Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a “colourless” day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour. There is also an insulting style of speech about “one grey day just like another.” You might as well talk about one green tree just like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.

…Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.

— G. K. Chesterton, “The Glory of Grey,” Alarms and Discursions

Purple was my first love, as colors go. “I heard that a lot of babies like purple,” my grandmother said when I told her. Within a few years, I had shifted my allegiance to green. My pediatrician gave me a lime-flavored lollipop after I said so. As an adolescent, I was concerned with trying to appear edgy and profound, so I started telling people that red, being the color of blood, was my favorite, even as I increasingly began wearing black clothes. At some point, purple and I got together again. Basically, I’ve slutted my way around the color wheel, but in middle age, I’ve come to truly appreciate the humble, autumnal greys (and browns, to a lesser extent). Still waters run deep; so do restrained colors.