darkness alone
“Time. Particles of darkness configured mysterious patterns on my retina. Patterns that degenerated without a sound, only to be replaced by new patterns. Darkness but darkness alone was shifitng, like mercury in motionless space.”
—Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase, translated by Alfred Birnbaum, 1989.
a confused sea of red caps
“They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they had taken either out of the court itself, or one of its rooms or passages. Over the chair they had thrown a red flag and to the back of it they had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not even the Doctor’s entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home on men’s shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him, and casting up to sight from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that he more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.
In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, as they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carried him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
the black prison
“In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day awaited their fate.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
the whole wild night
“The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
the diamond-cut-diamond arts
“He was . . . in the habit of declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to “catch” him, and on the diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him ‘not to be caught.’”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
The Full Tellson Flavour
“When they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
‘And you in brown!’
“‘And you in brown!’ she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry; ‘couldn’t you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her to death?’”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
The wine was red wine
“The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many wooden shoes.”
—Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859.
the gamut of sounds and the spectrum of colors
“There is a relationship between the gamut of sounds and the spectrum of colors. Long study has brought me to the conclusion that white must correspond to do, blue to re, pink to mi, black to fa, green to sol. When the relationships between colors and sounds have been found, music may be translated into landscapes and portraits by replacing the colors, and by marking the halftones with sharps and flats.”
—Ernest Cabaner, barman, bohemian musician, and Arthur Rimbaud’s piano teacher, mid-nineteenth century Paris; Pierre Petitfuls, Rimbaud, translated by Alan Sheridan, 1987.
of the soul and for the soul
“This language will be of the soul and for the soul, embracing everything, scents, sounds, colors, thought catching thought and pulling.”
—Arthur Rimbaud, letter to Paul Dem’ny, 1871.