Pigment Quotes

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic.

I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.

I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come out of him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. ...I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita.

Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

It was the dandelion principle! To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.

Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that's dynamic and expressivee--that's what's good for you if you're at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. "In the time of your life--live!" That time is short and it doesn't return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.

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.

Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal. And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don’t fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? . . . You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dilute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin’s robe with it. But still you wouldn’t be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly.

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C. Q. One had to choose between him and H.H., and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita.

And then the rains came. They came down from the hills and up from the sound. And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it rained a murder. And it rained dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain poured for days, unceasing. Flooding occurred. The wells filled with reptiles. The basements filled with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics roamed the dripping peninsulas. Moisture gleamed on the beak of the raven. Ancient Shaman's rained from their homes in dead tree trunks, clacked their clamshell teeth in the drowned doorways of forests. Rain hissed on the freeway. It hissed at the prows of fishing boats. It ate the old warpaths, spilled the huckleberries, ran into the ditches. Soaking. Spreading. Penetrating. And it rained an omen. And it rained a poison. And it rained a pigment. And it rained a seizure.

Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!

People hurried past, the others of the street, endless anonymous, twenty-one lives per second, race-walking in their faces and pigments, sprays of fleetest being.

Melanin is the black pigment which permits skins to appear other than white (black, brown, red and yellow). Melanin pigment coloration is the norm for the hue-man family. If there are non-white readers who disagree with this presentation of white rejection of the white-skinned self, may I refer you to the literature on the currently developing sun-tanning parlors.

I'll keep it," she said. "Then, when you get back, after you and the dark one are done making out and planning a future filled with blond-haired, green-eyed, pigment-challeneged rug rats, I'll bring it over and you can add it to your scrapbook, right before you start cooking me dinner. I like vegetarian lasagna with cottage cheese instead of ricotta." "Gwen?" "And don't forget the mushrooms. Garlic bread, too, please. That is, as long as your vampire lover doesn't object." "I want to say thank you," Isobel said. "For... everything." "No," Gwen said. "Thank you for the delicious dinner. I can almost taste the baklava you and Darth Vader will be making for dessert. Something tells me you're gonna have to look that one up, though.

Potassium cyanide," says the talent wrangler as she leans over to pick up a paper napkin off the floor. "Found naturally in the cassava or manioc roots native to Africa, used to tint architectural blueprints in the form of the deep-blue pigment known as Prussian blue. Hence the shade 'cyan' blue.

Sacha snaked one arm out from beneath the blankets and reached toward Cinder, grasping her wrist where skin met metal. Cinder squirmed, trying to pull away, but Sacha held tight. Her hand was marked by bluish pigment around her yellowed fingernails.

It was dusk and the light had an ultra-violet quality to it, a final burst of pigmentation as night and day rushed at each other in a clash of colour prisms before darkness finnaly, inevitably won out.

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

White can be attained by blending all the colors of the spectrum together, or through the substraction of ink and all other pigments. In short, it is "all colors" and "no color" at the same time.

I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?

My husband is my most ruthless critic... sometimes he will say, 'It's been said better before.' Of course it has. It's all been said better before. If I thought I had to say it better than anybody else, I'd never start. Better or worse is immaterial. The thing is that it has to be said; by me; ontologically. We each have to say it, to say it our own way. Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us. Good or bad, great or little: that isn't what human creation is about. It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black—so that the paint will not get between us and the picture.

My God, what do we want? What does any human being want? Take away an accident of pigmentation of a thin layer of our outer skin and there is no difference between me and anyone else. All we want is for that trivial difference to make no difference. What can I say to a man who asks that? All I can do is try to explain to him why he asks the question. You have looked at us for years as different from you that you may never see us really. You don’t understand because you think of us as second-class humans. We have been passive and accommodating through so many years of your insults and delays that you think the way things used to be is normal. When the good-natured, spiritual-singing boys and girls rise up against the white man and demand to be treated like he is, you are bewildered. All we want is what you want, no less and no more. (Chapter 13).

