.
Gerald Murnane (Border Districts)
The street sprinkler went past and, as its rasping rotary broom spread water over the tarmac, half the pavement looked as if it had been painted with a dark stain. A big yellow dog had mounted a tiny white bitch who stood quite still. In the fashion of colonials the old gentleman wore a light jacket, almost white, and a straw hat. Everything held its position in space as if prepared for an apotheosis. In the sky the towers of Notre-Dame gathered about themselves a nimbus of heat, and the sparrows – minor actors almost invisible from the street – made themselves at home high up among the gargoyles. A string of barges drawn by a tug with a white and red pennant had crossed the breadth of Paris and the tug lowered its funnel, either in salute or to pass under the Pont Saint-Louis. Sunlight poured down rich and luxuriant, fluid and gilded as oil, picking out highlights on the Seine, on the pavement dampened by the sprinkler, on a dormer window, and on a tile roof on the Île Saint-Louis. A mute, overbrimming life flowed from each inanimate thing, shadows were violet as in impressionist canvases, taxis redder on the white bridge, buses greener. A faint breeze set the leaves of a chestnut tree trembling, and all down the length of the quai there rose a palpitation which drew voluptuously nearer and nearer to become a refreshing breath fluttering the engravings pinned to the booksellers’ stalls. People had come from far away, from the four corners of the earth, to live that one moment. Sightseeing cars were lined up on the parvis of Notre-Dame, and an agitated little man was talking through a megaphone. Nearer to the old gentleman, to the bookseller dressed in black, an American student contemplated the universe through the view-finder of his Leica. Paris was immense and calm, almost silent, with her sheaves of light, her expanses of shadow in just the right places, her sounds which penetrated the silence at just the right moment. The old gentleman with the light-coloured jacket had opened a portfolio filled with coloured prints and, the better to look at them, propped up the portfolio on the stone parapet. The American student wore a red checked shirt and was coatless. The bookseller on her folding chair moved her lips without looking at her customer, to whom she was speaking in a tireless stream. That was all doubtless part of the symphony. She was knitting. Red wool slipped through her fingers. The white bitch’s spine sagged beneath the weight of the big male, whose tongue was hanging out. And then when everything was in its place, when the perfection of that particular morning reached an almost frightening point, the old gentleman died without saying a word, without a cry, without a contortion while he was looking at his coloured prints, listening to the voice of the bookseller as it ran on and on, to the cheeping of the sparrows, the occasional horns of taxis. He must have died standing up, one elbow on the stone ledge, a total lack of astonishment in his blue eyes. He swayed and fell to the pavement, dragging along with him the portfolio with all its prints scattered about him. The male dog wasn’t at all frightened, never stopped. The woman let her ball of wool fall from her lap and stood up suddenly, crying out: ‘Monsieur Bouvet!
Georges Simenon
From the height we had now reached, the sea no longer appeared, as it did from Balbec, like an undulating range of hills, but on the contrary like the view, from a mountain-peak or from a road winding round its flank, of a blue-green glacier or a glittering plain situated at a lower level. The ripples of eddies and currents seemed to be fixed upon its surface, and to have traced there for ever their concentric circles; the enamelled face of the sea, imperceptibly changing colour, assumed towards the head of the bay, where an estuary opened, the blue whiteness of milk in which little black boats that did not move seemed entangled like flies. I felt that from nowhere could one discover a vaster prospect. But at each turn in the road a fresh expanse was added to it and when we arrived at the Douville toll-house, the spur of the cliff which until then had concealed from us half the bay receded, and all of a sudden I saw upon my left a gulf as profound as that which I had already had in front of me, but one that changed the proportions of the other and doubled its beauty. The air at this lofty point had a keenness and purity that intoxicated me. I adored the Verdurins; that they should have sent a carriage for us seemed to me a touching act of kindness. I should have liked to kiss the Princess. I told her that I had never seen anything so beautiful. She professed that she too loved this spot more than any other. But I could see that to her as to the Verdurins the thing that really mattered was not to gaze at the view like tourists, but to partake of good meals there, to entertain people whom they liked, to write letters, to read books, in short to live in these surroundings, passively allowing the beauty of the scene to soak into them rather than making it the object of their conscious attention.
