Palette Of Life Quotes

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Victor Faust did much more than help me escape a life of abuse and servitude. He changed me. He changed the landscape of my dreams, the dreams I had every day about living ordinarily and free and on my own. He changed the colors on the palette from primary to rainbow—as dark as the colors of that rainbow may be.

Somewhere, things must be beautiful and vivid. Somewhere else, life has to be beautiful and vivid and rich. Not like this muted palette -a pale blue bedroom, washed out sunny sky, dull green yellow brown of the fields. Here, I know ever twist of every road, every blade of grass, every face in this town, and I am suffocating.

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning.

Lifes like a painters palette, just when you've got everything worked out the colours change

If the colour of life turns grey turn the palette the other way

Those who cannot perceive are no better than those who cannot see...Those who cannot empathize are no better than those who cannot perceive...

The heated debates about Homo sapiens’ ‘natural way of life’ miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

Don't ask me my opinions on art, because I don't have any. Aesthetic concerns have played a relatively minor role in my life, and I have to smile when a critic talks, for example, of my "palette". I find it impossible to spend hours in galleries analyzing and gesticulating.

Black is the absence of all color. White is the presence of all colors. I suppose life must be one or the other. On the whole, though, I think I would prefer color to its absence. But then black does add depth and texture to color. Perhaps certain shades of gray are necessary to a complete palette. Even unrelieved black. Ah, a deep philosophical question. Is black necessary to life, even a happy life? Could we ever be happy if we did not at least occasionally experience misery?

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued.

Many people have the confused idea that peace will happen when all the colors in the palette are the same. The actuality of peace is accepting each color’s differences and seeing the beauty each possesses.

Failure is a great teacher; but never insist on hiring one for yourself. Learn vicariously from others' teachers.

How can one fall in love? For me, love can only be uplifting...

Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn’t been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.

When once more alone, I reviewed the information I had got; looked into my heart, examined its thoughts and feelings, and endeavoured to bring back with a strict hand such as had been straying through imagination's boundless and trackless waste, into the safe fold of common sense. Arraigned to my own bar, Memory having given her evidence of the hopes, wishes, sentiments I had been cherishing since last night--of the general state of mind in which I had indulged for nearly a fortnight past; Reason having come forward and told, in her quiet way a plain, unvarnished tale, showing how I had rejected the real, and rapidly devoured the ideal--I pronounced judgement to this effect-- That a greater fool than Jane Eyre had never breathed the breath of life; that a more fantastic idiot had never surfeited herself on sweet lies, and swallowed poison as if it were nectar. "You," I said, "a favourite with Mr. Rochester? You're gifted with the power of pleasing him? You're of importance to him in any way? Go!--your folly sickens me. And you have derived pleasure from occasional tokens of preference--equivocal tokens shown by a gentleman of family and a man of the world to dependent and novice. How dared you? Poor stupid dupe! Could not even self-interest make you wiser? You repeated to yourself this morning the brief scene of last night? Cover your face and be ashamed! He said something in praise of your eyes, did he? Blind puppy! Open their bleared lids and look on your own accursed senselessness! It does no good to no woman to be flattered by her superior, who cannot possibly intend to marry her; and it is madness in all women to let a secret love kindle within them, which, if unreturned and unknown, must devour the life that feeds it; and if discovered and responded to, must lead into miry wilds whence there is no extrication. "Listen, then, Jane Eyre, to your sentence: tomorrow, place the glass before you, and draw in chalk your own pictures, faithfully, without softening on defect; omit no harsh line, smooth away no displeasing irregularity; write under it, 'Portrait of a Governess, disconnected, poor, and plain.' "Afterwards, take a piece of smooth ivory--you have one prepared in your drawing-box: take your palette, mix your freshest, finest, clearest tints; choose your most delicate camel-hair pencils; delineate carefully the loveliest face you can imageine; paint it in your softest shades and sweetest lines, according to the description given by Mrs. Fairfax of Blanche Ingram; remember the raven ringlets, the oriental eye--What! you revert to Mr. Rochester as a model! Order! No snivel!--no sentiment!--no regret! I will endure only sense and resolution... "Whenever, in the future, you should chance to fancy Mr. Rochester thinks well of you, take out these two pictures and compare them--say, "Mr. Rochester might probably win that noble lady's love, if he chose to strive for it; is it likely he would waste a serious thought on this indignent and insignifican plebian?" "I'll do it," I resolved; and having framed this determination, I grew calm, and fell asleep.

She could have wept. It was bad, it was bad, it was infinitely bad! She could have done it differently of course; the colour could have been thinned and faded; the shapes etherealised; that was how Paunceforte would have seen it. But then she did not see it like that. She saw the colour burning on a framework of steel; the light of a butterfly’s wing lying upon the arches of a cathedral. Of all that only a few random marks scrawled upon the canvas remained. And it would never be seen; never be hung even, and there was Mr Tansley whispering in her ear, “Women can’t paint, women can’t write ...” She now remembered what she had been going to say about Mrs Ramsay. She did not know how she would have put it; but it would have been something critical. She had been annoyed the other night by some highhandedness. Looking along the level of Mr Bankes’s glance at her, she thought that no woman could worship another woman in the way he worshipped; they could only seek shelter under the shade which Mr Bankes extended over them both. Looking along his beam she added to it her different ray, thinking that she was unquestionably the loveliest of people (bowed over her book); the best perhaps; but also, different too from the perfect shape which one saw there. But why different, and how different? she asked herself, scraping her palette of all those mounds of blue and green which seemed to her like clods with no life in them now, yet she vowed, she would inspire them, force them to move, flow, do her bidding tomorrow. How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably? She was like a bird for speed, an arrow for directness. She was willful; she was commanding (of course, Lily reminded herself, I am thinking of her relations with women, and I am much younger, an insignificant person, living off the Brompton Road). She opened bedroom windows. She shut doors. (So she tried to start the tune of Mrs Ramsay in her head.) Arriving late at night, with a light tap on one’s bedroom door, wrapped in an old fur coat (for the setting of her beauty was always that—hasty, but apt), she would enact again whatever it might be—Charles Tansley losing his umbrella; Mr Carmichael snuffling and sniffing; Mr Bankes saying, “The vegetable salts are lost.” All this she would adroitly shape; even maliciously twist; and, moving over to the window, in pretence that she must go,—it was dawn, she could see the sun rising,—half turn back, more intimately, but still always laughing, insist that she must, Minta must, they all must marry, since in the whole world whatever laurels might be tossed to her (but Mrs Ramsay cared not a fig for her painting), or triumphs won by her (probably Mrs Ramsay had had her share of those), and here she saddened, darkened, and came back to her chair, there could be no disputing this: an unmarried woman (she lightly took her hand for a moment), an unmarried woman has missed the best of life. The house seemed full of children sleeping and Mrs Ramsay listening; shaded lights and regular breathing.

