Quotes about grey (262 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“With blinded eyes I stared at the sky, this grey, endless sky of a crazy god, who had made life and death for his amusement.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

Life , Death , God

“Losing him was blue like I’d never known;
Missing him was dark grey all alone.
Forgetting him was like trying to know
Somebody you've never met.
But loving him was red;
Loving him was red.”

Taylor Swift (1989) American singer-songwriter

Red.
Song lyrics, Red (2012)

Love , Forgetting

“At night all cats are grey.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Cats , Night

“And once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path. It is curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working – bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming – all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned – reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”

George Orwell book A Hanging

Source: "A Hanging", in The Adelphi (August 1931)

Understanding , Food , World , Life

“The journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

Context: PIPPIN: I didn't think it would end this way.
GANDALF: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it.
PIPPIN: What? Gandalf? See what?
GANDALF: White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.
PIPPIN: Well, that isn't so bad.
GANDALF: No. No, it isn't.

World , Death

“Who shot him? I asked.
The grey man scratched the back of his neck and said: Somebody with a gun.”

Dashiell Hammett book Red Harvest

Source: Red Harvest

“Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Mountain

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Source: The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Books , Dreams , Sleep , Reading

“The world isn't black and white, Annie, it's shades of grey.”

Tami Hoag (1959) American writer

Source: A Thin Dark Line

World

“… the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.”

Anita Desai (1937) Indian novelist

Beauty

“I have discovered with advancing years that few things are entirely black or white, but more often different shades of grey.”

Jeffrey Archer book A Prisoner of Birth

Source: A Prisoner of Birth

“Grey dawn was seeping into the sick room [around Christmas 1867, Munch was almost dying then and spitting blood when he was 13; but he recovered]. I lay in the middle of the bed with my hands outside the bedclothes, looking straight ahead. Now I was in a pact with God. I had promised to serve him if I survived, if he allowed me to escape the tuberculosis. Now I could never be as before.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

T 2771, as quoted in Edvard Much – behind the scream, Sue Prideaux; Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 26
after 1930

God , Christmas

“[looking at the dead body of his first wife Camille, 5 Sept 1879], watching her tragic forehead, almost mechanically observing the colors which death was imposing on her rigid face. Blue. Blue, yellows, grey, what do I know?... How natural to to want to reproduce the last image of her, who was leaving us for ever. But even before the idea came to me to record her beloved features, something in me automatically responded tot the shocks of colours. I just seem to be compelled in an unconsciousness activity, the one I engage in every day, like an animal turning in its mill.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in Monet's letter, September 1879; as cited in The Private Lives of the Impressionists Sue Roe; Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2006, p. 209
1870 - 1890

Death , Color , Idea , Nature

“Hope had grown grey hairs,
Hope had mourning on,
Trenched with tears, carved with cares,
Hope was twelve hours gone.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins The Wreck of the Deutschland

"The Wreck of the Deutschland", lines 115-118
Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1918)

Hope , Tear

“I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words.”

W.B. Yeats book Michael Robartes and the Dancer

St. 1
Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921), Easter, 1916 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1477/

Housing

“"What is care?" asked the Princess, with a smile.
"It is a god", replied the Physician, "invisible, but omnipotent. It steals the bloom from the cheek and lightness from the pulse — it takes away the appetite, and turns the hair grey".”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, pt. 5, ch. 5 (1833).
Books

God , Smile , Light , Princess

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in that grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

Theodore Roosevelt The Strenuous Life

1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), The Strenuous Life
Variant: Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Failure , Suffering , Victory

“To swim in the open sky. To achieve the tenderness of clouds. To suspend these masses in the distance, very far away in the grey mist, make the blue explode. I feel all this coming, dawning in my intentions. What joy and what torment! If the bottom were still, perhaps I would never reach these depths. Did they do better in the past? Did the Dutch achieve the poetry of clouds I seek? That tenderness of the sky which even extends to admiration, to worship: it is no exaggeration.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Diary-note of Boudin, 3 December, 1856; as cited in the description of his painting 'Sky, Setting Sun, Bushes in Foreground' http://www.muma-lehavre.fr/en/collections/artworks-in-context/eugene-boudin/boudin-skies, by the Muma-museum, Le Havre
A quote from Boudin's personal diary sheds remarkable light on a small group of his sky studies
1850s - 1870s