Marcel Proust (Sodom and Gomorrah)
The village of Haworth stands, steep and grey, on the topmost side of an abrupt low hill. Such hills, more steep than high, are congregated round, circle beyond circle, to the utmost limit of the horizon. Not a wood, not a river. As far as eye can reach these treeless hills, their sides cut into fields by grey walls of stone, with here and there a grey stone village, and here and there a grey stone mill, present no other colours than the singular north-country brilliance of the green grass, and the blackish grey of the stone. Now and then a toppling, gurgling mill-beck gives life to the scene. But the real life, the only beauty of the country, is set on the top of all the hills, where moor joins moor from Yorkshire into Lancashire, a coiled chain of wild free places. White with snow in winter, black at midsummer, it is only when spring dapples the dark heather-stems with the vivid green of the sprouting wortleberry bushes, only when in early autumn the moors are one humming mass of fragrant purple, that any beauty of tint lights up the scene. But there is always a charm in the moors for hardy and solitary spirits. Between them and heaven nothing dares to interpose. The shadows of the coursing clouds alter the aspect of the place a hundred times a day. A hundred little springs and streams well in its soil, making spots of livid greenness round their rise. A hundred birds of every kind are flying and singing there. Larks sing; cuckoos call; all the tribes of linnets and finches twitter in the bushes; plovers moan; wild ducks fly past; more melancholy than all, on stormy days, the white sea-mews cry, blown so far inland by the force of the gales that sweep irresistibly over the treeless and houseless moors. There in the spring you may take in your hands the weak, halting fledgelings of the birds; rabbits and game multiply in the hollows. There in the autumn the crowds of bees, mad in the heather, send the sound of their humming down the village street. The winds, the clouds, Nature and life, must be the friends of those who would love the moors.
A. Mary F. Robinson (Emily Brontë)
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers, and yet must needs call forth sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter that we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
Hannah Winter was sixty all of a sudden, as women of sixty are. Just yesterday - or the day before, at most - she had been a bride of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wedding gown, very stiff and rich. And now here she was, all of a sudden, sixty. (...) This is the way it happened! She was rushing along Peacock Alley to meet her daughter Marcia. Anyone who knows Chicago knows that smoke-blackened pile, the Congress Hotel; and anyone who knows the Congress Hotel has walked down that glittering white marble crypt called Peacock Alley. It is neither so glittering nor so white nor, for that matter, so prone to preen itself as it was in the hotel's palmy '90s. But it still serves as a convenient short cut on a day when Chicago's lake wind makes Michigan Boulevard a hazard, and thus Hannah Winter was using it. She was to have met Marcia at the Michigan Boulevard entrance at two, sharp. And here it was 2.07. When Marcia said two, there she was at two, waiting, lips slightly compressed. (...) So then here it was 2.07, and Hannah Winter, rather panicky, was rushing along Peacock Alley, dodging loungers, and bell-boys, and traveling salesmen and visiting provincials and the inevitable red-faced delegates with satin badges. In her hurry and nervous apprehension she looked, as she scuttled down the narrow passage, very much like the Rabbit who was late for the Duchess's dinner. Her rubber-heeled oxfords were pounding down hard on the white marble pavement. Suddenly she saw coming swiftly toward her a woman who seemed strangely familiar - a well-dressed woman, harassed-looking, a tense frown between her eyes, and her eyes staring so that they protruded a little, as one who runs ahead of herself in her haste. Hannah had just time to note, in a flash, that the woman's smart hat was slightly askew and that, though she walked very fast, her trim ankles showed the inflexibility of age, when she saw that the woman was not going to get out of her way. Hannah Winter swerved quickly to avoid a collision. So did the other woman. Next instant Hannah Winter brought up with a crash against her own image in that long and tricky mirror which forms a broad full-length panel set in the marble wall at the north end of Peacock Alley. Passerby and the loungers on near-by red plush seats came running, but she was unhurt except for a forehead bump that remained black-and-blue for two weeks or more. The bump did not bother her, nor did the slightly amused concern of those who had come to her assistance. She stood there, her hat still askew, staring at this woman - this woman with her stiff ankles, her slightly protruding eyes, her nervous frown, her hat a little sideways - this stranger - this murderess who had just slain, ruthlessly and forever, a sallow, high-spirited girl of twenty in a wine-coloured silk wedding gown.
