by justin.slammer

The sun had gone, the western ranges faded in chill purple mist, but the western sky still burned with ragged bands of orange. It was October.
—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

by estimmel

The man wore a purple suit, a Panama hat over his shiny, slicked- down hair. He walked splay- footed, soundlessly.

The girl wore a green hat and a short skirt and sheer stockings, four- and- a- half inch French heels. She smelled of Midnight Narcissus.
—Raymond Chandler, "Pickup on Noon Street," from The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

by seriykotik1970

Where is the road?" some one shouted.

"On the blueprint, of course. . . . You’ve got it all in black and white.”
—Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel, 1929.

by gemsling

DEVICE: ‘Tis the Mode to express our fancie upon every occasion. . . . Shall I decipher my Colours to you now? Here is Azure and Peach: Azure is constant, and Peach is love; which signifies my constant Affection.

SISTER: This is very pretty.

DEVICE: Oh, it saves the trouble of writing. . . . [Y]our yellow is joy, because. . . .

LADY: Why, yellow, Sir, is Jealous.

DEVICE: No, your Lemon colour, a pale kind of yellow, is Jealous; your yellow is perfect joy. Your white is Death, your milke white innocence, your black mourning, your orange spitefull, your flesh colour lascivious, your maides blush envied, your red is defiance, your gold is avaritious, your straw plenty, your greene hope, your sea greene inconstant, your violet religious, your willow forsaken.
—James Shirley, ridiculing Device’s ribbons in Captain Underwit, early 1640s; quoted in Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England by Aileen Ribeiro, 2005.

by pellaea

A sea of shining white mist was in the valley, with glinting golden rays striking athwart it from the great cresset of the sinking moon; here and there the long, dark, horizontal line of a distant mountain’s summit rose above the vaporous shimmer, like a dreary, sombre island in the midst of enchanted waters. Her large, dreamy eyes, so wild and yet so gentle, gazed out through the laurel leaves upon the floating gilded flakes of light, as in the deep coverts of the mountain, where the fulvous- tinted deer were lying, other eyes, as wild and as gentle, dreamily watched the vanishing moon. Overhead, the filmy, lace- like clouds, fretting the blue heavens, were tinged with a faint rose. Through the trees she caught a glimpse of the red sky of dawn, and the glister of a great lucent, tremulous star.
—Charles Egbert Craddock (Mary Noailles Murfree) (1850–1922), "The ‘Harnt’ that Walks Chilhowee," from In the Tennesee Mountains, 1884.

by AliThinks

GEORGE BURNS: Going into the Pantages Theatre, there’s Gracie and Susan, and Harpo and myself. And he loved black jellybeans. He couldn’t get any black jellybeans, and all of a sudden there’s a little candy store next to the theatre. It’s during the war. All of a sudden he sees this candy store, and in the window there’s black jellybeans. He went in and he says, ‘How many black jellybeans have you got?’ The guy says, ‘Well, I got an order today, I paid thirty dollars for the black jellybeans.’ Harpo says, ‘I’ll give you thirty- five dollars for all the black jellybeans.’ Have you any idea how many jellybeans you can buy for thirty- five dollars?

Well, Gracie carried a bag of jellybeans, and Susan carried a bag, ‘cause we’re going into the theatre, and the little candy store would be closed when we left. And we couldn’t walk down to where the car was or we’d have missed the beginning of the picture. So the four of us are carrying about twenty- five pounds of black jellybeans into the theatre. But . . . before we went out, he also bought some colored jellybeans — ten cents’ worth of white, red, and pink jellybeans. That is, if we wanted a jellybean, he’d give us the colored ones because he didn’t want anyone to touch the black ones!

GROUCHO: I don’t blame him.
—from Hello, I Must be Going: Groucho and His Friends, by Charlotte Chandler, 1978.

by K. Sawyer

Green was the maiden, green, green! / Green her eyes were, green her hair. . . . / Through the green air she came. / (The whole earth turned green for her.) . . . / Over the green sea she came. / (And even the sky turned green then.)
—Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1959), "Green," translated by J.B. Trend. From Nine Centuries of Spanish Literature, edited by Seymour Resnick and Jeanne Pasmantier, Dover, 1994.

by MitzaBot goes BOOM

These are the kind of things that I wish to have — engraved amethysts, rosaries of black, amber and gold, blue cloth for a camora, black cloth for a mantle, such as shall be without a rival in the world, even if it costs ten ducats a yard; as long as it is of real excellence, never mind! If it is only as good as those which I see other people wear, I had rather be without it!
—seventeen-year-old Marchioness of Mantua, April, 1491. From a letter to Girolamo Zigliolo, about to leave for France. Quoted and translated from the Italian by Evelyn Welch in Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400—1600, 2005.

