they see red at the mere sight of green
“Go and promenade in the country, said the constable. We have tried, said Watt, time and time again. But they see red at the
respect the Chromatic scale
“Don’t rock the boat, don’t stand out, respect the Chromatic scale and, above all, don’t try to improve queuing.”
—Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey, 2009.
the Paint Shop
“I slackened my pace as I walked past the Paint Shop since it was considered exceptionally low-hued to gawp, and stepping inside was almost taboo, as I had no business to be there. Some of the hues in the window display I recognized, such as the single shade of yellow that often graced daffodils, lemons, bananas and gorse, but there were others, too—wild and sultry shades of blue that I’d never seen before, a cheeky pale yellow that might color who-knows-what and a wanton mauve that gave me a fizzy feeling down below. On the cans I noted familiar terms like umber, chartreuse, gordini, dead salmon, lilac, blouse, turquoise and aquamarine, and others that I hadn’t heard before, such as cornsilk, rectory, jaguar, old string, chiffon and suffield. It was all very eye-worthy.”
—Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey, 2009.
Color, and the enjoyment thereof
“Distribution of synthetic hue was strictly controlled by National Color and could be earned only in a single way: by the collection of scrap color for recycling into raw pigment. It was said that a ton of red tosh might yied about a gallon of univisual pigment—enough to keep three hundred roses at full color for six months or, at halfhue, a year. Some villages spent their every light-hour collecting scrap color, even to the detriment of basic food production. Color, and the enjoyment thereof, was everything.”
—Jasper Fforde, Shades of Grey, 2009.
blue spaceships
“blue spaceships winked at us from the sky and gifted us / with phosphorescent nights and strips of light on pacific beaches
If you were to draw the alphabet
“If you were to draw the alphabet instead of writing it, what would the difference be?”
—Lynda Barry, Picture This, 2010.
superamerikan chewing gum
“and the pianist shot back you make from poetry / some kind of superamerikan chewing gum / with spicy glue and the taste of mentholated eternity / shit the beatnik burst out / without irony life would be but a nostalgia shop”
—Ruxandra Cesereanu and Andrei Codrescu, Forgiven Submarine, 2009.
like flippping someone off with your pinky
“Writing a serious attack on someone in Comic Sans is
like flipping someone off with your pinky.”
—Lawrence August, quoted by Lewis Grossberger, in reference to this.
red and gold threads
“ ‘Fire worship was by no means the most foolish thing ever invented,’ he murmured to himself at one point. Otherwise ne
swirling specks of color
“Even as a young boy I had been in the habit of gazing at bizarre natural phenomena, not so much observing them as surrendering to their magic, their confused, deep language. Long gnarled tree roots, colored veins in rocks, patches of oil floating on water, light-refracting flaws in glass—all these things had held great magic for me at one time: water and fire particularly, smoke, clouds, and dust, but most of all the swirling specks of color that swam before my eyes the minute I closed them.”
—Herman Hesse, Demian, 1923.