Edna Ferber (Gigolo)
Marfiza já não podia ver azul nenhum. Nem rosa, roxo, fúcsia. Nem laranja, vermelho, âmbar, dourado. Nem esmeralda, esverdeado, ciano, jade, cáqui. Nem escarlate, triássico, urucum, jambo, carmim, alizarina. Näo via mais quase nada além de branco e preto. Claro e escuro. Dia a dia de páginas de jornal. Escureceu-se.
Paulo Salvetti (Cara Marfiza,)
The world she lives in is not mine. Life is faster for her; time runs slower. Her eyes can follow the wingbeats of a bee as easily as ours follow the wingbeats of a bird. What is she seeing? I wonder, and my brain does backflips trying to imagine it, because I can’t. I have three different receptor-sensitivities in my eyes: red, green and blue. Hawks, like other birds, have four. This hawk can see colours I cannot, right into the ultraviolet spectrum. She can see polarised light, too, watch thermals of warm air rise, roil, and spill into clouds, and trace, too, the magnetic lines of force that stretch across the earth. The light falling into her deep black pupils is registered with such frightening precision that she can see with fierce clarity things I can’t possibly resolve from the generalised blur. The claws on the toes of the house martins overhead. The veins on the wings of the white butterfly hunting its wavering course over the mustards at the end of the garden. I’m standing there, my sorry human eyes overwhelmed by light and detail, while the hawk watches everything with the greedy intensity of a child filling in a colouring book, scribbling joyously, blocking in colour, making the pages its own. And all I can think is, I want to go back inside.
Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
Images of white, semi clad women in colour would be very conspicuous in an otherwise unintelligible newspaper to Nanaki. It was somewhat incongruous to see little pictures, sourced from foreign news agencies, of white women in bikinis, sun tanning on a beach in Zakynthos or a procession of revellers in Sao Paulo complete with exotic costume regalia: trailing pheasant feathers for tails, operatic masks tantalisingly revealing pouty red lips, breasts protruding out of sequinned two pieces, women’s toned derrieres jutting out of glitzy g-strings vibrating animalistically to the samba, shapely legs fitting snugly into gold stilettos. Others showed women walking down the ramp in skimpy lingerie at a Missoni fashion show in Milan. At times these sights would intrigue Nanaki. For her, Urdu was unintelligible, just black marks on paper. Who reads this newspaper? And who are these pictures for? Whose reality is this?
Sakoon Singh (In The Land of The Lovers)
Mennonites were an Anabaptist denomination born out of the Protestant Reformation in the German- and Dutch-speaking areas of Central Europe. During the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, orthodox authorities lethally persecuted the Mennonites. The Mennonites did not intend to leave behind one site of oppression to build another in America. Mennonites therefore circulated an antislavery petition on April 18, 1688. “There is a saying, that we shall doe to all men like as we will be done ourselves; making no difference of what generation, descent or colour they are,” they wrote. “In Europe there are many oppressed” for their religion, and “here those are oppressed” for their “black colour.” Both oppressions were wrong. Actually, as an oppressor, America “surpass[ed] Holland and Germany.” Africans had the “right to fight for their freedom.” The 1688 Germantown Petition Against Slavery was the inaugural antiracist tract among European settlers in colonial America. Beginning with this piece, the Golden Rule would forever inspire the cause of White antiracists. Antiracists of all races—whether out of altruism or intelligent self-interest—would always recognize that preserving racial hierarchy simultaneously preserves ethnic, gender, class, sexual, age, and religious hierarchies. Human hierarchies of any kind, they understood, would do little more than oppress all of humanity.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Something else: it always struck me as troubling that the words in books are printed in black and white, when life is anything but. The binary colour of words on a page give the sense of simplicity and clarity. But life doesn't work like that.