The pigment must be mixed with the tears of spinsters of good family, who must live long lives of impeccable virtue and die without ever having had a day of true happiness.

...fair is a body pigment, that's all it is.

Whiteness, it turns out, is but a pigment of the imagination.

Love is true pigment of nature's spirit which owes existence of universe.

There is another important difference as well. Human eyes have three visual pigments, allowing us to see color. Octopuses have only one—which would make these masters of camouflage, commanding a glittering rainbow of colors, technically color-blind. How, then, does the octopus decide what colors to turn? New evidence suggests cephalopods might be able to see with their skin.

Mattia was right: the days had slipped over her skin like a solvent, one after the other, each removing a very thin layer of pigment from her tattoo, and from both of their memories. The outlines, like the circumstances, were still there, black and well delineated, but the colors had merged together until they faded into a dull, uniform tonality, a neutral absence of meaning.

Ah, gentle drivers gliding through summer's black nights, what frolics, what twists of lust, you might see from your impeccable highways if Kumfy Kabins were suddenly drained of their pigments and became as transparent as boxes of glass!

You can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painting as a simple collection of pigments, Which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.

Soul meet soul on lovers' lips.Except when wax and pigment come between them

Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter.

It has been remarked before that those who are sensitive to radiations in the far octarine—the eighth color, the pigment of the Imagination—can see things that others cannot.

Don’t be fooled by the few red or brown leaves you find on poison ivy in the fall—the plant is not dying; it’s just cheating with different pigments.

He brought color into my life. Acrylic? Oil? It didn't even matter. He always thought of himself as blackness, but the truth was, he injected so many different pigments into my existence.

But that day's not now. And even if this horror becomes an accent color - a smudge of lead white to highlight a cheekbone, a bit of yellow ochre the glint on a sword - sometimes those are the pigments that change one's perecption of an entire work of art.

And, talking about radiation, few wonder why, after hundreds of million of years of having our skins exposed to sun rays, we suddenly need so much protection from them—is it that our exposure is more harmful than before because of changes in the atmosphere, or populations living in an environment mismatching the pigmentation of their skin—or rather, that makers of sun protection products need to make some profits?

I quietly cast camouflage on myself, which is the nearest I can come to invisibility. It binds my pigment to my surroundings, so that I become practically invisible when I remain still. People can see me if I move quickly, but if I imitate the Rock of Gibraltar they have to really know I’m there to spot me. I figured it was best: Naked women rarely welcome the approach of strange naked men, except in porn movies.

The world is a glorious bounty. There is more food than can be eaten if we would limit our numbers to those who can be cherished, there are more beautiful girls than can be dreamed of, more children than we can love, more laughter than can be endured, more wisdom than can be absorbed. Canvas and pigments lie in wait, stone, wood, and metal are ready for sculpture, random noise is latent for symphonies, sites are gravid for cities, institutions lie in the wings ready to solve our most intractable problems, parables of moving power remain unformulated and yet, the world is finally unknowable.

Blonde hair and black hair are the two poles of human nature. Black hair signifies virility, courage, frankness, activity, whereas blonde hair symbolises femininity, tenderness, weakness, and passivity. Therefore a blonde is in fact doubly a woman. A princess can only be blonde. That's also why, to be as feminine as possible, women dye their hair yellow- but never black" "I'm curious about how pigments exercise their influence over the human soul", said Bertlef doubtfully. "it's not a matter of pigments. A blonde unconsciously adapts herself to her hair. Especially if the blonde is a brunette who dyes her hair yellow. She tries to be faithful to her hair colour and behaves like a fragile creature, a shallow doll, she demands tenderness and service, courtesy and alimony, she's incapable of doing anything for herself, all refinement on the outside and coarseness on the inside. If black hair became a universal fashion, life on this world would clearly be better. It would be the most useful social reform ever achieved.

The takeaway message here, as Jablonski points out, is that there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown.

Tyrian Purple. A historical pigment, nearly impossible to get. It was made from excreted dye of sea snails such as the Purpura lapillus. Snails were ill-motivated pigment makers; it took an enornous number of them to produce even a small amount of Tyrian purple.