Feeling , Past , Joy

“And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Into The Twilight http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1519/, st. 4
The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)

Love , God , World , Hope

“Valmiki went alone to the clear Ganga waterside and bathed. He washed away the anthill dust and peeled grey bark from a tree and made new fresh clothes. Then he sat back resting against a stone. He watched two small water birds in a tree nearby. The male bird was singing to his mate when before Valmiki’s eyes an arrow hit him, and the little bird fell from the limb. He thrashed on the ground an instant and then lay dead and blood drops strained his feathers.”

Vālmīki Ramayana

Source: Ramayana, p. 7.

Bird , Tree , Water , Singing

“Some burn damp faggots, others may consume
The entire combustible world in one small room
As though dried straw, and if we turn about
The bare chimney is gone black out
Because the work had finished in that flare.
Soldier, scholar, horseman, he,
As ’twere all life’s epitome.
What made us dream that he could comb grey hair?”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1516/, st. 11
The Wild Swans at Coole (1919)

Life , World , Dreams

“And all my days are trances,
And all my nightly dreams
Are where thy grey eye glances,
And where thy footstep gleams —
In what ethereal dances,
By what eternal streams.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

"To One In Paradise", st. 4; variants of this verse read "where thy dark eye glances".

Dreams , Dance

“Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving….”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Colour Out of Space (1927)

Tree

“But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.”

Evelyn Waugh book Brideshead Revisited

Part 1, Chapter 1
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Love , Search , Heart

“The woods of Arcady are dead,
And over is their antique joy;
Of old the world on dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is now her painted toy;
Yet still she turns her restless head.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

Source: Crossways (1889), The Song Of The Happy Shepherd, l. 1–5.

Truth , World , Dreams , Joy

“Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

September 1913 http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1576/, st. 3
Responsibilities (1914)

Wolf , Dead

“But, gathering in its ancient market-place,
Talked group with restless group; and not a face
But wrath made livid, for among them were
Death's staunch purveyors, such as have in care
To feast him. Fear had long since taken root
In every breast, and now these crushed its fruit,
The ripe hate, like a wine: to note the way
It worked while each grew drunk! men grave and grey
Stood, with shut eyelids, rocking to and fro.
Letting the silent luxury trickle slow
About the hollows where a heart should be;
But the young gulped with a delirious glee
Some foretaste of their first debauch in blood
At the fierce news”

Robert Browning book Sordello

Book the First
Sordello (1840)

Hate , Wine , Heart , Way

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life , Water , Heart , Happiness

“No brain at all, some of them [people], only grey fluff that's blown into their heads by mistake, and they don't Think.”

A.A. Milne book The House at Pooh Corner

Source: The House at Pooh Corner

People , Thinking

“Oh, ‘twould be marvelous if the world and its moral questions were like some game board, with plain black players and white, and fixed rules, and nary a shade of grey.”

Glen Cook book Shadows Linger

Source: Shadows Linger (1984), Chapter 33, “Juniper: The Encounter” (p. 367)

World , Game , Question

“People will always prefer black-and-white over shades of grey, and so there will always be the temptation to hold overly-simplified beliefs and to hold them with excessive confidence”

Thomas Gilovich (1954) American psychologist

Source: How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life

People , Confidence

“Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…”

Diana Gabaldon book Outlander

Source: Outlander

Despair

“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Life , Water , Heart , Happiness

“And in that one grey hair I saw my whole life and I said "I think I need a hair.”

Tim Burton (1958) American filmmaker

Source: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Life , Thinking

“My friends are gone and my hair is grey.
I ache in places I used to play.
And I’m crazy for love but I’m not coming on.
I’m just paying my rent every day in the tower of song.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Source: Dance Me to the End of Love

Love

“You don’t think in depression that you’ve put on a grey veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you’re seeing truly.”

Andrew Solomon (1963) American journalist

Source: The Noonday Demon

World , Mood , Thinking , Happiness

“The color of truth is grey.”

André Gide (1869–1951) French novelist and essayist

Truth , Color

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Mayakovsky, st. 4, from Meditations in an Emergency (1957).

