by tanakawho

The door of Quincy’s office was orange and his sofa was dark gray. Some of us in Weede’s group had doors of the same color but sofas of a different color. Some had identical sofas but different doors. Weede himself was the only one who had a red sofa. Weede and Ted Warburton were the only ones with black doors. But Mars Tyler’s sofa was ecru, a shade lighter than Grove Palmer’s door. I had all this down on paper. On slow afternoons I used to study it, trying to find a pattern. I thought there might be a subtle color scheme designed by management and based on a man’s salary, ability, and prospects for advancement or decline. Why did no two people have identical sofas and doors? Why was Ted Warburton allowed to have a black door when the only other black door belonged to Weede Denney? Why was Reeves Chubb the only one with a primrose sofa? Why was Paul Joyner’s perfectly good maroon sofa replaced by a royal blue one? Why was my sofa the same color as Weede’s door? There were others who felt as I did.
—Don DeLillo, Americana, 1971.

Although they are
Only breath, words
which I command
are immortal
(translated by Mary Barnard)

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.

The music of a sigh, the magician of a momentary joy.
—F.G., "British Poetry: the Drama,” The British Controversialist and Literary Magazine (1862)

After some preparatory ceremonies, the magician falls senseless and motionless, as if the soul had really abandoned the body. After a lapse of twenty-four hours, the soul returning, the apparently inanimate body awakens as if out of the profound sleep, and utters a deep-drawn sigh, as if emerging from death to life. Thus brought to himself, the magician answers questions put to him, and, to remove all doubt in regard to the character of his responses, he names and describes the places where he has been, with minute circumstances well known to the interrogator.
—John Campbell Colquhoun, An History of Magic, Witchcraft, and Animal Magnetism (1851)

A deep sigh escaped his parched lips, and that sigh was echoed by another. He looked up, and standing beside him, in the hush of solemn midnight, he beheld Grimwald the Magician!
—E.B. Clarke, "A Legend of Charlemagne,” The American Monthly Magazine (1837)

Jack Starhouse could make [cats] dance wild dances, leaping about upon their hind legs and casting themselves from side to side. This he did by strange sighs and whistlings and hissings.
—Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (2004)

He raised his arms, holding them out to her. ‘Kum [kunka] yali, kum buba tambe,’ and more magic words, said so quickly, they sounded like whispers and sighs. The young woman lifted one foot on the air. Then the other. She flew clumsily at first, with the child now held tightly in her arms. Then she felt the magic, the African mystery. Say she rose as free as a bird. As light as a feather.
—Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly (1985)

The shadow of a sigh penetrated the wall. "I am a magician indeed, with knowledge of every spell yet devised, the sleight of runes, incantations, designs, exorcisms, talismans. I am Master Mathematician, the first since Phandaal, yet I can do nothing to your brain without destroying your intelligence, your personality, your soul—for I am no god. A god may will things to existence; I must rely on magic, the spells which vibrate and twist space.”
—Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (1982)

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