Umber Quotes & Sayings

Beyond doubt, I am a splendid fellow. In the autumn, winter and spring, I execute the duties of a student of divinity; in the summer I disguise myself in my skin and become a lifeguard. My slightly narrow and gingerly hirsute but not necessarily unmanly chest becomes brown. My smooth back turns the colour of caramel, which, in conjunction with the whipped cream of my white pith helmet, gives me, some of my teenage satellites assure me, a delightfully edible appearance. My legs, which I myself can study, cocked as they are before me while I repose on my elevated wooden throne, are dyed a lustreless maple walnut that accentuates their articulate strength. Correspondingly, the hairs of my body are bleached blond, so that my legs have the pointed elegance of, within the flower, umber anthers dusted with pollen. — John Updike

That thing ruined my favorite T-shirt," complains Mario.
"Whatever." It's Marianne's voice. "You were just looking for a reason to get your shirt off." I try to look around for her, but my neck refuses. — Bill Blais

Between the palaces of the knights and those that served them; the convents, the elegant homes belonging to officers of the Church and the town; between the bakehouse and the shops of the craftsmen, the arsenals and magazines, the warehouses, the homes of merchants and courtesans, Italian, Spanish, Greek; past the painted shrines and courtyards scraped from pockets of earth with their bright waxy green carob trees, a fig, a finger of vine, a blue and orange pot of dry, dying flowers and a tethered goat bleating in a swept yard, padded the heirs of this rock, this precious knot in the trade of the world. Umber-skinned, grey-eyed, barefoot and robed as Arabs with the soft, slurring dialect that Dido and Hannibal spoke, they slipped past the painted facades to their Birgu of fishermen's huts and blank, Arab-walled houses or to sleep, curled in the shade, with the curs in a porch. — Dorothy Dunnett

Le Corbusier was the sort of relentlessly rational intellectual that only France loves wholeheartedly, the logician who flies higher and higher in ever-decreasing concentric circles until, with one last, utterly inevitable induction, he disappears up his own fundamental aperture and emerges in the fourth dimension as a needle-thin umber bird. — Tom Wolfe

An uninterrupted view of the Paris skyline was spread out before her, like a giant landscape painting rendered in shades of blue-grey, charcoal and purple-tinted umber; the dreamy palette of shifting shadows at twilight. The blue hour. — Kathleen Tessaro

Enjoy yourselves. And Hap: Don't let Umber near the arrows and bows; he's liable to shoot himself in the nose." Dodd grinned and snapped the reins, and the carriage rolled away.
Umber sniffed. "One of his lesser poems. Come, Hap. — P.W. Catanese

The glove suddenly feels much heavier, now, more dense. The rush of power didn't come through me, but wrapped around me; invisible and strangely empty, like a purely mechanical force. It wasn't like I just got stronger; it was separate from me, like something stepped in and punched him instead of me. I pull the glove off gingerly, half afraid I'll punch my own fingers off. — Bill Blais

Autumnal
nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day ... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it ... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses ... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth
reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere, by repute. Yesterday was blue, like smoke. — Tom Stoppard

The things I've seen," he continues easily, "have shown me that the only constant is change. Too much power in one place is a fool's errand. Eventually, and inevitably, no matter how good the intentions, or how long the life, power always wins out, and everyone suffers for it. The only true path of rational existence is balance; a constant re-assessment of the burdens of power, if you will. — Bill Blais

Telling someone like my mother that Hell is a real, physical place, somewhere you can travel to and from, would be like spray-painting the statue of Jesus hanging over the pulpit during mass. Better off telling her the Pope is gay. — Bill Blais

border - shades of vermillion, raw sienna, and burnt umber that would grow bolder and more vibrant with the strengthening — Michelle Isenhoff

I know you think I should be home taking care of my family. That maybe I'd be distracted or I wouldn't be as committed as the rest of you, but who's more committed: the person with something to lose, or the people who've got nothing left? — Bill Blais

Umber whunnnn yerrrnnn umber whunnnn fayunnnn These sounds: even in the haze. — Stephen King

Rowan's physical effect- godlike jawline, long-lashed eyes, umber skin, rakish quiff of hair- is that of lightening strike. — Helen Oyeyemi

Crayola makes all kinds of crazy colors. You know. Burnt umber. Burnt sienna. Blanched almond. Baby-shit yellow. And so on, and so forth. I'm just saying, cockroaches Have their own color. It's distinct. Crayola should get on that. The kids'll love it. — Chuck Wendig

