The walls were adorned with blue wallpaper, all tattered, it is true, and behind it, in the cracks, cockroaches swarmed in terrible numbers, so that there was an incessant rustling.

—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990

by jurvetson

The gauges sizzled with blue light. Long sparks crackled along the wall. Somewhere a red light blinked, like a silent, threatening eye, and a vial behind Joachim's back was filled with a green glow. Then everything calmed down; the spectacle of lights vanished.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods. Mann is describing the workings of a primitive X-ray machine.

Were Adam’s eyes the green of paradise? Did they open on the vivid green of the Garden of Eden? God’s green mantle. Was green the first colour of perception?

—Derek Jarman, “Green Fingers”, from Chroma: A Book of Color; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009

by darkmatter

The streetlamp at the corner- store sways shadows in a big black dance, the store sign swings and creaks in the wind, leaves fly, apples thud to the ground in the orchards, the stars are blazing in the somber sky — everything is raw, smoky, and terrific.
—Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

He shook my hand heartily and slapped me on the back and gave me a slice of cake. I had never had cake, and in retrospect it doesn’t make much sense that he would greet me at nine thirty in the morning with cake, but he did, and it was delicious. A white cream cake with stripes of sunflower orange.

—Dave Eggers, What is the What, 2006

If they were good it would be seene,
Good is as visible as greene,
And to all eyes it selfe betrayes.

—John Donne, ‘Communitie,’ 1633; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009

I was walking along minding my business
When love came and hit me in the eye
Flash! Bam! Alakazam!
Out of an orange colored sky.

—Milton DeLugg & Willie Stein, “Orange Colored Sky,” 1950

Above him shone the light, large, clinical and fierce. No furniture, just whitewashed walls, quite close all around, and the gray steel door, a smart charcoal gray, the color you see on clever London houses. There was nothing else. Nothing at all. Nothing to think about, just the savage pain.

—John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, 1963

He looked for poems of four, five, six lines. He scrutinized such poems, thinking into every intimation, and his feelings seemed to float in the white space around the lines. There were marks on the page and there was the page. The white was vital to the soul of the poem.

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 2003.

The sun was red, the moon was grey,
The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

—Dylan Thomas, “From Love’s First Fever to Her Plague”, The Poems of Dylan Thomas, 1971.

How do we know anything? How do we know the wall we’re looking at is white? What is white?

—Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis, 2003.

There is a corner of the sea that is deep but not so deep that it’s black. It’s the blue of a blueberry, violet in its heart, though this blue allows light through its million unseeable pores. The hue is evenly painted but electric, a klieg light pushing through a gel of cyan. But invading this blue are clouds of inky purple, billowing clouds curling in small waves, and they grow from below, splitting the sea between light above and dark growing from below.
Turn it upside down and this was the sky above Riga.

—Dave Eggers, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, 2002

by favorite

I want a lavender Cadillac
Don’t want it green or blue or black
Just a lavender Cadillac

—“I Want a Lavender Cadillac,” Maurice King & His Wolverines with Bea Baker, 1952

by favorite

Slow as sheep they moved, tranquil, impassable, filling the passages, contemplating the fretful hurrying of those in urban shirts and collars with the large, mild inscrutabilitiy of cattle or of gods, functioning outside of time, having left time lying upon the slow and imponderable land green with corn and cotton in the yellow afternoon.

—William Faulkner, Sanctuary, 1931

by nuanc

There is a red carnation in that vase. A single flower as we sat here waiting, but now a seven- sided flower, many- petalled, red, puce, purple- shaded, stiff with silver- tinted leaves — a whole flower to which every eye brings its own contribution.
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931.

by arlo_bates

He woke up the next day with a feeling of incomprehensible excitement. The April morning was bright and windy and the wooden street pavements had a violet sheen; above the street near Palace Arch an enormous red- blue- white flag swelled elastically, the sky showing through it in three different tints: mauve, indigo and pale blue.
—Vladimir Nabokov, The Defense, 1964.

What is green?
The grass is green.
With small flowers between.

—Christina Rossetti, ‘What Is Pink? A Rose Is Pink,’ 1872; quoted by Bruce R. Smith in The Key of Green, 2009.