I've always fixated on the things I want in my life--paint palettes and sumptuous fabrics and star-flecked skies and dancing on my tiptoes and the smell of jasmine. But I usually imagine myself alone or falling in love with all kinds of different people. These days, I've started to daydream of the permanent relationships I want to have. Friends who stay in my life forever. People who I trust to love me even if I'm wobbling--the way I trust Jonah. And if that's what I want, then I have scorched Earth to till and replant. I have a Japanese maple seedling, and I have seen how beautiful a rooted life can be. But I have miles to go before I decide where to plant us.

They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew. I was looking at him across my office desk at about four-thirty when the phone rang and I heard a cool, supercilious voice that sounded as if it thought it was pretty good. It said drawlingly, after I had answered: “You are Philip Marlowe, a private detective?

Without the full spectrum of emotions, we are not whole human beings. We are instead like the artist whose palette only has room for light and cheery colors. Our self-expression is boring and superficial like discount store paintings, unconvincingly ethereal in their insipid feathery pastels. The “negative” emotions add dark colors to an artist’s palette. They open up an infinite range of color, hue, and tone. Without black on the palette there are no rich colors, no depths, no contrasts, no intricacies. Without the dark colors it is impossible to capture the infinitely diverse themes and landscapes of life.

In a sense, one could speak of the secret life of colour. Despite its outward beckoning, like true beauty, colour is immensely hesitant in giving away its secrets. Painters learn to respect the hesitancy of colour and endeavour to refine their skill to become worthy of its revelations. A painter learns the language of colour slowly. As with any language, you struggle for a long time outside the language. There is a willed deliberateness to how you sequence the strange words to make a sentence.Then one day the language lets you in to where the words dance to your thoughts with ease and fluency. Perhaps for the painter there is a day when colour lets him in, when his palette sings with synergy and delight.

We all have a grain of god in us. We do get opportunities to realize it, when moments in life demand selfless deeds of compassion from us. But we often squander them.

When you are in a fix, often the fix is in you.

Mother Nature knows how to wield an artists palette.

They have bled together in her mind, those stories, become less a picture than a palette, a tone. Perhaps the city was less splendid. Perhaps there were shadows mixed in with the light.

In a hundred and fifty years, Haussman will set his mark upon the city, raise a uniform facade and paint the buildings in the same pale palette, creating a testament to art, and evenness, and beauty.

Every parent is an artist, for the bared canvas of a newborn’s soul begs for the artist’s touch. And because this is so, a parent must prepare the palette with the utmost care, choose the brushes with poised caution, and mindfully attend to every brushstroke regardless of how slight. And such caution is utterly imperative for the emerging rendering will be both a legacy borne of the parent, and a life lived by the child.

things were created by God and for God, no exceptions. Every note of music. Every color on the palette. Every flavor that tingles the taste buds. Arnold Summerfield, the German physicist and pianist, observed that a single hydrogen atom, which emits one hundred frequencies, is more musical than a grand piano, which only emits eighty-eight frequencies. Every single atom is a unique expression of God’s creative genius. And that means every atom is a unique expression of worship. According to composer Leonard Bernstein, the best translation of Genesis 1:3 and several other verses in Genesis 1 is not “and God said.” He believed a better translation is “and God sang.” The Almighty sang every atom into existence, and every atom echoes that original melody sung in three-part harmony by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Did you know that the electron shell of the carbon atom produces the same harmonic scale as the Gregorian chant? Or that whale songs can travel thousands of miles underwater? Or that meadowlarks have a range of three hundred notes? But the songs we can hear audibly are only one instrument in the symphony orchestra called creation. Research in the field of bioacoustics has revealed that we are surrounded by millions of ultrasonic songs. Supersensitive sound instruments have discovered that even earthworms make faint staccato sounds! Lewis Thomas put it this way: “If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants [singing] of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani [drumming] of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges [flies] hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.” Someday the sound will lift us off our feet. Glorified eardrums will reveal millions of songs previously inaudible to the human ear.

I am a palette of emotions; I remember how I have cov-eted to be free from the school rules. I look around to see people casually dressed up and walking with an aim maybe to make a better career or just add fame of DU degree like me. The campus is buzzing with freshman and activity. I just hope, these corridors, hallways, and passages don’t see me trip-ping and falling any day. I feel more comfortable standing in between the crowd of people moving. Like nobody is paying any heed. You can be yourself without feeling awkward about anything.

There is no chef without a homeland. To be a chef today is to center yourself in the traditions of your roots and use them to define your art and speak to any human being about who you are; your plate is your flag. Many of our most pungent memories are carried through food, just as connections to our ancestors are reaffirmed by cooking the dishes handed down to us. For some chefs, this bond is as easy as pointing to a Tuscan village or a Korean neighborhood, while others adopt the foods of culinary kinfolk outside their own background and use them to express their personal identity. Many take for granted their fast and easy connections to a food narrative that grounds them in a tradition, gives them a broad palette to explore, and affords them a genuine taste of eudaemonia, all of which is the holistic feeling of flourishing in life; and of course it is often blissfully apolitical.

Addie's father told her so many stories of Paris. Made it sound like a place of glamour and gold, rich with magic and dreams waiting to be uncovered. Now she wonders if he ever saw it, or if the city was nothing but a name, an easy backdrop for princes and knights, adventures and queens. They have bled together in her mind, those stories, become less a picture than a palette, a tone. Perhaps the city was less splendid. Perhaps there were shadows mixed in with the light.

had found the only hippie-opera-singer-dream-cabin-in-the-woods in Westchester! It was perfection, and I knew exactly what to do to bring it to life. I took it on like I was an interior designer on one of those makeover shows. I picked out and paid for every piece of brand-new furniture, all the knickknacks and accouterments. I chose every detail, from light fixtures to paint colors, all in “Pat’s palette.” I hung wooden flower boxes outside and filled them with romantic wildflowers. I got photo prints made of her Irish family members and Irish crests, had them mounted and framed, and hung them ascending the wall along the staircase.

