Scarlett Thomas Quotes

There is no greater mystery to me than that of light traveling through darkness.

When yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike lines.

How odd, that light should prevent one from seeing.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

You've seen the sun flatten and take strange shapes just before it sinks in the ocean. Do you have to tell yourself every time that it's an illusion caused by atmospheric dust and light distorted by the sea, or do you simply enjoy the beauty of it?

One can take a neon tube and simply paint it black on the front. So it would read as a black letter or a line, but it would also read as neon because there would be light coming from behind that black letter.

It is the eye which makes the horizon.

An optical impression is produced on our organs of sight which makes us classify as light, half-tone or quartertone, the surfaces represented by colour sensations. So that light does not exist for the painter.

Boss: I just heard that light travels faster than sound. I'm wondering if I should shout when I speak, just so my lips appear to sync-up with my words.

There is such a thing as the impression of luminosity.

Light refused increases darkness.

You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.

Yes, instruction! Light! Light! Everything comes from light, and to everything it returns.

When the light returns to its source, it takes nothing of what it has illuminated.

The vivacity and brightness of colors in a landscape will never bear any comparison with a landscape in nature when it is illumined by the sun, unless the painting is placed in such a position that it will receive the same light from the sun as does the landscape.

Each ray of light moves in the coordinate system 'at rest' with the definite, constant velocity V independent of whether this ray of light is emitted by a body at rest or a body in motion.

Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

Drawing is based upon perspective, which is nothing else than a thorough knowledge of the function of the eye.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

Black illusion is all I ever see.

Baseball is the only major sport that appears backwards in a mirror.

Illusion - or rather appearance, semblance - is the theme of my life (could be theme of speech welcoming freshmen to the Academy). All that is, seems, and is visible to us because we perceive it by the reflected light of semblance. Nothing else is visible.

It is necessary to introduce light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, and a sufficient amount of blues, to obtain an airy feeling.

Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.

The eye - which sees all objects reversed - retains the images for some time.