« Le noir, une non-couleur ? Où avez-vous encore pris cela ? Le noir, mais c’est la reine des couleurs ! » — Renoir (1841-1919)
• “Black, a non-color? Where did you get that idea? Black, why, it’s the queen of colors!”
Category Archives: Quotations
Gorge the Gaze on God’s Gift
“The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, color is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn.” — John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, Vol. 2 (1853)
Bored Bard
Pol. How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first; he said I was a Fishmonger: he is farre gone, farre gone: and truly in my youth, I suffred much extreamity for loue: very neere this. Ile speake to him againe. What do you read my Lord?
Ham. Words, words, words. — Hamlet (c. 1600), Act 2, Scene 2
Hamble On
HAMBLEDON (n.)
The sound of a single-engined aircraft flying by, heard whilst lying in a summer field in England, which somehow concentrates the silence and sense of space and timelessness and leaves one with a profound feeling of something or other. — The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983)
Elsewhere Other-Accessible
• The Meaning of Liff — full text
• The Meaning of Liff — at Wikipedia
Alt-Writer
“I’ve found a place halfway up the churchyard, near enough to the church to be aware of, in a spiritual sense, matins on Sunday morning, but also to be within reach of, in a temporal way, orgies on Saturday nights in The Woolpack. And alternating between the temporal and the spiritual is the way I wish to spend what eternity is left to me.” — Laurie Lee, Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape (2019)
Glowing Troppo
pombero, M. Á guar. En la tradición popular, duende imaginario de quien se dice que protege a los pájaros y a los cocuyos y rapta a niños que persiguen.
cocuyo, M. Insecto coleóptero de la América tropical, de unos tres centimétros de longitud, oblongo, pardo y con dos manchas amarillentas a los lados de tórax, por las cuales despide de noche una luz azulada bastante viva. — Diccionario esencial de la lengua española (2006)
Ghost Coast
In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,
At the sea-down’s edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,
The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses
The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses
Now lie dead.
• “A Forsaken Garden” (1876), Swinburne
Bristol Ditties
“Having no testosterone altered me physically and mentally. I grew breasts, became more empathetic and enjoyed the music of Nick Drake.” — Jeremy Clarke, The Daily Mail, 25ii20
Elsewhere Other-Accessible…
• Ink Tune — review of Nick Drake: Dreaming England (2013) by Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Astronomy Dominie
• ἐπαινῶ: παντὶ γάρ μοι δοκεῖ δῆλον ὅτι αὕτη γε ἀναγκάζει ψυχὴν εἰς τὸ ἄνω ὁρᾶν καὶ ἀπὸ τῶν ἐνθένδε ἐκεῖσε ἄγει. — Πολιτεία τοῦ Πλᾰ́τωνος
• • For every one, as I think, must see that astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another. — Plato’s Republic (c. 375 BC), Book 7, line 529a
Wander in Woods
Errantes silva in magna et sub luce maligna
inter harundineasque comas gravidumque papaver
et tacitos sine labe lacus, sine murmure rivos,
quorum per ripas nebuloso lumine marcent
fleti, olim regum et puerorum nomina, flores.
• Cupido Cruciatur, Decimius Magnus Ausonius (c.310-c.395)
They wander in deep woods, in mournful light,
Amid long reeds and drowsy headed poppies,
and lakes where no wave laps, and voiceless streams,
Upon whose banks in the dim light grow old
Flowers that were once bewailed names of kings.
• translated by Helen Waddell in her Medieval Latin Lyrics (1929)