I can take one individual note out of the music I am trying to write at the moment, and ti could belong anywhere. Yet where it sits, where I have placed it, it follows what came before and leads to what comes after. Without it the whole would not be as it is. As the composer I must know each individual note in order to make the whole. Like the colors on an artist's palette, on their own the notes are absolute, yet when they are placed in a particular work, their individuality becomes one with the whole. They have to be chosen for what they are - red, yellow, blue - but with the effect of their combined potential in mind. It is necessary to know the parts in order to make up the whole. It applies to music, to art, and to life itself, I think. When you listen to the finished composition, or when you go about living your life, the individual components join to make a whole that can so easily be taken for granted. But it is not until you become aware of the parts that you can begin to understand the miracle. It took me almost a lifetime to start searching for the sounds, the notes that make my life's music. And it required a sacrifice so enormous that it did away with all that had made my life meaningful. But in the total silence that came afterward, I finally heard a first single note, and others slowly followed. (5)

What’s white people? I’m blind. Never seen the color white in my life. Or the color black, blue, or gray for that matter. To a blind man, color means nothing. My ma used to tell me that the world is like a glorious set of watercolor paints laid out in a hand crafted palette. Sure wish I could see what that is. She made is sound special. The only things I can see are bad people, good people, and those in between. The bad ones you can easily avoid, but those in between people are the worst because you never know when they’ll help you up and when they’ll kick you in the teeth. So ask me instead if I hate people, and I will tell you that some are deserving of hate and others not.

He did not know how much time passed. He got up, ripped the canvas off the frame, threw it into a corner, and put on a new one. He mixed some paints, sat down, and began work. One starts with a hopeless struggle to follow nature, and everything goes wrong; one ends by calmly creating from one’s palette, and nature agrees with it and follows. On croit que j’imagine—ce n’est pas vrai—je me souviens. It was just as Pietersen had told him in Brussels; he had been too close to his models. He had not been able to get a perspective. He had been pouring himself into the mould of nature; now he poured nature into the mould of himself. He painted the whole thing in the colour of a good, dusty, unpeeled potato. There was the dirty, linen table cloth, the smoky wall, the lamp hanging down from the rough rafters, Stien serving her father with steamed potatoes, the mother pouring the black coffee, the brother lifting a cup to his lips, and on all their faces the calm, patient acceptance of the eternal order of things. The sun rose and a bit of light peered into the storeroom window. Vincent got up from his stool. He felt perfectly calm and peaceful. The twelve days’ excitement was gone. He looked at his work. It reeked of bacon, smoke, and potato steam. He smiled. He had painted his Angelus. He had captured that which does not pass in that which passes. The Brabant peasant would never die.

Have you ever just laid down on the grass and watch as the day slowly transitions to evening? The sky flows through hues of orange and slowly fades to greys, the incredible palette of dusk. This is where the magic begins to happen. First the planets reveal themselves as bright pinpoints of light against the bleak canvas, and for a few moments they are the only thing you can focus on - they’re so bright that they draw away from anything else. When you stare at only one, when there is so much distance between it and anything else, it almost seems to be dancing back and forth in space, playing mind tricks on you. However, as you emerge from its hypnotic trance, you begin to see the less significant stars awaken from what seems like nowhere. They too earn your attention, but in a different way. You can’t look at them directly because otherwise you won’t see their beauty. You have to glance at them from the side, from the corner of your eye to really see them in their fullness. The sky is not yet completely in darkness and the universe is already showing off. Distant stars even further light years away and planets orbiting from afar being to emerge and before you know it you almost don’t know where to look, there are little grains of sand lighting up the sky from everywhere. This happens every night - a spectacular natural light show but so many people miss it. It’s sad to think that, but it makes viewing it that much more special when you get to experience it. Just you and the universe, watching itself through your own very eyes.

In essence we are pure desire. That desire is an expression of a moment and that moment becomes a series of moments we call life. Suspended on the hands of an evanescent ticking. Pending on the beat of a vein woven drum. Fragile and fleeting. Ever mysterious and expanding. My outer life was full. My inner life was like rampant Boston ivy and aspects of my soul were more akin to cities than archetypes. Deluged with words and pulses, in poetry I am but the result of all those who came before me. I represent more than I am able to comprehend. My expression is the result of all those who slain me and all those who heal me. Thank you differently and the same, for the hues of my emotional palette only deepened and multiplied like the cells of some thousand galaxies. Pent, it was time for my expression to vent.

And what of all these spices? They're worth a pretty fortune." She waves a juddering arm across the table, at the tins and glass jars and earthenware pots. All at once a shaft of thin northern light swoops over them, jolting them into luminous life: bubbled glass jars of briny green peppercorns, salted capers, gleaming vanilla pods, rusted cinnamon sticks, all leaping and glinting. The sudden startling beauty of it, the palette of hues--ocher, terra-cotta, shades of earth and sand and grass---the pale trembling light. All thoughts of running a boardinghouse vanish. I reach for a jar, lift its cork lid. The scent of bark, earth, roots, sky. And for a second I am somewhere else. "The mysterious scent of a secret kingdom," I murmur. The jar contains little pellets, brown, spherical, unexotic. How marvelous that something so plain can have such an enthralling perfume, I think. "Oh, Miss Eliza. Always the poetess! It's only allspice." Cook gives a wan smile and gestures at the ceiling, where long bunches of herbs hang from a rack. Rosemary, tansy, sage, nettles, woodruff. "And what of these? All summer I was collecting these and they still ain't properly dry." "May I lower it?" Not waiting for an answer I wind down the rack until the drying herbs are directly in front of me---a farmyard sweetness, a woody sappy scent, the smell of bruised apples and ripe earth and crushed ferns.

