Ray Bradbury Forums
Eye Colour

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25 May 2003, 07:51 PM
Green Shadow
Eye Colour
Dandelion or anyone,
What colour are Ray Bradbury's eyes?
25 May 2003, 09:07 PM
dandelion
I can take this. In 1983 (20 YEARS ago!) I was hand-coloring a photocopy of a black-and-white picture of Ray as a child and wrote to ask his coloring. He responded:
"My hair was blonde or near-blonde, especially in summer. It always bleached out after a few weeks in the hot sun. It's still true, even though most of my hair is silver, those portions that are still the originial color bleach out to blonde in July!
My eyes are blue. Not Paul Newman's blue. But they will do."

FYI: Sorry to have to tack on to this lovely little quote, but folks, in your writing please don't do what Ray did here and refer to anyone of the male gender as "blonde." In English, girls can be "blond" or "blonde," but guys can only be "blond." This word comes from the French, where such things matter. A "blonde" is always automatically female. I think the words are even pronounced differently! I don't know whether DNA tests can determine the gender of the person from which a hair came, but if so, it seems the French knew more long ago than the English gave them credit for.
26 May 2003, 03:28 AM
Mr. Dark
Hmmmm. My hair is blond(e?) and it bleached out in the summers, also. I have light blue eyes. . .

So why am I not a Ray Bradbury.

Love the quote.

Didn't know about the blond/e distinction. Did the French really know something or was it just an example of inventing hairs only to split them?
26 May 2003, 11:05 AM
DanB
I think almost all adjectives are given masculine or feminine endings in French, Spanish, and I think Italian, but I don't know enough to say for sure. This is more tricky, though because "blond(e)" falls on that weird borderline between noun and adjective. I actually didn't know it pertained to english- I thought it was one of those words that you can technically spell either way, like grey or gray.