Under bright scarlet hair, teachers' favorite pigmentation of ink, the awful cast splashed and dripped down his face, a grisly reminder of mistakes bruising that had bruised.

And yes—scholars might care about the innovative brushwork and use of light, the historical influence and the unique significance in Dutch art. But not me. As my mother said all those years ago, my mother who loved the painting only from seeing it in a book she borrowed from the Comanche County Library as a child: the significance doesn’t matter. The historical significance deadens it. Across those unbridgeable distances—between bird and painter, painting and viewer—I hear only too well what’s being said to me, a psst from an alleyway as Hobie put it, across four hundred years of time, and it’s really very personal and specific. It’s there in the light-rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are—hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible—and then, at a distance, the miracle, or the joke as Horst called it, although really it’s both, the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone. It’s the place where reality strikes the ideal, where a joke becomes serious and anything serious is a joke. The magic point where every idea and its opposite are equally true.

Now I am a woman of bone and skin, the patches of pigmentation like a map of a rocky archipelago; I am obdurate and uncooperative, drifting on a sea of memory between islands of lucidity.

The use of natural pigments is similarly embodied in the Orthodox teaching that humanity—like all Creation—was created pure but not perfect, and the purpose of being born is to reach your true potential.

How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning.

...it was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. "Here, do you see this marvelous book, the skins of 182 sheep," he once pronounced as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. "The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot; pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects. Pigments formed at the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine.

You stupid bastard, does what you’re fighting for look so real now? Skin pigment. What a laugh! Why not eye color? Too bad nobody ever thought of that. It cuts it a little finer, but basically it’s the same thing.

The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death.

Aster, occasionally, through no will of her own, worried she wasn’t pretty enough, and why? Pretty was a strange thing to concern oneself over. Pretty was subjective and fallacious. Pretty couldn’t be replicated in a lab. She, as much as anyone, enjoyed the prismatic sweep of amaranth in bloom and the geography of animalian bodies. Yet when applied to people, it didn’t jive with her that pretty was meant for some and not others. More pressingly, it didn’t jive with Aster that some days she wanted to be one of those folks who was prettier than the other folks. It was like wanting to be more vanadium-based, or wanting to have orange-pigmented skin—arbitrary, bizarre, pointless. Still, she wanted it, and Theo made her feel like it was already so.

Raw eggs are for the paint. You separate the whites from the yolks and discard the whites and pat the yolks dry with a cloth and then mix the yolks with dry pigment to make the paint. Tempera can last thousands of years.

Its true that we learn a lot from science about how we function but there’s a danger in thinking knowledge of how we function is the full account of what we are. If you’re a chemist who is really interested in the optical properties of certain pigments you could analyse the Mona Lisa and describe it completely but you would never have mentioned the face, which is the meaning of this thing. In that way a neuroscientist can put together an enormously impressively picture of the brain but he would not have described what goes on when we react to another person.

I am every color of the spectrum.

At the magic touch of the beautiful, the secret chords of our being are awakened, we vibrate and thrill in response to its call. Mind speaks to mind. We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen. The master calls forth notes we know not of. Memories long forgotten all come back to us with a new significance. Hopes stifled by fear, yearnings that we dare not recognize, stand forth in new glory. Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

Fifteen sunflowers, some in bloom and some turning. Yellow on yellow pigment that darkened to ochre. Yellow earthenware vase decorated by a complementary blue line that cut across its middle. The original was painted by one of the loneliest men on earth. But painted in a frenzy of optimism and gratitude and hope. A celebration of the transcendent power of the color yellow.

Hello? Tonight I am going to the Restaurant, where I will eat a killed and burned-up bird and drink old purple grapes and also I will gulp clear water that used to have bugs and poop and poison in it but has been cleaned up so that it doesn’t make us blow chunks. Oh Joy I am going to the Restaurant and I am just drooling at the thought of the killed and burned bird and I want to sip the grape gunk and so I put skin-colored paint all over my face and I dab pasty red pigment on my lips and swish peachy powder on my cheeks and I take a pencil and draw an eye-shaped line around my eye so that people know where my blinkers are.