The very successes of the megamachine re-enforced dangerous potentialities that had hitherto been kept in check by sheer human weakness. The inherent infirmity of this whole power system lies exposed in the fact that kings, exalted above all other men, were constantly cozened, flattered, and fed with misinformation-zealously protected from any disturbing counterbalancing 'feedback.' So kings never learned from either their own experience or from history the fact that unqualified power is inimical to life: that their methods were self-defeating, their military victories were ephemeral, and their exalted claims were fraudulent and absurd. From the end of the first great Age of the Builders in Egypt, that of the Sixth Dynasty Pharaoh, Pepe I, comes corroborative evidence of this pervasive irrationality, all the more telling because it issues from the relatively orderly and unbedevilled Egyptians: The army returned in safety After it had hacked up the land of the Sand Dwellers ...After it had thrown down its enclosures... After it had cut down its fig trees and vines... After it had cast fire into all its dwellings... After it had killed troops in it by many ten-thousand. That sums up the course of Empire everywhere: the same boastful words, the same vicious acts, the same sordid results, from the earliest Egyptian palette to the latest American newspaper with its reports, at the moment I write, of the mass atrocities coldbloodedly perpetrated with the aid of napalm bombs and defoliating poisons, by the military forces of the United States on the helpless peasant populations of Vietnam: an innocent people, uprooted, terrorized, poisoned and roasted alive in a futile attempt to make the power fantasies of the American military-industrial-scientific elite 'credible.

Overall look: Soft and delicate   Hair: Most often blonde or golden grey   Skintone: Light, ivory to soft beige, peachy tones. Very little contrast between hair and skin   Eyes: Blue, blue-green, aqua, light green IF you are a Light Spring you should avoid dark and dusty colors, which would make you look pale, tired and even pathetic. Spring women who need to look strong, for example chairing a meeting, can do so by wearing mid-tone grey or light navy, not deeper shades. If you are a Light Spring and you wear too much contrast, say a light blouse and dark jacket, or a dress with lots of bold colors against a white background, you ‘disappear’ because our eye is drawn to the colors you are wearing. See your Light Spring palette opposite. Your neutrals can be worn singly or mixed with others in a print or weave. The ivory, camel and blue-greys are good investment shades that will work with any others in your palette. Your best pinks will be warm—see the peaches, corals and apricots—but also rose pink. Never go as far as fuchsia, which is too strong and would drain all the life from your skin. Periwinkle blue toned with a light blue blouse is a smart, striking alternative to navy and white for work. Why wear black in the evening when you will sparkle in violet (also, warm pink and emerald turquoise will turn heads)? For leisure wear, team camel with clear bright red or khaki with salmon.   Make-Up Tips Foundation: Ivory, porcelain Lipstick: Peach, salmon, coral, clear red Blush: Salmon, peach Eyeshadow for blue eyes: Highlighter Champagne, melon, apricot, soft pink Contour Soft grey, violet, teal blue, soft blues, cocoa Eyeshadow for blue-green and aqua eyes: Highlighter Apricot, lemon, champagne Contour Cocoa or honey brown, spruce or moss green, teal blue Eyeshadow for green eyes: Highlighter Pale aqua, apricot, champagne Contour Cocoa or honey brown, teal blue, violet, spruce.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction. A good night kiss. Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other - and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life and unpredictable adventure rather that a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composed music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things. Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest's customary climate is perfect for a writer. It's cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called "the bottom below the bottom," those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria's Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs. Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they're missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as they non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they're too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete's foot), the roof leaks, they can't stop coughing, and they feel as if they're slowly being digested by an oyster. Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. "Paradise!" you'll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

But…but that’s tragic! To go through life without color? Unable to appreciate art, or beauty?” He laughed. “Now, sweet-hold your brush before you paint me a martyr’s halo. It’s not as though I’m blind. I have a great appreciation for art, as I believe we’ve discussed. And as for beauty…I don’t need to know whether your eyes are blue or green or lavender to know that they’re uncommonly lovely.” “No one has lavender eyes.” “Don’t they?” His gaze caught hers and refused to let go. Leaning forward, he continued, “Did that tutor of yours ever tell you this? That your eyes are ringed with a perfect circle a few shades darker than the rest of the…don’t they call it the iris?” Sophia nodded. “The iris.” He propped his elbow on the table and leaned forward, his gaze searching hers intently. “An apt term it is, too. There are these lighter rays that fan out from the center, like petals. And when your pupils widen-like that, right there-your eyes are like two flowers just coming into bloom. Fresh. Innocent.” She bowed her head, mixing a touch of lead white into the sea-green paint on her palette. He leaned closer still, his voice a hypnotic whisper. “But when you take delight in teasing me, looking up through those thick lashes, so saucy and self-satisfied…” She gave him a sharp look. He snapped his fingers. “There! Just like that. Oh, sweet-then those eyes are like two opera dancers smiling from behind big, feathered fans. Coy. Beckoning.” Sophia felt a hot blush spreading from her bosom to her throat. He smiled and reclined in his chair. “I don’t need to know the color of your hair to see that it’s smooth and shiny as silk. I don’t need to know whether it’s yellow or orange or red to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering how it would feel brushing against my bare skin.” Opening his book to the marked page, he continued, “And don’t get me started on your lips, sweet. If I endeavored to discover the precise shade of red or pink or violet they are, I might never muster the concentration for anything else.” He turned a leaf of his book, then fell silent. Sophia stared at her canvas. Her pulse pounded in her ears. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, channeling down between her shoulder blades, and a hot, itchy longing pooled at the cleft of her legs. Drat him. He’d known she was taunting him with her stories. And now he sat there in an attitude of near-boredom, making love to her with his teasing, colorless words in a blatant attempt to fluster her. It was as though they were playing a game of cards, and he’d just raised the stakes. Sophia smiled. She always won at cards. “Balderdash,” she said calmly. He looked up at her, eyebrow raised. “No one has violet lips.” “Don’t they?” She laid aside her palette and crossed her arms on the table. “The slope of your nose is quite distinctive.” His lips quirked in a lopsided grin. “Really.” “Yes.” She leaned forward, allowing her bosom to spill against her stacked arms. His gaze dipped, but quickly returned to hers. “The way you have that little bump at the ridge…It’s proving quite a challenge.” “Is that so?” He bent his head and studied his book. Sophie stared at him, waiting one…two…three beats before he raised his hand to rub the bridge of his nose. Quite satisfactory progress, that. Definite beginnings of fluster.

