the color of café-au-lait

“‘La belle Zoraide had eyes that were so dusky, so beautiful, that any
man who gazed too long into their depths was sure to lose his head, and
even his heart sometimes. Her soft, smooth skin was the color of café-au-lait.’”

—Kate Chopin, ‘La Belle Zoraide’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

‘Here’s money!’

“He went and stood at the foot of the table, opposite to where Madame Delmandé sat, and let fall the box upon it.
    The thing in falling shattered, and from its
bursting sides gold came, clicking, spinning, gliding, some of it like
oil; rolling along the table and off it to the floor, but heaped up,
the bulk of it, before the tramp.
    ‘Here’s money!’ he called out, plunging his old hand in the thick of it.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘A Wizard from Gettysburg’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

white, bursting cotton, with the dew upon it

“When she had made her way through the brush and scrub cottonwood-trees
that lined the opposite bank, she found herself upon the border of a
field where the white, bursting cotton, with the dew upon it, gleamed
for acres and acres like frosted silver in the early dawn.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘Beyond the Bayou’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

the red rose

“He held the rose by its long, hardy stem, and swept it lightly and
caressingly across her forehead, along her cheek, and over her pretty
mouth and chin, as a lover might have done with his lips. He noticed
how the red rose left a crimson stain behind it.”

—Kate Chopin, ‘In and Out of Old Natchitoches’, from Bayou Folk, 1894.

ultimate beauty

“You know how it is. A three-hundred dollar suit doesn’t knock your eye
out. A Ming vase doesn’t shriek for attention. But the ultimate beauty,
the perfection, is there; and you’ll always see it if you look long
enough, see it and recognize it, regardless of whether you’ve ever seen
it before.
    Even if you’ve caught so much crap in your eyes that
you’re half-blind in one and can’t see out of the other . . .”

—Jim Thompson, WIld Town, 1957. The ellipses are his.

putting words down on paper

“‘Oh, now, really, Mr. McKenna,’ the operator laughed. ‘I’ll bet that’s your secret ambition, isn’t it? To be a writer?’
    ‘Well,’ Bugs shrugged easily, ‘why not? Nothing much
to it that I can see, once you’ve got a plot. Just putting words down
on paper.’
    ‘Now, that’s true, isn’t it? If you’ve got a good
idea, why, anyone could make a good story out of it. It certainly can’t
take any brains to do that.’”

—Jim Thompson, WIld Town, 1957.

A River Runs Through It: An American Tragedy

An American Tragedy

pinkly carpeted

“[I]n the orchard of a spring day later, between her fourteenth and
eighteenth years when the early May sun was making pink lamps of every
aged tree and the ground was pinkly carpeted with the falling and
odorous petals, she would stand and breathe and sometimes laugh, or
even sigh, her arms upreached or thrown wide to life. To be alive! To
have youth and the world before one.”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.

an airy, fairy quality

“But canoeing fascinated him really. He was pleased by the picturesque
and summery appearance he made in an outing shirt and canvas shoes
paddling about Crum Lake in one of the bright red or green or blue
canoes that were leased by the hour. And at such times these summer
scenes appeared to possess an airy, fairy quality, especially with a
summer cloud or two hanging high above in the blue.”

—Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925.