by pedrosimoes7

The black cat category contains /
cats that are black /
and cats that might as well be black /
and things that are black that might as well be cats /
and things that might as well be black and might as well be cats.
—Chris Piuma, a redundancy poem for Gale Czerski

by MontanaRaven

She was dressed in rich materials — satins, and lace, and silks — all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white. . . . [Then] I saw that everything . . . which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers.
—Charles Dickins, Great Expectations, 1861.

by wilmack

These flowers of the plum — / How red, how red they are, / How red, indeed!
—Izen (17–18th c.), a haiku; from The Moment of Wonder: A Collection of Chinese and Japanese Poetry, edited by Richard Lewis, 1964.

by AceFrenzy

She looked tall and her hair was the color of a brush fire seen through a dust cloud. On it, at the ultimate rakish angle, she wore a black velvet double- pointed beret with two artificial butterflies made of polka- dotted feathers and fastened on with tall silver pins. Her dress was burgundy- red wool and the blue fox draped over one shoulder was at least two feet wide. Her eyes were large, smoke- blue, and looked bored.
—Raymond Chandler, "The King in Yellow," from his collected short stories, The Simple Art of Murder, 1950.

by Ladymaggic

The painting was about four foot by three and had a background of pointillist dots in varying shades of ochre. In the centre there was a big blue circle with several smaller circles scattered around it. Each circle had a scarlet rim around the perimeter and, connecting them, was a maze of wiggly, flamingo- pink lines that looked a bit like intestines.

Mrs Lacey switched to her second pair of glasses and said, ‘What you got here, Stan?’

‘Honey- ant,’ he whispered in a hoarse voice.

‘The honey- ant’, she turned to the Americans, ‘is one of the totems at Popanji. This painting’s a honey- ant Dreaming.’
—Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, 1987.

by ilovemods

Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog- like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed- up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.
—Mickey Spillane, One Lonely Night, as quoted by Ayn Rand in The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature.

by bluenettle

The fires from the foundry chimneys burning high and glaringly into the night, / Casting their flicker of black contrasted with wild red and yellow light over the tops of houses, and down into the clefts of streets.
—Walt Whitman, from "A Song of Joys"; quoted in Silences: Classic Essays on the Art of Creating, by Tillie Olsen, 1978.

by Simon Pais-Thomas

An unpowdered complexion pale as any woman’s, / Unrouged lips rosy as any maiden’s. / Eyebrows so long as to meet his eyes, / A form so delicate as hardly to bear his clothes. / A jet- black crepe- silk cap he had, / Matching his face like a crown of jade. / Bright red tapestry- silk shoes he wore, / And stepped as lightly as if walking on clouds.
—Li Yu (1610–1680), The Carnal Prayer Mat, translated by Patrick Hanan, 1990.

by andrewtcrummy

The ‘best clothes’ donned for Sunday and formal occasions might be of dark material, but daily garb ran the spectrum of colors. Russet was favored, at least in New England, but reds, yellows, blues, and greens were also common. . . .

The lively colored outfits of the first settlers became more subdued as men moved into the backcountry. As James Axtell has remarked, ‘Colonial woodsmen quickly found that for stalking wild game or enemies — or being stalked — red coats, blue trousers, and yellow waistcoats were signal failures. Far better were the forest’s natural dull shades of brown and green.’
—David Freeman Hawke, Everyday Life in Early America, 1989.

by jipol

a handful of earth sweet and red / to clutch a world / in lands remote from here

a handful of earth, mute / yet bringing a touch of blue from the hills / of trees offering shade against the sun / of a sky filled with blue sun / and of ripening fruit
—Breyten Breytenbach, A Season in Paradise, on South Africa, 1980.

by Ahron de Leeuw

After so many cities of marble, dazzling white, here is one entirely pink — Jaipur. The eye, weary of excessive light reflected from white walls, rests on these palaces as on the softness of certain textiles faded by time. Our imagination finally finds the city of the legend that has inhabited our dreams since early childhood. . . . Everything is pink, with delicate floral patterns: houses, arches, domes, mosques’ minarets, pagodas’ spires — all pink.
—Guido Gozzano (1883—1916), Journey Toward the Cradle of Mankind, translated by David Marinelli, 1996.

by n0wak

Will we talk about the black bird?”

The fat man laughed and his bulbs rode up and down on his laughter. “Will we?” he asked, and, “We will,” he replied. His pink face was shiny with delight. “You’re the man for me, sir, a man cut along my own lines. No beating about the bush, but right to the point. ‘Will we talk about the black bird?’ We will. I like that, sir. I like that way of doing business. Let us talk about the black bird by all means.
—Dashiell Hammett; Sam Spade and the fat man, conversing in The Maltese Falcon, 1930.