Beauty , Thinking , Laughter , Tree

“Peter swept aside Yogi Tea and Harmony Herbal Blend, though he hesitated a second over the chamomile….. But no. Violent death demanded Earl Grey.”

Louise Penny book Still Life

Source: Still Life

Death , Tea

“Her pupils have taken on a lonely hue, like grey clouds reflected in a calm lake.”

Haruki Murakami book After Dark

Source: After Dark

“Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.”

Aldous Huxley book Island

Source: Island (1962)

Life , Death , Time

“Bonapartist democrat. Grey shades of a quiet mouse colour.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Les Misérables

“There is only one cure for grey hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Source: The Light That Failed [Illustrated]

Summer

“There are only two forces at work in this world- black and white. Only people are grey.”

Chris Heimerdinger (1963) American writer

Source: Gadiantons and the Silver Sword

People , World

“One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

Flying

“The great grey beast February had eaten Harvey Swick alive.”

Clive Barker book The Thief of Always

Source: The Thief of Always

“You should employ your little grey cells”

Agatha Christie book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

Source: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

“I'll use the knives for spreading
jam, and the gas to warm
my greying love.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poems, 1946-1966

Love

“Love was that way. You could not render it in black or white. It always came down to the strange, blended shades of grey.”

Jodi Picoult (1966) Author

Love , Way

“The person who doesn't scatter the morning dew will not comb grey hairs”

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005) American journalist and author

Personality

“Adulthood isn't black and white - it's a thousand shades of grey. Or taupe. It's not who you are, it's where you are.”

Elizabeth Noble (1968) British novelist

Source: Alphabet Weekends

Adulthood

“How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Soul , Star , Kiss , Light

“Love her as in childhood
Through feeble, old and grey.
For you’ll never miss a mother’s love
Till she’s buried beneath the clay.”

Frank McCourt book Angela's Ashes

Source: Angela's Ashes

Love , Childhood

“My tea's gone cold, I'm wondering why I got out of bed at all
the morning rain clouds up my window and I can't see at all
And even if I could it'd all be grey, but your picture on my wall
it reminds me that it's not so bad
it's not so bad”

Dido (1971) English singer-songwriter

Thank You
Song lyrics, No Angel (1999)

Tea

“Get it down quickly, don't worry about the background. Just go for the tonal values. You see? When you look at it, and above all when you see how to render it as you see it, thats is, in such a way that its make the same impression on the viewer as it does on you, you don't look for, you don't see the lines on the paper over there, do you? And then, when you look at the whole thing you don't try to count the scales on the salmon, of course you don't. You see them as little silver pearls against grey and pink – isn't thats right? – look at the pink of the salmon, with the bone appearing white in the centre and then grays, like the shades of mother of pearl. And the grapes, now do you count each? No, of course not. What strikes you is their clear, amber colour and the bloom which models the form by softening it. What you have to decide with the cloth is where the highlights come and then the planes which are not in the direct light. Halftones are for the magasin pittoresque engravers. The folds will come by themselves if you put them in the proper place. Ah! M. Ingres, there's the man! We're all just children. There's the one who knew how to paint materials! Ask Bracquemond [Paris' artist and print-maker]. Above all, keep your colours fresh. [instructing his new protegee, the Spanish young woman-painter Eva Gonzales, circa 1869]”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Manet, recorded by Philippe Burty, as cited in Manet by Himself, ed. Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Little Brown 2000, London; p. 52
1850 - 1875

Children , Way , Light , Appearance

“The City is of Night; perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning's fragrant breath
After the dewy dawning's cold grey air.”

James Thomson (B.V.) (1834–1882) Scottish writer (1834-1882)

Part I
The City of Dreadful Night (1870–74)

Death , Night

“There was no real need…of crasting any more pretty polly to tolchock some old veck in an alley and viddy him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry grey-haired ptitsa in a shop and go smecking off with the till’s guts.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, A Clockwork Orange (1962)

“pinkish and bluish draperies on neutral grey grounds and black cypresses…… The red of Jeptha's dress…… some reddish brown, some slightly pinkish…… Graduated blue sky…… the ground at the front a grey violet shadow… Look for some turquoise in the blue.(Degas' working note about choosing colors for his future painting 'The Daughter of Jeptha')”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

