Old devil moon
“Just when I think I’m
Free as a dove
Old devil moon
Deep in your eyes
Blinds me with love”
—E.Y. Harburg & B. Lane, Old Devil Moon, 1947.
The golden toad of Costa Rica
“In the 1980s zoologists became aware that many amphibians around the world, principally frogs but also salamanders, were in steep decline. . . . The golden toad of Costa Rica (Bufo periglenes) population . . . plummeted. Its color was spectacular: males in the breeding season looked as though they had been dipped whole in orange Day-Glo paint. . . . In the spring of 1987 hundred of thousands of breeding toads made their annual appearance on schedule in the only place the species occurred. . . . The following year a team . . . could find only five individuals. No golden toad has been seen since, and the species is presumed extinct.”
—Edward O. Wilson, The Future Of Life, 2002.
a broad orange stream
“At the bottom of the hill, the woods opened suddenly onto a pasture dotted here and there with black and white cows and sloping down, tier after tier, to a broad orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond.”
—Flannery O’Connor, The River, A Good Man Is Hard To Find And Other Stories, 1955.
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.