3 quotes from 3 books. Sent weekly.
Enjoy!
—Mark
“Personalities are not a single immutable color, like white or blue, but rather illuminated screens, and the shades we reflect depend much on what is around us.”
—Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid (2017)
“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.“
—Color: A Natural History of the Palette, by Victoria Finlay (2002)
“Color terms are often invented to include other qualities as well, particularly texture, luminosity, freshness, and indelibility. In Hanunóo, a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Philippines, malatuy means a brown, wet, shiny surface, the kind seen in freshly cut bamboo, while marara is a yellowish, hardened surface, as in aged bamboo. English-language speakers are prone to translate malatuy as ‘brown’ and marara as ‘yellow,’ but they would capture only part of the meaning and perhaps the less important part. Similarly, chloros in ancient Greek is usually translated as simply ‘green’ in English, but its original meaning was apparently the freshness or moistness of green foliage.”
—Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson (1998)