Silhouette

A silhouette is the image of a person, animal, object or scene represented as a solid shape of a single colour, usually black, its edges matching the outline of the subject. The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the whole is typically presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all.

The interior of a silhouette is featureless, and the whole is typically presented on a light background, usually white, or none at all.

CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F

...It is like the Myth of Eurydice: when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she vanishes and returns to hell...Jean Baudrillard.

One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree...Michael Chabon.

The silhouette is the most important thing in clothes. Every French girl knows that. High-waisted trousers give you long legs and a pretty bum which, after all, is what we all want. - Lou Doillon.

• He checked to be sure that he did have his huge leather coat and his absurd red hat on and that he was properly and dramatically silhouetted by the light of the doorway.
  • Douglas Adams in Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Simon and Schuster, 26 February 2013, p. 63

• Particularly in the case of all professional of press-images which testify of the real events. In making reality, even the most violent, emerge to the visible, it makes the real substance disappear. It is like the Myth of Eurydice: when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she vanishes and returns to hell. That is why, the more exponential the marketing of images is growing the more fantastically grows the indifference towards the real world. Finally, the real world becomes a useless function, a collection of phantom shapes and ghost events. We are not far from the silhouettes on the walls of the cave of Plato.
  • Jean Baudrillard in Jean Baudrillard - The Violence Of The Image, European Graduate School(EGS)

• To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers.
  • Kenneth Clark quoted in: Michael J. Gelb How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, Random House Publishing Group, 21 October 2009, p. 170

• One night there was an enormous full moon, fat and hanging right above the horizon, as though too debauched and decrepit to rise any farther. We were stoned, and the black Romanesque steeple of the church on the corner stood silhouetted against the moon, entwined with the shapes of branches of a dead tree, like an establishing shot from a vampire film, and I said this. She pressed herself against me, her teeth chattering.
  "Why are you afraid?" I said.
  "I don't know. Because vampires are so beautiful," she said.
  • Michael Chabon in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh]] in Modern Prose " The Mysteries Of Pittsburgh Предложения интернет-магазинов { Offers online stores), fb2.booksgid.com

• Watch me at the window from your place on the couch
  You watch me pretending that I am really looking out
  You say, "Come here, I can't see you in this light"
  But I'm much safer beside the moon tonight
  'Cause when I am a silhouette
  I have no fear, I can love you from here
  When I am a silhouette
  I can give myself to you and you'd never see through, never through.
  • Catie Curtis in: Silhouette Lyrics, songlyrics.com

• You can't remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.
  • E. L. Doctorow in: Sunbeams June 2001, issue 306, Sun Magazine

• The silhouette is the most important thing in clothes. Every French girl knows that. High-waisted trousers give you long legs and a pretty bum which, after all, is what we all want.
  • Lou Doillon in: Jess Cartner-Morley Fast and louche, The Guardian, 15 March 2008

• Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
  Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
  With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves.
  Let me forget about today until tomarrow.
  • Bob Dylan in: Christopher Ricks Dylan's Visions of Sin, Canongate Books, 5 May 2011, p. 167

• I know by heart, for in the paths of my wandering solitudes, it was these silhouettes of stones and its states of light attached to the structure / and the aesthetic substance / of the landscape that were the sole protagonists on the mineral impossibility of which I project day after day all the accumulated and chronically unsatisfied tension of meterotic-emotional life.
  • Salvador Dalí in: Scheidegger & Spiess, 15 October 2008, p. 14

G - L

The silhouette was named for Etienne de Silhouette, the notoriously stingy finance minister to Louis XV, who ironically was himself incapable of casting a shadow, due to lycanthropy? - John Hodgman.

• I have my mantra about silhouette, proportion, and fit. I believe that when they are in harmony and balance, you'll look great in anything.
  • Tim Gunn in: Getting Groomed: The Ultimate Wedding Planner for Gay Grooms, Chronicle Books, 22 October 2013, p. 113

• The silhouette was named for Etienne de Silhouette, the notoriously stingy finance minister to Louis XV, who ironically was himself incapable of casting a shadow, due to lycanthropy?
  • John Hodgman in: The Areas of My Expertise, Penguin, 2 October 2012, p. 43

• ...beds were quiet and she allowed her eyes to dwell in thought on the dark-veiled silhouette in the mirrors, she felt a thrill of admiration for that solitary form patrolling without visible strain or vainglory a demented dreamland of fearful potential.
  • Kathryn Hulme in: The Nun's Story, 1956, p. 130

Alone With The Sunrise
It's the way that we lie in the sand
(Slips right through my hands)
And the way that the sun makes your silhouette...

