... often when I write I am trying to make words do the work of line and colour. I have the painter's sensitivity to light. Much (...and perhaps the best) of my writing is verbal painting.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Take any noble musical air, and you find, on examining it, that not one even of the faintest or shortest notes can be removed with...out destruction to the whole passage in which it occurs; and that every note in the passage is twenty times more beautiful so introduced, than it would have been if played singly on the instrument. Precisely this degree of arrangement and relation must exist between every touch and line in a great picture. You may consider the whole as a prolonged musical composition: its parts, as separate airs connected in the story; its little bits and fragments of colour and line, as separate passages or bars in melodies; and down to the minutest note of the whole--down to the minutest touch,--if there is one that can be spared--that one is doing mischief.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We dreamed that a great painter had been born To cold Clare rock and Galway rock and thorn,... To that stern colour and that delicate line That are our secret discipline Wherein the gazing heart doubles her might....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The essential is to go on squirming forever at the end of the line, as long as there are waters and banks and ravening in heaven a... sporting God to plague his creature, per pro his chosen shits.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you have wit, use it to please, and not to hurt; you may shine, like the sun in the temperature zones, without scorching. Here ...it is wished for; under the Line it is dreaded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line--the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in A...sia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Here come the line-gang pioneering by. They throw a forest down less cut than broken.... They plant dead trees for living, and the dead They string together with a living thread.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living ...heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »