Quotes about colors
page 4

“You see, to me, for just a moment, despite all of the colors that touch and grapple with what I see in this world, I will often catch an eclipse when a human dies.
I've seen millions of them.
I've seen more eclipses than I care to remember”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

World

“Yes, I am letting my own experience color my answer, which is what experience is for….”

Robin McKinley book The Hero and the Crown

Source: The Hero and the Crown

“Sometimes this fellow's music was like little colored pieces of crystal candy, and other times it was the softest, saddest thing she had ever imagined about.”

Carson McCullers book The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

Source: The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Music, Imagination, Time

“Five white candles surrounded my summoning circle, the points of an invisible pentacle. White for protection. And because they’re the cheapest color at Wal-Mart.”

Jim Butcher book Grave Peril

Source: Grave Peril

“I imagine that it will not be easy to persuade Mortmain into a bonnet," Magnus observed. "Though the color would be fetching on him."
Henry burst into laughter. "Very droll, Mr. Bane."
"Please, call me Magnus."
"I shall!”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Princess

Source: Clockwork Princess

Imagination, Laughter

“I left parts of myself everywhere,
The way absent-minded people leave
Gloves and umbrellas
Whose colors are sad from dispensing so much bad luck”

Charles Simic (1938) American poet

Bad luck, People, Sadness, Way

“The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.”

Lois Lowry book The Giver

Source: The Giver

Love, Pain, Truth, Books

“You don't like the girl. You don't know what color eyes she has, you don't like her.”

David Benioff book City of Thieves

Source: City of Thieves

Girl

“Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of the nymphs, is overspread with melancholy today. Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

Nature, Holiday

“His steady gaze held hers. His blue eyes were very dark, uniquely so. She had known people before with blue eyes, but they had always been light blue. Will's were the color of the sky just on the edge of night.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

People, Light, Night

“The day was gray, the color of Europe.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“Facts may be colored by the personalities of the people who present them.”

Reginald Rose Twelve Angry Men

Source: Twelve Angry Men

People, Personality

“Not an ugly color, Nanny thought. Just not a human color.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

“Good memories are like charms… Each is special. You collect them, one by one, until one day you look back and discover they make a long, colorful bracelet.”

James Patterson book Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Source: Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

Memory

“We all love conflagrations. When the sky changes color, it is a dead man's passing.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Source: The Magnetic Fields

Love, Change, Dead

“Whatever colors you have in your mind. I'll show them to you and you'll see them shine.”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

Song lyrics, Nashville Skyline (1969), Lay Lady Lay

“If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth', or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.”

Victoria Finlay (1964) British journalist

Wine, Sea

“How beautifully leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Light

“Cry about the simple hell people give other people- without even thinking. Cry about the hell white people give colored folks, without even stopping to think that they're people too.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

People, Hell, Thinking, Cry

“When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. but the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, Halley, weren't yet in place. Scarlett's vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting.”

Sarah Dessen (1970) American writer

Someone Like You (1998)

Books, Waiting, Help

“The heavy red roses smoldering in the foggy morning, blood-colored and uninhibited, made me greedy, and tempted me powerfully to steal one--I asked the prices merely so I could come as near them as possible.”

Knut Hamsun book Hunger

Source: Hunger

“I allowed myself to forget how totally I had fallen in love with Lestat's iridescent eyes, that I'd sold my soul for a many-colored and luminescent thing, thinking that a highly reflective surface conveyed the power to walk on water.”

Anne Rice book Interview with the Vampire

Source: Interview with the Vampire

Love, Soul, Thinking, Water

“I wonder if Effie will still be wearing that silly pink wig, or is she'll be sporting some other unnatural color especially for the Victor Tour.”

Suzanne Collins (1962) American television writer and novelist

Sport

“You have your brush, you have your colors, you paint the paradise, then in you go.”

Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer

Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3831088 Journal of Modern Literature Vol. 2, No. 2, Nikos Kazantzakis (1971 - 1972)

Painting

“Christianity is not about learning how to live within the lines; Christianity is about the joy of coloring.”

Mike Yaconelli (1942–2003) American theologian

Source: Dangerous Wonder

Learning, Joy

“Although I have the colors, only the Lord can mix them with such harmony.”

Paulo Coelho book The Fifth Mountain

Source: The Fifth Mountain

“The trick… is to find the balance between the bright colors of humor and the serious issues of identity, self-loathing, and the possibility for intimacy and love when it seems no longer possible or, sadder yet, no longer necessary.”

Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) American playwright

Love

“Those prancing little pants-wetters come here to learn the colorful and gentlemanly art of fencing, with its many sportingand its proscriptions againstengagements. You on the other hand, you are going to learn how to.”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

Art, Learning

“Thisabout Tessa. I knew it was."
Will flushed, a wash of color across the pallor of this face. "Not just her."
"But you love her."
Will stared at him. "Of course I do," he said finally. "I had come to think i would never love anyone, but I love her.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Love, Thinking

“I narrowed my eyes at it. Ming-de’s little gift, I assumed. “You look better in color,” I snapped.
He sent me a sultry look over his shoulder. “Really? Most women think I look better in nothing at all.”

