4 Movies That Showcase Zhang Yimou’s Brilliant Use Of One Color Dominance

Looking for some color inspiration? Try Zhang Yimou’s films. This director repeatedly uses one dominant color in a movie to saturate it with emotion and symbol.

Here are four of my favorites.

Raise The Red Lantern (red)

House Of Flying Daggers (green)

Hero (white)

Shadow (black)

Learn more about Color Theory here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

7 Movies That Mix Black & White And Color Masterfully

Black-and-white and full-color palettes present such different visual realities that it’s extremely difficult to combine them in a single project. Without a reason, it’s distracting, but when it’s used symbolically, it can work wonders. Below are 6 movies that do it masterfully.

The Wizard Of Oz

The Wizard Of Oz portrays Dorothy’s mundane life in Kansas in black-and-white and the dreamland of Oz in color.

Wings Of Desire

In Wings Of Desire, the ordinary world is depicted in color, while the spirit world inhabited by angels is portrayed in black-and-white.

Asteroid City

Colorization and black-and-white (plus varied aspect ratios) are used to represent different time periods.

The Purple Rose Of Cairo

Celia becomes entranced by Tom, the main character of a movie, who steps out of the black-and-white screen and into Cecilia’s color reality.

Pleasantville

Simplistic black-and-white Pleasantville becomes increasingly morally more complex, signified by the growing presence of color in the picture. The film also uses the idea of “color” as a metaphor for the separation of people of color during the 1950s.

JFK

Using different film stocks and shifting constantly between black-and-white and color, JFK weaves real and reimagined news footage together, making it difficult to tell fact from supposition.

Oppenheimer

Color shows Oppenheimer’s subjective point of view. Black-and-white shows an objective perspective, usually through another character’s point of view.

Learn more about Color Theory here.
Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

 

33 Great Quotes About The Color Pink

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color pink.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“Blue is the only color which maintains its own character in all its tones it will always stay blue; whereas yellow is blackened in its shades, and fades away when lightened; red when darkened becomes brown, and diluted with white is no longer red, but another color – pink.”
— Raoul Dufy

“Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.”
– James Abbott McNeill Whistler

“Pink is not just a color; it’s a state of mind.”
– Jessica Lynn

“Pink isn’t just a color. It’s an attitude too.”
– Miley Cyrus

“Pink is not a color – it’s a culture to me.”
– DeAngelo Williams

“Purple is the hue worn by a baby witch or warlock. Pink and blue are for mortals.”
– Agnes Moorehead

“Pink is the color of strength, a color of conviction, a color of decision making.”
– Angad Bedi

“Pink represents compassion, love, and nurturing.”
– Sophia Richards

“Love just comes in one color. Pink!”
– Anthony T. Hincks

“In a world that often lacks compassion, pink stands as a reminder to be kind.”
– Matthew Green

“Through pink-colored glasses, the world becomes a more beautiful place.”
– Nathan Cooper

“My parents told me I’d point to a bed of flowers and say ‘Pink. Pretty,’ before I knew any other words.”
– Joni Mitchell

“Pink is a beautiful color because it is one of the colors that the sun makes at twilight and in the dawns.”
– C. Joybell C

“I don’t think people expect Bruce Springsteen to come out in a pink satin jacket, but Rod Stewart, they do. And I like doing it; I don’t wear it just because I think I have to. I’m a very flamboyant person.”
– Rod Stewart

“Pink makes everything fabulous.” – Barbie

“Everything should be available in the color pink, including monster trucks.”
– Richelle E. Goodrich

“Pink Champagne is about having fun and letting go, and living your life to the fullest!”
— Ariana Grande

“I believe in manicures. I believe in overdressing. I believe in primping at leisure and wearing lipstick. I believe in pink. I believe happy girls are the prettiest girls. I believe that tomorrow is another day, and… I believe in miracles.”
— Audrey Hepburn

“I am a self-proclaimed feminist in a lot of ways, but I am not going to say that I will take a pink flag and run to India Gate with that.”
– Taapsee Pannu

“Pink is the navy blue of India.”
– Diana Vreeland

“Nay, I am the very pink of courtesy.”
— William Shakespeare

“Almost all words do have color, and nothing is more pleasant than to utter a pink word and see someone’s eyes light up and know it is a pink word for him or her, too.”
– Gladys Taber

“Pink is a gentle reminder to embrace your femininity fearlessly.”
– Daniel Williams

“Look at that,’ she whispered, and then after a moment: ‘I’d like to just get one of those pink clouds and put you in it and push you around.”
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I fell off my pink cloud with a thud.”
– Elizabeth Taylor

“I’ve always been the girl who can’t sit on her hands. If there’s a pink elephant in the room, I’ll identify it and say it.”
– Angela Rayner

“I believe American corporations that have gotten so much from our country should be just as patriotic in return. Many of them are, but too many aren’t. It’s wrong to take tax breaks with one hand and give out pink slips with the other. And I believe Wall Street can never, ever be allowed to wreck Main Street again.”
— Hillary Clinton

“I chose the Pink Fund because my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and I was pretty young in high school. At the time when she got re-diagnosed, my family had to move and they lost a job. Times were tough a little bit financially. The Pink Fund allows money to be raised to help women in need. I’m really excited to be able to represent that.”
– Jordan Larson

“Pinkville was called Pinkville because in the military maps, it was shaded a bright kind of shimmering pink, which signified what was called on the maps a ‘built up’ area, which was extremely misleading – ‘built up’ only meant there were little villages and it wasn’t just desolate paddy land or unpopulated.”
– Tim O’Brien

“Pink seems to me the essentially false and negative colour; because it is the dilution of something that is rich and glowing…. pink suggests nothing but the horrible and blasphemous idea of wine with too much water in it…. the fading of the fire; pink is mere anæmia in the blood of the universe.”
– G. K. Chesterton

“USDA says pink slime, which is made of cow connective tissue and other scraps and then treated with ammonia to kill the salmonella, e Coli, potentially, the U.S. Government says it’s totally safe.”
– Jane Velez-Mitchell

“Here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun, half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.”
— Margaret Atwood

“The day you’re born, you get the pink slip on YOU. Outright ownership. You must only share that life with those that you and only you choose.”
— Jerry Lewis

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33 Great Quotes About The Color Purple

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color purple.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“When God made the color purple, God was just showing off.”
– Mae Jemison

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”
– Alice Walker

“He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple—the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it.”
– Willa Cather

“Be different. Be original. Nobody will remember a specific flower in a garden filled with thousands of the same yellow flower, BUT they will remember the one that managed to change its color to purple.”
– Suzy Kassem

“The key to success is to find a way to stand out–to be the purple cow in a field of monochrome Holsteins.”
― Seth Godin

“Seek to be the purple thread in the long white gown.”
– Epictetus

“‘Almost’ is all about gradations and nuance and about suggestion and shades. Not quite a red wine, but not crimson, not purple either, or maroon; come to think of it, ‘almost’ Bordeaux.”
– Andre Aciman

“Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.”
– James Whistler

“It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself. But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.”
– Terry Pratchett

“Made up of the glories of the most precious gems, to describe them is a matter of inexpressible difficulty. For there is amongst them the gentler fire of the ruby, there is the rich purple of the amethyst, there is the sea-green of the emerald, and all shining together in an indescribable union. Others, by an excessive heightening of their hues equal all the colours of the painter, others the flame of burning brimstone, or of a fire quickened by oil.”
– Pliny the Elder

“Foods that are deep blue, purple, red, green, or orange are leaders in antioxidants and contain many nutrients that boost immunity and enhance health.”
– Deepak Chopra

“Violet is the most soothing, tranquilizing and cooling color vibration. It encourages the healing of unbalanced mental conditions in people who are overly nervous or high-strung. Foods of the violet vibration are: purple broccoli, beetroot and purple grapes.”
– Tae Yun Kim

“Purple is the hue worn by a baby witch or warlock. Pink and blue are for mortals.”
– Agnes Moorehead

“Purple is the color of royalties. It stands for luxury, wealth, and sophistication. It is also the color of passion, romance, and sensitivity.” – Amira

“Love makes its record in deeper colors as we grow out of childhood into manhood; as the Emperors signed their names in green ink when under age, but when of age, in purple.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.”
– Regina Brett

“Purple puts us in touch with the part of ourselves that is regal.”
– Byllye Avery

“I’m not posh, not in the slightest. My parents spent some money on my education, but I wasn’t born to the purple.”
– Matthew Goode

“He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
– Rudyard Kipling

“Men with purple hearts carry silver guns and they will kill a man for what his father has done. But what my father did, I don’t live it: no, I am not him.”
– Conor Oberst

“Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”
– Alice Walker

“No prosaic description can portray the grandeur of 40 miles of rugged mountains rising beyond a placid lake in which each shadowy precipice and each purple gorge is reflected with a vividness that rivals the original.”
– Herbert Hoover

“The purple light or glow, which appears roughly fifteen or twenty minutes after sunset… looks like an isolated bright spot fairly high in the sky over the place the sun has set, and then it quickly expands and sinks until it blends with the colors underneath.”
– James Elkins

“When I write after dark the shades of evening scatter their purple through my prose.”
– Cyril Connolly

“Despite the fact that he’s been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft’s work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.”
– Ellen Datlow

“Early impressions are hard to eradicate from the mind. When once wool has been dyed purple, who can restore it to its previous whiteness?”
– St. Jerome

“I want to be pure in heart — but I like to wear my purple dress.”
– Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“I won’t eat any cereal that doesn’t turn the milk purple.”
– Bill Watterson

“purple does something strange to me”
– Charles Bukowski

“Purple Haze all in my brain, lately things don’t seem the same. Actin’ funny but I don’t know why. ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.”
– Jimi Hendrix

“Time is purple / Just before night.”
– Mary O’Neill

“Yesterday and tomorrow cross and mix on the skyline. The two are lost in a purple haze. One forgets, one waits.”
– Carl Sandburg

“Purple haze all in my eyes, don’t know if it’s day or night. You got me blowin’, blowin’ my mind. Is it tomorrow or just the end of time?”
– Jimi Hendrix

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20 Great Quotes About The Color Orange

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color orange.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“Orange is the happiest color.”
– Frank Sinatra

“Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.”
– Wassily Kandinsky

“Orange is the color of positive thinking and optimism.”
– Remez Sasson

“Orange strengthens your emotional body, encouraging a general feeling of joy, well-being, and cheerfulness.”
– Tae Yun Kim

“Orange is an underrated color, it’s the second most underrate color after yellow.”
– Michel Gondry

“There is no blue without yellow and without orange.”
– Vincent Van Gogh

“Who in the rainbow can draw the line where the violet tint ends and the orange tint begins? Distinctly we see the difference of the colors, but where exactly does the one first blendingly enter into the other?”
– Herman Melville

“Your mind makes out the orange by seeing it, hearing it, touching it, smelling it, tasting it and thinking about it but without this mind, you call it, the orange would not be seen or heard or smelled or tasted or even mentally noticed, it’s actually, that orange, depending on your mind to exist! Don’t you see that? By itself it’s a no-thing, it’s really mental, it’s seen only of your mind. In other words it’s empty and awake.” — Jack Kerouac

“Much like purple, orange tends to be a controversial color. People tend to either love it or hate it.”
– Kendra Cherry

“It was like trying to break up with the color orange, or Wednesday, or silent e. It was the most passionate and tumultuous relationship I’d ever known.”
– Rob Sheffield

“I forgive nothing. If you stole my orange crayon in the fifth grade, you’re still on my hit list, buddy.”
-Jonathan Carroll

“The sky takes on shades of orange during sunrise and sunset, the colour that gives you hope that the sun will set only to rise again.”
– Ram Charan

“Meanwhile, the sunsets are mad orange fools raging in the gloom.”
― Jack Kerouac

“Orange is an attention-grabbing color that tends to stand out visually.”
– Kendra Cherry

“The color orange relates to adventure and risk-taking, inspiring physical confidence, competition, as well as independence.”
– Anonymous

“Orange is a color of liberation from the pains of hurtful love and inner insecurities. To channel orange is to truly be free, to be you.”
― Frank Ocean

“When I think of flavors, I think color, so lemon should be yellow and orange is orang.”
– Dylan Lauren

“If the real world is orange juice, then art is like orange juice concentrate.”
– Martin Mull

“God doesn’t make orange juice, God makes oranges.”
– Jesse Jackson

“Why is a carrot more orange than an orange?”
–Steven Wright

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John Macintosh’s New Book – Tell Us, What Have You Seen?

.
And What Is Art?        

And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
 
 Rudyard Kipling
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The most gratifying thing about being a teacher is seeing your students grow. One of the pinnacles of my years of teaching has been witnessing John Macintosh’s effervescent explorations of photography. His creations have become as colorful and rich as he is. John is about to release his first photography book, Tell Us, What Have You Seen? Below, John shares some of the highlights of his artistic journey, things he has learned that are important to him, and how making a book has deepened his experience.
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Inquire about the book by emailing macgybe@gmail.com.
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“Eight years ago, as a birthday present to me, Petra signed us up for one of their photo workshops on a boat in Greenland. Since then, we have been privileged to witness much of Nature’s majesty in their delightful company. Many of the images in this book were taken during their workshops. They taught me everything I know about digital photography. But a voyage with the two of them is not just about understanding the tools of photography, nor is it just a voyage into the wonders of Nature. For me, those were journeys into the uncharted waters of my own creativity. Why am I so passionate about the unworldly intensity of blue ice, the sensuous flow of sinuous curves, or the warm patination of rust? I found it difficult to converse with my own tight-lipped creativity, but eventually, those conversations acted as a guide to my whimsical wanderings.
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When I had my show about five years ago, I was amazed at the attendance, including several people who had flown to Chicago from the East Coast. A lady who I knew from the floor of the CBOT had bullied her partner, who owns a local restaurant, to come along to the show. When I had met him previously, he had displayed little interest in my photography. But when he entered my show, he walked up to one of my metal prints and said, ” I can’t live without this.” Shortly afterward, he redecorated the entire restaurant to accommodate seventeen of my prints, which still hang there today. It gives me great pleasure to know that over a thousand diners get to see my work every month.
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What did I learn while making the book? Since I knew bugger all, I learned a lot. I decided that I would need a high class printer for the book, just as Blazing Editions are the printers for my prints. As someone without a name, I realized that the odds of finding a publisher were very remote. A couple of years ago, a well-known publisher in England told me, ” Beautiful images do not sell a book. A story sells a book.”  I thought that I didn’t have enough good images of one theme to tell a story, and so was born the idea of grouping different subject matters together through poetry.
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For me, Seth and JP were instrumental in creating a link between photography and poetry, as they constantly urged the use of haiku to stimulate the visual mind. I was very dubious when they suggested writing haikus about images and even more so when they encouraged us to do so before setting out with the camera. I was one of the most reluctant pupils to accept the connection between photography and poetry, between the world of word and image. But, bit by bit, over several trips, they wore down my resistance.
.

.Cloths Of Heaven

.Had I the Heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams,
I have spread my dreams under your feet,
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
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 William Butler Yeats

I read a huge amount of poetry over the last year and a half, which was extremely rewarding. Finding a poem that conjured up one of my images was always thrilling, but at one stage, I realized that I would not find enough poems (over 100 years old for copyright purposes) for a book with nearly 100 photographs, so I took the plunge of attempting to write my own poetry. That was definitely one of the hardest things I have ever done.
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I have tried especially hard to avoid the sensory overload that comes when words, lying side by side with the image, simply repeat what has already been communicated by the eye. It was a formidable challenge to balance the verbal and visual stimuli, without simply superimposing one on top of the other, but it was immensely rewarding when the two seemed to complement each other.
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Mixing my own poems with those of famous poets felt somewhat presumptuous, but I tried to let the image speak to me in its own voice. And just as my images cover a wide range, from portraits to landscapes to the abstract, the poems vary from short to long, from the lyrical, as in Sea Fever, to the whimsical. Above all, I wanted to avoid repetition and monotony. So as not to pigeonhole an image or a poem, I have left them without titles. I am hoping that the reader will return to the book, drawn either by the image or the poem or by a combination of both, like a hummingbird to a flowering bush.”
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John Macintosh
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I too have bubbled up,
Floated the measureless float,
And have been washed upon your shore.
I too am but a trail of drift and debris.
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 Walt Whitman   

Inquire about the book by emailing macgybe@gmail.com.

