Victoria Finlay

Throughout Asia and Europe, pearls were traditionally believed to ease a range of conditions, including eye diseases, fever, insomnia, 'female complaints', dysentery,…

— Victoria Finlay

In precious opals there might be a dash of red here, a seductive swirl of blue there, and in the center, perhaps,…

— Victoria Finlay

“The Jewish historian Hannah Arendt, in her book about the trial of Nazi administrator Adolf Eichmann, observes that in many cases the…

— Victoria Finlay

“Ezekiel looked into amber and saw God, but the Teutonic Knights saw something less noble: gold.”

— Victoria Finlay

“Emily Kame Kngwarreye”

— Victoria Finlay

“…in Pliny’s time, it was believed that only the blood of a newly sacrificed kid, or lamb, could shatter a diamond. Pliny…

— Victoria Finlay

“Like pearls that cannot be sprayed too much with perfume or warmed too much with smoke, left alone too much or touched…

— Victoria Finlay

Patterns drawn in ultraviolet might make those ordinary little petals into the exotic peacocks of the botanical world, and yet we cannot…

— Victoria Finlay

“Sometimes the mind is cruel: it tells us we are worth no more than our possessions, and that without them we would…

— Victoria Finlay

Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion…

— Victoria Finlay

“The probable reason that nobody at Mikimoto wanted a writer to go to the pearl farms of Ago…was because something terrible was…

— Victoria Finlay

I realized it was like a dating agency: the ions are the lost souls looking for mates; the electrolyte is the agency…

— Victoria Finlay

In 1879 the Bengali scholar S.M. Tagore compiled a more extensive list of ruby colors from the Purana sacred texts: ‘like the…

— Victoria Finlay

“Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings, Jean-Marie Chauvet”

— Victoria Finlay

“If Bacchus ever had a color he could claim for his own, it should surely be the shade of tannin on drunken…

— Victoria Finlay

Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.

— Victoria Finlay

Human life is fragile: we live in the space between one breath and the next. We often try to maintain an illusion…

— Victoria Finlay

Funny how we look for miracles in our lives when our life is one big miracle in itself.

— Victoria Finlay

“What they signified was precious, but what they were was not.”

— Victoria Finlay

Once upon a time Apache land would have stretched farther than the horizon, through New Mexico almost to Texas, but as white…

— Victoria Finlay

“...almost every pearl on sale today was born of the planned sexual violation of a small creature, and that considerable suffering hangs…

— Victoria Finlay