Vivid Color Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Vivid Color. Here they are! All 200 of them:

I wanted to meet the boy who documented suffering in such vivid color.
Colleen Hoover (Never Never: Part Two (Never Never, #2))
She wasn’t light; she was color. Every single one, dancing otherworldly and bright over his unworthy eyes. She was the explosion of the vivid gleams and glows of the world around him, like a constant rainbow, shining not after the rain but during.
Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Assistant to the Villain (Assistant to the Villain, #1))
A king is a living symbol, a beating heart, a star upon which Elfhame's future is written. Surely you have noticed that since his reign began, the isles are different. Storms come in faster. Colors are a bit more vivid, smells are sharper.... When he becomes drunk, his subjects becomes tipsy without knowing why. When his blood falls, things grow.
Holly Black (The Wicked King (The Folk of the Air, #2))
In the green morning I wanted to be a heart. A heart. And in the ripe evening I wanted to be a nightingale. A nightingale. (Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love.) In the vivid morning I wanted to be myself. A heart. And at the evening's end I wanted to be my voice. A nightingale. Soul, turn orange-colored. Soul, turn the color of love. - Ditty of First Desire
Federico García Lorca (Selected Verse)
NON-EMPATHS naturally put themselves first. They experience themselves in vivid color, brighter and more interesting than everyone else.
Rose Rosetree (Empath Empowerment in 30 Days: Enjoy your life so much more! (An Empath Empowerment® Book Book 1))
She was a blank, clean, white sheet for me to scribble on. And I scribbled. On her lips, on her jaw, her neck and collarbone. I jotted my hunger for her in vivid colors as
L.J. Shen (Sparrow)
What are my options?" "You could read obscure poetry while I play the triangle, I suppose. Or we can smother ourselves in peanut butter and howl at the moon. Use your imagination." "Fine,"I said. "You take my hand and back up toward the bed." "Excellent choice. What then?" "You sit down, and pull me down with you." "Where are you?" he asked. "You pull me onto your lap." "Where are your legs?" "Around your waist." "Well," Noah said, his voice slightly rough. "This is getting interesting. So I'm on the edge of your bed. I'm holding you on my lap as you straddle me. My arms are around you, bracing you there so you don't fall. What am I wearing?"... "What do you usually wear to bed?" I asked. Noah said nothing. I opened my eyes to an arched brow and a devious grin. Oh my God. "Close. Your. Eyes," he said. I did. "Now, where were we?" "I was straddling you," I said. "Right. And I'm wearing..." "Drawstring pants." "Those are quite thin, you know." I'm aware. ... "Right," he said. "So what are you wearing?" "I don't know. A space suit. Who cares?" "I think this should be as vivid as possible," he said. "For you," he clarified, and I chuckled. "Eyes closed," he reminded me. "I'm going to have to institute a punishment for each time I have to tell you." "What did you have in mind?" "Don't tempt me. Now, what are you wearing?" "A hoodie and drawstring pants too, I guess." "Anything underneath?" "I don't typically walk around without underwear." "Typically?" "Only on special occasions." "Christ. I meant under your hoodie." "A tank top, I guess." "What color?" "White tank. Black hoodie. Gray pants. I'm ready to move on now." I felt him nearer, his words close to my ear. "To the part where I lean back and pull you down with me?" Yes. "Over me," he said. Fuck. "The part where I tell you that I want to feel the softness of the curls at the nape of your neck? To know what your hipbone would feel like against my mouth?" he murmured against my skin. "To memorize the slope of your navel and the arch of your neck and the swell of your-
Michelle Hodkin (The Evolution of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer, #2))
If Monday were a color, she'd be red. Crisp, striking, vivid you couldn't miss her - a bull's-eye in the room, a crackling flame. I saw so much red that it blinded me to any flags" -Claudia
Tiffany D. Jackson (Monday's Not Coming)
Dreams! in their vivid coloring of life, As in that fleeting, shadowy, misty strife Of semblance with reality, which brings To the delirious eye, more lovely things Of Paradise and Love- and all our own! Than young Hope in his sunniest hour hath known.
Edgar Allan Poe (The Complete Stories and Poems)
Three weeks ago, he’d seen hail fall from the sky, only to be followed minutes later by a spectacular rainbow that seemed to frame the azalea bushes. The colors, so vivid they seemed almost alive, made him think that nature sometimes sends us signs, that it’s important to remember that joy can always follow despair. But a moment later, the rainbow had vanished and the hail returned, and he realized that joy was sometimes only an illusion.
Nicholas Sparks (The Choice)
And I know [other] faces aren't this colorful, this vivid, this lived-in, this superbly off-site, this brimming with dark unpredictable music. NOT THAT I EFFING NOTICE... For the record, breathing is overrated.
Jandy Nelson (I'll Give You the Sun)
If you can’t dream big, you will never see the vivid colors of probability over the darkness of possibility.
Shannon L. Alder
The things that we preceive as beautiful may be different, but the actual characteristics we ascribe to beautiful objects are similar. Think about it. When something strikes us as beautiful, it displays more presence and sharpness of shape and vividness of color, doesn't it? It stands out. It shines. It seems almost iridescent compared to the dullness of other objects less attractive.
James Redfield (The Celestine Prophecy (Celestine Prophecy, #1))
You can fall in love again with someone you're already in love with. It's like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.
Leah Raeder (Cam Girl)
Soul mates meet in a place where time stands still. You recall where you were when the call came in. The vivid colors of the day. The season. The way the sun was streaming in or how the rain fell upon the glass. That’s how you know it was your destiny. You can remember the smallest details of your meeting. And you thought it wouldn’t matter.
Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: A Dog's Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Series Book 3))
I read a lot. I listen a lot. I think a lot. But so little remains. The books I read, their plots, their protagonists fade. The university lectures that I had found pretty impressive on first hearing, have faded away. Now I am listening to one on Pirandello. Names of people, books, cities. They are already fading away. Even the titles of films I’ve seen recently — they have already faded. Authors of thousands of books I’ve read... All that remains are the colours of their bindings, their covers. I don’t remember much about Beauty and the Beast, but I remember clearly, vividly the hear of the day as we were crossing the Rhine bridge, to see the film. Everything that I see, or red, or listen to, connects, translates into moods, bits of surroundings, colors. No, I am not a novelist. No precision of observation, detail. With me, everything is mood, mood, or else —simply nothingness.
Jonas Mekas (I Had Nowhere to Go)
Let it shine, the light in you. Oh, and that's delighting me! Various colors shining through. Elated, it fills my soul with ecstasy.
Ana Claudia Antunes (A-Z of Happiness: Tips for Living and Breaking Through the Chain that Separates You from Getting That Dream Job)
Genuine connection to others shows up in the vivid colors of defiance and forgiveness, reverence and rebellion, fighting and fucking: the real stuff.
Matthew B. Crawford (The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction)
The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism”—its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on—are on vivid display today at the modern American dinner table, along with all the brightly colored packages that the food industry has managed to plant there.
Michael Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation)
I saw the Earth, yes. I saw the colors so magnificent, so vivid, so real. It was hope so large and round, green and blue.
Hafsah Laziaf (Unbreathable)
When I first saw her, she stood out in vivid, living color while the world around her turned to grayscale.
Lori Perkins (Hungry for Your Love)
Data. That’s what matters. That’s what tells us something. But people want to see pictures. Supernova in vivid color. Even though scientifically it’s useless.
Marcus Sakey (Brilliance (Brilliance Saga, #1))
The head of all flower heads is one flower; the sunflower in the sky, that gives the others vivid color stemming from the inside.
Curtis Tyrone Jones (Mirrors Of The Sun: Finding Reflections Of Light In The Shittiness Of Life)
From the moment I first started studying joy, it was clear that the liveliest places and objects all have one thing in common: bright, vivid color. Whether it’s a row of houses painted in bold swaths of candy hues or a display of colored markers in a stationery shop, vibrant color invariably sparks a feeling of delight.
Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
But the eye had now changed. The pupil, like a black mirror, caught reflections. The street, the cars going down the boulevards, and his young companion. She was rendered in most vivid colors.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Gods of Jade and Shadow)
We meet in a place where time stands still. You recall where you were when the call came in. The vivid colors of the day. The season. The way the sun was streaming in or rain falling on the glass. That’s how you know it was your destiny. You can remember all the tiny details of your meeting. And you thought it wouldn’t matter.
Kate McGahan (Jack McAfghan: Return from Rainbow Bridge: A Dog's Afterlife Story of Loss, Love and Renewal (Jack McAfghan Pet Loss Series Book 3))
Toombs sees me. This man I’ve admired in agonizing silence for so long sees me. And I see him too. Up close, in vivid colors. He’s a moving symphony of darkness, wicked temptation, and macabre tattoos. He’s beautiful.
Kendall Grey (Beats (Hard Rock Harlots, #2))
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.
Samuel R. Delany (Jewel Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction)
I remember the old northern legend of how God created the taiga while he was still a child. There were few colors, but they were childishly fresh and vivid, and their subjects were simple. Later, when God grew up and became an adult, he learned to cut out complicated patters from his pages and created many bright birds. God grew bored with his former child's world and he threw snow on his forest creation and went south forever.
Varlam Shalamov (Kolyma Tales)
You don’t know that I started believing in impossible things after I met you. Maybe a person could slide down a rainbow or taste the clouds or count to infinity. Why not, if there was Liv in the world? The stars shone brighter, the colors of the world became more vivid, everything was clearer, happier, better. All because of you.
Nina Lane (Awaken (Spiral of Bliss, #3))
He sat on his horse unmoving, a somber black figure in startling contrast to the vivid colors about him, the sun dazzling on his white gold hair. Unlike the duke and his bastard, there was no laughter in his face, and his eyes were not searching the housefronts for diversion-instead, he was staring intently straight up at my window.
Teresa Denys (The Silver Devil)
Jem gazed up into the proper deep blue he knew well from Dorsetshire, coupled with the vivid green of the roadside grass and shrubs, and found himself smiling at these colors that were so natural and yet shouted louder than any London ribbon or dress.
Tracy Chevalier (Burning Bright)
Of all the foolish, horrific things he'd ever accomplished, falling in love with a woman he so completely didn't deserve made the top of his list. But he did love her. It wasn't a question or eve a sudden realization. He'd known, hadn't he? It was like a tether was between them, wrapped directly around his heart, that she had the power to push and pull at her leisure. She was woven into his being; in the blink of his eyes, in the crinkle of his smile, in his rusty unused laughter, she was there. From the moment he'd met her, he thought of her like the sun. Bright and vibrant, untouchable. But he was wrong. She wasn't light; she was color. Every single one, dancing otherworldly and bright over his unworthy eyes. She was the explosion of the vivid gleams and glows of the world around him, like a constant rainbow, shining not after the rain but during. She was everything he never deserved but longed for anyways.
Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Apprentice to the Villain (Assistant to the Villain, #2))
She was rendered in most vivid colors.
Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Gods of Jade and Shadow)
And yet in the short space of half an hour all of life had changed, lost its color, its vividness, its whole meaning. No, she reflected, it wasn’t that that had happened. Life about her, apparently, went on exactly as before.
Nella Larsen (Passing)
I don’t know how to need someone this way. All this time my emotions have been guarded by a stick house, and now a wildfire is outside my door.
Ashley Bustamante (Vivid (The Color Theory, #1))
The rooms hidden behind the multitude of tents in Le Cirque des Rêves are a stark contrast to the black and white of the circus. Alive with color. Warm with glowing amber lamps. The space kept by the Murray twins is particularly vivid. A kaleidoscope of color, blazing with carmine and coral and canary, so much so that the entire room often appears to be on fire, dotted with fluffy kittens dark as soot and bright as sparks.
Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
She saw him pause to watch it, going still with his hand on a stem and his other holding a seed head. And she wished she could paint. All those vivid colors of late summer, bold and strong, and the man so still, so patient, dropping his work to share his flowers with a bird.
Nora Roberts (Red Lily (In the Garden, #3))
Let's make our existence more joyous, fulfilled and full of positive adventures... Let's add more vivid colors to life in the world around us: making it happier, merrier, easier, healthier, tastier and brighter! Our project is a constant source of inspiration to support these ideas.
Sahara Sanders
My birthday is in March, and that year it fell during an especially bright spring week, vivid and clear in the narrow residential streets where we lived just a handful of blocks south of Sunset. The night-blooming jasmine that crawled up our neighborhood's front gate released its heady scent at dusk, and to the north, the hills rolled charmingly over the horizon, houses tucked into the brown. Soon, daylight savings time would arrive, and even at early nine, I associated my birthday with the first hint of summer, with the feeling in classrooms of open windows and lighter clothing and in a few months no more homework. My hair got lighter in spring, from light brown to nearly blond, almost like my mother's ponytail tassel. In the neighborhood gardens, the agapanthus plants started to push out their long green robot stems to open up to soft purples and blues.
Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)
Lately she can read a novel in two hours. She has always been an avid reader, but these days she can read much faster. The colors, the conversations, everything is much more vibrant and inclusive, as if opening a book releases genies trapped inside. The scenes and people between their covers sometimes seem more vivid than real life, with their sunny, pearl-toothed characters, the witty conversation, the handsome stranger squeezed into a subway car or knocking about on the street. Sometimes, when she finishes a book at record speed, Dana feels a slight letdown, as if a good friend has hung up the phone in the middle of a conversation.
Susan H. Crawford (The Pocket Wife)
I let no chance go by untaken. I never hesitated to follow where my curiosity beckoned. I willingly went where there was danger in beauty and beauty in danger. I had experiences in plenty. Many were enjoyable, some were instructive, a few I would rather have missed. But I had them, and I have them still in memory. If, as soon as tomorrow, I go to my grave, it will be no black and silent hole. I can paint the darkness with vivid colors, and fill it with music both martial and languorous, with the flicker of swords and the flutter of kisses, with flavors and excitements and sensations, with the fragrance of a field of clover that has been warmed in the sun and then washed by a gentle rain, the sweetest-scented thing God ever put on this earth. Yes, I can enliven eternity. Others may have to endure it; I can enjoy it.
Gary Jennings (The Journeyer)
I vividly remember going to Google Docs, opening a document at the same time other students were working on it, and seeing their differently colored cursors moving around the screen, typing new words and making edits in real time. It was an epiphany.
