Daily Inspiration Quote by Carlisle Floyd

The jab lands softly but cuts deep: our mental image of the Puritans is basically a Halloween costume. Carlisle Floyd starts with wardrobe trivia and ends up indicting an entire cultural reflex - the way we flatten complicated people into a single, convenient aesthetic. “Black and white” isn’t just a palette; it’s a moral shorthand, a visual argument that says these were joyless, repressive zealots who drained the color from life. Floyd’s correction (“They loved very bright colors”) pries that shorthand apart. It forces the listener to admit how much “history” is really stagecraft.

As a composer, Floyd is especially attuned to what color does: it changes mood, character, and the audience’s ethical posture. Bright colors don’t magically redeem Puritans, but they destabilize the lazy certainty that we already know who they were. The line “other differences in perceptions” hints at the larger project: once you spot one myth, you start noticing the rest - how costume becomes character, how stereotype becomes plot.

There’s also an American subtext here. We inherit Puritans as origin story and scapegoat at the same time: blame them for prudishness, claim them for “values.” Floyd threads between those uses by reminding us that the past wasn’t monochrome. The point isn’t that we’ve misremembered a sleeve or a dye; it’s that we’ve preferred a simple symbol to a human reality, and that preference keeps rewriting history in our own anxious image.