Imagine your life as a painting and yourself as the artist. Every morning when you awaken, pick your color palette and paint the life of your dreams.

Perfecting is a journey...There is no destination called perfection.

People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multihued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.

See, I have this theory that humans are just living, breathing, talking forms of art, each crafted with a different technique and carved out of different materials. Each beautiful in their own way. And sure, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and totally subjective, and changes depending on your circumstance, yada-yada-yada… but most of the time, it’s pretty easy to classify people. Like, okay, you know those women who are gorgeous and never know it? Or the men who pass quietly through life, handsome and unnoticed, never begging for attention or crying out for recognition? Those are your watercolors. And the loud, vivacious, gorgeous-and-they-know-it creatures, with bright lipstick and closets full of bold colors and outfits they never wear twice? Acrylics. The graceful, elegant, aging beauties you pick out in the crowd, or across the cafe, the lines on their faces telling a story you just know you’d want to hear, with so many layers and smudges, twists and turns, you’re not even sure where they begin? Charcoals. Then, you’ve got the big-picture-beautiful people, with the collection of interesting features that together make a beautiful face. They’re your oil paintings — best from ten feet away and, at the end of the day, kind of funny looking if you lean closer and analyze all their elements separately. But I’m quickly learning that Chase Croft doesn’t fit any of my categories. He isn’t a brushstroke on canvas, or bumpy layers of paint on a palette, or imperfect lines scratched inside a sketchbook. His features aren’t just gorgeous as a collective — he’s one of those annoyingly attractive people whose every feature is equally stunning. He’s a sculpture.

It did not occur to me at that time to ask God to reveal his vision for my life. On my own, following my head rather than my heart, I chose the safe path.

Artists are not born out of love. It’s the absence of love that gives birth to this anguish, agony, resentment, fury and an hour-long conversation within the loneliness of an empty ribcage. It’s the quest for love, for recognition and then the set back leaving the artist aghast because none of that matters anymore. He has wandered way too far on this illicit lane of human psyche. You do not eat the forbidden apple and artists always do that, only to live a life cursed by their own romance with the sadness of a vain destination. It’s dangerous to be this close to an artist where you keep his name on the tip of your tongue, hold yellow in your fist, and stare at the bewildering starry night. There’s chaos, so much of it that you hear his screams in his letters to Theo, you see him in the cracks of the palette of dried water paint. There are a few things that we do not want to share with anyone. That's where the heart is.

The back door closed as Megan came around the house, and she saw Finn cross the yard and head into the toolshed again. Megan wheeled her bike over to the side wall and propped it up with the others. She paused for a moment, listening. There was no noise. Nothing. What was he doing in there? God, I really hope it doesn’t involve a stack of Playboys or something, Megan thought, grimacing. Still, even with that disgusting thought in her mind, she couldn’t help giving in to her curiosity. Besides, she was supposed to be immersing. Part of that was finding out what guys did when they were by themselves in a toolshed, right? Bracing herself, Megan walked over to the door and pulled it open. Finn whirled around, his eyes wide, and stared at her. He was wearing a blue T-shirt that read Good Boys Vote and it was dotted with fingerprints of purple paint. His hair was a little more mussed than usual. “Okay, life flashing before my eyes,” he said, letting out a breath. “You scared the crap outta me.” “Sorry,” Megan said. Something in her mind told her that she should just back out of the room, but she was too stunned to move. Finn was not, thank goodness, doing anything unsavory. He was holding a paint palette and a brush and standing in front of a canvas. Around him, behind him, on the floor, and leaning against the walls were dozens of other canvases, all in various stages of completion.

These trends culminate in the Narmer Palette. Its very form harks back to a time when wandering cattle herders lived a seminomadic existence, carrying everything they needed with them and using their own bodies as canvasses for their art. In such a society, face paint played a central role in the ritual life of the community, and cosmetic palettes were a favorite and prized possession. But by Narmer’s time, the palette had been transformed into a vehicle for proclaiming the omnipotence and divinity of the king. The

I get up and stare out at the place where I live. I’m right at the heart of Planet Normal. Its strangest resident maybe, but I don’t care about that. I like a place where dads go to work in the mornings and people grumble when the post is late. If Rattigan’s army of the undead is out there waiting for me, they’re well disguised. There are some clouds dotting the sky. Those high stately ones that look like ships sailing in from the west. There aren’t many of them, though, and the sun is already well into its stride. It’s going to be hot. Drift downstairs. Eat a nectarine straight from the fridge. Make tea. Eat something else, because we citizens of Planet Normal don’t get by on a single nectarine. I unlock my garden shed and open a window in there, because if it’s hot outside, the shed can get boiling. It’ll be too hot even with the window open, but I lock up all the same. I always do. I’d intended to shower and stuff, but I did all that last night and I’ve already let too much time drift by to do it all again now. Sharp means sharp, now, Griffiths. Apart from sniffing my wrists to make sure they don’t smell of the firing range, I do as little as I can. But I have to get dressed. That’s easy, normally. Select a bland, appropriate outfit from the array of bland, appropriate outfits I have in my wardrobe. I used to own almost nothing that wasn’t black, navy, tan, white, charcoal or a pink so muted that you might as well call it beige. I never thought those colours suited me particularly. I didn’t have an opinion on the subject. It was just a question of following the golden rule: observe what others do, then follow suit. A palette of muted classic colours seemed like the safest way to achieve the right effect. Since Kay turned fourteen or fifteen, however, she’s campaigned to get me to liven up my wardrobe. It’s still hardly vibrating with life. It still looks something like an exhibition of Next office wear, 2004‒10. All the same, I have options now that I wouldn’t have had a few years back. And today I’ll be seeing Dave Brydon. He’ll be seeing me. I want his eyes on me, and I want his eyes to be hungry ones, sexed up and passionate. I

Though I didn’t start out plotting a life for Meg, it happened as the writing and the storylines unfolded, much like life itself. I would place obstacles in Meg’s way and see how she handled them. Sometimes she overcame them with ease, other times with great difficulty.