The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.

We should not be too quick to dismiss our own [ocular] arrangement. As so often in biology, the situation is more complex.....we have the advantage that our own light-sensitive cells are embedded directly in their support cells (the retinal pigment epithelium) with an excellent blood supply immediately underneath. Such an arrangement supports the continuous turnover of photosensitive pigments. The human retina consumes even more oxygen than the brain, per gram, making it the most energetic organ in the body.

The day stretched on. Each portrait was a single stepping-stone, the sum of which would form a path home. I lost count of how many portraits I did, marking them only by the emotions I used: curiosity, surprise, amusement, bliss. The pigments dwindled in their teacups.

What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other.

the sunset looked way too pigmented—as if the color palette of sorrow had been thrown on it. yes, if sorrow had colors, they would be lilac mixed with pinks and some sneaky whites like the clouds at twilight. i thought it was a masterpiece; a way for nature to share that at the end of the day, each sobbed whisper goes directly to the skies. but before that, it leaves its color on the canvas of earth one last time.

Race is one millimeter deep. Intrepidly attending the dissection of a corpse", Bryson quotes the surgeon who pulled back a minute layer of skin and said: “That’s all that race is – a sliver of epidermis.” As we spread across the world, some people are thought to have evolved lighter skin in order to glean vitamin D from weaker sunlight. Throughout human history, people have “de-pigmented” and “re-pigmented” to suit their environment. Biologically, skin colour is just “a reaction to sunlight”, Bryson quotes the anthropologist Nina Jablonski as saying. She adds: “And yet look how many people have been enslaved or hated or lynched or deprived of fundamental rights through history because of the colour of their skin.

Yes. You see, the whole nature, shape and even the modern blue pigment of the TARDIS is so deeply unfamiliar to the primitive mind that, although the optic nerve registers its presence, the brain cannot decode what it is seeing. The primitive visual cortex is unable to relay information about it consciously to the viewer. In effect, even though her chameleon circuit is still damaged, she’s as good as invisible. She’ll be just fine.

Revenge is a color, a color that never fades. A beautiful color. It is the color of the sky at dawn when lovers are hauled out of their beds and garroted in the middle of the street; the color of the ancient sea when Noah’s Ark has been breached below the water line; the color of Jacob’s Ladder as it collapses while Jacob has climbed only half-way to heaven. But it is more than that, much more. It contains the pigment that colors the eyes of the lovers that betray you.

I liked sleeping in the attic. There was no Crucifixion scene hanging at the foot of the bed to trouble me. There were no paintings at all, but the clean scent of linseed oil and the musk of the earth pigments. I liked my view of the New Church, and the quiet. No one came up except him. The girls did not visit me as they sometimes had in the cellar, or secretly search through my things. i felt alone there, perched high above the noisy household, able to see it from a distance.

During this time (at high school) I discovered the Public Library... It was here that I found a source of knowledge and the means to acquire it by reading, a habit of learning which I still follow to this day. I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house. I soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours. I made the (to me) astounding discovery that the pigments I extracted changed their colours when I changed the pH of the solution.

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes....Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world - I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when the struggle against oppression becomes an end in itself, the focal point of all meaning. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea that those devoted to a cause have found their whole meaning in the struggle, so that the desired victory becomes implicitly an undesirable meaninglessness. Such a truncated vision is one of the pitfalls of theologies of the oppressed. Sometimes black theology, for example that of James Cone, resounds with a cry for vengeance and is fiercely biblical and patriarchal. It transcends religion as a crutch (the separation and return of much old-fashioned Negro spirituality) but tends to settle for being religion as a gun. Tailored to fit only the situation of racial oppression, it inspires a will to vindication but leaves unexplored other dimensions of liberation. It does not get beyond the sexist models internalized by the self and controlling society — models that are at the root of racism and that perpetuate it. The Black God and the Black Messiah apparently are merely the same patriarchs after a pigmentation operation — their behavior unaltered.

