There are connoisseurs of blue just as there are connoisseurs of wine.
Interpretation
Appreciation of beauty can extend beyond food and drink to other elements of life, like color.
In this quote, Colette suggests that just as wine has enthusiasts who can recognize and appreciate its subtle flavors, there are also people who possess a deep appreciation for color, specifically the color blue. This highlights the idea that aesthetics are subjective, and one's appreciation for different forms of beauty can be as refined and nuanced as it is in gastronomy.
In practice
During an art gallery opening, one might say this quote to emphasize the culture of color appreciation.
It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I went to collect the few personal belongings which...I held to be invaluable: my cat, my resolve to travel, and my solitude.
The only virtue on which I pride myself is my self-doubt; when a writer loses her self-doubt, the time has come to lay aside her pen.
You must not pity me because my sixtieth year finds me still astonished. To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.
Truffles must come to the table in their own stock and as you break open this jewel sprung from a poverty-stricken soil, imagine - if you have never visited it - the desolate kingdom where it rules.
Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content.
I'm just someone who likes cooking and for whom sharing food is a form of expression.
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.
My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold, and anything else is just a waste of time.
One begins by plaguing oneself to no purpose in order to be true to nature, and one concludes by working quietly from one's own palette alone, and then nature is the result.
Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
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