Quote from Degas' working notes; as quoted in The private lives of the Impressionists, Sue Roe, Harpen Collins Publishers, New York 2006, p. 34
quotes, undated

Color , Future , Painting , Daughters

“Horsed upon hippogriffs, the hags of night
Shall come to visit me; and once an age
Some desperate wight, or wizard, gaunt and grey,
Shall seek this spot by help of hidden lore,
To ask of things forgotten or to come.
But who, beholding me, shall dare defy
The wrath of Jove? Since vain is wisdom's boast,
And impotent the knowledge that o'erleaps
The dusky bourne of time. Twere better far
That gods should quaff their nectar merrily,
And men sing out the day like grasshoppers,
So may they haply lull the watchful thunder.”

Hartley Coleridge (1796–1849) British poet, biographer, essayist, and teacher

Prometheus
Poems (1851), Prometheus

Wisdom , Men , God , Age

“To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Quote of Richter on his 'Grey Paintings', in a letter to nl:Edy de Wilde, 23 February 1975; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: on 'Grey-paintings' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/subjects-2/grey-paintings-9
1970's
Variant: It [grey color] makes no statement whatever... It has the capacity that no other color has, to make 'nothing' visible. To me grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, non-commitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape (note 99).... but, grey like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea.... The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of color.

Idea , Painting , Indifference

“Use materials with forceful MUSCULAR colours – the reddest of reds, the most purple of purples, the greenest of greens, intense yellows, orange, vermillion – and SKELETON tones of white, grey and black.”

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) Italian artist

(Manuscript, 1914); as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 148
Futurist Manifesto of Men's clothing,' 1913/1914

“It was indeed a dead grove, made up of the corpses of trees. Even the wood of these corpses was non-living, a deathly grey, silver-green, with peeling bark; and the bark had also flaked, shrivelling and simply sloughing off like dead skin. And arching along all the dead twigs, crawled a supple, clutching, lashing, bold convolvulus-serpent. It was her leaves which glowed a cheerful green on the dead branches, on all their agonizing bifurcations; it was her flowers which hung on the branches from clusters of tiny suckers and tentacles, astonishingly tender and serene. They were so alien to that austere and honest deathly sterility that they seemed almost dazzling. It was like an explosion of something splendid, like the sombre and magical secret of that dead river and its dry valley. There was something about that copse reminiscent of the hut on chickens' legs, or Koschei's hoard, or the field sown with dead men's bones.”

Yury Dombrovsky book The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

tr. Alan Myers, The Harvill Press, 1996, Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 100-101
cited and discussed in Peter Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom Under Totalitarianism, Routledge, 2000, p. 145 https://books.google.com/books?id=MoLCsjaQT08C&lpg=PA145&ots=ekC9_khOAS&dq=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&f=false
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1975)

Men , Secret , Flowers , Tree

“All that interests me is the grey areas, the passages and the tonal sequences, the pictorial spaces, overlaps and interlockings. If I had any way of abandoning the object as the bearer of this structure, I would immediately start painting abstracts.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 93, note 24

Way , Painting

“Ballet for a rainy day
Silent film of melting miracle play
Dancing out there through my window
To the backdrop of a slow descending grey”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Ballet For A Rainy Day".
Skylarking (1986)

Dance

“Mr. Hellfrick was an atheist, retired from the army, living on a meager pension, scarcely enough to pay his liquor bills, even though he purchased the cheapest gin on the market. He lived perpetually in a grey bathrobe without a cord or button, and though he made a pretense at modesty he really didn't care, so that his bathrobe was always open and you saw much hair and bones underneath.”

John Fante book Ask the Dust

Ask the Dust (1939)

“"No, no no," she said. "You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … where you couldn't see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.”

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) Christian apologist, novelist, and Medievalist

Psyche
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)

Beauty , Home , Mountain , Understanding

“One must always paint in opposition to nature, and to one’s own 'mood'. To let oneself go is a weakness, a sort of hysterics. If you are full of red, choose a green or a blue; if you feel like yellow, choose grey or black. In this continuous opposition lies the entire secret of plastic creation… To create a great work of art demands self-mortification.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in his article 'Elementarism', as cited in De Stijl – Van Doesburg Issue, January 1932, pp. 17–19
1926 – 1931

Secret , Art , Feeling , Mood

“The lights of Saxon England were going out, and in the gathering darkness a gentle, grey-beard prophet foretold the end. When on his death-bed Edward spoke of a time of evil that was coming upon the land his inspired mutterings struck terror into the hearers.”

