Black is the color of coal, ebony, and the night sky. It is the very darkest color, the result of the absence of or complete absorption of light. It is the opposite of white.
In the Western World, it is the color most commonly associated with mourning, the end, secrets, magic, power, violence, evil, and elegance.
Read more about Black: Variations of Black, Etymology and Language, Political Movements, Selected Flags Containing Black, Religion, Sports, Black in Other Cultures, Idioms and Expressions
Famous quotes containing the word black:
“Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
—Toni Morrison (b. 1931)