There will come a day, when this horror is not the only color on your palette. But that day's not now. And even if this horror becomes an accent color- a smudge of lead white to highlight a cheekbone, a bit of yellow ochre the glint on a sword- sometimes those are the pigments that change one's perception of an entire work of art.

The art of a great painting is not in any one idea, nor in a multitude of separate tricks for placing all those pigment spots, but in the great network of relationships among its parts. Similarly, the agents, raw, that make our minds are by themselves as valueless as aimless, scattered daubs of paint. What counts is what we make of them.

Our tree’s only source of energy is the sun: after light photons stimulate the pigments within the leaf, buzzing electrons line up into an unfathomably long chain and pass their excitement one to the other, moving biochemical energy across the cell to the exact location where it is needed. The plant pigment chlorophyll is a large molecule, and within the bowl of its spoon-shaped structure sits one single precious magnesium atom. The amount of magnesium needed for enough chlorophyll to fuel thirty-five pounds of leaves is equivalent to the amount of magnesium found in fourteen One A Day vitamins, and it must ultimately dissolve out of bedrock, which is a geologically slow process.

As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as "anticlimax" began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words "The Personal is The Political." At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was - cliché is arguably forgiven here - very bad news. From now on it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic "preference," to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: "Speaking as a..." The could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this much for the old "hard" Left: we earned our claim to speak and intervene by right of experience and sacrifice and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality pr pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when The Left lost - or I would prefer to say, discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.

I am black, I am white, and I am every color in-between.

It was the King Color, of which all the lesser colors are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections. It was octarine, the color of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.

Oliver, my professor, was a scientific bounder, a journalist by instinct, a thief of ideas,—he was always prying! And you know the knavish system of the scientific world. I simply would not publish, and let him share my credit. I went on working, I got nearer and nearer making my formula into an experiment, a reality. I told no living soul, because I meant to flash my work upon the world with crushing effect and become famous at a blow. I took up the question of pigments to fill up certain gaps. And suddenly, not by design but by accident, I made a discovery in physiology.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree,” he writes. But if we look at the whole tree of life, Darwin says, we can find innumerable gradations from extremely simple eyes consisting of hardly more than a nerveless cluster of pigment cells, which are rudimentary light sensors, to the marvels of the human eye, which are more impressive pieces of work than the human telescope.

Disdain for blacks as inherently inferior to other people and the pretense that reason and humanity are proportional to the pink pigment in Western flesh were new prejudices. Disgust with Mali fed them. Attitudes remained equivocal, but the balance of white assumptions tilted against blacks. If white respect for black societies had survived the encounter with Mali, how different might the subsequent history of the world have been?

In my travels on the surface, I once met a man who wore his religious beliefs like a badge of honor upon the sleeves of his tunic. "I am a Gondsman!" he proudly told me as we sat beside eachother at a tavern bar, I sipping my wind, and he, I fear, partaking a bit too much of his more potent drink. He went on to explain the premise of his religion, his very reason for being, that all things were based in science, in mechanics and in discovery. He even asked if he could take a piece of my flesh, that he might study it to determine why the skin of the drow elf is black. "What element is missing," he wondered, "that makes your race different from your surface kin?" I think that the Gondsman honestly believed his claim that if he could merely find the various elements that comprised the drow skin, he might affect a change in that pigmentation to make the dark elves more akin to their surface relatives. And, given his devotion, almost fanaticism, it seemed to me as if he felt he could affect a change in more than physical appearance. Because, in his view of the world, all things could be so explained and corrected. How could i even begin to enlighten him to the complexity? How could i show him the variations between drow and surface elf in the very view of the world resulting from eons of walking widely disparate roads? To a Gondsman fanatic, everything can be broken down, taken apart and put back together. Even a wizard's magic might be no more than a way of conveying universal energies - and that, too, might one day be replicated. My Gondsman companion promised me that he and his fellow inventor priests would one day replicate every spell in any wizard's repertoire, using natural elements in the proper combinations. But there was no mention of the discipline any wizard must attain as he perfects his craft. There was no mention of the fact that powerful wizardly magic is not given to anyone, but rather, is earned, day by day, year by year and decade by decade. It is a lifelong pursuit with gradual increase in power, as mystical as it is secular. So it is with the warrior. The Gondsman spoke of some weapon called an arquebus, a tubular missile thrower with many times the power of the strongest crossbow. Such a weapon strikes terror into the heart of the true warrior, and not because he fears that he will fall victim to it, or even that he fears it will one day replace him. Such weapons offend because the true warrior understands that while one is learning how to use a sword, one should also be learning why and when to use a sword. To grant the power of a weapon master to anyone at all, without effort, without training and proof that the lessons have taken hold, is to deny the responsibility that comes with such power. Of course, there are wizards and warriors who perfect their craft without learning the level of emotional discipline to accompany it, and certainly there are those who attain great prowess in either profession to the detriment of all the world - Artemis Entreri seems a perfect example - but these individuals are, thankfully, rare, and mostly because their emotional lacking will be revealed early in their careers, and it often brings about a fairly abrupt downfall. But if the Gondsman has his way, if his errant view of paradise should come to fruition, then all the years of training will mean little. Any fool could pick up an arquebus or some other powerful weapon and summarily destroy a skilled warrior. Or any child could utilize a Gondsman's magic machine and replicate a firebal, perhaps, and burn down half a city. When I pointed out some of my fears to the Gondsman, he seemed shocked - not at the devastating possibilities, but rather, at my, as he put it, arrogance. "The inventions of the priests of Gond will make all equal!" he declared. "We will lift up the lowly peasant