Winston S. Churchill book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples

On the death of King Edward the Confessor in January, 1066, months before the Norman Invasion; Vol I; The Birth of Britain.
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58)

Death , Light , Evil , Time

“Behind the top hats, a little lady wearing lila-coloured tights was balancing on a tightrope in the middle of all that blue-grey tobacco-laden air. I sauntered in among the standing clientele. I was on the lookout for an attractive girl. Yes – that one wasn’t bad. When she became aware of my gaze her facial expression changed to that of a frozen mask and she stared emptily into space. I found a stair – and collapsed into it – tired and listless. Everyone clapped. The Lila-clad tightrope-walker curtsied, smiled and disappeared. A group of Romanian singers took her place. There was love and hate – and longing and reunion – and lovely dreams – and that soft music melting together with the colours. The melted notes became green palm trees and steely blue water floating in the blue haze of the room. An artwork is a crystal. A crystal has a soul and a mind, and the artwork must also have these.”

Edvard Munch (1863–1944) Norwegian painter and printmaker

a note of Munch, written in Ekely, 1929; Munch Museum
1896 - 1930

Love , Hate , Smile , Dreams

“The colour of my soul is iron-grey and sad bats wheel about the steeple of my dreams.”

Claude Debussy (1862–1918) French composer

Letter to Ernest Chausson (1894)

Sadness , Dreams , Soul

“Now I as a painter shall never stand for anything of importance. I feel it utterly... I sometimes regret I did not simply keep to the Dutch palette [of Dutch impressionism ] with its grey tones, and have brushed away at landscapes of Montmartre [in 1886-87] with no ado.”

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

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, 3 May 1889; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 590), p. 33
1880s, 1889

Feeling

“Towards the end of 1958, I greatly increased.... the works done with what is called poor material. I felt the need to persist and go deeper with the entire message of what is insignificant, worn or dramatised by time... In fact, it was the most conscious resumption of subjects that had often attracted me. In my research, I had discovered this material, one I find loaded with strange suggestions, which is cardboard. A grey, anonymous material that won't be easily manipulated, for which very reason the slightest mark of the hand torments it and destroys it. But the piece of cardboard, the box, the lid, the tray.... dirty clothes (socks, T-shirt, underpants…), old furniture, everyday objects; not used as a representation or theme in the picture but as real bodies, objects.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

as quoted in 'Tàpies: From Within', June/November 2013 - Presse Release text, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC), pp. 7-8
1971 - 1980, Memòria Personal', 1977

Time , Clothes , Box

“Outbursts blossom in Lapland rapidly
. in earth, in barley, grass, dwarf birches too.
This I have pondered very frequently
when people’s daily lives there I review.

Oh why are all our beautiful ones dying
and why do great ones rot in disarray?
Oh why among us many minds are losing?
Oh why so few the kantele now play?

Oh why here everywhere a man soon crashes
like hay when scythed – ambitious man indeed,
a man of honour, sense – it all soon smashes,
or breaks apart one day in life of need?

Elsewhere, a fire still glints in greying tresses,
in old ones glows still spirit of the sun.
But here our new-born infants death possesses
and youth will grave’s dull earth soon press upon.

And what of me? Why ponder I so sadly?
An early sign, be sure, of grim old age.
Oh why the blood-spent rule keep I not gladly,
but sigh instead at people’s mortal wage?

One answer is there only: Lapland’s summer.
In thinking then my mind is soon distressed.
In Lapland birdsong, joy are short – a glimmer –
as flowers’ blooms and gladness wilt and rest.

But winter’s wrath is only long. Dear moment
when resting thoughts delay and don’t take flight,
in search of lands where blazing sun is potent
and take their leave of Lapland’s icy bite.

Oh, great white birds, you guests of summer Lapland,
with noble thoughts we’ll greet you, when you’re here!
Oh, tarry here among us, build your nests and
a while delay your southern journey near!