She returned to the floor, and a tray appeared beside her with a sandwich, glass of milk, and some cubes of cantaloupe. She didn't know who brought it in, but she picked up a piece of the cantaloupe and examined it. The color matched some of the roses in the lady's garden, exactly what she needed for the flowers she'd drawn behind her butterfly. Yellow, white, and a dab of red- she combined them on the plate until a soft peach colored her palette. Walter thought she should grow up, like the lady wanted Oliver to do, but grown-ups didn't spend their nights dancing in gardens. Or painting. "I will stay a girl forever," she whispered, changing the lyrics from 'Peter Pan.' "And be banished if I don't." She began to paint her butterfly. "I'll never grow up," she chanted as she worked. It wasn't until the first rays of dawn spilled across her paper that she began to feel sleepy. Her floor was covered with pictures and papers, but where others might see a mess, she saw a new world. There were flowers and trees and butterflies she'd brought to life with her hands. And her heart. A lot of people thought she wasn't good at anything, but it wasn't true. She was good at making things.

As psychoanalysis has made so clear, human beings move through life dictated to by a mess of conscious and unconscious memories, acts and feelings. The language of art is a reflection of this: it’s one of slippages, ambiguities and contradictions that are communicated via images, which are, by their very nature, indeterminate.

Throughout her life Sofonisba enjoyed teaching and this small drawing could be read as a testament to the joy it gave her.

That’s how it works when your enemy, the devil, gets you alone, angry and vulnerable.” She drew her hand up to the middle of her chest and stared at him. Her brushes and palette knives lay unattended. Jesus responded to her confused look. “He’s ruthless. He doesn’t wait until you’re old enough to defend yourself. He gets at you as young as possible, whenever there’s an opening. He gets the biggest return on his investment that way. The things that sink deep into your soul when you’re so young will sprout and develop a life of their own.

Throughout her life, Henriette Wyeth has to decide: Love or work. Fidelity or freedom. Beauty or snark. East or west. Her father’s daughter or her husband’s wife. Her children’s mother or her artist’s heart—her palette or her paint, her feathers or her shells.

Anderson’s fastidious Etsy auteurship is to be admired, but Anderson is a collector, and a collector’s taste is notable for what he leaves out. Sometimes nonwhite characters, mostly quiet Indian actors decked out in the elaborate livery of the help, have appeared in Anderson’s other films. But in the safe insulated palette of Moonrise Kingdom, there is no hint of the Other. The characters are all mid-century white, the scrubbed white of Life magazine ads.

She had always painted people as a way of understanding them, using her figure studies as a form of dialogue. Now, she felt compelled to choose subjects that demanded nothing of her in return. The composition was simple, naive even, the forms crudely drawn, the palette limited.

When you are really hurt, you can easily hurt someone. The tool called ‘Apology’ may not always work. So you tend to think that political correctness helps. But does it? It may force you to hide the darkest and brightest parts and make the world grey. So, the important parts of the palette will be missing from the society.

Ironically, by denying the sexual component of many same-sex activities and seeking alternative "functions", scientists have inadvertantly ascribed a much richer and varied palette of behavioral nuances to homosexual interactions than is often granted to heterosexual ones. Because heterosexuality is linked so inextricably to reproduction, its nonsexual "functions" are often overlooked, whereas because homosexuality is typically disassociated from reproduction, its sexual aspects are often denied. By bringing these two views together - by recognizing that both same-sex and opposite-sex behaviors can be all these things and sexual, too - we will have come very close indeed to embracing a fully integrated or *whole* view of animal life and sexuality.

I pull the fire escape door open, scoop my eyeshadow palette off the ground and slip back inside. For a moment, I pause in the corridor and catch my breath. Adrenaline is surging through me. Rage. A normal woman would call the police at this point. But a normal woman would never have been paranoid enough in the first place to pretend to go to the toilet, only to sneak out of the fire escape and spy through a window to watch what her date does when he has five minutes alone with her drink. Nope. A normal woman would have gone to the loo, done a pee and topped up her lipstick. Or she’d have texted a friend about her hot date, feeling giddy with hope and excitement. Now, let’s think about what would have happened to a normal woman. A normal woman would have headed back to her date, smiling prettily, before sitting down and drinking her drugged drink. Then, a short while later, that normal woman would have started feeling far more drunk than she normally does after just a couple of drinks, but she’d probably blame herself. She’d wonder if maybe she’d drunk too much. Or maybe she’d blame herself for having not eaten earlier in the day because she didn’t want to look fat in her dress. Or maybe she’d blame herself because that’s just what she does; she blames herself. And then, just as she started to feel woozy and a bit confused, her date would take her outside for some fresh air and she’d be grateful to him. She’d think he was caring and responsible, when really, he was just whisking her out of sight, before she started to look less like she was drunk and more like she’d been drugged. And then the next thing she’d know, she’d be staggering into the back of a cab and her date would be asking her to tell the driver where she lived. And when she’d barely be able to get the words out and her date made a joke to the driver about how drunk she was, she’d feel small and embarrassed. And then she’d find herself slumping into her date’s open arms, flopping against his big manly body, and she’d feel grateful once more that this man was taking care of her and getting her home safe. And then, once the taxi slowed down and she blinked her eyes open and found they’d pulled up outside her flat, she’d notice in a fleeting moment of clarity that when the driver asked for the fare, her date thrust two crisp ten-pound notes towards him in a weirdly premeditated move, as though he’d known this moment was going to happen all along. As though he’d had the cash lined up, the plan set, and she’d feel something. Something. But then she’d be staggering out of the taxi, even sloppier than when she got in, and her legs would be buckling, and she’d cling to her date for support, her make-up now smudged, her eyes half-closed, her hair messy. She’d look a state and he’d ask her which flat was hers, and she’d walk with him to her front door, to the flat where she lives alone. To the place that’s full of books and cute knick-knacks from charity shops and colourful but inexpensive clothes. She’d unlock her front door, her hand sliding drunkenly over the lock, and she’d lead him into the place she’s been using as a base to try to get ahead in life, and then he’d look around, keen-eyed, until he spotted her bedroom and he’d draw her in. And then all of a sudden he’d be in her bedroom and she wouldn’t be able to remember if she’d asked him back or not or quite how this happened, and it would all be moving so fast and her thoughts would be unable to keep up – they’d keep sliding away – and he’d be kissing her and she’d be unsure what was happening as he pulled off her dress and she’d wonder, did she ask for this? Does she want this? Has she been a ‘slut’ again? But the thoughts would be weak, they’d keep falling away and he’d be confident and he’d be certain and he’d be good-looking and he’d be pulling off her bra and taking off her knickers. He’d be pushing himself inside her. The next day, he’d be gone by the time she woke up. She’d be blocked, unmatched...