Alas," the Spider Queen said softly, "life needs dark leaves in the wreath. There cannot be true joy without sorrow, or real happiness without loss. They come as a pair. It is simply how it must be, if one is to live a full life. Take my own wreath, for example." She pointed at a particularly striking one made up of foliage so dark it was almost purple and black in places, but brightened with spectacular bursts of scarlet poinsettia. "I first saw the poinsettia in Mexico," she said. "The Euphorbia pulcherrima, to give it its botanical name, but it's also known as a 'Christmas star' because of its red pigment, so vibrant and bold. I would not give up my dark leaves if it meant losing the poinsettia," she said.

Newcomers to manuscripts sometimes ask what such books tell us about the societies that created them. At one level, these Gospel Books describe nothing, for they are not local chronicles but standard Latin translations of religious texts from far away. At the same time, this is itself extraordinarily revealing about Ireland. No one knows how literacy and Christianity had first reached the islands of Ireland, possibly through North Africa. This was clearly no primitive backwater but a civilization which could now read Latin, although never occupied by the Romans, and which was somehow familiar with the texts and artistic designs which have unambiguous parallels in the Coptic and Greek churches, such as carpet pages and Canon tables. Although the Book of Kells itself is as uniquely Irish as anything imaginable, it is a Mediterranean text and the pigments used in making it include orpiment, a yellow made from arsenic sulphide, exported from Italy, where it is found in volcanoes. There are clearly lines of trade and communication unknown to us.

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone. In any case, forty thousand years ago, we left painted handprints on the cave walls of Lascaux, Ardennes, Chauvet. The black pigment used to paint the animals at Lascaux was made of manganese dioxide and ground quartz; and almost half the mixture was calcium phosphate. Calcium phosphate is produced by heating bone four hundred degrees Celsius, then grinding it. We made our paints from bones of the animals we painted. No image forgets this origin.

For man is a symbol-making animal. He constructs a symbolic model of outer reality in his brain, and expresses it by a second set of symbols in terms of words, equations, pigment, or stone. All he knows directly are bodily sensations, and all he can directly do is to perform bodily motions; the rest of his knowledge and means of expression is symbolical. To use a phrase coined by J. Cohen, man has a metaphorical consciousness. Any attempt to get a direct grasp at naked reality is self-defeating; Urania, too, like the other muses, always has a last veil left to fold in.