Oh, from the swan now learn a lesson wholesome!
They leave in autumn, come back in the spring.
It’s our own peaceful shore that us-wards pulls them,
Our sloping fell’s kind shelter will them bring.

Batter the air with whooping wings and leave us!
Wonders perform, enlighten other lands!
But when you see that winter’s gone relieve us –
I beg, beseech, re-clasp our weary hands!”

Eino Leino (1878–1926) Finnish poet and journalist

Life , Death , People , Youth

“For see, the dapple-grey coursers of the morn
Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs,
And chase it through the sky.”

John Marston Antonio's Revenge

Antonio's Revenge, Act I, sc. i.

Light

“Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-from high flat temples-in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blonde Satan.”

Dashiell Hammett book The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon (1930)

“Come, spur away,
I have no patience for a longer stay,
But must go down
And leave the chargeable noise of this great town.
I will the country see,
Where old simplicity,
Though hid in grey,
Doth look more gay
Than foppery in plush and scarlet clad:
Farewell, you city wits, that are
Almost at civil war;
'Tis time that I grow wise, when all the world grows mad.
More of my days
I will not spend to gain an idiot's praise;
Or to make sport
For some slight puny of the inns of court.
Then, worthy Stafford, say,
How shall we spend the day?
With what delights
Shorten the nights?
When from this tumult we are got secure,
Where mirth with all her freedom goes,
Yet shall no finger lose;
Where every word is thought, and every thought is pure.
There from the tree
We'll cherries pluck and pick the strawberry,
And every day
Go see the wholesome country girls make hay,
Whose brown hath lovelier grace
Than any painted face
That I do know
Hyde Park can show.”

Thomas Randolph (poet) (1605–1635) English poet and dramatist

"An Ode to Master Anthony Stafford, to hasten him into the Country"
Poems (pub. 1638)

War , World , Girl , Sport

“Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there—and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags.”

Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) English poet, author and literary critic

Festubert, 1916 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57255/festubert-1916 (1921)

Love , Life , Men , Lie

“The grey road whereupon we trod became as holy ground:
The eve was all one voice that breathed its message with no sound:
And burning multitudes pour through my heart, too bright, too blind,
Too swift and hurried in their flight to leave their tale behind.”

George William Russell (1867–1935) Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, and artistic painter

By Still Waters (1906)

Heart

“What was the conduct of the minister in the year 1782, when his pretended sincerity for a parliamentary reform had been defeated in that House, by a motion for the order of the day? He had abandoned it for ever. William Pitt, the reformer of that day, was William Pitt the prosecutor, aye, and persecutor too, of reformers now… What was object of these people? "Their ostensible object," said the minister, "is parliamentary reform; but their real object is the destruction of the government of the country." How was that explained? "By the resolutions," said the minister, "of these persons themselves; for they do not talk of applying to parliament, but of applying to the people for the purpose of obtaining a parliamentary reform." If this language be criminal, said Mr. Grey, I am one of the greatest criminals. I say, that from the House of Commons I have no hope of a parliamentary reform; that I have no hope of a reform, but from the people themselves; that this House will never reform itself, or destroy the corruption by which it is supported, by any other means than those of the resolutions of the people, acting on the prudence of this House, and on which the people ought to resolve. This they only do by meeting in bodies. This was the language of the minister in 1782.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Speech in the House of Commons (17 May 1794), reported in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803. Vol. XXXI (London: 1818), pp. 532-533.
1790s

People , Hope , Support , Housing

“You have an excellent heart, my friend — but your grey cells are in a deplorable condition.”

