Victoria Finlay > Quotes

“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

“...almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency that can help them find each other.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors.” But color—like sound and scent—is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe—and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them.”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious glance of green. But each stone flickers with a unique fire and a good opal is one with an opinion of its own.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“In 1879 the Bengali scholar S.M. Tagore compiled a more extensive list of ruby colors from the Purana sacred texts: ‘like the China rose, like blood, like the seeds of the pomegranate, like red lead, like the red lotus, like saffron, like the resin of certain trees, like the eyes of the Greek partridge or the Indian crane…and like the interior of the half-blown water lily.’ With so many gorgeous descriptive possibilities it is curious that in English the two ancient names for rubies have come to sound incredibly ugly.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them—if we want to see it—there is blood, dust, love, curses, and suffering. There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation…and there is a company’s profit curve.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“When our eyes see the whole range of visible light together, they read it as “white.” When some of the wavelengths are missing, they see it as “colored.”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“What they signified was precious, but what they were was not.”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched too much, the mother oysters and mussels must be treated gently—as the Scottish pearl-fishers, too, had learned to their regret. These creatures are a barometer of how we are treating our planet. Sometimes in our greed to make them produce pretty things for our pleasure we forget that they deserve our respect.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would be nothing. And when we believe it, perhaps it is true.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“The probable reason that nobody at Mikimoto wanted a writer to go to the pearl farms of Ago…was because something terrible was happening in that bay. Since the 1990s, pollution has been pouring into the water, partly as a result of careless husbandry but also from untreated sewage from all the hotels that bring people in to enjoy the ‘unspoiled wilderness’. No wonder the Japanese farmers were pulling out their oysters after just nine months: any longer than that and they risked losing most of their stock to the effluent in the water—it was killing the akoya oysters… Similar things are happening in Lake Biwa… Thanks to the pollution in the area, production at Lake Biwa has now declined almost to the point of nonexistence.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“White paint can be made of many things. It can come from chalk or zinc, barium or rice, or from little fossilized sea creatures in limestone graves. The Dutch artist Jan Vermeer even made some of his luminescent whites with a recipe that included alabaster and quartz—in lumps that took the light reflected into the painting and made it dance.3”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“…in Pliny’s time, it was believed that only the blood of a newly sacrificed kid, or lamb, could shatter a diamond. Pliny wondered—as many did until the seventeenth century when this ‘fact’ was still being quoted as a gemological curiosity—how anyone could have thought to experiment with such a thing … He did not realize that the story was probably a metaphor, perhaps with the same root as the Christian symbol of the Lamb of God. A diamond is the hardest substance; a sacrificed lamb or goat the most innocent. The only way to overcome harshness and brutality, the imagery suggests, is with love.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“Once upon a time Apache land would have stretched farther than the horizon, through New Mexico almost to Texas, but as white men found gold, silver, turquoise, and copper beneath its surface they carved up the territory like children sneaking to the fridge and slicing off a chocolate cake bit by bit: hoping at first that the loss wouldn’t be noticed but ultimately not really caring.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“The use of natural pigments is similarly embodied in the Orthodox teaching that humanity—like all Creation—was created pure but not perfect, and the purpose of being born is to reach your true potential.”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“But color—like sound and scent—is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe—and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them. While”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the Nazi camps were run by ordinary bureaucrats: the evil was astonishing in its banality.”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“When light shines on a leaf, or a daub of paint, or a lump of butter, it actually causes it to rearrange its electrons, in a process called "transition." There the electrons are, floating quietly in clouds within their atoms, and suddenly a ray of light shines on them. Imagine a soprano singing a high C and shattering a wineglass, because she catches its natural vibration. Something similar happens with the electrons, if a portion of the light happens to catch their natural vibration. It shoots them to another energy level and that relevant bit of light, that glass-shattering "note," is used up and absorbed. The rest is reflected out, and our brains read it as "color.".... 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. The atoms in a ripe tomato are busy shivering - or dancing or singing, the metaphors can be as joyful as the colors they describe - in such a way that when white light falls on them they absorb most of the blue and yellow light and they reject the red - meaning paradoxically that the "red" tomato is actually one that contains every wavelength except red. A week before, those atoms would have been doing a slightly different dance - absorbing the red light and rejecting the rest, to give the appearance of a green tomato instead.”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“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.”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette

“But now I understood mourning clothes for the first time. I needed an armband, a ribbon, any kind of sign that would be understood by strangers and friends to say I couldn’t be relied on, that I was to be treated carefully, that I was not, for a while, in this world.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“I’ve come to understand that under some circumstances a mourning period is liberating. You don’t have to act in normal ways while your heart is grieving. You can wear black and later grey or mauve and people will understand that you are in a liminal place, and can’t be fully counted on. There’s freedom in mourning time too.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“After that, I began to notice how fabrics can give a glimpse of something truthful, a clue to what is underneath the surface of things. I learned that the word ‘clue’ itself comes from an Old English term for a ball of yarn that can be unwound to show the right path. And, almost in passing, I saw how the stories of fabrics, their histories, are about endeavour and work and secrets and feuds and inventions and abuse and beauty and ugliness, and sometimes they are about tenderness.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“The warp threads need to be the strongest: if they break, the whole cloth is lost.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Stop concentrating,’ Dominga says. ‘You have to understand the thread, but not by thinking… you’ll know, you’ll feel when it’s going wrong.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Ezekiel looked into amber and saw God, but the Teutonic Knights saw something less noble: gold.”
― Victoria Finlay

“I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. —SIR ISAAC NEWTON”
― Victoria Finlay, Jewels: A Secret History

“Winter’s when people make things, she said. The dark months are the fabric months.”
― Victoria Finlay, Fabric: The Hidden History of the Material World

“Art history is so often about looking at the people who made the art; but I realized at that moment there were also stories to be told about the people who made the things that made the art. My”
― Victoria Finlay, Color: A Natural History of the Palette