The door in a nook of a stone bridge led me to grandly decorated passages, candlelit. Eerie and beautiful all at once. I became increasingly anxious as I breathed in, out, my air out into the air of the passageway, and the passageway’s air entering me. A cycle of life in stone. Salty, bitter air. Like a night-sweat. Like insomnia. You wake, sweating and you are paralysed and sweat. You lick your upper lip (not such a stiff upper lip now), and that is what you taste. The sweat of stone, the sickly-sweet decorum of history on the palette.

I could feel the park coiling into itself, slowing it’s pulse and reducing its palette, preparing for the cold days ahead.

God gives us a fresh canvas and a palette of colors each day. Paint with bright colors and bold strokes, you're always on display!

It’s the palette of an A24 movie made flesh, and it feels powerful. I am the main character, whom things are taken from, won then irrevocably lost, but while the open ending isn’t quite hopeful, at least it’s still about me. I’m not an asterisk or a footnote in my own life. I don’t have to hold my tongue here, because I’m the fucking star.

The rest of life was just waiting, waiting to go back to the Pudding. It was as if the lights were always on at the Pudding and off everywhere else. But those lights were soft, and the gentle, impressionistic shadows they shed on the dining room were always in the most delicate palette of peach, rose, and pinkish cream.

For the new human, “wise” means something very different. It means being self-aware. Aspiring to your full potential. Noticing your character flaws. Identifying what makes you happy and what makes you miserable, then taking action to nudge yourself toward the happy end of the continuum. Living as a spiritual being on a physical path. Taking care of all your material needs just like your ancestors—then going beyond those to Bliss Brain. Bliss Brain is the brain of the future. It’s beckoning us to the next stage of evolution, and a wisdom that transcends the best of our ancestry. SELECTIVE ATTENTION Selective attention is the process of bringing desired experiences to the foreground of consciousness while delegating others to the background. When we train ourselves to direct our attention deliberately, we are able to shift our emotions in a positive direction even amid the distractions and annoyances of everyday life. The trick is to practice the subject-object shift we learned in Chapter 3. Even when you’re being buffeted by a strong emotion like the fear that served Caveman Brain so well, selective attention allows you to change. You can shift to the perspective of a witness, downregulate the intensity of feeling, and move yourself to a positive state. Selective attention doesn’t mean denying the problems you face. It isn’t avoidance; it’s making a choice from among a palette of options. While acting on fear was the best option for Caveman Brain, a conscious person examines all the options before selecting a thought, feeling, or behavior. By using the power of selective attention, we reshape our brains.

Find your passion. Paint your self-portrait with the vibrant colors from the palette of life, one magical stroke at a time.

So in short, how do I view, and cope with all the evil in the world? Well, outside of ethics and morality its morbidly beautiful as its natural. Within ethics and morality, it's a painting palette gifted to those who are uniquely fortunate enough to experience immense pain and suffering, full of colors for you to paint your canvas with, the greater the injustice, the broader the spectrum. After all, most people love the morbid beauty in horror

Rinzler was struck by the fact that for all its onstage spontaneity, Monroe’s music wasn’t intuitive. He had consciously created it and could relate exactly where he had gotten each sound, like a painter who knows exactly what colors he has used from his palette.35 Rinzler began to see that this enigmatic man did little that he had not very deliberately decided upon.

Sometimes from the sea of sadness... arises an aura of light...that closes the door to the melancholy in eyes....it shuts all that is burnt in the battles...and reveals the unburnt and alive.....sometimes from the sea of black and white....arises a painting that portrays the colors....only to carry you to a door of beauty.....for it washes out the dull rain and brings the vivid inside.....and your soul becomes the palette....for your forgotten dreams come to life..... A world of possibilities open for your finger holds the brush....as your eyes envision the beauty beyond despair.....for an imagination arises from the sea of hopelessness.... What once waned as the long lost dreams....forsaken like the dust on the quaint trunk.....is now touched by your soul of colors....for you have engaged in an art.....from the hearth of emotions.....Shaken is the dust,, for the dullness is washed... and the gray is there no more....for there comes the spring rain on your soul....

Even more threatening to Christian assumptions than the Qur’an’s flat denial that Jesus had been crucified, however, was the imperious, not to say terrifying, tone of authority with which it did so. Very little in either the Old or the New Testament could compare. For all the reverence with which Christians regarded their scripture, and for all that they believed it illumined by the flame of the Holy Spirit, they perfectly accepted that most of it, including the Gospels themselves, had been authored by mortals. Only the covenant on the tablets of stone, given to Moses amid fire and smoke on the summit of Sinai, ‘and written with the finger of God’,13 owed nothing to human mediation. Perhaps it was no surprise, then, that Moses, of all the figures in the Old and New Testaments, should have featured most prominently in the Qur’an. He was mentioned 137 times in all. Many of the words attributed to him had served as a direct inspiration to Muhammad’s own followers. ‘My people! Enter the Holy Land which God has prescribed for you!’14 The Arab conquerors, in the first decades of their empire, had pointedly referred to themselves as muhajirun: ‘those who have undertaken an exodus’. A hundred years on from Muhammad’s death, when the first attempts were made by Muslim scholars to write his biography, the model that they instinctively reached for was that of Moses. The age at which the Prophet had received his first revelation from God; the flight of his followers from a land of idols; the way in which—directly contradicting the news brought to Carthage in 634—he was said to have died before entering the Holy Land: all these elements echoed the life of the Jews’ most God-favoured prophet.15 So brilliantly, indeed, did Muslim biographers paint from the palette of traditions told about Moses that the fading outlines of the historical Muhammad were quite lost beneath their brushstrokes. Last and most blessed of the prophets sent by God to set humanity on the straight path, there was only the one predecessor to whom he could properly be compared. ‘There has come to him the greatest Law that came to Moses; surely he is the prophet of this people.’16