Ian Lamont (Google Drive & Docs In 30 Minutes)
When the sun goes down, melting away his caresses into the sky which consonants with the ocean, lively colors are scattered through the deep pale depth during some short sensuous instants. Later, as by art of magic, light is consumed into the infinite horizon giving space to the poked voidness and its full-cristal-covered vastness. Then, to mystify the night, a marvelous and alluring sentinel rests next to us through the vivid night, just until the next prismatic fest arrives with its celebrating aperture.
Jose A. Arvide
With that single phrase, the color of the world changed... to something so vivid... so dramatic... so loving that it almost hurts...
Minari Endou (Dazzle, Volume 06)
Every lost color returned, one by one by one like cherry blossoms bursting to life in the spring, brighter and more vivid than ever before. - pleasantville ii
Parker Lee (DROPKICKromance)
See each scene deep, love it like a complex faceted jewel. Get the light, shadow & vivid color. Set scene the night before. Sleep on it, write it in the morning.
Sylvia Plath (The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath)
Memories were like tomb paintings, thought the Major, the colors still vivid no matter how many layers of mud and sand time deposited. Scrape at them and they come up all red and blazing.
Helen Simonson (Major Pettigrew's Last Stand)
Darkness just loosens the mask. Sharpens the mind's eye. Makes the color of a remembered pencil, or a tick of waxy red on a cracked plaster wall, as vivid as that taillight a few feet away.
Garth Risk Hallberg (City on Fire)
The heroes pop out at you, impossibly vivid, colorful as playing cards but all from different decks, a jumble of incompatible suits and denominations dealt out for an Alice in Wonderland game.
Austin Grossman (Soon I Will Be Invincible)
The garden was the most beautiful place Margherita had ever seen. In spring, it was a sea of delicate blossom. In summer, it was green and fruitful. In autumn, the trees blazed gold and red and orange, as vivid as Margherita's hair. Even in winter, it was beautiful, with bare branches against the old stone walls and green hedges in curves and curlicues about beds of winter-flowering herbs and flowers.
Kate Forsyth (Bitter Greens)
How can I know for sure? How can I ever truly know? My heart wants to justify every action and begs me to believe he is being honest, but my intellect keeps flashing warning lights and asking questions.
Ashley Bustamante (Vivid (The Color Theory, #1))
...his paintings are distinctly Vincent: vivid colors thick paint textured fields and skies and flowers and trees and houses all in blues and oranges and yellows and pinks and whites and greens and reds.
Deborah Heiligman (Vincent and Theo: The Van Gogh Brothers)
She was about twenty-four, Rosemary guessed - her face could have been described in terms of conventional prettiness, but the effect was that it had been made first on the heroic scale with strong structure and marking, as if the features and vividness of brow and coloring, everything we associate with temperament and character had been molded with a Rodinesque intention, and then chiseled away in the direction of prettiness to a point where a single slip would have irreparably diminished its force and quality. With the mouth the sculptor had taken desperate chances - it was the cupid's bow of a magazine cover, yet it shared the distinction of the rest.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night)
As the wind swelled, my tree started to sway. Almost like a human body it swung back and around, gently at first, then more and more wildly. While the swaying intensified, so did my fears that the trunk might snap and hurl me to the ground. But in time my confidence returned. Amazed at how the tree could be at once so flexible and so sturdy, I held on tight as it bent and waved, twisted and swirled, slicing curves and arcs through the air. With each graceful swing, I felt less a creature of the land and more a part of the wind itself. "The rain began falling, it's sound merging with the splashing river and the singing trees. Branches streamed like waterfalls of green. Tiny rivers cascaded down every trunk, twisting through moss meadows and bark canyons. All the while, I rode out the gale. I could not have felt wetter. I could not have felt freer. "When, at last, the storm subsided, the entire world seemed newly born. Sunbeams danced on rain-washed leaves. Curling columns of mist rose from every glade. The forest's colors shown more vivid, its smells struck more fresh. And I understood, for the first time in my life, that the Earth was always being remade, that life was always being renewed. That it may have been the afternoon of this particular day, but it was still the very morning of Creation.
T.A. Barron (The Lost Years of Merlin (Merlin, #1))
She felt alert, somehow—perhaps awake was a better word: everything seemed clearer, as if a fog had lifted; colors were sharper, the edges of things more defined. The world no longer felt muted and gray and far away—behind a veil. It felt alive again, and vivid, and full of color, wet with autumn rain; and vibrating with the eternal hum of endless birth and death.
Alex Michaelides (The Maidens)
Now here is an oddity. A question for the zombie philosophers. What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and color? Since I became Dead I've recorded new memories with the fidelity of an old cassette deck, faint and muffled and ultimately forgettable. But I can recall every hour of the last few days in vivid detail, and the thought of losing a single one horrifies me. Where am I getting this focus? This clarity? I can trace a solid line from the moment I met Julie all the way to now, lying next to her in this sepulchral bedroom, and despite the millions of past moments I've lost or tossed away like highway trash, I know with a lockjawed certainty I'll remember this one for the rest of my life.
Isaac Marion (Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies, #1))
Coral, my love, you are too pure, too innocent, too alive for me,” he said slowly, almost carefully. “My world is like a drawing in black and white on a gray canvas, without a single note of color to bring it to life. And now, on this pale and melancholic picture, a red flower has fallen, a warm and scented flower.” He sighed. “It’s a wonderful contrast, but too vivid…
Hannah Fielding (Burning Embers)
The bullet will go through his skull, splashing warm blood and brain fluid all over. And from then on you'll have recurring nightmares of vivid colors and dead faces... with their eyes popping out and leaking bits of brain. Are you sure you want to do this?
Minari Endou (Dazzle, Volume 04)
You can fall in love again with someone you’re already in love with. It’s like waking from a dream within a dream and finding another layer, the colors more vivid, the light more lucid, the fantasy more real. Being in love is an endless loop of waking to reverie.
Leah Raeder (Cam Girl)
The colors, so vivid they seemed almost alive, made him think that nature sometimes sends us signs, that it’s important to remember that joy can always follow despair. But a moment later, the rainbow had vanished and the hail returned, and he realized that joy was sometimes only an illusion.
Nicholas Sparks (The Choice)
Donnelley was lifting his shirt away from the torn flesh in his side. He was cranked around, trying to assess the damage in the muck-spotted mirror. To Vero, he looked like an expressionist painting in which all the objects were the same color of too-vivid red: the shirt, the hands holding the shirt, the belt bassing through pant loops. At the center of it all was the thing that corrupted its surroundings with its own gruesome color - a wound.
Robert Liparulo (Germ: If You Breathe, It Will Find You)
Just like the movements in a symphony, the rain sent vibrations through his body, painting the world in a physical map of mountains, valleys and high peaks dropping into deep ravines. The physical structures were all created by sound itself, and the colors were intense and vivid—substance created by sound, by feeling.
Christine Feehan (Water Bound (Sea Haven/Sisters of the Heart, #1))
Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat? Then crouch within the door— Red—is the Fire’s common tint— But when the vivid Ore Has vanquished Flame’s conditions— It quivers from the Forge Without a color, but the Light Of unannointed Blaze— Least Village, boasts it’s Blacksmith— Whose Anvil’s even ring Stands symbol for the finer Forge That soundless tugs—within— Refining these impatient Ores With Hammer, and with Blaze Until the designated Light Repudiate the Forge—
Emily Dickinson (The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson)
So long time has passed since those days, and since that story, which is still vivid in my memory, and even more vivid than all the rest. Some times I stay alone in my work - room here, in my father's old mansion in Pasadena, and I look through the old, yellow pages again and again. Then I go back to the north part which is furnished in my style, with many colored Bulgarian carpets and blankets (special kind of Bulgarian blankets with long fur), I make my coffee in a cooper coffee - pot, which has been brought from there, and my thoughts wonder to those absurd memories of mine... Very often some friends ask me - what is that unusual memories of yours? I can't explain to them, better say I don't want to, and I always avoid the answer by saying - a la Bulgaro - in a Bulgarian way..."Oh, yes, yes"...
Alexandar Tomov (A la bulgaro)
I’m going to classify his heated stares as figments of my very vivid imagination, which has gotten increasingly more colorful since I started writing my books. Every guy, young or old, is a potential character or potential muse. I can now turn everyday occurrences into romance, innocent sentences and questions into innuendo. Take
Sara Ney (Things Liars Hide (#ThreeLittleLies #2))
A small crowd had gathered to gaze at the astonishing display of color: vivid blues; regal purples; soft, candy-floss pinks; strawberry reds; vibrant lime greens; sun-bright, buttercup yellows; rich oranges; and creamy, vanilla whites. Tilly’s eyes were unable to take it all in, her mouth unable to suppress a smile of sheer delight. It was as if someone had poured a box of paints onto this one street, leaving nothing with which to brighten up the drab gray of the rest of the city she had just passed.
Hazel Gaynor (A Memory of Violets: A Novel of London's Flower Sellers)
The subject matter is perhaps best characterized as “the subjective quality of experience.” When we perceive, think, and act, there is a whir of causation and information processing, but this processing does not usually go on in the dark. There is also an internal aspect; there is something it feels like to be a cognitive agent. This internal aspect is conscious experience. Conscious experiences range from vivid color sensations to experiences of the faintest background aromas; from hard-edged pains to the elusive experience of thoughts on the tip of one’s tongue; from mundane sounds and smells to the encompassing grandeur of musical experience; from the triviality of a nagging itch to the weight of a deep existential angst; from the specificity of the taste of peppermint to the generality of one’s experience of selfhood. All these have a distinct experienced quality. All are prominent parts of the inner life of the mind. We can say that a being is conscious if there is something it is like to be that being, to use a phrase made famous by Thomas Nagel.1
David J. Chalmers (The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (Philosophy of Mind))
They were brightly colored, their gold rims vivid. From a distance, they looked like flowers, pinks and creams, reds and golds, unfolding in the sun.
Jennifer Weiner (That Summer)
Ammar’s eyes opened without warning, vivid and blue, the same color as her own. He looked at her. She watched him settle into an awareness of the day, what morning it was.
Guy Gavriel Kay (The Lions of Al-Rassan)
The colors, so vivid they seemed almost alive, made him think that nature sometimes sends us signs, that it's important to remember that joy always follow dispair.
Nicholas Sparks (The Choice)
Tempe is like a condensed drop of color that has landed in my world of water, spreading and outlining things, creating contrast and vividness. More than one drop might be too much.
Michael Robotham (When You Are Mine)
These two men have flipped my world, made colors more vivid, made sounds sweeter, made the world as a whole more bearable.
Kate Stewart (Flock (The Ravenhood, #1))
Imagine yourself successful, confident, and unafraid, then color in that happy vision with as many details as you can. Make it vivid, and reinforce it every day.
Andrea Plos (Sources of Wealth)
I see many colors. They smell many scents. Our experience isn't the same. But it's comparably vivid.
Carl Safina (Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel)
When they sprinkle on the soul Colours make you vibrant from within Let your aura be covered with so much vividity That the hues and your demeanor twin
Neelam Saxena Chandra
If Monday were a color, she’d be red. Crisp, striking, vivid, you couldn’t miss her—a bull’s-eye in the room, a crackling flame. I saw so much red that it blinded me to any flags.
Tiffany D. Jackson (Monday's Not Coming)
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Sylvia Plath
Atmospheric dust billows in polychromed glitter above me, the vibrant, shimmering haze decorating the blue-blackness of space, and its luminous, variegated hues remind me of the one wish I made on countless stars—I wanted to live in a world of colors, where I could travel to bright and exotic places, where I could see and do magical things. Well, here I am in the most exotic of places, in a world of vivid radiance, with magic all around me. How was I to know the countless times I made that wish I should have specified that those places be free of evil monsters?
Garten Gevedon (Dorothy in the Land of Monsters (Oz ReVamped, #1))
he studied Grandma Mama, hearing her hum a morning melody. her flowered robe was slightly soiles, but still vivid in splashes of rose colors.She was a short woman, and a little wide.Her salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a bun, and when she spoke, her gold tooth winked at you.All warm and friendly,Grandma Mama had a heart of gold, but a fist full of fire at the same time.
C-Murder
You saved me, you should remember me. The spring of the year; young men buying tickets for the ferryboats. Laughter, because the air is full of apple blossoms. When I woke up, I realized I was capable of the same feeling. I remember sounds like that from my childhood, laughter for no cause, simply because the world is beautiful, something like that. Lugano. Tables under the apple trees. Deckhands raising and lowering the colored flags. And by the lake’s edge, a young man throws his hat into the water; perhaps his sweetheart has accepted him. Crucial sounds or gestures like a track laid down before the larger themes and then unused, buried. Islands in the distance. My mother holding out a plate of little cakes— as far as I remember, changed in no detail, the moment vivid, intact, having never been exposed to light, so that I woke elated, at my age hungry for life, utterly confident— By the tables, patches of new grass, the pale green pieced into the dark existing ground. Surely spring has been returned to me, this time not as a lover but a messenger of death, yet it is still spring, it is still meant tenderly.
Louise Glück
Peering at myself in the mirror without my glasses, my face looked sort of blurry and moist. My glasses are the thing I hate most about my face, but there are certain good things about glasses that other people might not understand. I like to take my glasses off and look out into the distance. Everything goes hazy, as in a dream, or like a zoetrope—it's wonderful. I can't see anything that's dirty. Only big things—vivid intense colors and light are all that enters my vision. I also like to take my glasses off and look at people. The faces around me, all of them, seem kind and pretty and smiling.
Osamu Dazai
Somehow I cannot let it go yet, funeral though it is, Let it remain back there on its nail suspended, With pink, blue, yellow, all blanch'd, and the white now gray and ashy, One wither'd rose put years ago for thee, dear friend; But I do not forget thee. Hast thou then faded? Is the odor exhaled? Are the colors, vitalities, dead? No, while memories subtly play—the past vivid as ever; For but last night I woke, and in that spectral ring saw thee, Thy smile, eyes, face, calm, silent, loving as ever: So let the wreath hang still awhile within my eye-reach, It is not yet dead to me, nor even pallid.
