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.
“Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place—and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all—so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time.”
Source: Culture series, Inversions (1998), Chapter 2 (p. 22)
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Iain Banks 139
Scottish writer 1954–2013Related quotes
The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 267
Young India 1924-1926 (1927), p. 1285
1920s
Source: "Chinese Model Liu Wen Would Like to Remind Everyone That Not All Asians Look the Same" https://www.allure.com/story/liu-wen-model-interview in Allure (2 March 2016)
Closing lines
Life in the Freezer (1993)
“I love to see two truths at the same time. Every good comparison gives the mind this advantage.”
Letter 130 (to the Queen of Navarre), 28 April, 1545.
Source: The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure