William H. Gass

In a philosophical approach to color, William Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

A Philosophical Inquiry

On Being Blue

So rarely have I ever wanted to immediately reread a book after finishing it the same way I would get back in line to get on a roller coaster or ferris wheel once more.

dagonet

Nora 

One of the most stunning uses of the english language I have come across.

Anthony Sabourin

I don't know how to review this. It's a 91-page drum solo of a book that is about colour and language and life. The parts of it that I was able to understand, I enjoyed.

Donald

Damn near perfect, really. Gass is exactly right about sex in literature.

On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.

Gass writes:
Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of the exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright think quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.

On Being Blue A Philosophical Inquiry

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