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

Hercule Poirot’s Early Cases (1974)

Heart

“She began to speak, but waited a moment for the maid to clear away the tea. In the waning light her room seemed gentle and grey, and there hung about it an odour (I do not write ‘the odour’) of Roman Catholicism, which is assuredly among the gracious things of the world. It was the room of a woman who had found time to be good to herself as well as to others; who had brought forth fruit, spiritual and temporal; who had borne a mysterious tragedy not only with patience but actually with joy.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

The rock
The Life to Come and other stories (1972)

World , Light , Time , Waiting

“I brought Durand eight pictures, among them my 'Sunset' and the motif done from my window. They have been praised, but I find them poor, - tame, grey, monotonous, - I am not at all satisfied. - I am working with fury and I have finally discovered the right execution, the search for which has tormented me for a year. I am pretty sure I have it now, all I need is to spend this coming autumn in Rouen or in some other place where I can find striking motifs.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

Quote of Pissarro, from Osny, February 1884, in a letter to his son Lucien; in Camille Pissarro - Letters to His Son Lucien ed. John Rewald, with assistance of Lucien Pissarro; from the unpublished French letters; transl. Lionel Abel; Pantheon Books Inc. New York, second edition, 1943, p. 61
1880's

Search , Autumn

“Some states, e. g. "pregnant", are all-or-none, no intermediates. But sexual abuse has shades of grey, from violent buggery to mild touching.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/282850316377014272
Twitter

“I am searching for a tone, which we call 'colored grey'. I mean that all colors, even the strongest, can be brought together in such a way as to give the impression of a warm, vital grey. (translation from the Dutch original: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

version in original Dutch / citaat van Bilders' brief, in het Nederlands: Ik zoek naar een toon, die wij gekleurd-grijs noemen; dat is alle kleuren, hoé sterk ook, zoodanig tot één geheel gebragt, dat ze de indruk geven van een geurig, warm grijs.
Quote from Gerard Bilders' letter (July 1860) to his maecenas , as cited by Victorine Hefting, in Jongkinds's Universe; Henri Scrépel, Paris, 1976, p. 18-19
1860's

Color , Way , Search

“As part of my current charge I have been instructed to provide an occasional journal of my recent activities*.
* I avoid the term blog, since coincidentally this word is also the name of a repulsive sub-caste of foliots, characterised by ooze, fleshy folds and gills of blue-grey gristle. Think slugs, but with worse personalities.”

Jonathan Stroud (1970) British writer of fantasy fiction

The Bartimaeus Trilogy Official Website, Bart's Journal

Thinking , Parting , Personality

“Those eyes the greenest of things blue
The bluest of things grey.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Félise.
Undated

“When rowan leaves are dank and rusting
And rowan berries red as blood,
When in my palm the hangman's thrusting
The final nail with bony thud,
When, over the foul flooding river,
Upon the wet grey height, I toss
Before my land's grim looks, and shiver
As I swing here upon the cross,
Then, through the blood and weeping, stretches
My dying sight to space remote;
I see upon the river’s reaches
Christ sailing to me in a boat.”

Alexander Blok (1880–1921) poet

"Autumn Love" (1907); translation from C. M. Bowra (ed.) A Book of Russian Verse (London: Macmillan, 1943) p. 99.

Christ

“As I came down the Highgate Hill,
The Highgate Hill, the Highgate Hill,
As I came down the Highgate Hill
I met the sun's bravado,
And saw below me, fold on fold,
Grey to pearl and pearl to gold,
This London like a land of old,
The land of Eldorado.”

Henry Howarth Bashford (1880–1961) British physician and writer

London, from Romances http://www.giga-usa.com/quotes/authors/henry_howarth_bashford_a001.htm (1917). Compare: Alfred Noyes, Go down to Kew in Lilac-time.

Sun

“A Spring o'erhung with many a flow'r,
The grey sand dancing in its bed,
Embank'd beneath a Hawthorn bower,
Sent forth its waters near my head:
A rosy Lass approach'd my view;
I caught her blue eye's modest beam:
The stranger nodded 'How d'ye do!”

Robert Bloomfield (1766–1823) British writer

And leap'd across the infant stream.
Rosy Hannah, stanza 1, from Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs (1802)

Spring , Water , Dance

“The window I'm proudest of is at the Granby courthouse. … When the building was inaugurated …the Bishop of Saint-Hyacinthe… told me something that still warms my heart.
"Why is the third story so beautiful? Isn't that where people wait to be taken to prison?"
"Everyone has the right to see a flower before dying, Your Grace. The flowers shouldn't be grey."”