Scott Eastman told me that he “never completely fit in one world.” He grew up in Oregon and competed in math and science contests, but in college he studied English literature and fine arts. He has been a bicycle mechanic, a housepainter, founder of a housepainting company, manager of a multimillion-dollar trust, a photographer, a photography teacher, a lecturer at a Romanian university—in subjects ranging from cultural anthropology to civil rights—and, most unusually, chief adviser to the mayor of Avrig, a small town in the middle of Romania. In that role, he did everything from helping integrate new technologies into the local economy to dealing with the press and participating in negotiations with Chinese business leaders. Eastman narrates his life like a book of fables; each experience comes with a lesson. “I think that housepainting was probably one of the greatest helps,” he told me. It afforded him the chance to interact with a diverse palette of colleagues and clients, from refugees seeking asylum to Silicon Valley billionaires whom he would chat with if he had a long project working on their homes. He described it as fertile ground for collecting perspectives. But housepainting is probably not a singular education for geopolitical prediction. Eastman, like his teammates, is constantly collecting perspectives anywhere he can, always adding to his intellectual range, so any ground is fertile for him.

scenes from the Legends of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table many lovely pictures have been painted, showing much diversity of figures and surroundings, some being definitely sixth-century British or Saxon, as in Blair Leighton’s fine painting of the dead Elaine; others—for example, Watts’ Sir Galahad—show knight and charger in fifteenth-century armour; while the warriors of Burne Jones wear strangely impracticable armour of some mystic period. Each of these painters was free to follow his own conception, putting the figures into whatever period most appealed to his imagination; for he was not illustrating the actual tales written by Sir Thomas Malory, otherwise he would have found himself face to face with a difficulty. King Arthur and his knights fought, endured, and toiled in the sixth century, when the Saxons were overrunning Britain; but their achievements were not chronicled by Sir Thomas Malory until late in the fifteenth century. Sir Thomas, as Froissart has done before him, described the habits of life, the dresses, weapons, and armour that his own eyes looked upon in the every-day scenes about him, regardless of the fact that almost every detail mentioned was something like a thousand years too late. Had Malory undertaken an account of the landing of Julius Caesar he would, as a matter of course, have protected the Roman legions with bascinet or salade, breastplate, pauldron and palette, coudiére, taces and the rest, and have armed them with lance and shield, jewel-hilted sword and slim misericorde; while the Emperor himself might have been given the very suit of armour stripped from the Duke of Clarence before his fateful encounter with the butt of malmsey. Did not even Shakespeare calmly give cannon to the Romans and suppose every continental city to lie majestically beside the sea? By the old writers, accuracy in these matters was disregarded, and anachronisms were not so much tolerated as unperceived. In illustrating this edition of “The Legends of King Arthur and his Knights,” it has seemed best, and indeed unavoidable if the text and the pictures are to tally, to draw what Malory describes, to place the fashion

The curve of the roof as the pitch flattens put towards the eaves is deliciously sensual. The colors are exquisite, a palette of reds and yellows and pinks that reflect the mood of the day, fresh light pink in the dawn, ruddy and strong at midday, ochre and subdued in the afternoon, ripe and luscious in the evening. In the setting sun they glow with their own inner light like iron in a furnace. We laid out under the stars the old battle scars of marriage, the grudges and wounds, compromises and disillusionments, frustrations and disappointments that two people share when they make one life together. Relationships are built on trust and openness, self-sacrifice and kindness, but they also need envy and competition, selfishness and malice to give them spice and interest. Not forgetting lust.

Everyone in their life has his own particular way of expressing life’s purpose—the lawyer his eloquence, the painter his palette, and the man of letters his pen from which the quick words of his story flow. I have my bicycle.

Fifty years earlier, before its sandstone blocks were carried off to serve as the foundations of a factory in a nearby town, the ruins of a little temple had stood upon that hill. And it was there, in the footings of a vanished temple, by the remnants of a prehistoric shrine, that Quibell and Green uncovered a vast agglomeration of courtly objects, a cache such as had not been seen before and has never since been equalled in all of Egypt: a pair of beautiful life-sized pharaonic statues made of sheets of beaten copper; a golden image of a hawk with glittering obsidian eyes still standing in its ancient shrine; two splendidly engraved cosmetic palettes; some prehistoric slaughtering knives; a remarkable collection of stone vases; a heap of mace heads piled like potatoes, some of which were vividly engraved in a manner similar to the cosmetic palettes. And in amongst all this, suffused by ground-water and penetrated by the roots of thorn and halfa grass, lay a mass of ivories which, Quibell remarked, ‘resembled potted salmon’, but on inspection proved to be hundreds of separate and delicately carved objects from the time of the first kings but which were so cemented and decayed that they are still under restoration to this day.

Your life is an empty page waiting to be written, an untouched canvas, so go paint your masterpiece, with a palette of kindness

This is how it goes in life: sometimes you’re born with a cleft palette or rickets, like my bow-legged Granddaddy, or a touch short on brains, like my Great Aunt Cal who everyone called ‘Stool.’ Me? I’m a double hitter. In addition to being what folks call “large boned,” I came into this world with homosexual tendencies—though back then I thought of it only as my strange, strong affections for some female friends, having no such notion of “homosexual tendencies” as a thing, at least not in Midland, Texas. Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the kitchen at Sugarland Prison, when I got a job at the egg store. The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps. The egg store smelled like wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled like wood and smoked pig fat.

We experience life as feelings. It’s funny, then, that so much fiction is written to minimize feelings or leave them out altogether. It’s as if emotions are not a fit subject or writing about them is too simplistic. Even fiction that celebrates feelings, romance for instance, can sometimes work with only a limited and familiar emotional palette. We can wallow in emotional content yet feel curiously empty.

You have your own palette to color your own canvas.

I watch a makeup tutorial on YouTube and decide that a new eyeshadow palette will solve all my problems.

If people want what you have, they will break down your door, leap over broken links, and beg you for more. If they don’t want what you’ve got, changing the color palette won’t make a damned bit of difference.