Marcus Sedgwick (The Monsters We Deserve)
Is the movie of your LIFE how you intended it to be? Do you feel you’re the star of your own movie, or is someone else – a celebrity, royalty, a privileged toff, a super rich person – always in the main shot? Are you an out-of-focus blur in the background? How close does your movie stick to the original script you intended for your life? If it’s nowhere near, isn’t it time to change the script or change your life? Become the star of your own movie, transform it into colour rather than the dull black and white it is now. Ask yourself – if the movie of your life was in a cinema, would you watch it? Would you want other people to see it? Would they walk out because it’s so boring? Even worse, would you walk out too and demand a refund?
Adam Weishaupt (Wolf or Dog?)
I think we placate ourselves with the fallacy of meritocracy by insisting that we just don't see race. This makes us feel progressive. But this claim to not see race is tantamount to compulsory assimilation. My blackness has been politicised against my will, but I don't want it wilfully ignored in an effort to instil some sort of precarious, false harmony. And, though many placate themselves with the colour-blindness lie the aforementioned drastic differences in life chances along race lines show that while it might be being preached by our institutions, it's not being practised.
Reni Eddo-Lodge (Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race)
The same year that the Civil War ended, the two states among those with the largest percentage of Black people – Mississippi, with 54 percent in the 1870 census, and South Carolina, with 59 percent – passed what came to be known as “Black codes,” a repressive slate of laws to “regulate the Domestic Relations of Persons of Colour.” These laws forced freedmen into contractual labor agreements, which looked eerily similar to slavery, with white farmers. The South Carolina act even stipulated that “all persons of color who make contracts for service or labor, shall be known as servants, and those with whom they contract, shall be known as masters.” Freedmen without “some lawful and respectable employment” could be charged with vagrancy. They literally made Black unemployment a crime for Black people.
Charles M. Blow (The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto)
Most of the Times, Life shows us how difficult this journey is, only at Times when the sun clears we see the Sunshine, but the rain often washes away the clouds and both the clouds and the rain dampen our weary hearts, only to let us see a glimpse of a distant rainbow, once in a while. I guess it's always about the Time, the guardian of this Journey that we have to wait and persevere, that we have to remain resilient in the resolve to walk ahead, to find some way to hold on to the voyage, to not let the ship sink in the hollows of a mirage, to just live. And that is what Life is about, perhaps to know that Gloom and Melancholy is a distinct part of our journey, and actually something that occupies the most part of our journey, and it doesn't have to be a deep Grief it can simply be the mundane sorrow of carrying on this existence knowing that Life is just a short frame holding dark colours as much as the bright ones, sometimes even more of those blackness only to bring out the whites a little bit more. And while all of this goes on, somewhere our heart would know that there is One who is beyond this frame of Life and the space of Time and Cosmos; who is always holding your hand giving you the breath to walk ahead. May be He doesn't take away the blackness but throughout stays firm in your path, holding your shadow and your soul ever so gently to make you become the Light that you could only possibly be by embracing all of your Soul's journey. He doesn't perhaps change the potholes in your way, but He does ensure that even when you tumble you don't end up falling and if you do fall, He makes sure that you rise all over again from the flames of Life's fire with the fury of a phoenix. He doesn't end your suffering but lets you see that throughout your pain He is partaking in an even greater portion of it, alongside you. Simple, He doesn't let you see that He is God, because He shares your Life as a companion, walking beside you hand in hand, to make you live all that your soul had contracted before this journey began and even when He is beyond Time, He lets Time be your friend in a journey that is bound in human flesh and guarded by the tick-tock of that guardian. So when I asked my Soul, what is that troubles me the most, I heard my Soul, Smile in a safe knowledge, when I have Him, need I let my troubles concern me? My heart knew, He has already tucked my mind in the tranquil world of Life's paint-brush and a rainbow is just around the corner. A distant yet distinct rainbow. A rainbow that is churned in Love, the love that only He can provide, the Love that is always lurking on the edges of those clouds and rain, in the silhouette of a rainbow forever promised on the other side of a thunderstorm. Love & Light, always - Debatrayee
Debatrayee Banerjee
produced by the white and the marabou in the proportion of 88 to 40, or by the white and the sacatra, in the proportion of 72 to 56 and so on all through the 128 varieties. But the sang-mělé with 127 white parts and 1 black part was still a man of colour.
