the lines of hieroglyphs
“Sumerian cuneiform died and was buried. But the lines of hieroglyphs have survived until the present day. A later form of writing, which we call Protosinaitic . . . borrowed almost half of its signs from Egyptian hieroglyphs. Protosinaitic, in turn, appears to have lent a few of its letters to the Phoenicians, who used it in their alphabet. The Greeks then borrowed the Phoenician alphabet, turned it sideways, and passed it on to the Romans, and thence to us. . . .”
—Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Ancient World, 2007.
a cerulean blue grand piano
“In a sunken area in the middle of the coffee lounge, a woman wearing a bright pink dress sat at a cerulean blue grand piano playing quintessential hotel-coffee-lounge numbers filled with arpeggios and syncopation. Not bad actually, though not an echo lingered in the air beyond the last note of each number.”
—Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
an unappealing orange
“The carpet was an unappealing orange, the sort of orange you’d get by leaving a choicely sunburnt weaving out in the rain for a week, then throwing it into the cellar until it mildewed. This was an orange from the early days of Technicolor.”
—Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
The yellow glow
“The yellow glow of the light bulbs drifted about the room like pollen.”
–Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
darkness alone
“Time. Particles of darkness configured mysterious patterns on my retina. Patterns that degenerated without a sound, only to be replaced by new patterns. Darkness but darkness alone was shifitng, like mercury in motionless space.”
—Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
a confused sea of red caps
“They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they had taken either out of the court itself, or one of its rooms or passages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag and to the back of it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not even the Doctor’s entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home on men’s shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.
In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, as they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carried him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
the black prison
“In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day awaited their fate.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
the whole wild night
“The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
the diamond-cut-diamond arts
“He was . . . in the habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to “catch” him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him ‘not to be caught.’”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
The Full Tellson Flavour
“When they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.