Walt Whitman
Every concept in our conscious mind, in short, has its own psychic associations. While such associations may vary in intensity (according to relative importance of the concept to our whole personality, or according to the other ideas and even complexes to which it is associated in our unconscious), they are capable of changing the "normal" character of that concept. It may even become something quite different as it drifts below the level of consciousness. These subliminal aspects of everything that happens to us may seem to play very little part in our daily lives. But in dream analysis, where the psychologist is dealing with expressions of the unconscious, they are very relevant, for they are the almost invisible roots of our conscious thoughts. That is why commonplace objects or ideas can assume such powerful psychic significance in a dream that we may awake seriously disturbed, in spite of having dreamed of nothing worse than a locked room or a missed train. The images produced in dreams are much more picturesque and vivid than the concepts and experiences that are their waking counterparts. One of the reasons for this is that, in a dream, such concepts can express their unconscious meaning. In our conscious thoughts, we restrain ourselves within the limits of rational statements-statements that are much less colorful because we have stripped them of most of their psychic associations.
C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
Rebeca leans her head against her sister's shoulder and watches the changing colors of the landscape. The sun sinks in front of them and turns the sandy earth orange and pink. The sky, too, is filled with crazy, vivid pinks and purples and blues and yellows, and the colors are slow to deepen, slow to slip into blackness, but when at last they are gone, the darkness is deeper and more vast than anything Luca has ever seen.
Jeanine Cummins (American Dirt)
I watched him swallow, then close his eyes as a shiver ran through his body. When he opened his eyes again, color poured through the air around him - the vivid, hot pink of passionate love. Kai was showing me his colors.
Wendy Higgins, Sweet Reckoning
And the coming of Anne—the vivid, imaginative, impetuous child with her heart of love, and her world of fancy, bringing with her color and warmth and radiance, until the wilderness of existence had blossomed like the rose.
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables Collection: 11 Books)
I had myself been to Seville when I was twenty-three and I, too, had liked it. I liked its white, tortuous streets, its cathedral, and the wide-spreading plain of the Guadalquivir; but I liked also those Andalusian girls with their grace and their gaiety, with their dark shining eyes, the carnations in their hair stressing its blackness and by the contrast itself more vivid; I liked the rich color of their skins and the inviting sensuality of their lips.
W. Somerset Maugham (The Razor’s Edge)
The sunny scene looked impossibly vivid, as though painted in primary colors by an artist who hadn’t yet learned how to shade; it should trouble him, it really should, that he felt so goddamned alive. Was he never going to learn subtler pleasures? Miss Masters seemed to feel it, too. She wrested free of his hold,skipping ahead a little, then spinning back to face him. Her eyes were as blue as the sky behind her, her hair as bright as the sun; she was not a subtle pleasure herself.
Meredith Duran (Written on Your Skin)
That is what's important. The life of the line. When I draw, it's like tied and untied writing. My lines can be vivid or dead. The drawing is beautiful if the line is alive. A line is in danger of dying all along. My method of drawing is very much like jazz improvisation. I improvise with the lines and the colors. (...) There's great joy in drawing. Writing is drawing in different apparel, and drawing is another way of writing. And when I draw, I write. Perhaps when I write, I draw.
Jean Cocteau
Yorkshire had none of the color I'd known in Cape Town- the vivid pinks and purples of the freesias and arum lilies in the flower sellers' baskets. Yorkshire had none of the fragrant floral perfume, or the tang of salt in the air from the ocean.
Hazel Gaynor (The Cottingley Secret)
Human skin is confined to a dull color palette of cream, beige, taupe, and brown when people are alive, but all bets are off once someone is dead. Decomposition allows skin to flower into vivid pastels and neons. This woman happened to be orange.
Caitlin Doughty (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory)
Liberation is a beautiful thing when embarking on the glorious moment when the truth about someone is revealed to you, in bold and vibrant color and you have the courage, with wide-open eyes to see reality more vividly, and the wisdom to act accordingly.
Elissa Gabrielle
At first Alexander could not believe it was his Tania. He blinked and tried to refocus his eyes. She was walking around the table, gesturing, showing, leaning forward, bending over. At one point she straightened out and wiped her forehead. She was wearing a short-sleeved yellow peasant dress. She was barefoot, and her slender legs were exposed above her knee. Her bare arms were lightly tanned. Her blonde hair looked bleached by the sun and was parted into two shoulder-length braids tucked behind her ears. Even from a distance he could see the summer freckles on her nose. She was achingly beautiful. And alive. Alexander closed his eyes, then opened them again. She was still there, bending over the boy’s work. She said something, everyone laughed loudly, and Alexander watched as the boy’s arm touched Tatiana’s back. Tatiana smiled. Her white teeth sparkled like the rest of her. Alexander didn’t know what to do. She was alive, that was obvious. Then why hadn’t she written him? And where was Dasha? Alexander couldn’t very well continue to stand under a lilac tree. He went back out onto the main road, took a deep breath, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked toward the square, never taking his eyes off her braids. His heart was thundering in his chest, as if he were going into battle. Tatiana looked up, saw him, and covered her face with her hands. Alexander watched everyone get up and rush to her, the old ladies showing unexpected agility and speed. She pushed them all away, pushed the table away, pushed the bench away, and ran to him. Alexander was paralyzed by his emotion. He wanted to smile, but he thought any second he was going to fall to his knees and cry. He dropped all his gear, including his rifle. God, he thought, in a second I’m going to feel her. And that’s when he smiled. Tatiana sprang into his open arms, and Alexander, lifting her off her feet with the force of his embrace, couldn’t hug her tight enough, couldn’t breathe in enough of her. She flung her arms around his neck, burying her face in his bearded cheek. Dry sobs racked her entire body. She was heavier than the last time he felt her in all her clothes as he lifted her into the Lake Ladoga truck. She, with her boots, her clothes, coats, and coverings, had not weighed what she weighed now. She smelled incredible. She smelled of soap and sunshine and caramelized sugar. She felt incredible. Holding her to him, Alexander rubbed his face into her braids, murmuring a few pointless words. “Shh, shh…come on, now, shh, Tatia. Please…” His voice broke. “Oh, Alexander,” Tatiana said softly into his neck. She was clutching the back of his head. “You’re alive. Thank God.” “Oh, Tatiana,” Alexander said, hugging her tighter, if that were possible, his arms swaddling her summer body. “You’re alive. Thank God.” His hands ran up to her neck and down to the small of her back. Her dress was made of very thin cotton. He could almost feel her skin through it. She felt very soft. Finally he let her feet touch the ground. Tatiana looked up at him. His hands remained around her little waist. He wasn’t letting go of her. Was she always this tiny, standing barefoot in front of him? “I like your beard,” Tatiana said, smiling shyly and touching his face. “I love your hair,” Alexander said, pulling on a braid and smiling back. “You’re messy…” He looked her over. “And you’re stunning.” He could not take his eyes off her glorious, eager, vivid lips. They were the color of July tomatoes— He bent to her—
Paullina Simons
I still remember—so vividly I can smell the gentle fragrance of the spring air—the afternoon when I decided, after thinking everything over, to abdicate from love as from an insoluble problem. it was in May, a May that was softly summery, with the flowers around my estate already in full bloom, their colors fading as the sun made its slow descent. Escorted by regrets and self-reproach, I walked among my few trees, I had dined early and was wandering, like a symbol, under the useless shadows and faint rustle of leaves. And suddenly I was overwhelmed by a desire to renounce completely, to withdraw once and for all, and I felt an intense nausea for having had so many desires, so many hopes, with so many outer conditions for attaining them and so much inner impossibility of really wanting to attain them.
Fernando Pessoa (The Education of the Stoic: The Only Manuscript of the Baron of Teive)
His delicate blue-ish cheeks dusted the softest shade of pink, and he bit that bottom lip again. The backdrop of thick black trees, and grey and white grass made his colors even more vivid. Pink, blue, purple, with big, green eyes. He was a tiny rainbow in a sea of black.
Kitt Lynn (The Blue Path (Blushing Moon, #2))
I felt him in my mind, even more vividly than I felt him in my body, a hurtful, hateful rending presence, like the color of blood, like the taste of iron, like the scent of burning, destroying everything in his path until he reached for the core of my power and seized it.
Sarah Monette (Mélusine (Doctrine of Labyrinths, #1))
One day, soon after her disappearance, an attack of abominable nausea forced me to pull up on the ghost of an old mountain road that now accompanied, now traversed a brand new highway, with its population of asters bathing in the detached warmth of a pale-blue afternoon in late summer. After coughing myself inside out I rested a while on a boulder and then thinking the sweet air might do me good, walked a little way toward a low stone parapet on the precipice side of the highway. Small grasshoppers spurted out of the withered roadside weeds. A very light cloud was opening its arms and moving toward a slightly more substantial one belonging to another, more sluggish, heavenlogged system. As I approached the friendly abyss, I grew aware of a melodious unity of sounds rising like vapor from a small mining town that lay at my feet, in a fold of the valley. One could make out the geometry of the streets between blocks of red and gray roofs, and green puffs of trees, and a serpentine stream, and the rich, ore-like glitter of the city dump, and beyond the town, roads crisscrossing the crazy quilt of dark and pale fields, and behind it all, great timbered mountains. But even brighter than those quietly rejoicing colors - for there are colors and shades that seem to enjoy themselves in good company - both brighter and dreamier to the ear than they were to the eye, was that vapory vibration of accumulated sounds that never ceased for a moment, as it rose to the lip of granite where I stood wiping my foul mouth. And soon I realized that all these sounds were of one nature, that no other sounds but these came from the streets of the transparent town, with the women at home and the men away. Reader! What I heard was but the melody of children at play, nothing but that, and so limpid was the air that within this vapor of blended voices, majestic and minute, remote and magically near, frank and divinely enigmatic - one could hear now and then, as if released, an almost articulate spurt of vivid laughter, or the crack of a bat, or the clatter of a toy wagon, but it was all really too far for the eye to distinguish any movement in the lightly etched streets. I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
Bright lamplight bounced off golden varnished wood. The suddenly vivid colors of scarves, hats, hair and faces after the gray-green gloom they’d been immersed in all morning dazzled them. The solid warmth of the coal-fired range, dry and hot, pressed against them from the front as the lingering damp embedded in their backs brought forth a final, convulsive shiver. The sights and smells of rich food and aromatic coffee hit them, no longer just a hope in their hollow stomachs. This made them all as if drunk with good fortune and delighted them with sheer, physical pleasure.
Antonio Dias
When I open my eyes to a painting, it is as though everything has changed and will never be the same again. Colors look more vivid, the lines and edges of objects sharper, and I fall in love with the world and all its beauty—the tragedies and love stories on the faces of people walking by,
Eleanor Brown (The Light of Paris)
I say is someone in there?’ The voice is the young post-New formalist from Pittsburgh who affects Continental and wears an ascot that won’t stay tight, with that hesitant knocking of when you know perfectly well someone’s in there, the bathroom door composed of thirty-six that’s three times a lengthwise twelve recessed two-bevelled squares in a warped rectangle of steam-softened wood, not quite white, the bottom outside corner right here raw wood and mangled from hitting the cabinets’ bottom drawer’s wicked metal knob, through the door and offset ‘Red’ and glowering actors and calendar and very crowded scene and pubic spirals of pale blue smoke from the elephant-colored rubble of ash and little blackened chunks in the foil funnel’s cone, the smoke’s baby-blanket blue that’s sent her sliding down along the wall past knotted washcloth, towel rack, blood-flower wallpaper and intricately grimed electrical outlet, the light sharp bitter tint of a heated sky’s blue that’s left her uprightly fetal with chin on knees in yet another North American bathroom, deveiled, too pretty for words, maybe the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (Prettiest G.O.A.T.), knees to chest, slew-footed by the radiant chill of the claw-footed tub’s porcelain, Molly’s had somebody lacquer the tub in blue, lacquer, she’s holding the bottle, recalling vividly its slogan for the past generation was The Choice of a Nude Generation, when she was of back-pocket height and prettier by far than any of the peach-colored titans they’d gazed up at, his hand in her lap her hand in the box and rooting down past candy for the Prize, more fun way too much fun inside her veil on the counter above her, the stuff in the funnel exhausted though it’s still smoking thinly, its graph reaching its highest spiked prick, peak, the arrow’s best descent, so good she can’t stand it and reaches out for the cold tub’s rim’s cold edge to pull herself up as the white- party-noise reaches, for her, the sort of stereophonic precipice of volume to teeter on just before the speaker’s blow, people barely twitching and conversations strettoing against a ghastly old pre-Carter thing saying ‘We’ve Only Just Begun,’ Joelle’s limbs have been removed to a distance where their acknowledgement of her commands seems like magic, both clogs simply gone, nowhere in sight, and socks oddly wet, pulls her face up to face the unclean medicine-cabinet mirror, twin roses of flame still hanging in the glass’s corner, hair of the flame she’s eaten now trailing like the legs of wasps through the air of the glass she uses to locate the de-faced veil and what’s inside it, loading up the cone again, the ashes from the last load make the world's best filter: this is a fact. Breathes in and out like a savvy diver… –and is knelt vomiting over the lip of the cool blue tub, gouges on the tub’s lip revealing sandy white gritty stuff below the lacquer and porcelain, vomiting muddy juice and blue smoke and dots of mercuric red into the claw-footed trough, and can hear again and seems to see, against the fire of her closed lids’ blood, bladed vessels aloft in the night to monitor flow, searchlit helicopters, fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching.
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
Like its master, it was entirely devoid of hair, but was of a dark slate color and exceeding smooth and glossy. Its belly was white, and its legs shaded from the slate of its shoulders and hips to a vivid yellow at the feet. The feet themselves were heavily padded and nailless, which fact had also contributed to the noiselessness of their approach, and, in common with a multiplicity of legs, is a characteristic feature of the fauna of Mars. The highest type of man and one other animal, the only mammal existing on Mars, alone have well-formed nails, and there are absolutely no hoofed animals in existence there.
Edgar Rice Burroughs (A Princess of Mars (Barsoom, #1))
My tattoos are permanent; it’s just my body that’s temporary. So is yours. We’re only here on earth for a short while, so I decided a long time ago that I wanted to decorate myself as playfully as I can, while I still have time.” I love this so much, I can’t even tell you. Because—like Eileen—I also want to live the most vividly decorated temporary life that I can. I don’t just mean physically; I mean emotionally, spiritually, intellectually. I don’t want to be afraid of bright colors, or new sounds, or big love, or risky decisions, or strange experiences, or weird endeavors, or sudden changes, or even failure.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Like Oz, life is full of beauty and horror. Whether you’re in the magical realm or the so-called civilized one, you can look at the world around you and see both things at almost any time. But what being in Oz taught me is that no matter how horrific a situation may be, no matter how devastating or scary or chaotic, there is still always beauty in the colors of it all, even in the grays. As I look back on the last four years of my life, on everything that led me to the place where my life changed forever for a second time, I might think I wasted too many crucial years perceiving my world through a lens that leeched the color from everything I set my eyes on, but now I can forgive myself for my mistakes and maybe even be grateful for the trials I’ve faced. After all, a rainbow only comes out when it rains. The most spectacular rainbows are set against a backdrop of a half dark sky where gray clouds hover and rain batters the surface of the earth, but the horizon is clear and bright—a pure, radiant blue surrounding a shining golden sun. When I’m in Oz, that rainbow is who I am—a vivid, radiant spectrum of colors with a clear bright landscape ahead only made more rich-hued and vibrant by the darkness that lies behind it.