We have nothing left. Orphans. Castaways." She turns to me. "Childless. That is what we are. The unwanted or the un-killed. We
are together only by the wrongs done to us. There is no-one else to worry about us, to fear for our safety, or to give us comfort. — Bill Blais

You want me to join your group of demon hunters," I can't believe I just said that out loud, "because of a can of pepper spray and a boat load of luck? You're insane. — Bill Blais

Most people create a destiny of minutiae, of the mundane. They create their own limitations. When the moment comes for them to stretch and leap, they find themselves boxed in, locked down by their own fears. — Bill Blais

I haven't been around here for long. Well ... actually, I haven't been around anywhere for long. I don't know who I am, or what I'm here for. I know that Lord Umber's important, though. I've seen all the good things he's done. I know for sure the world needs him. I can't say that about me. — P.W. Catanese

Demons exist,' he says simply, as if talking about the weather. 'They are real and they are dangerous. We hunt them when necessary and return them when we can. — Bill Blais

I'm in a secret underground hideout of a group of monster hunters, filled with magical totems, brass monkeys that move and enough firepower to take over a small country. — Bill Blais

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A beauty bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air - explode softly - and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth - boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn't go cheap, either - not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination. — Robert Fulghum

Down every hall is a gruesome tangle of impossible creatures, and every one of them is split open or strung with barbs or dragging their insides after them, flailing along on shattered limbs or shredded wings or blasted stumps.
I've got the pistol, half a can of spray and a handful of useless shotgun slugs.
I'm dead. — Bill Blais

The worm hissed. "You said it couldn't see!" shouted Oates, forgetting Umber's instruction to be silent. He shook a fist. "We all heard it, Umber! You specifically said, it couldn't see!"
"I know-isn't it wonderful to learn something new?" Umber laughed. — P.W. Catanese

They didn't come to crush the city. They came to crush the hubris of its king."
"That must have hurt," Oates said. Umber pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Hubris means arrogance, you great buffoon. — P.W. Catanese

When we speak of the perfection of art, we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shade, umber or soot. — John Constable

The maester had taught him all the banners: the mailed fist of the Glovers, silver on scarlet; Lady Mormont's black bear; the hideous flayed man that went before Roose Bolton of the Dreadfort; a bull moose for the Hornwoods; a battle-axe for the Cerwyns; three sentinel trees for the Tallharts; and the fearsome sigil of House Umber, a roaring giant in shattered chains. — George R R Martin

We fight monsters and unholy creatures for a living here. Grotesque, evil, violent, dangerous; they're certainly all these things. And yet, we somehow manage to go to sleep each night and wake up each morning. The terror wears off. What was horrific becomes mundane. We lose ourselves to a numbed normalcy after a while, a self-inflicted detachment. You forget how you got here, what it was like before. And then someone comes along, someone new, someone who sees it all with fresh eyes, and it snaps you out of your daily coma, reminding you of what you've forgotten. Of what you've become. — Bill Blais

If I were going to paint the dimension I see in front of me, I'd load my palette up with burnt umber, opaque black, a spectrum of grays - nothing brighter than that. I'd have to grind something into the paint with my thumb, some sort of grit or ash, because the grime here goes deeper than surfaces. — Claudia Gray

Mario the Magnificent is Orange! His eyes sparkle with eagerness as he winks at me. — Bill Blais

Hap sighed. If he could change one thing about Umber-besides his constant need for the thrill of exploration-it would be his obsession with secrets and surprises. — P.W. Catanese

Look, I didn't ask for any of this, but I'm here now. I get that it's dangerous. I get that I'm fat. I get that I'm about as far from prepared for this insanity as you can get. But I'll tell you something about me: I don't quit. So enough with the let's-scare-the-fat-girl routine, okay? — Bill Blais

Light slanting down across Alode the Cliff illuminated a hundred forests; the irradiated foliage seemed to glow with internal light: bitter lime, intense gray-blue given pointillist fire by scarlet seed-pots, dark umber, black-blue, black-green — Jack Vance

Do I strike you as a frivolous man, Kelly?"
I look at him, sitting there in another thousand dollar suit. Pompous? Yes. Self-centered? Yes. Careless? "No. — Bill Blais

Bastian had climbed a dune of purplish-red sand and all around him he saw nothing but hill after hill of every imaginable color. Each hill revealed a shade or tint that occured in no other. The nearest was cobalt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve, turquoise blue, lilac, moss green, ruby red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, vermillion, lapis lazuli, and so on from horizon to horizon. And between the hill, separating color from color, flowed streams of gold and silver sand. — Michael Ende