a sweet blue sky
“Pillars of gray-brown smoke from Exxon’s vast complex ventilated a sweet blue sky. Across the Mississippi River Bridge, green flatlands stretched on toward Acadiana. . . .”
—Jason Berry, Last of the Red Hot Poppas, 2006.
no-tell motel neon signs
“At Metro Airport, he paid the cabby and got in his car. . . . The dashboard went luminous as he drew a puff on his stogie, paid the attendant and glided past a string of no-tell motel neon signs.”
—Jason Berry, Last of the Red Hot Poppas, 2006.
technicolor pachyderms
“I can stand the sight of worms
And look at microscopic germs
But technicolor pachyderms
Is really too much for me”
—Pink Elephants On Parade, words and lyrics by Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace, from Disney’s Dumbo, 1941.
big black car
“We would go on between the fields until we hit a town. The houses would be lined up along the street, under the trees, with their lights going out now, until we hit the main street, where the lights would be bright around the doorway of the movie house and the bugs would be zooming against the bulbs and would ricochet off to hit the concrete pavement and make a dry crunch when somebody stepped on them. The men standing in front of the pool hall would look up and see the big black crate ghost down the street and one of them would spit on the concrete and say, “The bastard, he reckins he’s somebody,” and wish that he was in a big black car, as big as a hearse and the springs soft as mamma’s breast and the engine breathing without a rustle at seventy-five, going off into the dark somewhere. Well, I was going somewhere. I was going back to Burden’s Landing.”
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, 1946.
a Luna moth
“And all of a sudden I remembered once how into a room where I was sitting one night, a big pale apple-green moth, big as a bullbat and soft and silent as a dream—a Luna moth, the name is, and it is a wonderful name—came flying in. Somebody had left the screen door open, and the moth drifted in over the tables and chairs like a big pale-green, silky, live leaf, drifting and dancing along without any word under the electric light where a Luna moth certainly did not belong. The night air coming into the room now was like that.”
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, 1946.
hot, melted-butter colored sunlight
“I could sleep late, and then wake up and not move, just watching the hot, melted-butter colored sunlight pour through the cracks in the shade, for my hotel was not the best in town and my room was not the best in the hotel.”
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, 1946.
the lemon-pale sun
“. . . the lemon-pale sun of late autumn. . . .”
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, 1946.
A Powdery Pastel
“He stopped on the steps and waited, a not very tall old man, and thin, wearing blue jean pants and a blue shirt washed so much that it had a powdery pastel shade to it and a black bow tie, the kind that comes ready-tied on an elastic band. . . . The blue of the eyes was pale and washed out like the blue of the shirt.”
—Robert Penn Warren, describing Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, 1946.
A diamond
“‘A diamond ain’t a thing in the world but a piece of dirt that got awful hot.’”
—Robert Penn Warren, Willie Stark wisdom from All the King’s Men, 1946.
the toad bears a jewel in its forehead
“How life is strange and changeful, and the crystal is in the steel at the point of fracture, and the toad bears a jewel in its forehead, and the meaning of moments passes like the breeze that scarcely ruffles the leaf of the willow.”
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, 1946.