Garten Gevedon (Dorothy in the Land of Monsters (Oz ReVamped, #1))
The ability to draw a connection between two things that had previously appeared to be unrelated is an important part of creativity, and it appears that it can be enhanced by electrical stimulation. Compared to participants who were given fake tDCS, those who got electricity created more unusual analogies—that is, analogies between things that seemed very unlike one another. Nevertheless, these highly creative analogies were just as accurate as the more obvious ones created by the participants whose devices were secretly turned off. Dopaminergic drugs can do the same thing. Although some patients who take dopaminergic drugs for Parkinson’s disease develop devastating compulsions, others experience enhanced creativity. One patient who came from a family of poets had never done any creative writing. After starting dopamine-boosting drugs for his Parkinson’s disease, he wrote a poem that won the annual contest of the International Association of Poets. Painters treated with Parkinson’s medication often increase their use of vivid color. One patient who developed a new style after being treated said, “The new style is less precise but more vibrant. I have a need to express myself more. I just let myself go.” Just like Winnie-the-Pooh: “It is the best way to write poetry, letting things come.
Daniel Z. Lieberman (The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity―and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race)
that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white.
G.K. Chesterton (The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books])
So when nobody's watching, is the rainbow there? No, it is not. Your eyes are needed to complete the geometry. The triad of Sun, water droplets, and observer are all required for a rainbow. When no one is present, we can picture the situation as an infinity of potential rainbows, each slightly offset from the others with various color emphases (since bigger droplets produce more vivid rainbows but rob them of blue). Moreover, only when neurons in the retina and brain are stimulated by light's invisible magnetic and electrical pulses do they conjure the subjective experience of spectral colors. For both reasons, we are as necessary for rainbows as the Sun and the rain.
Bob Berman
From the moment he'd met her, he thought of her like the sun. Bright and vibrant, untouchable. But he was wrong. She wasn't light; she was color. Every single one, dancing otherworldly and bright over his unworthy eyes. She was the explosion of vivid gleams and glows of the world around him, like a constant rainbow, shining not after the rain but during.
Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Assistant to the Villain (Assistant to the Villain, #1))
NON-EMPATHS naturally put themselves first. They experience themselves in vivid color, brighter and more interesting than everyone else. Granted, a non-empath will occasionally have an insight, such as “I notice things going on beneath the surface of the conversation.” While an unskilled empath has insights constantly, and to such an extent that it’s like living grayed out—fascinated by everyone else, because even random people appear so much more colorful. Yet a SKILLED EMPATH gets to be in full color, just like everyone else, and going deeper when we choose. Yes, going deeper as a matter of choice. Otherwise we stay on the surface of life, enjoying the very human privilege of personal vividness in living color.
Rose Rosetree (Empath Empowerment in 30 Days (An Empath Empowerment® Book))
Many say autumn is by far the most spectacular season in Lanark County. During these brief few weeks Mother Nature paints our landscape with her most vivid palette, colouring our trees with broad strokes of the richest crimsons, fiery oranges, and the sunniest yellows, leaving no doubt in anyone's mind that these sugar maples are the crown jewels of our forests.
Arlene Stafford-Wilson (Lanark County Comfort)
It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one. On this one: the day I returned from the emergency room after having a fit about wanting to remove my mouth. Not an easy day to look at people in their vivid clothes, in their shining hair, pointing and smiling at colorful woven sweaters. I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be them at the same time. At home, Joseph was nicer to me than usual and we played a silent game of Parcheesi for an hour in the slanted box of remaining sunlight on the carpet. Dad came by and brought me a pillow. Mom went to take a nap. Joseph won. I went to bed early. I woke up the same.
Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)
She felt alert, somehow—perhaps awake was a better word: everything seemed clearer, as if a fog had lifted; colors were sharper, the edges of things more defined. The world no longer felt muted and gray and far away—behind a veil. It felt alive again, and vivid, and full of color, wet with autumn rain; and vibrating with the eternal hum of endless birth and death.
Alex Michaelides (The Maidens)
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of revery. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. Black fantastic shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills, and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleepers. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
Oscar Wilde (Complete Works)
Wearing bright color became a way to make herself more accessible to people, short-circuiting their tendency to judge her too quickly. Beth owns no dark coats, only ones in vivid shades like yellow and green. On a miserable winter day she notices that people walk by and smile. It’s almost as if a colorful garment is a tiny gift, a brilliant spot of joy in a bleak landscape.
Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
Beautiful she was by the morning light; with her fair, rich color, and her gleaming eyes, and her crown of halfbright, half-dusky hair, like the bronze in which there much mixture of gold. But I thought I never saw anything of so much greed, or so intensely selfish. There was a vivid animal pleasure in the sight of what were dainties to her senses ; but there was no sort of gratitude or feeling at the generous and thoughtful affection which had been thus tender of her in her absence. She ate all there was on the table; seeming to like to draw the pleasure out to its longest span; when ended, she washed the things and set them away, and did a little house-work, all in a very idle, slovenly manner—like one whose heart was not at all in her occupation.
Ouida (Puck)
The group of artists and scientists that had so far done least was the one that had attracted the greatest interest—and the greatest alarm. This was the team working on “total identification.” The history of the cinema gave the clue to their actions. First sound, then color, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old “moving pictures” more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely, the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was an audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would involve stimulation of all the senses, and perhaps hypnosis as well, but many believed it to be practical. When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become—for a while, at least—any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or imaginary. He could even be a plant or an animal, if it proved possible to capture and record the sense impressions of other living creatures. And when the “program” was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life—indeed, indistinguishable from reality itself. The prospect was dazzling. Many also found it terrifying, and hoped that the enterprise would fail. But they knew in their hearts that once science had declared a thing possible, there was no escape from its eventual realization…. This, then, was New Athens and some of its dreams. It hoped to become what the old Athens might have been had it possessed machines instead of slaves, science instead of superstition. But it was much too early yet to tell if the experiment would succeed.
Arthur C. Clarke (Childhood's End)
He was in love with her. Of all the foolish, horrific things he'd ever accomplished, falling in love with a woman he so completely didn't deserve made the top of his list. But he did love her. It wasn't a question or even a sudden realization. Hed known, hadn't he? He'd known from the moment shed called him pretty. It was like a tether between them, wrapped directly around his heart, that she had the power to push and pull at her leisure. Evangelina Celia Sage was woven into his being; in the blink of his eyes, in the crinkle of his smile, in his rusty unused laughter, she was there. From the moment he'd met her, he thought of her like the sun. Bright and vibrant, untouchable. But he was wrong. She wasn't light; she was color. Every single one, dancing otherworldly and bright over his unworthy eyes. She was the explosion of the vivid gleams and glows of the world around him, like a constant rainbow, shining not after the rain, but during. She was everything he never deserved but longed for anyway. He remembered the blood on her clothes, the employer who had hurt her before, the unjust way shed been treated, and the final nail in the proverbial coffin was that echoing, agonizing word. He was ruined. But he loved her anyway.
Hannah Nicole Maehrer (Assistant to the Villain (Assistant to the Villain, #1))
If a fountain could jet bouquets of chrome yellow in dazzling arches of chrysanthemum fireworks, that would be Canada Goldenrod. Each three-foot stem is a geyser of tiny gold daisies, ladylike in miniature, exuberant en masse. Where the soil is damp enough, they stand side by side with their perfect counterpart, New England Asters. Not the pale domesticates of the perennial border, the weak sauce of lavender or sky blue, but full-on royal purple that would make a violet shrink. The daisylike fringe of purple petals surrounds a disc as bright as the sun at high noon, a golden-orange pool, just a tantalizing shade darker than the surrounding goldenrod. Alone, each is a botanical superlative. Together, the visual effect is stunning. Purple and gold, the heraldic colors of the king and queen of the meadow, a regal procession in complementary colors. I just wanted to know why. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair. Growing together, both receive more pollinator visits than they would if they were growing alone. It’s a testable hypothesis; it’s a question of science, a question of art, and a question of beauty. Why are they beautiful together? It is a phenomenon simultaneously material and spiritual, for which we need all wavelengths, for which we need depth perception. When I stare too long at the world with science eyes, I see an afterimage of traditional knowledge. Might science and traditional knowledge be purple and yellow to one another, might they be goldenrod and asters? We see the world more fully when we use both. The question of goldenrod and asters was of course just emblematic of what I really wanted to know. It was an architecture of relationships, of connections that I yearned to understand. I wanted to see the shimmering threads that hold it all together. And I wanted to know why we love the world, why the most ordinary scrap of meadow can rock us back on our heels in awe.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
When she discovered a more complex truth—that she had also been culpable in her marriage, that she wasn’t always right—something remarkable happened. Her vision seemed to change. She could perceive colors more intensely. Freed from her black-and-white thinking and rigid interpretation of the past, the world appeared more vivid and vibrant. She drove her children crazy, pointing at flowers—yellow, red, purple, blue—saying, “Look at that! Look! Look!
Edith Eger (The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life)
It was in part her growing faith that made even the stuff of the earth seem lovelier. Prayer makes us more alive. It makes life richer, color more vivid, sounds clear, light brighter, joy deeper, sorrow sweeter. It is not compartmentalized into a spiritual square, stacked away in a closet to be pulled out in a quiet time, but it is messy, in a beautiful way, spilling out over life like sunshine. And Elizabeth that was wholly alive, embracing the world with true joy.
Claire Dwyer (This Present Paradise: A Spiritual Journey with St. Elizabeth of the Trinity)
Like the dryad of the previous morning, this fairy had pale-green skin with leaflike veins running beneath. Her hair was a vivid red, like the fruit of the hawthorn tree, hanging loose in waves and adorned with coils of threaded dried hawthorn berry, much darker in color. She wore a diaphanous white-and-gold gown that, when I looked closer, I discovered was made of blossoms. She had thin limbs and pointy features—nose, chin, elbows, fingers. Thorny. Her ears curved up and out of her hair.
Sharon Lynn Fisher (Salt & Broom)
Imagery may be defined as the evocation, by means of words, of something that is meant to appeal to the reader's sense of color, or sense of outline, or sense of sound, or sense of movement, or any other sense of perception, in such a way as to impress upon his mind a picture of fictitious life that becomes to him as living as any personal recollection. For producing these vivid images the writer has a wide range of devices from the brief expressive epithet to elaborate word pictures and complex metaphors.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Russian Literature)
It was the Sea of Galilee, now known by its Latin name, Mare Tyberiadis, sunk in its deep depression among surrounding hills whose red and brown coloring played across the surface of the water, so that sometimes the lake was its own blue—a deep, pulsating blue of vivid quality which made the heart cry out with joy—while at other times it was red or brown or, where the trees were, green. But always its colors were in motion, a living, twisting kaleidoscope, as marvelous a body of water as there was on earth.
James A. Michener (The Source)
Her dark eyes shone, and since I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I did not have enough “power of observation,” as they say, to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterward, whenever I thought of her again, the memory of their brilliance would immediately present itself to me as that of a vivid azure, since she was blonde: so that, perhaps if she had not had such dark eyes—which struck one so the first time one saw her—I would not have been, as I was, in love most particularly with her blue eyes.
Lydia Davis (Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1))
Her dark eyes shone, and since I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I did not have enough “power of observation,” as they say, to isolate the notion of their color, for a long time afterward, whenever I thought of her again, the memory of their brilliance would immediately present itself to me as that of a vivid azure, since she was blonde: so that, perhaps if she had not had such dark eyes—which struck one so the first time one saw her—I would not have been, as I was, in love most particularly with her blue eyes.
Marcel Proust (Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1))
Ye examined Feng. The kerosene lamp was a wonderful artist and created a classical painting with dignified colors and bright strokes: Feng had her coat draped over her shoulders, exposing her red belly-band, and a strong, graceful arm. The glow from the kerosene lamp painted her figure with vivid, warm colors, while the rest of the room dissolved into a gentle darkness. Close attention revealed a dim red glow, which didn't come from the kerosene lamp, but the heating charcoal on the ground. The cold air outside sculpted beautiful ice patterns on the windowpanes with the room's warm, humid air.
Liu Cixin
You know what it's like when you see a rainbow?" I said carefully, like I was walking along a narrow, high wall, resisting the urge to put my arms out for balance. "Yeah?" she answered just as slowly. "Like everyone stops to look at it, to appreciate it, because you can't help but take in all those colors? That's what it's been like, having you at the shop. You walk into a room and everything gets more vivid, and people can't help but feel... joyful." My unspoken words floated in the air between us. You make me smile. You make me laugh. When you open your mouth and say something saucy, all I can think about is the curve of your lips.
Sarah Chamberlain (Love Walked In)
Suddenly he thought he had lived over stores long enough, he wanted someplace to stretch his long limbs, someplace where he belonged, where he wasn't always ducking to keep out of peoples' way. Gardens, chateaux- Morry saw them laid out like spangled Christmas cards- vividly colored invitations to a fairytale world. He felt homesick for spacious houses set in spreading lawns fringed with great calm shade trees-he was homesick for things he had never known, for families he had only read about, he missed people-old friends that had lived only in the novels he had read. Homesick... for a Lamptown that Hogan has just created out of six beers.
Dawn Powell (Dance Night)
I drove back into town, full of the look of her, full of the impact of her. It was an impact that made the day, the trees, the city, all look more vivid. Her face was special and clear in my mind—the wide mouth, the one crooked tooth, the gray slant of her eyes. Her figure was good, shoulders just a bit too wide, hips just a shade too narrow to be classic. Her legs were long, with clean lines. Her flat back and the inswept lines of her waist were lovely. Her breasts were high and wide spaced, with a flavor of impertinence, almost arrogance. It was the coloring of her though that pleased me most. Dark red of the hair, gray of the eyes, golden skin tones.
