Colour Quotes

“My world was the size of a crayon box, and it took every colour to draw her”
― Sarah Kay, No Matter the Wreckage: Poems

“I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a colour?

Colour is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. Because I’ve listened to souls whispering – like the susurrus of the wind – from book to book and object to object for tens or thousands of years, allow me to say that my touch resembles the touch of angels. Part of me, the serious half, calls out to your vision while the mirthful half sours through the air with your glances.

I’m so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted.

I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor in subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colours, shadows, crowds or even of loneliness. How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being! Wherever I’m spread, I see eyes shine, passions increase, eyebrows rise and heartbeats quicken. Behold how wonderful it is to live! Behold how wonderful to see. I am everywhere. Life begins with and returns to me. Have faith in what I tell you.”
― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red

“Let me, O let me bathe my soul in colours; let me swallow the sunset and drink the rainbow.”
― Khalil Gibran

“People appear like angels until you hear them speak. You must not rush to judge people by the colour of their cloaks, but by the content of their words!”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“The world is a wide place where we stumble like children learning to walk. The world is a bright mosaic where we learn like children to see, where our little blurry eyes strive greedily to take in as much light and love and colour and detail as they can.

The world is a coaxing whisper when the wind lips the trees, when the sea licks the shore, when animals burrow into earth and people look up at the sympathetic stars. The world is an admonishing roar when gales chase rainclouds over the plains and whip up ocean waves, when people crowd into cities or intrude into dazzling jungles.

What right have we to carry our desperate mouths up mountains or into deserts? Do we want to taste rock and sand or do we expect to make impossible poems from space and silence? The vastness at least reminds us how tiny we are, and how much we don't yet understand. We are mere babes in the universe, all brothers and sisters in the nursery together. We had better learn to play nicely before we're allowed out..... And we want to go out, don't we? ..... Into the distant humming welcoming darkness.”
― Jay Woodman, SPAN

“238. I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

239. But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

240. All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”
― Maggie Nelson, Bluets

“The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“Love is like dried flowers sometimes. Even though you watch the petals shrink and change colour, you cannot help treasuring them”
― Munia Khan

“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

“Was it the case that colours dimmed as the eye grew elderly? Or was it rather that in youth your excitement about the world transferred itself onto everything you saw and made it brighter?”
― Julian Barnes, England, England

“Drawing makes you look at the world more closely. It helps you to see what you're looking at more clearly. Did you know that?"
I said nothing.
"What colour's a blackbird?" she said.
"Black"
"Typical!”
― David Almond, Skellig

“Colours are nature gone wild.”
― Raheel Farooq

“The great hall was shimmering in light, sun streaming from the open windows, and ablaze with colour, the walls decorated with embroidered hangings in rich shades of gold and crimson. New rushes had been strewn about, fragrant with lavender, sweet woodruff, and balm... the air was... perfumed with honeysuckle and violet, their seductive scents luring in from the gardens butterflies as blue as the summer sky.”
― Sharon Kay Penman, Devil's Brood

“Some powerful magnificence not human in other words, seemed under me. And it was the same mild pink colour, like the water of a watermelon, that did it. At once I recognised the importance of this, as throughout my life I had known these moments when the dumb begin to speak, when I hear the voices of objects and colours; then the physical universe starts to wrinkle and change and heave and rise and smooth, so it seems even the dogs have to lean against a tree, shivering.”
― Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King

“The cattle crouched round them in soft shadowy clumps, placidly munching, and dreaming with wide-open eyes. The narrow zone of colour created by the firelight was like the planet Earth - a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Hustler vs dynasty; Women vs men; straight vs crooked; white vs black; left vs right; youth vs old; are forms of separatist business enterprises I don't subscribe to. They drain your energy chasing what we can't change when we can be the best we wanna be.”
― DON SANTO

“Sometimes I try to think of a future without him, but it's like trying to imagine a new colour.”
― Annie Lord, Notes on Heartbreak

“The green earth is a symbol of hope.
Walk on it like you are going somewhere, even when you are going nowhere.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover

“All I knew was the way that colour spoke to me, as if I'd been waiting my whole life to find it, to set it free." He thought for a moment. "There's always been something about blue. A thousand years ago Yves Klein said it was the essence of colour itself: the colour that stood for all other colours.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Zima Blue

“Rainbows are smiles of happiness for the world from god above.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“West of Arkham the hills rise wild
and there are valleys with deep woods that no ax has ever cut.
There are dark, narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically,
where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glimpse of sunlight.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space

“...a flash of colour amid a shadowy, gloomy background made me stop, a riot of colour and texture that compelled me to face the gilded frame.

I'd never- never- seen anything like it.

It's just a still life, a part of me said. And it was: a green glass vase with an assortment of flowers drooping over its narrow top, blossoms and leaves of every shape and size and colour- roses, tulips, morning glory, goldenrod, maiden's lace, peonies...

The skill it must have taken to make them look so lifelike, to make them more than lifelike... Just a vase of flowers against a dark background- but more than that; the flowers seemed to be vibrant with their own light, as if in defiance of the shadows gathered around them. The mastery needed to make the glass vase hold that light, to bend the light with the water within, as if the vase did indeed have weight to it atop its stone pedestal... Remarkable.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“I suppose the study was more of a library, as I couldn't see any of the walls thanks to the small labyrinths of stacks flanking the main area and a mezzanine dangling above, covered wall to wall in books. But study sounded less intimidating. I meandered through some of the stacks, following a trickle of sunlight to a bank of windows on the far side. I found myself overlooking a rose garden, filled with dozens of hues of crimson and pink and white and yellow.

I might have allowed myself a moment to take in the colours, gleaming with drew under the morning sun, had I not glimpsed the painting that stretched along the wall beside the window.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“The firelight danced on his mask, warming the gold, setting the emeralds glinting. Such colour and variation- colours I didn't know the names of, colours I wanted to catalog and weave together. Colours I had no reason not to explore now.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Thorns and Roses

“...she went to the usual spot on her finger and poked with the sharp tip until a drop of blood welled obediently to the surface. It was the brightest colour in the room, more alive than even the body it had just quit.”
― Emma Törzs, Ink Blood Sister Scribe

“And he said...

...the sky shall be filled with the color of oceans.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“I am not Black, I am Cocoa.”
― Mitta Xinindlu

“To make a colour colourless or colourful, it needs colour.”
― Ehsan Sehgal

“He had been sleepwalking through his own life, a life that was a canvas devoid of colour, and at last, he had awoken to a dazzling reality.”
― M. A. Kuzniar