moonlight
“In the evening after dinner the whole family liked to bask in the flood of moonlight on the balcony of the house. The young night was pollinated with stars, and the full moon looked to me like a huge lollipop as it rose in the east over the purple hills and shed light on our unlit town. The nights of the full moon were magical for us, and filled us with excitement, for we were not brought up with electricity. The moonlight seemed to give a sort of warmth on a cold night and coolness on a hot night. It even seemed to heal sorrows and spiritual wounds.”
—Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.
a ‘purging of the realm according to custom’
“When [Mindon] died without an obvious heir in 1878, one of his queens intrigued to raise to the throne one Thibaw, an insignificant son of the king’s who had spent most of his life in a Buddhist monastery. She and her supporters hoped to rule the country with Thibaw as a puppet. . . .
It had been an immemorial tradition when a new king succeeded for there to be a “purging of the realm according to custom” “i.e. a massacre of the previous ruler’s kinsmen. Since Thibaw was distant from the throne, he had to kill eighty-three members of the royal family. The killings were spread over two days and were carried out by members of the Royal Guard. As was customary, the princesses were strangled while the princes were sewn into red velvet sacks and gently beaten to death with paddles”it being taboo to shed royal blood.”
—Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.
moving stairs
“My anxiety grew as I watched people stepping on and off what looked to me like moving stairs, and realized we would have to do the same. As far as I knew there was only one escalator in the whole of Burma, in Rangoon. It was quite a tourist attraction, and I had once gone to look at it, but discovered that it had not been in working order for years.”
—Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.
The greatest hyphenator ever
Saturday night
“The lights of Philadelphia burn in oncoming night beyond. Everyone is going off to eat, there will be drinking in bars, and parties, and wild hilarities. And the football players, taking showers or combing their hair or being rubbed down by some consoling trainer, are thinking of the soft sweet girl awaiting them for the dance.
This was when Peter saw the joys of his college life—always on the Saturday night when the game was over and night spread it rewarding darkness over all.”
—Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
the Great White Way
“As they sped downtown past 59th Street, they began to see pepole in multitudes, they began to see a sea of heads weaving underneath lights unlike the lights they had already seen. These lights were a blazing daytime in themselves, a magical universe of lights sparkling and throbbing with the intensity of a flash explosion. They were white like the hard white light of a blowtorch, they were the Great White Way itself.”
—Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.
Vernacular Baton Rouge 3
A Baton Rouge slash Coca-Cola classic.
a dark blue mood
“It was Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood.”
—Ross Macdonald, The Singing Pigeon, 1953.
Death was in the the dream
“I must have dozed for a few minutes. A dream rushed by the threshhold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise. Death was in the the dream. He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers.”
—Ross Macdonald, The Singing Pigeon, 1953.
a beautiful winking wonder
“Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon, a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire. It stood upon a green knoll, and below it were lines of warehouses, sheds, and mills. Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now”
—Rudyard Kipling describing the Shwedagon Pagoda in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches—Letters of Travel vol. 1, 1899.