Karen Chance American writer

Source: Embrace the Night

Women, Thinking

“Summer came.
For the books thief, everything was going nicely.
For me, the sky was the color of Jews.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Books, Summer

“The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit.”

Scott Westerfeld book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Cats, Summer

“I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.”

Mark Rothko (1903–1970) American painter

1950's <br class="br">Source: Conversations with Artists, Selden Rodman, New York Devin-Adair 1957. p. 93.; reprinted as 'Notes from a conversation with Selden Rodman, 1956', in Writings on Art: Mark Rothko (2006) ed. Miguel López-Remiro p. 119 books.google http://books.google.de/books?id=ZdYLk3m2TN4C&pg=PA119 <br class="br">Context: I am not an abstractionist... I am not interested in the relationships of color or form or anything else... I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on — and the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures show that I communicate those basic human emotions... The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point!

“His beauty did not blaze like Will's did in fierce colors and repressed fire, but it had its own muted perfection, the loveliness of snow falling against a silver gray sky.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

Beauty, Perfection

“And this is for Colored girls who have considered suicide, but are moving to the ends of their own rainbows.”

Ntozake Shange for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Source: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf

Girl, Suicide

“Love was a feeling completely bound up with color, like thousands of rainbows superimposed one on top of the other.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Love, Feeling

“Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being.”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

Source: No Name in the Street

“Any fool can tell a story. Take a few odds and ends of things that happen to you, dress them up, shuffle them about, add a dash of excitement, a little color, and there you have it.”

Lloyd Alexander (1924–2007) American children's writer

Source: The Arkadians

Fools

“So many humans.
So many colors.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“The best musicians transpose consciousness into sound; painters do the same for color and shape.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

“There is no idea so bad that it cannot be made to look brilliant with the proper application of fonts and color.”

Scott Adams (1957) cartoonist, writer

Source: Dilbert's Guide to the Rest of Your Life: Dispatches from Cubicleland

Idea

“Ugliness is an illusion, gentlemen. Like beauty. Like color. All depends on the light. The only reality is action.”

Karen Traviss book Star Wars Republic Commando: True Colors

Source: True Colors

Beauty, Reality, Light, Dependency

“If I feel ragged, my prep team seems in worse condition, knocking back coffee and sharing brightly colored little pills. As far as I can tell, they never get up before noon unless there's some sort of national emergency, like my leg hair.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Feeling, Coffee

“When youre sharing a foxhole with another man, you don't worry about what color he is, just whether or not he will protect your back”

Lee Benson American journalist

“Do you want to hold it?' she asked, dangling the padded envelope in front of Hale with two fingers.

'No.'

'Do you want to touch it and kiss it and wear it around your neck?'

'Don't be silly,' he told her. 'Everyone knows green isn't my color.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Kiss

“It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you watch them on a screen.”

Anthony Burgess book A Clockwork Orange

Source: A Clockwork Orange

World

“She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.”

Toni Morrison A Mercy

Source: A Mercy

Lying, Learning, Loneliness

“A kind of light spread out from her. And everything changed color. And the world opened out. And a day was good to awaken to. And there were no limits to anything. And the people of the world were good and handsome. And I was not afraid any more.”

John Steinbeck book East of Eden

Source: East of Eden

People, World, Light, Change

“The question is, what color will everything be at that moment when I come for you? What will the sky be saying?”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Question

“Why the Egyptian, Arabic, Abyssinian, Choctaw? Well, what tongue does the wind talk? What nationality is a storm? What country do rains come from? What color is lightning? Where does thunder goe when it dies?”

Ray Bradbury book Something Wicked This Way Comes

Source: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Country

“She wore a gown the color of storms, shadows, and rain and a necklace of broken promises and regrets.”

Susanna Clarke book Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Source: Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Great minds may have cold hearts. Form but no color. It is an incompleteness. And so they are afraid of any woman who both thinks and feels deeply.”

Sena Jeter Naslund (1942) American writer

Source: Ahab's Wife, or The Star-Gazer

Feeling, Thinking, Heart

“My books promised me that life wasn’t just made up of workday tasks and prosaic things. The world is bigger and more colorful and more important than that.”

Laura Amy Schlitz (1955) children's author

Life, Books, World

“Demon?” Gwen gasped out. Her back jerked ramrod-straight, and her face leeched of
color. “Did you just say demon?”

Oh, uh…did I say that?” Strider once again glanced around the plane helplessly. “No, no.
I think I said seaman.”

Gena Showalter (1975) American writer

Source: The Darkest Whisper

Jerk, Thinking

“Isn't it strange that I know you'd risk your life to save mine, but I don't even know what your favorite color is?”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Life

“I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.”

