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"I am assuming...that colour is real. I am not assuming, however, that colours are real...they are the product of the lexical and grammatical structures of particular languages." - John Lyons, Colour: Art and Science pp. 194-224

"How do I know this colour is red? ...because I have learned English." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, pp. 36, 37

Colour is all of these things, and more besides, but very rarely is colour just neutral." pg. 71

"Chromophilia recognizes the otherness of colour and plays it up. Chomronphia is perhaps only chromophilia without the colour." pg. 71

"Colour is both a fall into nature, which may in turn be a fall from grace or a fall into grace, and against nature, which may result in a corruption of nature or freedom from its corrupting forces. Colour is a lapse into decadence and a recovery of innocence, a false addition to a surface and the truth beneath that surface. Colour is disorder and liberty; it is a drug, but a drug that can intoxicate, poison or cure.

"To be called colourful is to be flattered and insulted at the same time." pg. 67

"Colour is often close to the body and never far from sexuality, be it heterosexual or homosexual. When sex comes into the story, colour tends to come with it, and when colour occurs, sex is often not too far away." pg. 63

"While cosmetics can both enhance beauty and conceal ugliness, they can also suffocate life. They really are against nature; they can be used to decorate a corpse, but they can also make a corpse of what they decorate." pg. 57-58

"If colour has 'the power to dream, to think or speak'. then is a very dangerous cosmetic, not a quiet and patient lady-in-waiting." pg. 55

It is not just that colour is at the wrong end of a moral opposition; it is, perhaps, just beyond the wrong end."

depth, if appearance masks essence, then make-up masks a mask, veils a veil, disguises a disguise. It is not simply a deception; it is a double deception. It is a surface on a surface, and thus even farther from substance than 'true' appearance. How things appear is one thing; how things appear to appear is another. Colour is a double illusion, a double deception.

"Western philosophy is used to dealing with ideas of depth and surface, essence and appearance, or basis or superstructure, and this just about always translates into a moral distinction between the profound and the superficial. So where does colour lie along this well-worn path? Well, if colour is make-up, then it is not really on this path at all, and perhaps this is a part of the colour problem. IF surface veils

"Figuratively, colour has always meant the less-than-true and the not-quite-real. The Latin colorem is related to celare, to hide or conceal; in Middle English 'to colour' is to embellish or adorn, to disguise, to render specious or plausible, to misrepresent." - pg 52

(It is typical of prejudices to conflate the sinister and the superficial.) Either way, colour is routinely excluded from the higher concerns of the Mind. It is other to the higher values of Western culture. Or perhaps culture is other to the higher values of colour. Or colour is the corruption of culture." - pg. 22-23

or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other it is perceived merely as a secondary quality of experience, and thus unworthy of serious consideration. Colour is dangerous, or it is trivial, or it is both.

"Chromophobia manifests itself in the many varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity. More specifically: this purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, the colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body -- usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer

"If colour is unimportant...why is it so important to exclude it so forcefully?" - pg 21

Lack of colour = voluntary poverty

"Here is the problem: not white; not whites; but generalized white, because generalized white - whiteness - is abstract, detached, and open to contamination by terms like 'pure'...//Pure white: this is certainly a Western problem." - pg. 13

"The virtuous whiteness of the West also conceals other less mystical terrors. These are more local and altogether more palpable; they are mainly, terrors of the flesh." - pg. 17

"There is a kind of white that is not created by bleach but that itself is bleach." - pg 10

"We should be especially careful not to get drawn into seeing color and white as opposites." -pg 12-13