Here’s a thought for you. If you were blind you wouldn’t understand the concept of colour, of pigments and shades. You wouldn’t understand visual perception at all. You’d be completely unaware of it. But what if there’s something else? Some aspect of something magical and mysterious that is all around us, yet we can’t see it, we can’t feel it, we can’t taste it, and we can’t smell it. In fact, we have no organ in our body capable of discovering it and observing it. We can’t track it down, we can’t stumble across it, and we can’t smoke it out. We’re not born with the organ to bring it to light, and so it can’t be revealed to us in any other way. And what if these enchanted, otherworldly aspects, for want of a better word, are strands in a cosmic web that connects all your tribe, so wherever you wander in the world, there’s a spiritual force that continues to connect you to your tribe?

At the magic touch of the beautiful the secret chords of our being are awakened, we vibrate and thrill in response to its call. Mind speaks to mind. We listen to the unspoken, we gaze upon the unseen. The master calls forth notes we know not of. Memories long forgotten all come back to us with a new significance. Hopes stifled by fear, yearnings that we dare not recognise, stand forth in new glory. Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

Sadly the receipt will not survive long enough for Lazlo to read it. It is already fading, as the thermal paper on which it is printed degrades over time. The reason for this is that printing on thermal paper does not mean adding ink to it. Rather, the ink is already encapsulated within the paper, in the form of a so-called leuco dye and an acid. The act of printing requires only a spark to heat up the paper so that the acid and dye react with each other, converting the dye from a transparent state into a dark pigment. It is this cunning paper technology that ensures that cash registers never run out of ink. But over time the pigment reverts to its transparent state and so the ink fades, taking with it the evidence of curry and beer dinners.

I have started looking into the mirror more often. I have pigmentation, a few blemishes. My body never looked like this, never felt like this- heavy, tired, exhausted, swollen, achy, weak. There are a million reasons to not like myself right now. But one reason that outgrows all these emotions- I am the first home to my baby. A woman can dislike her body, can she really dislike her baby’s abode? Therefore, I love the way it’s swelling- it gives my baby’s tiny arms and legs more space. I love the way it’s pigmenting, it gives my baby better protection from the sun. I love the way it’s exhausted, it prioritises baby’s nutritional requirements over mine. And I would love all the stretch marks in the end too. That’s my baby’s name plate at his first home.

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. ... Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. I think the health of ou civilization, the depth of out awarness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

The Elsinore's bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming valley. Not a man had gained his feet. Bridge and men swept back toward me and fetched up against the mizzen-shrouds. And then that prodigious, incredible old man appeared out of the water, on his two legs, upright, dragging with him, a man in each hand, the helpless forms of Nancy and the Faun. My heart leapt at beholding this mighty figure of a man-killer and slave-driver, it is true, but who sprang first into the teeth of danger so that his slaves might follow, and who emerged with a half-drowned slave in either hand. I knew augustness and pride as I gazed--pride that my eyes were blue, like his; that my skin was blond, like his; that my place was aft with him, and with the Samurai, in the high place of government and command. I nearly wept with the chill of pride that was akin to awe and that tingled and bristled along my spinal column and in my brain. As for the rest--the weaklings and the rejected, and the dark-pigmented things, the half-castes, the mongrel-bloods, and the dregs of long-conquered races--how could they count? My heels were iron as I gazed on them in their peril and weakness. Lord! Lord! For ten thousand generations and centuries we had stamped upon their faces and enslaved them to the toil of our will.

It's... 'Titian,'" Genevieve breathed. "I'm sure of it." A slow, awestruck, disbelieving smile took over her face. Stunned pleasure shone from her eyes. And he was certain her heart was racing with the sheer delight of being in the 'presence' of the thing. Because his heart was racing at simply watching her love it. She turned to look at him as if he himself had painted it. Her radiance rendered him absolutely silent. He could only bask. One was either moved by something or one was not, he knew. Certain tastes- for fine wine or teas, for instance- could be acquired. 'Skill' could be acquired, but talent could not. And passion was either intimate... or it was not. He still in truth didn't care to know much about the painting. He only cared about what it did to Genevieve Eversea. And it was 'this' that gave it its value in his eyes. Not the name of the artist, or the pigments he had used. He felt her joy as his own.

