Weekend Words: Blue
The Guardian reported this week that Queen Elizabeth appeared “unimpressed by a painting given to her by the German president, Joachim Gauck.”
The Guardian reported this week that Queen Elizabeth appeared “unimpressed by a painting given to her by the German president, Joachim Gauck.” The painting, which depicts the Queen as a young girl riding a blue pony, is called “Horse in Royal Blue.” The Queen was quoted as saying, “It’s a funny colour for a horse.”
All political power is primarily an illusion. Illusion. Mirrors and blue smoke, beautiful blue smoke rolling over the surface of highly polished mirrors, first a thin veil of blue smoke, then a thick cloud that suddenly dissolves into wisps of blue smoke, the mirrors catching it all, bouncing it back and forth.
—Jimmy Breslin
Blueness doth express trueness.
—Ben Jonson
When
Sir
Beelzebub called for his syllabub in the hotel in Hell
Where Proserpine first fell,
Blue as the gendarmerie were the waves of the sea,
(Rock and shocking the barmaid).
—Dame Edith Sitwell, “Sir Beelzebub”
No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just… come out the other side. Or you don’t.
—Stephen King
There is no blue without yellow and without orange.
—Vincent van Gogh
Oh, the blues ain’t nothing but a good woman feeling bad.
—Georgia White
Whippoorwills call, evenin’ is nigh
Hurry to my blue heaven
Turn to the right, there’s a little white light
Will lead you to my blue heaven.
—George A Whiting, “My Blue Heaven”
Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.
—Henri Frederic Amiel
We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything
we know.
—Alice Walker, “We Have a Beautiful Mother”
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
The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green
They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”
The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”
And they said then, “But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,
A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.
—Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”
So, so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
—Roger Waters and David Jon Gilmour, “Wish You Were Here”
