by bobtravis

Bluebird blue as the sky- blue heart / Of my girl whose heart is the sky
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), "A Bird is Singing," from The Self-Dismembered Man: Selected Later Poems of Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by Donald Revell, 2004.

by Farruska

We entered the room, and my eyes fell at once on the picture. I looked at it for a long time. It was a pile of mangoes, bananas, oranges, and I know not what. . . . The colours were so strange that words can hardly tell what a troubling emotion they gave. There were sombre blues, opaque like a delicately carved bowl in lapis lazuli, and yet with a quivering lustre that suggested the palpitation of mysterious life; there were purples, horrible like raw and putrid flesh, and yet with a glowing, sensual passion that called up vague memories of the Roman Empire of Heliogabalus; there were reds, shrill like the berries of holly — one thought of Christmas in England, and the snow, the good cheer, and the pleasure of children — and yet by some magic softened till they had the swooning tenderness of a dove’s breast; there were deep yellows that died with an unnatural passion into a green as fragrant as the spring and as pure as the sparkling water of a mountain brook. . . . They belonged to a Polynesian garden of the Hesperides.
—W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919, a novel inspired by the life of Paul Gauguin.

by marcella bona

O Paris / The yellow dies from red to green / Paris Vancouver Hyéres Maintenon New York and the Antilles / The window opens like an orange / Comely fruit of light
—Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), "The Windows," translated from the French by Donald Revell, 2004.

by Aaron P

In winter in Tangier, the rain often ends late in the afternoon: when it does, the dark blue clouds split open to spill out a pinkish beige on to the previously white walls of the Casbah, the shadows turning cool green in contrast. Loti was correct in describing Tangier as the white city. But its whiteness is that of a canvas waiting to receive colour — blue, pink, and green — that nature provides.
—John Elderfield, 1990.

by budak

I opened my eyes — and all the sea was ice- nine. The moist green earth was a blue- white pearl. The sky darkened. Borasisi, the sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel. The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.
—Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle, 1963.

by matrianklw

It was the night of the full moon. Flaring like a white- hot coin, so brilliant that it hurt one’s eyes, the moon swam rapidly upwards in a sky of smoky blue, across which drifted a few wisps of yellowish cloud. The stars were all invisible. The croton bushes, by day hideous things like jaundiced laurels, were changed by the moon into jagged black- and- white designs like fantastic woodcuts. . . .

‘Look at the moon, just look at it!’ Flory said. ‘It’s like a white sun. It’s brighter than an English winter day.’

Elizabeth looked up into the branches of the frangipani tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow. Even Elizabeth, indifferent to such things, was astonished.
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.

by Flipped Out

Some people say / The Green River Blues ain’t bad, / Then it must not have been / Them Green River Blues I had.
—Charley Patton, "Green River Blues," 1929.

by Olivander

I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all around the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red — good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager- beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the center. And the river was there — fascinating — deadly — like a snake.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899.

by {laura}

At a party, the young woman in mouse- gray is as difficult to see as a mouse, while the ones in brilliant reds and pinks and oranges draw suitors just as a highly colored flower does insects — and are sometimes as readily pollinated.
—Allison Lurie, The Language of Clothes, 1981.

by Anosmia

A meaningless swirl in the stream of time, a temporary gathering of bits, a few random specks, a cloud . . . Complexities: green dust, purple dust, gold.
—John Gardner, Grendel, 1971.

by SeenyaRita

Some great sea of liquid green with its milk- white crest of foam rose.
—Jack London, The Complete Short Stories of Jack London, 1893.

by ♫♪iΛ7 m a₫ ♫♪

His heart was a purple castle.
—Patrick Süskind, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, 1986.

by Dream gerl x

Suddenly a green- rose rainbow appears right on your ridge with steamy clouds all around and an orange sun turmoiling . . .

What is a rainbow,
Lord? — a hoop
For the lowly

. . . and you go out and suddenly your shadow is ringed by the rainbow as you walk on the hilltop, a lovely- haloed mystery making you want to pray. —
—Jack Kerouac, Alone on a Mountaintop, from Lonesome Traveler, 1960

by kandyjaxx

The sky was a velvety black paw pressing on the white landscape with a feline delicacy, stars flying like sparks from its fur.
—Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume, 1984.

by Trinity

Negatives — positives . . . the hallucinatory play of black and white . . . I deduced therefrom, philosophically speaking, that white and black signs, and the inevitable antinomy of the ideas of the past, like ‘day and night’, ‘angel and devil’, ‘good and evil’, are in reality complementaries, a fertile androgynous idea . . . White and black, yes and no, it is the binary language of cybernetics, making possible the building of a plastic bank in electronic brains. White and black, it is the indestructibility of art- thought and hence the perenniality of the work in its original form.
—Victor Vasarely, 1965; quoted in Optic Nerve: Perceptual Art of the 1960s by John Houston, 2007.

by James Jordan

Down the long road into Statesville, he walked toward a realm of gold, sunset had turned all the world to gold.

And next morning, he was on the great road again, walking into sunrise gold. The sun came up behind him like a big red full moon, a red that was full of yellow, a red orange warm gold that absorbed all the pinks and pale reds of the morning.
—Julian Lee Rayford, Cottonmouth, 1941.

by manueb

One weekend Trout and Eel decided to paint their bedroom blue. The walls were the turquoise of the southern seas, the ceiling was cobalt, the floors indigo, the color of waters so deep and distant, no human had ever seen them before. Here in this room anyone could imagine the sound of waves breaking.
—Alice Hoffman, Indigo, 2002

by Introspectre

As by a fascination, every eye was now directed to the glaring greenish- grey eye of Simon.
—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852.