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33 Great Quotes On The Color Yellow

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color blue.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“Orange is an underrated color, it’s the second most underrated color after yellow.”
– Michel Gondry

“Yellow usually means it’s not that serious.”
– Bobby Unser

“Whenever I drive under a yellow light, I always kiss my finger and tap it on the roof of the car.”
– Jared Padalecki

“I have these new policies toward my life, like ‘I will not accelerate when I see the yellow light.'”
– Elizabeth Gilbert

“The middle of the road is for yellow lines and dead armadillos.”
– Jim Hightower

“Fear has nothing to do with cowardice. A fellow is only yellow when he lets his fear make him quit.”
– Jerome Cady

“Yellow wakes me up in the morning. Yellow gets me on the bike every day. Yellow has taught me the true meaning of sacrifice. Yellow makes me suffer. Yellow is the reason I’m here.”
– Lance Armstrong

“Yellow is not an in-between color, you’re either all in or you’re not.”
– Mobolaji Dawodu

“Watch out where the Huskies go
And don’t you eat that yellow snow.”
– Frank Zappa

“Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.”
-Pablo Picasso

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33 Great Quotes On The Color Blue

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color blue.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
– Neil Armstrong

“Whenever I gaze up at the moon, I feel like I’m on a time machine. I am back to that precious pinpoint of time, standing on the foreboding – yet beautiful – Sea of Tranquility. I could see our shining blue planet Earth poised in the darkness of space.”
– Buzz Aldrin

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience….. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
– Carl Sagan

“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.”
– Archibald MacLeish

“No water, no life. No blue, no green.”
– Sylvia Earle

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24 Great Quotes On The Color Brown

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color brown.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

“I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and am genuinely sorry for the poor browns.”
- Winston Churchill

“Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom while others lay brown beneath the August sun.”
- Kent Nerburn

"Brown is a sober and sedate colour, grave and solemn, but not dismal, and contributes to the expression of strength, stability, and solidity, — vigour, warmth, and rusticity, — and in minor degree to the serious, the sombre, and the sad; not with the painter only, but also with the rhetorician and poet, with whom, nevertheless, many of the broken colours are yet "airy nothings" and "without a name."
- George Field

“Nevertheless, this external sound turns into internally powerful sound. When properly used brown paint produces indescribable inner beauty, self-restraint.”
- Wassily Kandinsky

“A baton of light across the bracken redeemed the reputation of the color brown with fiery reds and yellows.”
- Ian McEwan

“The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, which is commonly presumed infinite.”
- Barbara Kingsolver

"Brown is neither one of the basic color perceptions nor a primary color used in color mixtures, but for human beings it is constantly present both in nature and in their everyday surroundings. It is the color of the earth itself — of rocks and sand, of the bark of trees, of the fur of animals. In that sense, at least, it could be called the basic color of everyday life."
- Kunio Fukuda

"Brown is the color of hearth and home — of dried herbs and stone-ground bread and freshly baked cookies. It represents all of the nurturing, life-sustaining, down-to-earth qualities of terra firma, the very shade of earth itself. Just as in the sturdy oak, brown represents roots, a steady, stable source of security, comfort, and normalcy. It is the color of fertile soil and plowed earth, buckskin and rawhide, weathered redwood, bison and mustang, frontier land — rugged and outdoorsy. It is pine cone and bracken, chipmunk and acorn, beaver and doe. Brown is considered a classic shade of solid substance."
- Leatrice Eiseman

“My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I’m told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but it’s silver when it’s wet, and all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet.”
- Shel Silverstein


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29 Great Quotes On The Color Gray

Enjoy this collection of quotes on the color gray.

Which is your favorite? Have one to add? Leave a comment!

 

"Life isn't black or white, it's all sorts of shades of grey."
- Nicky Morgan

"There's so much grey to every story - nothing is so black and white."
- Lisa Ling

"Life isn't black and white. It's a million gray areas, don't you find?"
- Ridley Scott

"There are infinite shades of grey. Writing often appears so black and white."
- Rebecca Solnit

"For grey matter, there is no black and white. If you think in black and white, then you do not use enough brain functions."
- Peter Kabakci

"The color of truth is gray."
- Andre Gide

"Compromise in colors is grey."
- Edi Rama

“The color grey is a reference to ambiguity, speculation, and nebulous deconstruction without solution.”
— Philip Bachman

"Gray is the color... the most important of all... absent of opinion, nothing, neither/nor."
- Gerhard Richter

“Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other color has, to make the invisible visible.”
– Roma Tearne

“One must first allow the presence of gray to take root, then release it to weigh its absence before being certain about anything.”
– Reena Doss


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