his red and blue pencil
“With his red and blue pencil the blue-eyed, red-faced official made little crosses here and there on the papers, showing Krug where to sign.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.
a golden fork lying in the sun
“. . . when Krug mentioned once that the word “loyalty” phonetically and visually reminded him of a golden fork lying in the sun on a smooth spread of pale yellow silk, Maximov replied somewhat stiffly that to him loyalty was limited to its dictionary denotation.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.
Ed’s note
I’ve been obsessively collecting these color quotes for about three years, and it’s almost time to stop. I am editing these into chapters that I am categorizing by hue, etcetera, and the process is nearly complete.
I’ll self-publish it if I have to, such things can be done these days, but it only counts as credit in academia if someone else publishes it. This is “peer review.” So I’m about to begin my search for a publisher, someone who will take these color quotes off my hands and then make us both famous. I personally think this book could be very big.
Does anyone know a publisher, or a book agent? I am seriously looking. I think I want a book agent. Are they anything like secret agents? Do they just show up at your door?
the apple jelly of the heart-rending sea
“The cat was asleep in the stuffy room of the President’s daughter who was dreaming of not being able to find a certain pot of apple jelly which she knew was a ship she had once seen in Bervok and a sailor was leaning and spitting overboard, watching his spit fall, fall, fall, into the apple jelly of the heart-rending sea for her dream was shot with golden-yellow, as she had not put out the lamp, wishing to keep awake until her old father’s guests had gone.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.
‘runs blue, writes black’
“It is all inky black with a pale blue inky sky—‘runs blue, writes black’ as that ink bottle said, but it did not, nor does the sky, but the trees do with their trillions of twigs.”
—Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister, 1947.
a mauve mist
“Toward the end of the afternoon, a mauve mist veils the avenues so that you do not know where they end, and the unexpected discovery of a wild hyacinth, with its three slender bells of artless blue swaying in the wind, has all the charm of a stolen joy.”
—Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.
The thin rain
“The thin rain, falling past the square of my lighted window, looks like damp, finely-sifted flour, white against the black background of the road.”
—Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.
a tawny brown
“His hair and his eyebrows and lashes are as black as the devil, and it needed a very bright ray of sunshine one day to show me that, beneath all that black, my admirer’s eyes are a tawny brown, and very deep set.”
—Collette, The Vagabond; translated by Enid McLeod, 1955.
a field of violets
“Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.
the patina of the centuries
“He wore a large black hat that looked like a raven with widespread wings, and a velvet vest across which the patina of the centuries had skated.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, translated by Gregory Rabassa, 1970.