Diane Ackerman

When I was in Istanbul many years ago, I marveled at the way the onion-shaped mosques carved the sky between them. Instead of seeing a skyline, as one would in New York or San Francisco, one saw only the negative space between the swirling, swooping, spiraling minarets and bulbous domes

The color we see is always the one being reflected, the one that doesn’t stay put and get absorbed. We see the rejected color, and say “an apple is red.” But in truth an apple is everything but red

As Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid Land Camera and instant photography, deduced, we judge colors by the company they keep. We compare them to one another, and revise according to the time of day, light source, memory.*

Most people can identify between 150 and 200 colors. But we do not all see exactly the same colors, especially if we’re partly or completely color-blind

Not all languages name all colors. Japanese only recently included a word for “blue.” In past ages, aoi was an umbrella word that stood for the range of colors from green and blue to violet

Because ancient Greek had very few color words, a lot of brisk scholarly debate has centered around what Homer meant by such metaphors as the “wine-dark sea.”

The intensity of the color affected my nervous system. At the time, I called the emotion wonder, and thought: Isn’t it extraordinary to be alive on a planet where there are yellows such as this

The sensory misers will inherit the earth, but first they will make it not worth living on

A turning leaf stays partly green at first, then reveals splotches of yellow and red as the chlorophyll gradually breaks down. Dark green seems to stay longest in the veins, outlining and defining them. During the summer, chlorophyll dissolves in the heat and light, but it is also being steadily replaced. In the fall, on the other hand, no new pigment is produced, and so we notice the other colors that were always there, right in the leaf, although chlorophyll’s shocking green hid them from view. With their camouflage gone, we see these colors for the first time all year, and marvel, but they were always there, hidden like a vivid secret beneath the hot glowing greens of summer.

Anthocyanin, the pigment that gives apples their red and turns leaves red or red-violet, is produced by sugars that remain in the leaf after the supply of nutrients dwindles