‘green and greasy’

“Counting the money, I found there was three thousand dollars of ‘green and greasy,’ worn paper money, in small bills.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

a ‘salmon belly’

“He unrolls the bills, looking at them with a mysterious smile on his fat face. You don’t understand his smile and wonder if he is thinking how he cheated somebody in a poker game; he looks like a gambler.
    The roll interests you, the outside one is what you call a ‘salmon belly.’ It is a yellowback—a big bill.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926. The money is Canadian.

‘foot juice’ or ‘red ink’

“The wine dumps, where wine bums or ‘winos’ hung out, interested me. Long, dark, dirty rooms with rows of rickety tables and a long bar behind which were barrels of the deadly ‘foot juice’ or ‘red ink,’ as the winos called it.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

the ‘star routes’

“They were both past fifty, wore clean overalls, substantial shoes, and clean-looking blue shirts. A month later I could have classified them correctly as professional bums, too old to ride the trains, satisfied to throw their feet along the ‘star routes,’ or country roads, where food was seldom refused, and to sleep in their bindles, or blankets, under the stars.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

my eyes

“There are two vertical furrows between my eyes that make me appear to be wearing a continual scowl. My eyes are wide enough apart and not small, but they are hard, cold, calculating. They are blue, but of that shade of blue farthest removed from the violet.”

—Jack Black, You Can’t Win, 1926.

Purple snowflakes

“Drifting on air without a care
Purple snowflakes
Cover the ground without a sound”

[I]n English they have more than three thousand terms for different colors

“[I]n English they have more than three thousand terms for different colors, yet most people can name eight at best. The average person can recognize the colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet—though people already begin to have trouble with indigo and violet. It takes a lot of experience to learn to distinguish and name the various shades, and a painter is better at it than, say, a taxi driver, who just has to know the colors of traffic lights.”

—Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2005.

Dark of the invisible moon

“Dark of the invisible moon. The nights now only slightly less black. By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp.”

—Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006.

We’re in the Money

With silver you can turn your dreams to gold

“The long lost dollar has come back to the fold,
With silver you can turn your dreams to gold.”

—Al Dubin & Harry Warren, “We’re in the Money”, 1933.