John D. MacDonald (A Bullet for Cinderella)
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons. They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are. My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage—— My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks. I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure. I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free—— The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet. The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck. Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself. The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health. --"Tulips", written 18 March 1961
Sylvia Plath (Ariel)
When she did, her mouth fell open. The vivid glamour of the world outside paled in comparison to the world within. It was a palace of vaulting glass and shimmering tapestry and, woven through it all like light, magic. The air was alive with it. Not the secret, seductive magic of the stone, but a loud, bright, encompassing thing. Kell had told Lila that magic was like an extra sense, layered on top of sight and smell and taste, and now she understood. It was everywhere. In everything. And it was intoxicating. She could not tell if the energy was coming from the hundreds of bodies in the room, or from the room itself, which certainly reflected it. Amplified it like sound in an echoing chamber. And it was strangely—impossibly—familiar. Beneath the magic, or perhaps because of it, the space itself was alive with color and light. She’d never set foot inside St. James, but it couldn’t possibly have compared to the splendor of this. Nothing in her London could. Her world felt truly grey by comparison, bleak and empty in a way that made Lila want to kiss the stone for freeing her from it, for bringing her here, to this glittering jewel of a place. Everywhere she looked, she saw wealth. Her fingers itched, and she resisted the urge to start picking pockets, reminding herself that the cargo in her own was too precious to risk being caught. The
Victoria Schwab (A Darker Shade of Magic (Shades of Magic, #1))
...I drag the kids to the farmers' market and fill out the week's cheap supermarket haul with a few vivid bunches of organic produce...Once home, I set out fresh flowers and put the fruit in a jadeite bowl. A jam jar of garden growth even adorns the chartreuse kids' table...I found some used toddler-sized chairs to go around it...It sits right in front of the tall bookcases...When the kids are eating or coloring there, with the cluster or mismatched picture frames hanging just to their left, my son with his mop of sandy hair, my daughter just growing out of babyhood...they look like they could be in a Scandinavian design magazine. I think to myself that maybe motherhood is just this, creating these frames, the little vistas you can take in that look like pictures from magazines, like any number of images that could be filed under familial happiness. They reflect back to you that you're doing it - doing something - right. In my case, these scenes are like a momentary vacation from the actual circumstances of my current life. Children, clean and clad in brightly striped clothing, snacking on slices of organic plum. My son drawing happy gel pen houses, the flourishing clump of smiley-faced flowers beneath a yellow flat sun. To counter the creeping worry that I am a no-good person, I must collect a lot of these images, postage-stamp moments I can gaze upon and think, I can't be fucking up that bad. Can I?
Nina Renata Aron (Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls: A Memoir of Women, Addiction, and Love)
Richard and I seemed really to be at the end of our rope, for he had done what he could for me, and it had not worked out, and now he was going away. It seemed to me that he was sailing into the most splendid of futures, for he was going, of all places! to France, and he had been invited there by the French government. But Richard did not seem, though he was jaunty, to be overjoyed. There was a striking sobriety in his face that day. He talked a great deal about a friend of his, who was in trouble with the U.S. Immigration authorities, and was about to be, or already had been, deported. Richard was not being deported, of course, he was traveling to a foreign country as an honored guest; and he was vain enough and young enough and vivid enough to find this very pleasing and exciting. Yet he knew a great deal about exile, all artists do, especially American artists, especially American Negro artists. He had endured already, liberals and literary critics to the contrary, a long exile in his own country. He must have wondered what the real thing would be like. And he must have wondered, too, what would be the unimaginable effect on his daughter, who could now be raised in a country which would not penalize her on account of her color. And that day was very nearly the last time Richard and I spoke to each other without the later, terrible warfare. Two years later, I, too, quit America, never intending to return.
James Baldwin (Nobody Knows My Name)
When what stays in our mind is the vivid flash of a bold glance, inevitably what will take us by surprise in our next glimpse, almost solely strike us, that is, will be a look close to languid, a gentle and pensive expression, overlooked in the former memory. It is this which, in our comparison of memory with the new reality, will color our disappointment or our surprise; and by its notifying us that our memory had been defective, it will seem to be reality itself that was in need of refocusing. Then the aspect of the face that was recently overlooked, having now become for that reason the most unforgettable, the most real, the most accurately corrective, will itself become an object for us to dream about and recall.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
Students who take Latin are more proficient and earn higher scores on the verbal SAT exam. The business world has long recognized the importance of a rich vocabulary and rates it high as evidence of executive potential and success. Understanding the etymological history of a word gives the user vividness, color, punch, and precision. It also seems that the clearer and more numerous our verbal images, the greater our intellectual power. Wheelock’s Latin is profuse with the etymological study of English and vocabulary enrichment. Our own experiences have shown that students will not only remember vocabulary words longer and better when they understand their etymologies, but also will use them with a sharper sense of meaning and nuance.
Frederic M. Wheelock (Wheelock's Latin (The Wheelock's Latin Series))
The cheerful array of fruits and vegetables, all so much larger and more vividly colored than those you could find in a regular supermarket, made Rika feel as if she were visiting a market in a far-flung land. She was drawn by the look of the kebabs and various kinds of bread, but it was the rice that called to her the most powerfully. The lamb pilaf, stuffed vine-leaves, and roast peppers filled with pilau particularly caught her attention. The smooth, boiled dumplings with their savory yoghurt sauce fired up her appetite. At each bite of the bean salad, she could feel resolve rising up from the pit of her stomach. The teeth-tingling sweetness of the small hard pies lit up a honey-colored light in a part of her brain she didn't usually use, so that it felt ready to melt.
Asako Yuzuki (Butter)
The reaction of the people below to this fantastic sight and sound was one of wild excitement. Details could be seen vividly from aloft. An elderly man and woman fell to their knees and prayed. People in the villages stood still and gaped upward. Most of them still had their Sunday finery on. "You could see people going to church...man, wife, and child walking along the country roads." Bombardier Herbert Light, through his binoculars, saw an open-air festival in progress, with the women dressed in colorful skirts and blouses. One of them threw her apron over her head in panic. As they roared over the wheat fields, the first unfriendly acts occurred: farmers threw stones and pitchforks at them. One farmer leading two horses was startled by the advancing planes and leaped into a nearby stream. A girl swimming in another river was reported by ten separate crews.
Leon Wolff (Low Level Mission)
February gave way to March, with its bursting colors of a too-early spring. Such warm weather was a welcome contrast to the near freezes of the previous year, as if this newborn century was impatient to exhibit its glory and all the unforeseen changes it would bring. Alice’s heart expanded at the sight of white snowdrops in lieu of absent snow; the vivid purples of wild petunias, pincushion flowers, and irises laced with the varying hues of tulips; and the glorious flowering shrubs---azaleas and camellias---lighting up the shade, covered entirely in blossoms as if they nurtured blooms but no leaves. She had seen the prairie carpeted in wildflowers, but this display was unlike that wild one of nature, somehow singularly intimate and welcoming, whereas the prairie engulfed and dwarfed her. There is not one thing that humankind has done on earth that is equal to one square inch of this, she thought.
Diane C. McPhail (The Seamstress of New Orleans)
The human eye has three kinds. One type excels at detecting red and associated wavelengths. One is tuned to blue. The other optimally perceives light of two colors: purple and yellow. The human eye is superbly equipped to detect these colors and send a signal pulsing to the brain. This doesn’t explain why I perceive them as beautiful, but it does explain why that combination gets my undivided attention. I asked my artist buddies about the power of purple and gold, and they sent me right to the color wheel: these two are complementary colors, as different in nature as could be. In composing a palette, putting them together makes each more vivid; just a touch of one will bring out the other. In an 1890 treatise on color perception, Goethe, who was both a scientist and a poet, wrote that “the colors diametrically opposed to each other . . . are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye.” Purple and yellow are a reciprocal pair.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants)
On Floriography This poem explores the ancient practice of floriography, the coded language of flowers, as a way to express human love through the use of fragrance, colors, and vivid symbolism. By elucidating the phenomenon of florescence alongside the art of floral arrangement, the poem encourages readers to extract poetry and beauty out of a dystopic world. If you often find yourself at a loss for words or don’t know what to say to those you love, just extract poetry out of poverty, this dystopia of civilization rendered fragrant, blossoming onto star-blue fields of loosestrife, heady spools of spike lavender, of edible clover beckoning to say without bruising a jot of dog’s tooth violet, a nib of larkspur notes, or the day’s perfumed reports of indigo in the gloaming— what to say to those whom you love in this world? Use floriography, or as the flower-sellers put it, Say it with flowers. —Indigo, larkspur, star-blue, my dear.
Karen An-hwei Lee
Many years passed before I learned of other ways to access the healthy and limitless part of my mind that psychedelic drugs had opened in my youth. In 2001, deep into a Vipassana course, a few days into silence and ten hours a day of meditation, I found myself in a psychedelic state. My body had become nothing but light, I was one with the universe and anything I could imagine was possible. I was a rock in an Alaskan stream purified by the freezing water rushing over me as a massive beautiful brown bear lumbered by. I looked up to see an intricate geometric pattern of shapes in motion in the air above; changing and unfolding, the most beautiful vivid and sharp color combinations to make Josef Albers cry with joy. I realized a profound simplicity of purpose, my focus crystal clear, I saw the beauty in all, and was overwhelmed with love and gratitude for all the joy and pain in my life. In that moment, I learned that no drug was ever necessary for a mind-opening experience.
Flea (Acid for the Children: A Memoir)
Midway through the gruesomely pleasant dinner, Kev became aware that Amelia, who was seated at the end of the table, was unusually quiet. He looked at her closely, realizing her color was off and her cheeks were sweaty. Since he was seated at her immediate left, Kev leaned close and whispered, “What is it?” Amelia gave him a distracted glance. “Ill,” she whispered back, swallowing weakly. “I feel so … Oh, Merripen, do help me away from the table.” Without another word, Kev pushed his chair back and helped her up. Cam, who was at the other end of the long table, looked at them sharply. “Amelia?” “She’s ill,” Kev said. Cam reached them in a flash, his face taut with anxiety. As he gathered Amelia in his arms and carried her, protesting, from the room, one would think she’d suffered a severe injury rather than a probable case of indigestion. “Perhaps I might be of service,” Dr. Harrow said with quiet concern, laying his napkin on the table as he made to follow them. “Thank you,” Win said, smiling at him gratefully. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Kev barely restrained himself from gnashing his teeth in jealousy as Harrow left the room. The rest of the meal was largely neglected, the family going to the main receiving room to wait for a report on Amelia. It took an unnervingly long time for anyone to appear. “What could be the matter?” Beatrix asked plaintively. “Amelia’s never ill.” “She’ll be fine,” Win soothed. “Dr. Harrow will take excellent care of her.” “Perhaps I should go to their room,” Poppy said, “and ask how she is.” But before anyone could offer an opinion, Cam appeared in the doorway of the receiving room. He looked bemused, his hazel eyes vivid as he glanced at the assorted family members around him. He appeared to search for words. Then a dazzling smile appeared despite his obvious effort to moderate it. “No doubt the gadje have a more civilized way to put this,” he said, “but Amelia is with child.” A chorus of happy exclamations greeted the revelation. “What did Amelia say?” Leo asked. Cam’s smile turned wry. “Something to the effect that this wouldn’t be convenient.” Leo laughed quietly. “Children rarely are. But she’ll adore having someone new to manage.
Lisa Kleypas (Seduce Me at Sunrise (The Hathaways, #2))
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamored of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those who minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie. Gradually white fingers creep through the curtains, and they appear to tremble. In black, fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners of the room, and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring of the birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared to wake the sleeper, and yet must needs call forth Sleep from her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin, dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book that we had been studying, or the wired flower that we had worn at the ball, or the letter we had been afraid to read, or that we had read too often. Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colors, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.
Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray)
A lot goes through your mind when you’re dying. What they say about life flashing before your eyes is true. You remember things from your childhood and adolescence—specific images, vivid and real, like brilliant sparks of light exploding in your brain. Somehow you’re able to comprehend the whole of your life in that single instant of reflection, as if it were a panoramic view. You have no choice but to look at your decisions and accomplishments—or lack of them—and decide for yourself if you did all that you could do. And you panic just a little, wishing for one more chance at all the beautiful moments you didn’t appreciate, or for one more day with the person you didn’t love quite enough. You also wonder in those frantic, fleeting seconds, as your spirit shoots through a dark tunnel, if heaven exists on the other side, and if so, what you will find there. What will it look like? What color will it be? Then you see a light—a brilliant, dazzling light—more calming and loving than any words can possibly describe, and everything finally makes sense to you. You are no longer afraid, and you know what lies ahead. Sunshine and Rain
Julianne MacLean (The Color of Heaven (The Color of Heaven Series Book 1))
Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so causedhim to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
Here he comes,” Blake said. When Kaidan climbed the steps to the deck he came straight for me, his hair slicked back with sweat from running. He took my face in his hands, breathing hard, lips tight, eyes like blue blazes. “Don’t ever do that again,” he ground out. It took a second to process his words and remember what exactly I wasn’t supposed to do again. Then I recalled interfering. “I know it was dangerous,” I admitted, “but there were five of them—” “I can bloody well handle myself, Anna!” His hands flung away from my face. “Maybe if there were only a couple, but there were five pissed-off psychos with weapons! I couldn’t just stand there and watch!” Kaidan, exasperated, pivoted like he was going to walk away, raked his fingers through his hair, and turned to me again. “What did you think you could do?” he asked. “You got in a lucky shot when you racked him, but what if it hadn’t worked? As you saw today your mind powers don’t always work!” Ah. He had no idea what I was capable of now. I held a hand out. “Give me your knife.” His eyebrows went together. “What?” “Just give it to me.” I stepped closer, feeling edgy. “No, Anna, I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but this is ridic—” My movements were fast as I went for him full force, using all my body weight and strength to hook a foot behind his knee and slam my palm into his shoulder. He landed on his back with a surprised oof and I crouched over him. “Give me your knife,” I said again. “Holy . . .” Blake let out a long whistle from where he watched at the rail. Kaidan lay there with a whimsical sort of look and said, “God, that was hot.” I held out my hand. This time he fished the knife from his waistband and placed the onyx handle in my palm. From my crouched position I momentarily eyed a wooden bird statue perched at the top of the deck rail twenty feet away, then let the cool metal fly from my fingers. It spun through the air with a sound like rapid wing beats, then a whump as it stuck into the side of the bird’s head. “Dude!” Blake yelled. Beneath me, where Kaidan lay, burst a vivid cloud of red so brief I wondered if I’d imagined it. I stared down at him in shock. “You showed your colors!” I said. “Did not.” He pushed himself up and we both stood. “You totally let ’em out, brah,” Blake told him with a grin. “Shut up.” When he peered down at me I said, “I’ve been training. I’m not completely helpless anymore.” “I can see that,” he murmured.