C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution)
What the universe actually does is a tiny proportion of all the things it could have done instead. For instance, suppose that a car park has one hundred parking slots, and that cars are either red, blue, green, white, or black. When the car park is full, how many different patterns of colour are there? Ignore the make of car, ignore how well or badly it is parked; focus solely on the pattern of colours. Mathematicians call this kind of question ‘combinatorics’, and they have devised all sorts of clever ways to find answers. Roughly speaking, combinatorics is the art of counting things without actually counting them. Many years ago a mathematical acquaintance of ours came across a university administrator counting light bulbs in the roof of a lecture hall. The lights were arranged in a perfect rectangular grid, 10 by 20. The administrator was staring at the ceiling, going ‘49, 50, 51 …’ ‘Two hundred,’ said the mathematician. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘Well, it’s a 10 by 20 grid, and 10 times 20 is 200.’ ‘No, no,’ replied the administrator. ‘I want the exact number.’*2 Back
Terry Pratchett (The Globe: The Science of Discworld II (Science of Discworld, #2))
When I look in the mirror before I go to bed at night, I sometimes do think I look very pretty. I like my skin, because it's so smooth and white. And my eyes seem large and grey and mysterious, and I don't believe there can be a film star in the world with such long, black lashes.[***]Still, it's a shame if someone's so often at her prettiest when she's alone. Or perhaps I'm only imagining it. At any rate, when I'm with Gerti I feel small and pale and peaky. Even my hair doesn't shine. It's a kind of dull blonde colour.
Irmgard Keun (Nach Mitternacht)
The way yoga has been stolen is not a unique example of the way money and capital blind us from our social responsibility, but it's one of the most glaringly obvious cases. .... As if yoga was for white women only. This claim that whiteness has enforced, the claim all white people always seem to have to the other, always centring themselves in every narrative, is a very bid problem that needs to be addressed and unlearned. This has to be included in the necessary evolution of yoga. If white people spent more time humanising themselves, maybe they could see non-white people with more depth and complexity a well. This means not treating us like we're the other, unconsciously objectifying our difference, only to expect sympathy of the very definitions that were created by white people. All black, indigenous, and other people of colour deserve your respect and humanity, not your sympathy. If you're a white person who profits off of yoga, what we need now is your action, your commitment, find trusted organisations and give at least a quarter of what you make on work in India.
Fariha Róisín (Who Is Wellness For?: An Examination of Wellness Culture and Who It Leaves Behind)
Dogs are colour-blind. So, the next time you buy your dog a brightly coloured toy, stick to black and white.
Bill O'Neill (The Big Book of Random Facts Volume 8: 1000 Interesting Facts And Trivia (Interesting Trivia and Funny Facts))
he knocked him over. The slave picked himself up without any sign of resentment, and resumed. The same hand which had knocked over the slave closed on an enormous fee, and the barber took his exit with the same insolence and elegance as before. This was the type for whom race prejudice was more important than even the possession of slaves, of which they held few. The distinction between a white man and a man of colour was for them fundamental. It was their all. In defence of it they would bring down the whole of their world.
C.L.R. James (The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution)
When I rebelled, even here in the ‘enlightened’ twenty-first century, I was lumbered with with the feeling that I was rebelling on the behalf on an entire people, and when I refrained from rebelling it was to challenge the opinion that I was proof of a black problem; acts of resistance considered fair game when enacted by white people assume a dangerous radical hue in the eyes of Western society when carried out by blacks. In essence, I wasn’t comfortable enough in my own skin in this Antifa stuff, partly because I felt the colour of that skin carried its own surplus surreality in the surroundings i grew up in; I could be wearing an Oxford shirt and chinos and driving a Toyota Prius, and still be enough of an outsider.
Johny Pitts
If this was death, he wasn’t enjoying it. Pain played a dark melody through his soul, and he could barely think. Black and red was all he saw and felt, flashes of white joining the sharper bites of the ever-present agony. Drumbeats pounded to the rhythm of colour, a battle song to instil deep fear and even deeper trauma. His mind reeled, seeming to sink for minutes at a time, before resurfacing in flames. He supposed it might have been interesting from an observer’s point of view. But when pain and darkness was your very being, all you really wanted was for it to end.
