Victoria Finlay · 464 pages
Rating: (55K votes)
“Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors.” But color—like sound and scent—is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe—and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them.”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“What they signified was precious, but what they were was not.”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“Art history is so often about looking at the people who made the art; but I realized at that moment there were also stories to be told about the people who made the things that made the art. My”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz—in lumps that took the light reflected into the painting and made it dance.3”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“The use of natural pigments is similarly embodied in the Orthodox teaching that humanity—like all Creation—was created pure but not perfect, and the purpose of being born is to reach your true potential.”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“But color—like sound and scent—is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe—and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them. While”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“When our eyes see the whole range of visible light together, they read it as “white.” When some of the wavelengths are missing, they see it as “colored.”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“The best way I’ve found of understanding this is to think not so much of something “being” a color but of it “doing” a color.”
― Victoria Finlay, quote from Color: A Natural History of the Palette
“Elizabeth: "Your balls, Mr. Darcy?"
Darcy: "They belong to you, Miss Bennett.”
― Seth Grahame-Smith, quote from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
“...to form something greater than the sum of its parts.”
― Teri Terry, quote from Slated
“Wallowing was for elephants, depressing people and depressing elephants”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from The Bane Chronicles
“As my mom has said, when one person is unhappy, it usually means two people are unhappy but that one has not come to terms with it yet.”
― Mindy Kaling, quote from Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
“What do you look at while you’re making up your mind? Ours is not a reflective culture, we do no raise our eyes up to the hills. Most of the time we decide the critical things while looking at the linoleum floor of an institutional corridor, or whispering hurriedly in a waiting room with a television blatting nonsense.”
― Thomas Harris, quote from Hannibal
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