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Peril (Sweet, #2))
There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make us almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality... Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted, and by degrees the forms and colors of things are restored to them, and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern. The wan mirrors get back their mimic life... Nothing seems to us changed. Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known. We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness... a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation and regret... It was the creation of such worlds as these that seemed to Dorian Gray to be the true object... of life.
Oscar Wilde
In front of me girls were entering and exiting the showers. The flashes of nakedness were like shouts going off. A year or so earlier these same girls had been porcelain figurines, gingerly dipping their toes into the disinfectant basin at the public pool. Now they were magnificent creatures. Moving through the humid air, I felt like a snorkeler. On I came, kicking my heavy, padded legs and gaping through the goalie mask at the fantastic underwater life all around me. Sea anemones sprouted from between my classmates’ legs. They came in all colors, black, brown, electric yellow, vivid red. Higher up, their breasts bobbed like jellyfish, softly pulsing, tipped with stinging pink. Everything was waving in the current, feeding on microscopic plankton, growing bigger by the minute. The shy, plump girls were like sea lions, lurking in the depths. The surface of the sea is a mirror, reflecting divergent evolutionary paths. Up above, the creatures of air; down below, those of water. One planet, containing two worlds. My classmates were as unastonished by their extravagant traits as a blowfish is by its quills. They seemed to be a different species. It was as if they had scent glands or marsupial pouches, adaptations for fecundity, for procreating in the wild, which had nothing to do with skinny, hairless, domesticated me.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
This week we'll be learning about key elements of high quality picture books. Using the award winner lists in our course materials, select one picture book and share why it received its award. For example, Abuela is listed in the 100 Picture Books Everyone Should Know. According to Publishers Weekly, this is why it's so good: "In this tasty trip, Rosalba is "always going places" with her grandmother--abuela . During one of their bird-feeding outings to the park, Rosalba wonders aloud, "What if I could fly?" Thus begins an excursion through the girl's imagination as she soars high above the tall buildings and buses of Manhattan, over the docks and around the Statue of Liberty with Abuela in tow. Each stop of the glorious journey evokes a vivid memory for Rosalba's grandmother and reveals a new glimpse of the woman's colorful ethnic origins. Dorros's text seamlessly weaves Spanish words and phrases into the English narrative, retaining a dramatic quality rarely found in bilingual picture books. Rosalba's language is simple and melodic, suggesting the graceful images of flight found on each page. Kleven's ( Ernst ) mixed-media collages are vibrantly hued and intricately detailed, the various blended textures reminiscent of folk art forms. Those searching for solid multicultural material would be well advised to embark.
B.F. Skinner
Summer days and junior year, you are my sunshine that brightens up my full moon; we are going to soar together, we will not need to wish upon a star because our dreams will, at last, become true. There may be dark clouds overhead, and times of rain. This may be there showering upon us, but love still grows, we will not care, we will be there looking at that view that goes on for miles. Sometimes we will have to cope with the rainfall that wants to keep us apart. Sometimes I think that I am going to lose my way to you. While the gray storms end up taking our joyful colors away once more. Upon the clear, we stand together at last… arm in arm, and hand and hand, we are laced, and we embrace one another. The colors of red, blue, and pink are the sky once more. Plus, all along you were there, this time we share. The colors begin setting the mood and light ones more. All the vivid gold sights with the feelings of being united and that will be us as a pair. The many stars shine bright because we are going to be there all night, holding on to what we had that night. I used to bite my lips, thinking about that gold band, and the sparkly rock on top. You can make me feel like royalty; yes, I will be your queen ruler. Maybe someday all this will not be a fantasy and the dreams will come true when we look at a different view, just me and you.
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh The Lusting Sapphire Blue Eyes)
The α7 receptor, however, stood out from the crowd because of its special relationship with nicotine. No one experiences this more vividly than habitual smokers: Nicotine has a way of turbocharging the effects of the acetylcholine that this receptor needs in order to function, and smokers—or the α7 receptors in their brains—like it when their acetylcholine is turbocharged. This is the feeling cigarettes can give smokers—that way nicotine has of focusing their minds for short periods, or calming them. Could it just be a coincidence, Freedman wondered, that many schizophrenia patients—Peter Galvin among them—can’t get enough cigarettes? For very brief moments, nicotine may offer them at least some relief from their delusions. If Freedman could amplify that effect—mimic it in a lab, bottle it, and send it out to everyone diagnosed with schizophrenia—could it treat the symptoms of the illness more effectively and less harmfully than Thorazine? First, he needed more proof. In 1997, Freedman devised an experiment: He gave nicotine to people with schizophrenia, usually many pieces of Nicorette chewing gum, and then measured their brain waves with his double-click test. Sure enough, people with schizophrenia who chewed three pieces of Nicorette passed the test with flying colors. They responded to the first sound and didn’t respond to the second, just like people without schizophrenia. The effects didn’t last after the nicotine wore off, but Freedman still was stunned.
Robert Kolker (Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family)
What are you when you don’t think about yourself, or your past, or your future? This is quite mysterious indeed. It may seem eerie, confounding, or just plain bizarre. However, if you persist in inquiring in this way, “Who am I?” not settling for any memory (past) or referring to your imagination (future), you might find that you actually have no idea who or what you are. Even stranger, regardless of what was just recognized, your sense of “I” or “me” is quite strong and obvious with no facts, thoughts, or references attached to it. You find yourself in a space with no past and no future. This space does not rely on any concepts to define who you are, and yet here you remain. Undeniably here, awake, alert, and aware of the senses. The sounds haven’t gone anywhere, have they? The colors and shapes in front of you are still there. In fact, they are a bit more vivid, aren’t they? The sensations in the body are right here. Yet there is no story, no past, no future, no “substance” of what you always thought of as you. At this point you have a choice. You can start thinking again and just forget this little exercise, or you can decide you really want to find the answer and so you keep asking and keep investigating directly in this moment, “What am I without referencing the past and future?” If you do proceed in this way and find yourself in a thoughtless space, it’s okay to just remain there. You don’t need to continue to ask the question unless you get lost in thought.
Angelo DiLullo (Awake: It's Your Turn)
She looked thoughtful. “Who knows? Perhaps now is the time to see through the habit. Accidents, illness, healing, they’re all more mysterious than any of us ever imagined. I believe that we have an undiscovered ability to influence what happens to us in the future, including whether we are healthy—although, again, the power has to remain with the individual patient. “There was a reason that I didn’t offer an opinion concerning how badly you were hurt. We in the medical establishment have learned that medical opinions have to be offered very carefully. Over the years the public has developed almost a worship of doctors, and when a physician says something, patients have tended to take these opinions totally to heart. The country doctors of a hundred years ago knew this, and would use this principle to actually paint an overly optimistic picture of any health situation. If the doctor said that the patient would get better, very often the patient would internalize this idea in his or her mind and actually defy all odds to recover. In later years, however, ethical considerations have prevented such distortions, and the establishment has felt that the patient is entitled to a cold scientific assessment of his or her situation. “Unfortunately when this was given, sometimes patients dropped dead right before our eyes, just because they were told their condition was terminal. We know now that we have to be very careful with these assessments, because of the power of our minds. We want to focus this power in a positive direction. The body is capable of miraculous regeneration. Body parts thought of in the past as solid forms are actually energy systems that can transform overnight. Have you read the latest research on prayer? The simple fact that this kind of spiritual visualization is being scientifically proven to work totally undermines our old physical model of healing. We’re having to work out a new model.” She paused and poured more water on the towel around my ankle, then continued, “I believe the first step in the process is to identify the fear with which the medical problem seems to be connected; this opens up the energy block in your body to conscious healing. The next step is to pull in as much energy as possible and focus it at the exact location of the block.” I was about to ask how this was done, but she stopped me. “Go ahead and raise your energy level as much as you can.” Accepting her guidance, I began to observe the beauty around me and to concentrate on a spiritual connection within, evoking a heightened sensation of love. Gradually the colors became more vivid and everything in my awareness increased in presence. I could tell that she was raising her own energy at the same time. When I felt as though my vibration had increased as much as possible, I looked at her. She smiled back at me. “Okay, now you can focus the energy on the block.” “How do I do that?” I asked. “You use the pain. That’s why it’s there, to help you focus.
James Redfield (The Tenth Insight: Holding the Vision (Celestine Prophecy #2))
To the delight of visiting American sailors, the British still had a military base there, Changi, and shared it with those stout lads from Down Under, the Australians, who naturally came supplied with Down Under lassies. Australian women were the glory of Singapore. These tall, lithe creatures with tanned, muscular legs and striking white teeth that were forever being displayed in dazzling smiles somehow completed the picture, made it whole. You ran into them at Raffles, the old hotel downtown with ceiling fans and rattan chairs and doddery old gentlemen in white suits sipping gin. You ran into them in the lobbies and restaurants of the new western hotels and in the bazaars and emporiums. You saw them strolling the boulevards and haggling with small Chinese women in baggy trousers for sapphires and opals. You saw them everywhere, young, tan, enjoying life, the center of attention wherever they were. It helped that their colorful tropical frocks contrasted so vividly with the drab trousers and white shirts that seemed to be the Singaporean national costume. They were like songbirds surrounded by sparrows. “If Qantas didn’t bring them here, the United Nations should supply them as a gesture of good will to all human kind.” Flap Le Beau stated this conclusion positively to Jake Grafton and the Real McCoy as they stood outside Raffles Hotel surveying the human parade on the sidewalk. “I think I’m in love,” the Real McCoy told his companions. “I want one of those for my very own.
Stephen Coonts (The Intruders (Jake Grafton #2))
Cendrillon specialized in seafood, so we had four fish stations: one for poaching, one for roasting, one for sautéing, and one for sauce. I was the chef de partie for the latter two, which also included making our restaurant's signature soups. O'Shea planned his menu seasonally- depending on what was available at the market. It was fall, my favorite time of the year, bursting with all the savory ingredients I craved like a culinary hedonist, the ingredients that turned my light on. All those varieties of beautiful squashes and root vegetables- the explosion of colors, the ochre yellows, lush greens, vivid reds, and a kaleidoscope of oranges- were just a few of the ingredients that fueled my cooking fantasies. In the summer, on those hot cooking days and nights in New York with rivulets of thick sweat coating my forehead, I'd fantasize about what we'd create in the fall, closing my eyes and cooking in my head. Soon, the waitstaff would arrive to taste tonight's specials, which would be followed by our family meal. I eyed the board on the wall and licked my lips. The amuse-bouche consisted of a pan-seared foie gras served with caramelized pears; the entrée, a boar carpaccio with eggplant caviar, apples, and ginger; the two plats principaux, a cognac-flambéed seared sea scallop and shrimp plate served with deep-fried goat cheese and garnished with licorice-perfumed fennel leaves, which fell under my responsibility, and the chief's version of a beef Wellington served with a celeriac mash, baby carrots, and thin French green beans.
Samantha Verant (The Secret French Recipes of Sophie Valroux (Sophie Valroux #1))
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.
George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss [with Biographical Introduction])
No one waited in line at the counter, thanks to Dagon and Eliana’s tardy entry. “Morning, Kusgan,” she trilled when the elder Segonian stepped up to the counter. Kusgan greeted her with a wide smile. “And how are you today, ni’má?” “Hungry,” she declared. “What do you have for me? Something spicy, I hope?” “Indeed.” When Kusgan turned his attention to Dagon, his eyes sparkled with amusement as though he had guessed just how and with whom she had worked up an appetite. “And for you, Commander?” “The usual.” His lips twitched. “A larger portion perhaps?” Dagon laughed. “I would appreciate that, yes.” Heat crept up her neck to her cheeks. As Kusgan turned away and headed into the kitchen, she leaned closer to Dagon and whispered, “Am I blushing? Because I feel like he’s guessed why I’m so hungry and you’re all smiles this morning.” He regarded her cheeks with a grin. “Yes, you’re blushing.” Groaning, she brought her hands up to cover her face. “Curse my pale skin,” she grumbled. “It won’t let me hide anything.” “Would it make you feel better if Iblushed?” She peeked up at him through her fingers. And as she watched, his cheeks flushed a vivid pink, demonstrating anew his ability to change his coloring at will. Laughing in delight, she dropped her hands. “Yes!” Then she poked him in the chest as the heat in her own cheeks faded. “I dare you to walk around like that all day.” Smiling, he abandoned the pink camouflage and let his face return to its natural color. “If I did, the men would get no work done because they’d all be too busy wondering what the srulyou did in bed that left me blushing for hours afterward.” Eyes widening, she laughed. “You’re right. Don’t do it.
Dianne Duvall (The Segonian (Aldebarian Alliance, #2))
Ah, God! what trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms. Often, when forced from his hammock by exhausting and intolerably vivid dreams of the night, which, resuming his own intense thoughts through the day, carried them on amid a clashing of phrensies, and whirled them round and round in his blazing brain, till the very throbbing of his life-spot became insufferable anguish; and when, as was sometimes the case, these spiritual throes in him heaved his being up from its base, and a chasm seemed opening in him, from which forked flames and lightnings shot up, and accursed fiends beckoned him to leap down among them; when this hell in himself yawned beneath him, a wild cry would be heard through the ship; and with glaring eyes Ahab would burst from his state room, as though escaping from a bed that was on fire. Yet these, perhaps, instead of being the unsuppressable symptoms of some latent weakness, or fright at his own resolve, were but the plainest tokens of its intensity. For, at such times, crazy Ahab, the scheming, unappeasedly steadfast hunter of the White Whale; this Ahab that had gone to his hammock, was not the agent that so caused him to burst from it in horror again. The latter was the eternal, living principle or soul in him; and in sleep, being for the time dissociated from the characterizing mind, which at other times employed it for its outer vehicle or agent, it spontaneously sought escape from the scorching contiguity of the frantic thing, of which, for the time, it was no longer an integral. But as the mind does not exist unless leagued with the soul, therefore it must have been that, in Ahab's case, yielding up all his thoughts and fancies to his one supreme purpose; that purpose, by its own sheer inveteracy of will, forced itself against gods and devils into a kind of self-assumed, independent being of its own. Nay, could grimly live and burn, while the common vitality to which it was conjoined, fled horror-stricken from the unbidden and unfathered birth. Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
Oh, my," said Nerissa, when she could speak. Juliet, smiling, murmured, "Would you just look at her." "I don't think we can help but look at her," murmured an urbane voice, and gasping, all three women turned to see Lucien standing in the doorway, arms crossed and his black eyes gleaming in the candlelight. He lifted his hand.  "Turn around, my dear," he said, giving a negligent little wave.  Her eyes huge, Amy slowly did as he asked, staring down at herself in awe and disbelief.  The gown, an open-robed saque of watered silk, shimmered with every movement, a vibrant purplish-blue in this light, a vivid emerald-green in that.  Its robed bodice open to show a stomacher of bright yellow satin worked with turquoise and green embroidery, it had tight sleeves ending in treble flounces just behind the elbow, which, combined with the chemise's triple tiers of lace, made Amy feel as though she had wings.  She smoothed her palms over the flounced and scalloped petticoats of royal blue silk, and then, with impulsive delight, threw back her head on a little laugh, extended her arms and spun on her toe, making gauzy sleeves, shining hair, and yards upon yards of shimmering fabric float in the air around her. Hannah, who did not think such behavior was quite appropriate, especially in front of a duke, frowned, but Lucien was trying hard to contain his amusement.  He couldn't remember the last time he'd made anyone so happy, and it touched something deep inside him that he'd long thought dead.  He exchanged a look of furtive triumph with Nerissa. "Oh!  Is it really me?" Amy breathed, reverently touching her sleeve and then raising wide, suddenly misty eyes to her small audience. "It is really you," Juliet said, smiling. "Only someone with your coloring could wear such bold shades and make them work for instead of against you," said Nerissa, coming forward to tie a black ribbon around Amy's neck.  "Lud, if I tried to wear those colors, I daresay they would overwhelm me!" "Speaking of overwhelmed . . ."  Amy turned to face the man who still lounged negligently in the doorway, his fingers trying, quite unsuccessfully, to rub away the little smile that tugged at his mouth.  "Your Grace, I don't know how to thank you," she whispered, dabbing away one tear, then another.  "No one has ever done anything like this for me before and I . . . I feel like a princess." "My dear girl.  Don't you know?"  His smile deepened and she saw what was almost a cunning gleam come into his enigmatic black eyes.  "You are a princess.  Now dry those tears and if you must thank me, do so by enjoying yourself tonight." "I will, Your Grace." "Yes," he said, on a note of finality.  "You will." And
Danelle Harmon (The Beloved One (The De Montforte Brothers, #2))
Another black, Shelby Steele, argues that affirmative action encourages blacks to invest in their status as victims, because it is as victims that they reap the benefits of race-based preferences. Power comes from portraying oneself as “oppressed,” not from work or achievement. “When power itself grows out of suffering,” he writes, “blacks are encouraged to expand the boundaries of what qualifies as racial oppression, a situation that can lead us to paint our victimization in vivid colors even as we receive the benefits of preference.
Jared Taylor (Paved With Good Intentions: The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary America)
Only sanitary art could reach the highest ideals of beauty, Ruskin theorized. Rembrandt’s canvases, Ruskin specifically objected, were “unromantic and unhygienic.” By contrast, he extolled J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes for their bright colors extending even to white, and for their direct depiction of sunlight. Such work, according to Ruskin, was modern, hygienic, and romantic. Sanitation helped to further a change of style and sensibility in the arts, associating modernity with clarity of line, bright tones, and vivid colors. All that was dark was dirty, stinky, and abhorrent.
Frank M. Snowden III (Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present)
A lot goes through your mind when you’re dying. What they say about life flashing before your eyes is true. You remember things from your childhood and adolescence—specific images, vivid and real, like brilliant sparks of light exploding in your brain. Somehow you’re able to comprehend the whole of your life in that single instant of reflection, as if it were a panoramic view. You have no choice but to look at your decisions and accomplishments—or lack of them—and decide for yourself if you did all that you could do. And you panic just a little, wishing for one more chance at all the beautiful moments you didn’t appreciate, or for one more day with the person you didn’t love quite enough. You also wonder in those frantic, fleeting seconds, as your spirit shoots through a dark tunnel, if heaven exists on the other side, and if so, what you will find there. What will it look like? What color will it be? Then you see a light—a brilliant, dazzling light—more calming and loving than any words can possibly describe, and everything finally makes sense to you. You are no longer afraid, and you know what lies ahead.
Julianne MacLean (The Color of Heaven (The Color of Heaven Series Book 1))
The voiceover promised a baker in Terre Haute, Indiana, who saw colors when he heard music, every note bringing with it a vivid shade on the color spectrum. There was a flutist in Hamburg, Germany, who experienced flavors as shapes and textures. Her favorite was white asparagus, which was a pleasing hexagonal form with smooth bumps all over its surface. There was a writer in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, who saw all her words in colors because each letter of the alphabet appeared to her in a different hue. According to the voiceover, the name of the writer's hometown, with its preponderance of vowels, which were jewel tones of reds and oranges and pinks, was her favorite word.
Monique Truong (Bitter in the Mouth)
On the back stair, poised and frankly amused, was a young gallant of medium height, sturdily built and fashionably clad, vividly handsome and girded with a sword. The sword, however, was sheathed in white vellum, the left hand was naked of rings, and the shoulder-length hair was the color of midnight. One step farther up stood a slender page-boy, with a tiger lily and a hyacinth tucked behind one translucent ear.
Tanith Lee (Cyrion (IMAGINAIRE))
Mom shakes her head, and suddenly I hear it. She isn't just red. She never has been. This whole time, I've heard the wrong notes. My mother has all this blue just beneath the surface. She's been purple all along. Anger plus sadness is purple. Purple is vivid and real and layered. Purple is what you are when you can sing two notes at once, when you hear harmony with every melody before you even learn the notes. Purple is what I've seen in Shanna's eyes sometimes. You sound purple if you've ever cried your eyes out at night. You're purple if you love someone who can't love you back the way you want to be loved--the way you need it.
Emily Barth Isler (The Color of Sound)
What people are saying about WAR EAGLES ​5 out of 5 stars! WW2 with a dash of fantasy! I really enjoyed stepping back in time as the race for air travel was developing. One could truly feel the passion these pilots and engineers had for these magnificent machines. The twist of stepping back into a land of Vikings and dinosaurs was very well executed. Well done to both the author and the narrator. ​ Reminiscent of Golden Age Sci Fi This audio book reminded me of some of the 40's and 50's era tales, but what it happens to be is an alternative timeline World War II era fun adventure story. Think of a weird mash-up of a screw-up Captain America wanna-be mixed with the Land of the Lost mixed with Avatar where Hitler is the real villain and you might come close. At any rate, it's load of good fun and non stop action. But don't get distracted for a minute or you'll miss something! There are american pilots, Polish spies, Vikings, giant prehistoric eagles and, of course, Nazis! What more could you ask for to while away an afternoon? Our hero even gets the (Viking) girl! Put your feet up an get lost in what might have been.... 4 out of 5 stars! it's Amelia Earnhart meets WWII This is not an accurate historical fiction book, but rather an action-packed book set an historical time. I normally listen to my books at a higher speed, however the amount of drama and action in this book I had to slow it down. I like the storyline and the narrator however, the sound effects throughout the book did kind of throw me since I'm not used to that and most audible books. still I would recommend this is a good read.​ 5 out of 5 stars! I Would Like to See this on the Silver Screen Back in the late 1930s, the director of King Kong started planning War Eagles as his next block buster film. Then World War II intervened and the project languished for decades. It helps to know this background to fully appreciate this novel. It’s a big cinematic adventure waiting to find the screen. The heroes are larger than life, but more importantly, the images are bigger and more vivid than the mighty King Kong who reinvented the silver screen. And what are those images you may ask? Nazis developing super-science weapons for a sneak attack on America, Viking warriors riding gargantuan eagles in a time-forgotten land of dinosaurs, and of course, those same Vikings fighting Nazis over the skyline of New York City. This book is a heck of a lot of fun. It starts a little bit slow but once the Vikings enter the story it chugs along at a heroic pace. There is a ton of action and colorful confrontations. Narrator William L. Hahn pulls out all the stops adding theatrical sound effects to his wide repertoire of voices which adds a completely appropriate cinematic feel to the entire story. If you’re looking for some genuinely heroic fantasy, you should try War Eagles. Wonderful story War Eagles is a really good adventure story. ​5 out of 5 stars!
Debbie Bishop (War Eagles)
But we are damned. Compared to you.” “By duration? Eight hundred thousand of your years— so much as I have counted—are still not enough. Your time is short and vivid, colored. Mine…I scream, sometimes, in this night.” “Good God.” He paused. The voice had shifted to a deeper bass and now seemed to echo in the cabin. “I would like to have those years, whatever you say. Mortality—” “Is a spice. A valued one.” “Still—” “You are not damned.
Gregory Benford (In the Ocean of Night (Galactic Center, #1))
The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths; colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority; surprise invasions at dawn; and fit soldiers parading through a captured city. Examined more closely, however, some of these familiar images induce facile errors. The image of the all-powerful dictator personalizes fascism, and creates the false impression that we can understand it fully by scrutinizing the leader alone. This image, whose power lingers today, is the last triumph of fascist propagandists. It offers an alibi to nations that approved or tolerated fascist leaders, and diverts attention from the persons, groups, and institutions who helped him. We need a subtler model of fascism that explores the interaction between Leader and Nation, and between Party and civil society.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
I looked again at the photo of me, hair wild, rumpled sweatshirt, typing away, all in the name of being diligent. What other moments had I missed, head buried in my work? Year after year, I couldn’t possibly be present for everyone. But this felt different. I hadn’t felt the weight of missing out until I saw it in retrospect, in vivid color from a long-past October day. Until you get quiet, you can’t know what your heart needs to confess.
Rebekah Lyons (Rhythms of Renewal: Trading Stress and Anxiety for a Life of Peace and Purpose)
It was a typed-sentence morning, perfect clarity. She could see herself in vivid color, high definition.
Mary Beth Keane (Ask Again, Yes)
Jesus In My dreams I’ve seen you in my dreams vivid and bright colors never seen before, they wrap around my heart never asking a question your eyes pierced into my soul write for me, I’ll guide your way truth that will be told. There are those who disregard the truth you’re able to see within their heart you come to me, I hear your prayers so, I’m here to guide your way. There’s freedom in your words as they define their very soul I’ll guide your words through brilliant colors knowing the truth that will be told.
Ron Baratono
These two men have flipped my world, made colors more vivid, made sounds sweeter, made the world as a whole more bearable. My dreams consist of ray-filled days full of coconut lotion, long kisses, itchy sunburns, floating between waterfalls, and sighs before exhausted bodies collapse against feathery pillows. Other dreams of rainy days and nights filled with flips of pages and old nineties flicks, of cheddar popcorn and lavender scented blankets, of lightning and thunder and the fast pants and moans between the streak in the sky and the ground rattling boom that follows.
Kate Stewart (Flock (The Ravenhood, #1))
Fair warning, my place isn’t exactly a palace.” Not a palace but a waking dream. A vision I had the night Dominic told me he wanted nothing for a future. A vivid dream of a long driveway lined with Bradford pear trees that bloom white in the spring. A driveway that leads to a house on top of a hill floating in the middle of the mountains. A small house with lots of built-in bookshelves, cozy reading nooks draped with soft plush blankets and throw pillows. And behind it, a garden filled to the brim with every imaginable scent and color. I’d searched for nearly a month before I found something resembling what I dreamt of. The day I closed on it, I painted the front door blood red. And then I stocked the fridge with a rare wine. My last touch was adding my French Bulldog, Beau.
Kate Stewart (Exodus (The Ravenhood Duet, #2))
The sunlight bounced off the concrete paving slabs and hurt his eyes. He flipped the glades down. Colors stayed vivid: the garish yellow-brown of the withered grass, the blinding gray of the concrete, the booming silver overcast through which the sun burned like its tiny burning-glass image through paper. Placing one foot in front of the other became difficult, complicated, tricky, an awkward business, more than he’d bargained for, a whole new belt of slugs. Worse, associational chains kept echoing away in his head, amplifying and distorting, repeating and refining—no, that wasn’t quite it …
Ken MacLeod (The Star Fraction (The Fall Revolution #1))
The scientific basis for separating neocortical from limbic brain matter rests on solid neuroanatomical, cellular, and empirical grounds. As viewed through the microscope, limbic areas exhibit a far more primitive cellular organization than their neocortical counterparts. Certain radiographic dyes selectively stain limbic structures, thus painting the molecular dissimilarity between the two brains in clean, vivid strokes. One researcher made an antibody that binds to cells of the hippocampus—a limbic component—and found that those same fluorescent markers stuck to all parts of the limbic brain, lighting it up like a biological Christmas tree, without coloring the neocortex at all. Large doses of some medications destroy limbic tissue while leaving the neocortex unscathed, a sharp-shooting feat enabled by evolutionary divergence in the chemical composition of limbic and neocortical cell membranes.
Thomas Lewis (A General Theory of Love)
By looking at tetrachromats among modern animals and working backward, scientists can deduce that the first vertebrates were likely tetrachromats, too. Mammals, probably because they were all initially nocturnal, lost two of their ancestral cones and became dichromats. But they scurried beneath the feet of dinosaurs, which were almost certainly tetrachromats and “probably saw all kinds of cool non-spectral colors,” Stoddard says. It’s ironic that for the longest time, illustrators and filmmakers portrayed dinosaurs in dull shades of brown, gray, and green. Only recently have artists started painting these animals with bright colors, inspired by the revelation that they are the ancestors of birds. But even these vivid hues, applied with a trichromat’s eye, capture just a tiny proportion of the colors that dinosaurs probably wore or saw.