Marcelle Ferron (1924–2001) Canadian artist

"You speak like the Gospels."
Original in French: La verrière dont je suis la plus fière se trouve au palais de justice de Granby. … À l'inauguration de l'édifice... l'évêque de Saint-Hyacinthe... m'a fait un commentaire qui me rechauffe toujours le coeur.
Pourquoi le troisième étage est-il si beau? N'est-ce pas là ou se trouvent les gens qui attendent leur transfert en prison?
Monseigneur, tout homme a le droit de voir une fleur avant de mourir. Il ne faut pas que les fleurs soient grises.
Vous parlez comme les Évangiles.
L'esquisse d'une mémoire, 1996

People , Beauty , Flowers , Waiting

“[After Hale's cremation] She came out of the crematorium, and there from the twin towers above her head fumed the very last of Fred, a thin stream of grey smoke from the ovens. Fred dropped indistinguishable grey ash on the pink blossoms: he became part of the smoke nuisance over London, and Ida wept.”

Graham Greene book Brighton Rock

Brighton Rock (1938)

Parting

“There is no god, or love, just time / Saying "Do what you will. Nothing's real today" / We are fleeting numbers, and images / Like the liquid crystal digital readout / Floating on the sea of grey.”

Jonathan Larson (1960–1996) American composer and playwright

Superbia

Love , God , Time , Sea

“I oppose Islam, for the simple reason that Islam opposes me and everything I believe in. I don't care how Muslims feel about that. I don't care how anyone feels about it, nor should I be required to. In my opinion, Islam's disgusting treatment of women is a crime against humanity, nothing less. It's a thousand percent wrong, there's no grey area, it's unconscionable and unforgivable, and it's poisoning the whole world. It's not different or relative, it's backward and uncivilised. There's no excuse for it, and no excuse for defending it.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

"Free speech in Europe" (10 November 2010)
2010

Women , World , Feeling

“Old folks love to seem wise- and if you are silly enough to correspond with grey hairs, take the consequence.”

Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) British composer, writer and grocer

(from vol 2, letter 1: some time in 1778, to Mr J___ W___e ).

Love

“But how much are the delicate convolutions of the brain influenced by the digestive apparatus? When the mal de mere seizes me I, Hercule Poirot, am a creature with no grey cells, no order, no method — a mere member of the human race somewhere below average intelligence!”

Agatha Christie book Death in the Clouds

Death in the Clouds (1935)

Intelligence

“In order to give the better effect to this diversion, a hole is dug in the ground for the retreat of the animal; and the dogs run at him singly in succession; for it is not usual, I believe, to permit any more than one of them to attack him at once; and the dog which approaches him with the least timidity, fastens upon him the most firmly, and brings him the soonest from his hole, is accounted the best. The badger was formerly called the "grey," hence the denomination of grey-hounds applied to a well known species of dogs, on account of their having been generally used in the pursuit of this animal.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 280
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Public entertainment

Dogs , Success , Animals

“My own mother is always telling us how well behaved our children are, but little does she know how we got them that way! She would turn grey if she knew, I cane her perfect grandson, but she loves the result.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

Cults, Sects and Questions (c. 1979)

Love , Children , Way , Perfection

“I, too, often shrivel the grey shreds,
Sniff them and think and sniff again and try
Once more to think what it is I am remembering,
Always in vain. I cannot like the scent,
Yet I would rather give up others more sweet,
With no meaning, than this bitter one.”

Edward Thomas (1878–1917) Poet and journalist

Poem Old Man http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/old-man/

Thinking

“Earl Grey rose, and said, that the motion of the noble lord had his most entire and full assent…he could not sit silent on the occasion, impressed as he was with feelings of gratitude and admiration towards that great commander who was the subject of this vote, and deriving a just national pride from the consideration, that the honour of the country had been so greatly exalted by the conduct of that distinguished general and his brave army…the apparent contrast, or contradiction, as some might call it, between the sentiments which he had now delivered, and the opinions which he had expressed on former occasions…upon the whole it appeared manifest, that by the most exemplary and patient perseverance under unfavourable circumstances, and at the moment of action by the skilful combination of force and the most determined courage, a great success had been achieved, and as much honour done to the British army as any victory could have accomplished.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1811/apr/26/vote-of-thanks-to-lord-wellington-and in the House of Lords (26 April 1811) on the Vote of Thanks to Lord Wellington, and the British and Portuguese Armies.
1810s

Feeling , Courage , Appearance , Success