Journaling starting top left and going clockwise:
- Keats, the English poet, once proposed "Confusion to the memory of Newton... because he destroyed the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to a prism." Later in his poem "Lamia," Keats wrote that science "will clip an Angel's wings... / Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -- / Unweave a rainbow." I, however, stand in wonder when I contemplate the complex biomolecular changes and reactions that occur in the human brain underpinning our ability to "(un)weave the rainbow."
- There are two kinds of brown. One is "warm and friendly like leaf mould." The other is "like the trunks of aged trees with worm holes in them, or like withered hands."
―Nella Braddy, preface to Midstream by Helen Keller
- ...the color of the veins in an old lady's arm...
...it’s a mythical creature... turn it around in your mouth, testing all angles, caressing for asperities. You will find none... It’s a mathematical equation. Both sum and subtraction and the result is both infinite and zero.
― wine forger Rudy Kurniawan and connoisseur Paul Wasserman describing old burgundies
- The brain of the race is so permeated with colour that it dyes even the speech of the blind...The colours that glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not correspond exactly with those you delight in; but they are none the less colour to me. I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grapefruit.
― Helen Keller
