"My mother always called me plain. She saw this as a flaw to be corrected. She wanted the whole world dressed in dazzling color—even me."

"I never quite complied. I have the fashion sense of Vladimir and Estragon and the panache of my New England nana. When left to my devices, I choose to be unobtrusive. I choose gray. It suits my diffidence and soothes my extroversion. It is the color, rather than the sound, of silence. It sits with monkish, folded hands and asks for nothing. It never shouts. It never pushes.... A color psychology article on Bustle tells me that I fear commitment. 'Grey is emotionless,' it says, 'boring, detached, and indecisive. Those who say their favorite color is grey don’t tend to have any major likes or dislikes.'... Lovers of gray 'lack the passion that comes with loving a real color.' And yet I yearn for it. I fill my drawers with gray brassieres. I dress my bed in sheets and duvets like a day with all the blue drained out of it. The tidiness, the monochrome inspire peace.... As the black-and-white photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said to the color photographer William Eggleston: 'You know, William, color is bullshit.'... Dorothy may tumble, tornadic, into Technicolor, but still she always wishes to go home.... I sometimes drive an hour to the ocean, hoping I will find it thoroughly obscured by fog. I am not a melancholic or a bore, but I want a break from all the rainbow violence in the world...."

From "Ode to Gray" by Meghan Flaherty (in The Paris Review).



You know, William, color is bullshit.