7. But what kind of love is it, really? Don't fool yourself and call it sublimity. Admit that you have stood in front of a little pile of powdered ultramarine pigment in a glass cup at a museum and felt a stinging desire. But to do what? Liberate it? Purchase it? Ingest it? There is so little blue food in nature- in fact blue in the wild tends to mark food to avoid (mold, poisonous berries)- that culinary advisers generally recommend against blue light, blue paint, and blue plates when wand where serving food. But while the color may sap appetite in the most literal sense, it feeds it in others. You might want to reach out and disturb the pile of pigment, for example, first staining your fingers with it, then staining the world. You might want to dillute it and swim in it, you might want to rouge your nipples with it, you might want to paint a virgin's robe with it. But still you wouldn't be accessing the blue of it. Not exactly. 8. Do not, however, make the mistake of thinking all desire is yearning. "We love to contemplate blue, not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it," wrote Goethe, and perhaps he is right. But I am not interested in longing to live in a world in which I already live. I don't want to yearn for blue things, and God forbid for any "blueness." Above all, I want to stop missing you. 9. So please do not write to tell me about anymore beautiful blue things. To be fair, this book will not tell you about any, either. It will not say, Isn't X beautiful? Such demands are murderous to beauty. 10. The most I want to do is show you the end of my index finger. Its muteness. 11. That is to say: I don't care if it's colorless.

there is no such thing as different races of humans. Any differences we traditionally associate with race are a product of our need for vitamin D and our relationship to the Sun. Just a few clusters of genes control skin color; the changes in skin color are recent; they’ve gone back and forth with migrations; they are not the same even among two groups with similarly dark skin; and they are tiny compared to the total human genome. So skin color and “race” are neither significant nor consistent defining traits. We all descended from the same African ancestors, with little genetic separation from each other. The different colors or tones of skin are the result of an evolutionary response to ultraviolet light in local environments. Everybody has brown skin tinted by the pigment melanin. Some people have light brown skin. Some people have dark brown skin. But we all are brown, brown, brown. Our reactions to other groups are real enough, but evolutionary biology shows that those reactions have nothing to do with race, because race is not real. Scientifically speaking, there is tribalism and group bias, but there cannot be any such thing as racism. We are all one.

Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface—all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. This process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middle layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 microns across. These also reflect light, including polarized light (which humans can’t see, but a number of octopuses’ predators, including birds, do). The iridophores create an array of glittering greens, blues, golds, and pinks. Some of these little organs seem to be passive, but other iridophores appear to be controlled by the nervous system. They are associated with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the first neurotransmitter to be identified in any animal. Acetylcholine helps with contraction of muscles; in humans, it is also important in memory, learning, and REM sleep. In octopuses, more of it “turns on” the greens and blues; less creates pinks and golds. The topmost layer of the octopus’s skin contains chromatophores, tiny sacks of yellow, red, brown, and black pigment, each in an elastic container that can be opened or closed to reveal more or less color. Camouflaging the eye alone—with a variety of patterns including a bar, a bandit’s mask, and a starburst pattern—can involve as many as 5 million chromatophores. Each chromatophore is regulated via an array of nerves and muscles, all under the octopus’s voluntary control.

But mostly, finally, ultimately, I'm here for the weather. As a result of the weather, ours is a landscape in a minor key, a sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tent to melt together, creating a perpetual blurred effect, as if God, after creating Northwestern Washington, had second thoughts and tried unsuccessfully to erase it. Living here is not unlike living inside a classical Chinese painting before the intense wisps of mineral pigment had dried upon the silk - although, depending on the bite in the wind, they're times when it's more akin to being trapped in a bad Chinese restaurant; a dubious joint where gruff waiters slam chopsticks against the horizon, where service is haphazard, noodles soggy, wallpaper a tad too green, and considerable amounts of tea are spilt; but in each and every fortune cookie there's a line of poetry you can never forget. Invariably, the poems comment on the weather. In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call "drizzle" are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I, I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. "What's so hot about the sun?" I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don't belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand, introverted, feral, buddhistically cool, behave as if they were locals. Which, of course, they are.