Ed Yong (An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us)
The plate the waiter now set before her looked like an abstract painting: vivid green shot through with bright-coral slashes. "Taste!" he urged. It was clearly a fish but so sweet she did not recognize it. Looking at the color, she hazarded a guess. "Salmon? Or maybe not. It doesn't taste like salmon." Troisgros looked very pleased. "That is because it was caught just this morning in the Allier, our local river. But also because we preserve the color by slicing the fish very thinly and searing it for just a few seconds." "So it's almost raw?" She wasn't sure about this. "In Japan they eat their fish raw." She took another bite; the herbal sauce flirted with bitterness. "The flavor is so green I feel I'm eating color." "Sorrel." He gestured to the waiter, who removed the plates and then set a single small bird surrounded by sliced fruit in front of each of them. "Sarcelle aux abricots," he announced. "Sarcelle?" Stella did not recognize the word. "It's a freshwater duck," said Jules. "I can't remember the word in English." "Teal," Troisgros supplied. Stella closed her eyes and tried describing the flavor. "It tastes wild." She began to dream herself into the dish as if it were a painting, imagining a golden field in the sunshine, feeling the air rush past, hearing the sound of her own wings. Circling in a great joyous arc, she spotted a tree covered in tawny fruits, breathed their perfume in the air. "I wanted---" the chef was watching her--- "to give you the essence of the animal. To let you taste what the duck ate on her flight through life.
Ruth Reichl (The Paris Novel)
His Strength Why me, His whisper oh so clear? Loves swiftness I can hear. Guiding me to the perfect place His strength is always near. How do I explain to those who wander in the night, this perfect peaceful feeling it’s there but out of sight. I’ll never stop rejoicing He's touched my very soul, colors of the rainbow this vivid light and more. Amen.
Ron Baratono
savage nations, uneducated people, and children have a great predilection for vivid colors,” but that “people of refinement avoid vivid colors in their dress and the objects that are about them, and seem inclined to banish them altogether from their presence.
Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
For all of the mystery that shrouds Tax, I live when I am with him. Everything is more potent. Colors are more vivid, food more savory, scents more aromatic.
Nina G. Jones (Debt)
Whatever perceptions arise, you should be like a little child going into a beautifully decorated temple; he looks, but grasping does not enter into his perception at all. So you leave everything fresh, natural, vivid, and unspoiled. When you leave each thing in its own state, then its shape doesn’t change, its color doesn’t fade, and its glow does not disappear. Whatever appears is unstained by any grasping, so then all that you perceive arises as the naked wisdom of Rigpa, which is the indivisibility of luminosity and emptiness.
Sogyal Rinpoche (The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying)
a bright point of light. Not blue, just a point of light so bright it had no color at all. Just a bright point in the dark. Like a mathematical proposition. Total light against the total dark of the surrounding sheet metal. Light, the opposite of dark. Dark, the absence of light. Positive and negative. Both propositions were contrasted vividly
Lee Child (Die Trying (Jack Reacher, #2))
I think it's physically impossible to be unhappy when you're on or near a carousel. Maybe it's the vivid colors, the crazy menagerie, the loopy music. Whatever it is, merry-go-rounds have magical powers.
Orly Konig (Carousel Beach)
The world seemed to throb in that moment and reverberate. The buildings appeared clearer, sheening in an autumn crispness; the wind rippled through the grass, and the green shades of each blade waved at the summer-colored sun; the smells in the air—suddenly—vividly smelled of spring and fresh starts; and the world felt still, calm like a winter’s clarity. It all felt somehow more real, and more familiar to Danny, like a memory he had at some point forgotten. And there she stood. His heart skipped a couple of beats. Rapidly, he blinked and said, in a very quiet voice, to the first woman he had ever everythinged. “You shouldn’t be here.
Kyle St Germain (Dysfunction)
Truth Will Be Told I’ve seen you in my dreams vivid and bright colors never seen before wrap around my heart never asking questions, your eyes pierced into my soul you guide our way, truth that will be told. There are those who disregard truth you see within their heart they come to you, you hear their prayers you’re there to guide their way. There’s freedom in your love It defines our very soul Lord, these brilliant colors fill the heart knowing the truth that will be told.
Ron Baratono
To see where the psychedelic revolution really started, we have to go back to April 16, 1943, when LSD's creator, Albert Hofmann, mixed a batch of the stuff that he had synthesized from rye fungus five years earlier. He was hoping to find a cure for the common migraine and decided to do more research with a substance he called ¨LSD-25.¨ While mixing it up, a small amount was absorbed through his fingertips. Notes in his diary record history's first acid trip: [What overcame me was] a remarkable but not unpleasant state of intoxication . . . characterized by an intense stimulation of the imagination, an altered state of awareness of the world. As I lay in a dazed condition with eyes closed there surged up from me a succession of fantastic, rapidly changing imagery of a striking reality and depth, alternating with a vivid, kaleidoscopic play of colors. This condition gradually passed off after about three hours.
Paul Perry
Born close to the water," White wrote, "be it on a coast or the shores of an inland sea, the Blues are known for striking and vivid eye color ranging from silvering indigo to a deep and meditative navy. Prone to song, they are apt to take up the mandolin or ukulele--really, any small, whimsical stringed instrument will do. The Blue, without exception, will be deeply spiritual (see:Rituals [Solstice], Herbology, Volunteerism) though not eager to join standard organized religion, and will draw to herself an eclectic and accomplished circle of artists, musicians, recovering addicts, fallen capitalists, the elderly, the poor, the romantics, seekers of all sorts. This endearing breed is most easily identified by her ability to sync all other women around her to her own monthly cycle, since her fecundity is among the strongest on the planet (though you will almost never find her the wife of any man). Her houseplants are among the healthiest you will find in a home. Catch her feeding them with the water used to rinse clean her cloth menstrual pads, and you are certain to have found a true Blue. Count yourself very lucky indeed.
Rachel Yoder (Nightbitch)
These two men have flipped my world; made colors more vivid, made sounds sweeter, made the world as a whole more bearable. My dreams consist of ray-filled days full of coconut lotion, long kisses, itchy sunburns, floating between waterfalls, and sighs before exhausted bodies collapse against feathery pillows. Other dreams of rainy days and nights filled with flips of pages and old nineties flicks, of cheddar popcorn and lavender-scented blankets, of lightning and thunder and the fast pants and moans between the streak in the sky and the ground-rattling boom that follows. But these are my waking dreams, and I’m living them.
Kate Stewart (Flock (The Ravenhood Book 1))
And with that, he stepped out from the darkness of the tunnel mouth to find himself in a kind of cave; the air was warm with sandalwood, and nutmeg, and allspice, and cardamom, and the Moths were all around him. For a moment, Tom was breathless with the beauty of the Midnight Folk. In the semi-darkness, their wings shone with a faint luminescence and their skin gleamed with unearthly tattoos, like something under black light. Their hair was braided with feathers and rags, and all of them seemed to be covered with a powdery dust that twinkled and shone against their skin, setting the shadows darkly aflame. And all around them lay a pattern of those vivid tracks, as if the luminescence could be transferred to their surroundings by touch; each set of prints a different shade in troubled, alien colors. Instinctively, he looked for Charissa's colors in the crowd. But she was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he was surrounded by the dangerous shine of the enemy. He saw them only in slices of light against the velvet darkness. The tip of a wing; the gleam of an eye; the mystic spiral of a tattoo that seemed to move across the skin.
Joanne Harris (The Moonlight Market)
And yet even that awful memory, which felt like it would crush my heart if only I would let it, the memory of that night, changed color day by day, so that when it snuck up on me, it took less and less time for my heart to settle down, until I finally felt the vortex in my heart growing smaller. It was bizarre to witness such vividly painful emotions, profound enough it felt like I could touch them, transform so completely.
Mieko Kawakami (All the Lovers in the Night)
If you are trying to recover from something or replenish yourself, place a hand on your heart and say to yourself, “I give myself my own love.” It is a powerful statement. I give myself my own love. Some of you will feel it going through the hand back into the heart recycling what it is you send out. A lot of love escapes your body from this point, so send it back in. The heart is a magnet when it is full. Think about that for a second. Think about the times in your life when you are greatly in love with a person, a project, or your own experience of life. Everything flows. The colors are more vivid. The light is brighter. You are your own master of your heart, and the fastest way to feed it is through yourself. Very quickly you will find you will be able to connect with others to have the experiences you want, the relationships you want, the work you want, or the creations you want to birth.
Lee Harris
Now, a small bluish patch of color is not, strictly speaking, a tree; but for us it represents the tree. Suppose that we walk toward the tree. Do we continue to see what we saw before? Of course, we say that we continue to see the same tree; but it is plain that what we immediately perceive, what is given in consciousness, does not remain the same as we move. Our blue patch of color grows larger and larger; it ceases to be blue and faint; at the last it has been replaced by an expanse of vivid green, and we see the tree just before us. During our whole walk we have been seeing the tree. This appears to mean that we have been having a whole series of visual experiences, no two of which were just alike, and each of which was taken as a representative of the tree. Which of these representatives is most like the tree? Is the tree really a faint blue, or is it really a vivid green? Or is it of some intermediate color? Probably
George Stuart Fullerton (An Introduction to Philosophy)
The second time wearing the suit was a little less nerve-racking.  I didn’t stare nervously in the mirror and eye all the pale skin glaring back at me.  Instead, I appreciated the vivid coloring on the suit.  Rachel had good taste. Intent on finding the beach towels Rachel had used, I opened the door and stopped short at the sight of Clay.  His huge dog head moved up, then down, as his eyes traveled the length of my body.  I flushed, slammed the door, and changed back into shorts and a tank top.  I opted to cut the grass, instead. Clay sat on the porch and watched me push the mower back and forth.  When I moved to the front, he followed.  He was never in the way, just always there.  After I went back inside to read, he did disappear for a bit.  He had apparently taken my complaint about his hygiene seriously and had chosen to shower again.  I hoped he would make it a daily routine. Since he’d bathed and given me privacy as I’d asked, I had no reason to complain when I went to my room that night and saw him lying on the foot of the bed.  However, when I woke Wednesday morning with him lying next to me, I did complain.  Lividly. “Now, just hold on,” I whispered with a scowl.  “You’re a dog.  Act like one.  Fur stays at the foot of the bed.” He grudgingly moved to his place at the foot of the bed, watching me the whole time. “Don’t give me your doleful eyes.  This is your choice, not mine.”  As soon as I said that, I recalled his talent for misinterpretation which had caused this co-ed housing in the first place.  “Not that you’d get to sleep next to me in your skin either.  So, don’t even think about it.  If you don’t like the end of the bed, you can always sleep on the floor.” *
Melissa Haag (Hope(less) (Judgement of the Six #1))
when you breathe in your air, it is going to be clean. Imagine the color of clean. This is so clean and so pure that when you feel it enter your body, it wants to get out anything that is bad. As you breathe out, it gets rid of the bad air that dissolves into nothing. Then you breathe in some crisp, pure air and breathe out the bad nasty air again. Just focus on your body and breathing. Good in, bad out. Feel it go through your entire body, especially up through your head. We are going to start going into your brain. Imagine a hallway, it is a long hallway. Picture it. Is it tall or short? Wide or narrow? It has a lot of doors, see the details on the door. The handle is made of what material? Any particular designs? See the hinges, the numbers and vividly see all of it. How much detail can you put into this? Find the detail. You walk down the hall you will notice some doors have a good energy coming from them while others do not.
Charles Thornton (Untethered Mind Meditation Release your Brain from Stress (Mindful Meditations for Life Book 2))
The artist Eleseth," Shallen observed to Pattern, "once did an experiment. She set out only ruby spheres, in their strength, to light her studio. She wanted to see what effect the all - red light would have upon her art." "Mmmm," Pattern said. "To what result?" "At first, during a painting session, the color of light affected her strongly. She would use too little red, and the fields of blossoms would look washed out." "Not unexpected." "The interesting thing, however, was what happened if she continued working," Shallen said, "If she painted for hours by that light, the effects diminished. The colors of her reproductions grew more balanced, the pictures of flowers more vivid. She eventually concluded that her mind compensated for the colors she saw. Indeed, if she switched the color of the light during a session, she'd continue for a time to paint as if the room were still read, reacting against the new color.
Brandon Sanderson (Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive, #2))
Let music ignite your vivid inner colors and bring you harmony inside and out.
Amy Leigh Mercree (Joyful Living: 101 Ways to Transform Your Spirit and Revitalize Your Life)
Vivid living is your destiny! You are a being of color and light. Unleash your bliss.
Amy Leigh Mercree (Joyful Living: 101 Ways to Transform Your Spirit and Revitalize Your Life)
Life is truly colorful, but most vibrant when viewed in black and white. Life is truly black and white, but most vivid when enacted colorfully.
Prabir Das
IMMIKER HAD HOBBIES. He liked to play with little monsters. He liked to tie them down and peel away their claws, or their vividly colored scales, or clumps of their hair and feathers. One day in the boy’s tenth year, Larch came upon Immiker slicing stripes down the stomach of a rabbit that was colored like the sky. Even bleeding, even shaking and wild-eyed, the rabbit was beautiful to Larch. He stared at the creature and forgot why he’d come looking for Immiker. How sad it was, to see something so small and helpless, something so beautiful, damaged in fun. The rabbit began to make noises, horrible, panicked squeaks, and Larch heard himself whimpering. Immiker glanced at Larch. “It doesn’t hurt her, Father.” Instantly Larch felt better, knowing that the monster wasn’t in pain. But then the rabbit let out a very small, very desperate whine, and Larch was confused. He looked at his son. The boy held a dagger dripping with blood before the eyes of the shaking creature, and smiled at his father.
Kristin Cashore (Fire)
Laura's mind was already racing with the creative possibilities presented to her. She whipped out her sketchbook and started to work away with a stump of charcoal, trying to capture the sweep of the hills and the patterns made by the blocks of light and dark. She half closed her eyes, the better to appreciate the variations in tone and depth. She was astonished to find just how brash and vivid and wonderfully discordant colors in nature could be. At this time of year there was no sense that things were attempting to blend or mingle or go unseen. Every tree, bush, and flower seemed to be shouting out its presence, each one louder than the next. On the lower slopes the leaves of the aged oak trees sang out, gleaming in the heat. On every hill bracken screamed in solid swathes of viridian. At Laura's feet the plum purple and dark green leaves of the whinberry bushes competed for attention with their own indigo berries. The kitsch mauve of the heather laughed at all notions of subtlety. She turned to a fresh page and began to make quick notes, ideas for a future palette and thoughts about compositions. She jotted down plans for color mixes and drew the voluptuous curve of the hills and the soft shape of the whinberry leaves.
Paula Brackston (Lamp Black, Wolf Grey)