Kassia St. Clair > Quotes

“Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations: you could no more meaningfully secure a precise universal definition for all the known shades than you could plot the coordinates of a dream.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Van Gogh's sunflowers, it seems, are wilting, just like their real-life counterparts did.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“So, in a way, the color we perceive an object to be is precisely the color it isn’t: that is, the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Different things are different colors because they absorb some wavelengths of the visible light spectrum, while others bounce off. So the tomato’s skin is soaking up most of the short and medium wavelengths—blues and violets, greens, yellows and oranges. The remainder, the reds, hit our eyes and are processed by our brains. So, in a way, the color we perceive an object to be is precisely the color it isn’t: that is, the segment of the spectrum that is being reflected away.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Someone wearing a snow-pale winter coat telegraphs a subtle visual message: "I do not need to take public transportation.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“It seems blue, once considered the color of degenerates and barbarians, has conquered the world.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“With apologies to Kandinsky, perhaps a better summation of the color would be: “Orange is like a man, desperately seeking to convince others of his powers.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“In Indonesia, bamboo is often planted over the site of felled trees to produce fabrics that can then be marketed as being “renewable” and environmentally friendly. Because rayon is made from cellulose, it is ripe for greenwashing, especially when consumers are fuzzy about how it’s made.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History

“debate over whether colors really, physically exist or are only internal manifestations has raged since the seventeenth century.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Some amaranth was grown on special floating gardens, boats filled with soil and set adrift on lakes; the water helped regulate the temperature of the soil and stopped animals from getting at the crop.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Rods do the heavy lifting of our vision. We have about 120 million in each eye; they are incredibly sensitive and principally distinguish between light and dark. But it is the cones that are most responsive to color.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Rods do the heavy lifting of our vision. We have about 120 million in each eye; they are incredibly sensitive and principally distinguish between light and dark.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“The Lewis Chessmen, as they are now known, are mysterious.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Canopy, an environmental organisation, believes that 120 million trees are felled each year to produce rayon and other cellulose-based materials.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History

“called rods and cones because of their respective shapes. Rods do the heavy lifting of our vision. We have about 120 million in each eye; they are incredibly sensitive and principally distinguish between light and dark. But it is the cones that are most responsive to color.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“Pope Paul II decreed in 1464 that his cardinals were to wear robes of rich scarlet instead of purple, the poor Tyrian-purple mollusks [here] being all but extinct by this time.5 The habit stuck and scarlet became inextricably linked with insignia, particularly in the Church and academia, a heritage Mary was drawing on at her execution.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“In 1629 a priest complained that the locals were supplementing their Christian devotions with little edible figures of Christ baked from amaranth dough.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“For the ancients green was, like red, one of the middle colors between white and black, and in fact red and green were often confused linguistically: the medieval Latin sinople could refer to either until the fifteenth century.6 In 1195 the future Pope Innocent III reinterpreted green’s role in the divine order in an influential treatise. It must, he wrote, “be chosen for holidays and the days when neither white nor red nor black are suitable, because it is a middle color between white, red, and black.”7 This, theoretically, gave it far greater prominence in the West, but materially it was still rare: it never appeared in more than 5 percent of heraldic arms. One”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color

“The name likely comes from its place of origin: it was originally a thick woollen serge cloth from the French city of Nîmes. Over time, the cloth was increasingly made elsewhere using cheap cotton and the words ‘serge de Nîmes’ were mumbled down to ‘denim’.”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History

“Colors, therefore, should be understood as subjective cultural creations.”
― Kassia St. Clair

“Oscar Wilde was arrested outside the Cadogan Hotel in London in April 1895. The following day the Westminster Gazette ran the headline "Arrest of Oscar Wilde, Yellow Book Under His Arm." Wilde would be found officially guilty of gross indecency in court a little over a month later, by which time the court of public opinion had long since hanged him. What decent man would be seen openly walking the streets with a yellow book?”
― Kassia St. Clair, The Secret Lives of Color