Frantz Fanon book Black Skin, White Masks

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

Love

“I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

Albert Hofmann (1906–2008) Swiss chemist

World, Beauty, Nature, Light

“Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.”

W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) American poet

Sad

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U. S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Feeling, Boy

“We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delinaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all.
I know, he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Way

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Love, Sun

“I think you'd be pretty in any color."-Posy to Octavia”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

Thinking

“Hoo! You're like a giant mood ring! I wonder if I can make different colors show up depending on where i touch you
- Nell Harris”

Katie MacAlister (1964) Author

Mood, Dependency

“The world is dyed with the color of blood. It will never be able to go back to the way it was before.”

Matsuri Hino Japanese manga artist

World, Way

“He was all silver and ashes, not like Will's strong colors of blue and black and gold.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: The Infernal Devices: Clockwork Angel

Strong

“Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!

As if there were no
such thing as integrity!”

Frank O'Hara book Lunch Poems

Source: Lunch Poems

Change

“Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them."

"I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly.

"Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.”

Sue Grafton (1940–2017) American writer

Source: M is for Malice

People

“Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: “We don’t serve colored people here.” I said: “That’s all right, I don’t eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.””

Dick Gregory (1932–2017) American comedian, social activist, social critic, writer, and entrepreneur

Nigger: An Autobiography (1964)

People, Time

“All you can ever achieve is a sense of your soul. You gain little glimpses of its light, colors, and contours. You feel the inspiration of its possibilities and the wonder of its mysteries.”

John O'Donohue (1956–2008) Irish writer, priest and philosopher

Source: Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

Feeling, Soul, Sense, Light

“Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Source: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Dreams, Reality, Painting

“Sit in reverie and watch the changing color of the waves
that break upon the idle seashore of the mind.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Change

“I really believe that no matter how old people get, they tend to change in certain ways depending on how people treat them - they change their colors.”

Banana Yoshimoto book Asleep

Source: Asleep

People, Way, Change, Dependency

“The witchlight made his skin paler, his eyes more intently blue. They were the color of the water in the North Atlantic, where the ice drifted on its blue-black surface like the snow clinging to the dark glass pane of a window.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Angel

Source: Clockwork Angel

Water

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity.”

Herman Melville book Billy Budd, Sailor

Source: Billy Budd, the Sailor (1891), Ch. 21
Source: Billy Budd, Sailor
Context: Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other? So with sanity and insanity. In pronounced cases there is no question about them. But in some supposed cases, in various degrees supposedly less pronounced, to draw the exact line of demarcation few will undertake tho' for a fee some professional experts will. There is nothing nameable but that some men will undertake to do it for pay.

Drawing

“Color is only beautiful when it means something.”

Robert Henri (1865–1929) American painter

Beauty

“I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman’s eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.”

David Foster Wallace book The Broom of the System

Source: The Broom of the System

Sun

“Her eyes were luminous gold. I wondered if that was the last color a bug saw when it was trapped in amber—and if the bug thought,, right before it was frozen forever.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

“What I thought was an end
turned out to be a middle.
What I thought was a brick wall
turned out to be a tunnel.
What I thought was an injustice
turned out to be a color of the sky.”

Tony Hoagland (1953–2018) American writer

“I am because we are. We all bleed the same color. We all want to love and be loved.”

Madonna (1958) American singer, songwriter, and actress

About her documentary I Am Because We Are http://www.youtube.com/user/iambecauseweare

Love

“What color is in a picture, enthusiasm is in life.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Life

“… with white dawns and glaring moons, and sunsets smeared with too much color.”

Natalie Babbitt book Tuck Everlasting

Source: Tuck Everlasting

“I can read in red.
I can read in blue.
I can read in pickle color too.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Source: I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

Reading

“The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer.”

Jonathan Carroll (1949) novelist, short story writer

Source: The Ghost in Love

Angels

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

W.E.B. Du Bois book The Souls of Black Folk

Source: To the Nations of the World, address to Pan-African conference, London (1900). These words are also found in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), ch. II: Of the Dawn of Freedom

Problem

“Love - true love - is a precious thing. It is painful, uncomfortable, makes fools of us all, but it is what breathes meaning and color and purpose into our lives.”

Kate Mosse book Sepulchre

Source: Sepulchre

Love, Pain, Fools

“then, as though it had been waiting on a near by roof for their arrival, the moon came slanting suddenly through the vines and turned the girl's face the color of white roses.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Beautiful and Damned

Source: The Beautiful and Damned

Girl, Waiting

“We are like chameleons; we take our hue and the color of our moral character from those who are around us.”

John Locke (1632–1704) English philosopher and physician

Attributed to Locke on various quotes sites and on social media, this quotation is a false rendering of "We are all a sort of chameleons, that still take a tincture from things near us: nor is it to be wondered at in children, who better understand what they see, than what they hear" from Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693).
Misattributed