Victoria Finlay Quotes

Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot appreciate them.

What they signified was precious, but what they were was not.

In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps, a flirtatious glance of green. But each stone flickers with a unique fire and a good opal is one with an opinion of its own.

…in Pliny's time, it was believed that only the blood of a newly sacrificed kid, or lamb, could shatter a diamond. Pliny wondered - as many did until the seventeenth century when this 'fact' was still being quoted as a gemological curiosity - how anyone could have thought to experiment with such a thing … He did not realize that the story was probably a metaphor, perhaps with the same root as the Christian symbol of the Lamb of God. A diamond is the hardest substance; a sacrificed lamb or goat the most innocent. The only way to overcome harshness and brutality, the imagery suggests, is with love.

I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency that can help them find each other.

Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.

If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken lips, of John Keat's 'purple-stained mouth', or perhaps even of Homer's dangerously wine-dark sea.

Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion of permanence, through what we do, say, wear, buy, and how we enjoy ourselves and who and how we love. Yet it is an illusion that is constantly being undermined by change and death. We can use diamonds in whatever way we like. They are empty things, pretty as water, yet within them - if we want to see it - there is blood, dust, love, curses, and suffering. There is desire to make someone happy, there is admiration, there is ostentation ... and there is a company's profit curve.

Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would be nothing. And when we believe it, perhaps it is true.

Years later the Romantic poet John Keats would complain that on that fateful day Newton had "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow by reducing it to prismatic colors." But color - like sound and scent - is just an invention of the human mind responding to waves and particles that are moving in particular patterns through the universe - and poets should not thank nature but themselves for the beauty and the rainbows they see around them.

Almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs on those necklace strings.