• Alone With The Sunrise
  It's the way that we lie in the sand
  (Slips right through my hands)
  And the way that the sun makes your silhouette
  And the chances that I have to make you smile
  They're not coming around
  Now I'm alone
  • Stephen Jerzak in: Stephen Jerzak Lyrics, azlyrics.com

• Yellow square, a red and blue avenue, an Eiffel tower with a camouflaged silhouette.. ..that would all be lit up at night, instead of fireworks.
  • Fernand Léger in: French cubist painter Fernand Léger’s wartime proposal to Leon Trotskii for “a polychrome Moscow”, thecharnelhouse.org, 8 August 2013

• The introduction of symmetries belongs here too, silhouettes in inkblots, etc. Likewise the gradation we establish in the order of creatures: all this is not in the things but in us. In general we cannot remember too often that when we observe nature, and especially the ordering of nature, it is always ourselves alone we are observing.
  • Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, in Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, philosopherzone.com

• The intense artillery fire has stripped the trees of leaves and branches so that the outline of the coral ridge itself can be seen silhouetted against the sky. Since I have been on Owi Island, at irregular intervals through the night and day,...
  • Charles Lindbergh in: The wartime journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970, p. 879

M - R

• A cluster of stars palely glowed above us, between the silhouettes of long thin leaves; that vibrant sky seemed as naked as she was under her light frock. I saw her face in the sky, strangely distinct, as if it emitted a faint radiance of its own.
  • Vladimir Nabokov in: The Annotated Lolita , Penguin UK, 28 November 2013, p. 94

• The trees that whisper in the evening
  Carried away by a moonlight shadow
  Sing a song of sorrow and grieving
  Carried away by a moonlight shadow
  All she saw was a silhouette of a gun
  Far away on the other side.
  He was shot six times by a man on the run
  And she couldn't find how to push through.
  • Mike Oldfield in: Moonlight Shadow, metrolyrics.com

• Roger: The fire's out anyway.
  Group: No day but today.
  Roger: Take your powder, take your candle.
  Group: No day but today.
  Roger: Take your brown eyes, your pretty smile, your silhouette.
  Group: No day but today.
  Roger: Another time, another place, another rhyme, a warm embrace.
  • Rent in: Another Day Various Artists, Musixmatch

• Then we all sprang up and stript
  To hunt the verminous brood.
  Soon like a demons' pantomime
  The place was raging.
  See the silhouettes agape,
  See the gibbering shadows
  Mixed with the battled arms on the wall.
  • Isaac Rosenberg in: Max Egremont Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, Pan Macmillan, 8 May 2014, p. 145

S - Z

The simplest and most classic kind of silhouette cameo is the bust-length portrait. Originally known as 'shades', these were popular all over England and the New World during the Georgian and Regency periods. The vast majority of party silhouettes cut today are of this kind...

It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.

• I like a very sexy silhouette, and I like to feel like when you put something on, you zip yourself into it, and you're secure in there.
  • L'Wren Scott in: Amy Larocca First Lunch, Then Fashion, New York Magazine, 6 May 2008

• The simplest and most classic kind of silhouette cameo is the bust-length portrait. Originally known as 'shades', these were popular all over England and the New World during the Georgian and Regency periods. The vast majority of party silhouettes cut today are of this kind... It's hard to beat the simple beauty of an elegantly cut profile set into an oval or rectangle mount. In the hands of an expert, such a classic portrait can be cut in as little as 60 seconds.
  • The Silhouettes in: The Silhouettes Classic Hand-cut Cameos: Either bust-length…, roving-artist.com

• The most classic of all silhouettes tend to be cut at period costume balls. Piled up wigs and masks - together with flowing dresses and elegant coats - offer a wonderful opportunity for a silhouettist, who may find himself cutting some very eighteenth-century looking portraits.
  • The Silhouettes in: "The Silhouettes Classic Hand-cut Cameos: Either bust-length..."

• It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.
  • Oswald Spengler in: The Decline of the West, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 246

• Perfect. There was just enough light in the street for a good silhouette. I knew it would happen quickly, I’d have no choice: just pull the trigger and go deaf from the terrible noise a frenzy of screaming and scratching followed by ghastly thump of a body knocked and down to the sidewalk.
  • Hunter S. Thompson in: The Rum Diary: Film Tie-in Edition, A&C Black, 17 October 2011, p. 115

• You've cast your gaze upon the quintessential frontier type. Note the lean silhouette. Eyes closed by the sun, yet sharp as a hawk. He has the look of both.
  • Tombstone (1993) in: Quotes for Morgan Earp (Character), IMDb