Steven Raaymakers (A Canticle of Two Souls (Aria of Steel, #1))
Neither is there black nor white in human creation. This colours only show diversity of forms of arts.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Neither is there black nor white in human creation. These colours represent diversity of arts.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Black is colourful as white is a colour that is beautiful.
Lailah Gifty Akita
The window glass was cold as Jude touched his nose to its surface. He looked north over the centre of Tirana and drank in the thrill of the panorama. From a restaurant in the Sky Tower he could see down over the lush, green square of land criss-crossed with paths that was Rinia Park. He had arranged to meet Edona there at 3pm. To his left the apartment blocks clustered densely away to the horizon in colours of mustard, olive and denim blue. Ahead he could make out the rouge and yellow government ministry buildings on the edge of Skanderbeu Square, and the white needle of the Et’hem Bey Mosque. His eyes turned to the east past the black glass panelled Twin Towers and concrete Pyramid to the traffic flowing up the Gjergj Fishta Boulevard, where the harsh mid-day sunlight was glinting off car roofs and windscreens. Beyond that, through a haze of heat and light smog, Mount Dajti rose up to the blue, utterly cloudless sky. (From 'The Silencer').
Paul Alkazraji (The Silencer)
Half of the men sing the first verse and the others the second, repeating both several times in quick tempo until the bucket appears over the rim of the well; then the women take over and pour the water into leathern troughs. Scores of camels press forward, bellowing and snorting, quivering with excitement, crowding around the troughs, not visibly pacified by the men's soothing calls, Hu-oih ... huu-oih! One and another pushes its long, flexible neck forward, between or over its companions, so as to still its thirst as quickly as possible; there is a rocking and pushing, a swaying and thronging of light-brown and dark-brown, yellow-white and black-brown and honey-coloured bodies, and the sharp, acrid smell of animal sweat and urine fills the air. In the meantime, the bucket has been filled again, and the herdsmen draw it up to the quick accompaniment of another couplet:
Muhammad Asad (The Road To Mecca)
When colours are surrounded by black they glow out of the dark and that gives the colours a special importance. If you put colours on white, in a white frame or in white surroundings, then they appear muddy. White dulls the colours.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
That was how it came to pass that the humdrum regulars at a neighbourhood bar on First Avenue were bemused that night by the sudden invasion of an exotic couple - foreigners from Fifth or Park. The woman in a long black velvet coat with lapels of flame-coloured silk. The man with a top hat and one of those white scarves just like something in the movies. More polite than Fifth and Park, First Avenue did not stare or whisper. First is nothing if not tolerant. It will even tolerate the undeserving rich if they are quiet and well-behaved.
Helen McCloy
The window glass was cold as Jude touched his nose to its surface. He looked north over the centre of Tirana and drank in the thrill of the panorama. From a restaurant in the Sky Tower he could see down over the lush, green square of land criss-crossed with paths that was Rinia Park. He had arranged to meet Edona there at 3pm. To his left the apartment blocks clustered densely away to the horizon in colours of mustard, olive and denim blue. Ahead he could make out the rouge and yellow government ministry buildings on the edge of Skanderbeu Square, and the white needle of the Et’hem Bey Mosque. His eyes turned to the east past the black glass panelled Twin Towers and concrete Pyramid to the traffic flowing up the Gjergj Fishta Boulevard, where the harsh mid-day sunlight was glinting off car roofs and windscreens. Beyond that, through a haze of heat and light smog, Mount Dajti rose up to the blue, utterly cloudless sky. (From 'The Silencer').
Paul Alkazraji (The Silencer)
Baháʼí writings describe racism as 'an outrageous violation of the dignity of human beings'. 'Numerous points of partnership and agreement exist between the two races [i.e. black and white]; whereas the one point of distinction is that of colour. Shall this, the least of all distinctions be allowed to separate you as races and individuals?' ('Abdu'l Bahá) 'Know ye not why We created you all from the same dust? That no one should exalt himself over the other. Ponder at all times in your hearts how ye were created. Since We have created you all from one same substance it is incumbent on you to be even as one soul, to walk with the same feet, eat with the same mouth and dwell in the same land...' (Baháʼu'lláh)
John Danesh (The Baha'i Faith in Words and Images)