red tape

“Now and then, in the eagerness of despatching pressing business, I would inadvertently summon Bartleby, in a short, rapid tone, to put his finger, say, on the incipient tie of a bit of red tape with which I was about compressing some papers.”

—Herman Melville, from Bartleby the Scrivener, 1853.

I associate pink with lightness

“Now here’s twenty pills, capsules actually . . . ten red and black and ten a light pink. ‘Which ones did he say were the ups, Marc?’ I casually ask. He gulps and says ‘I never asked, I thought you knew.’ This is very bad, as you must realize. So Lang butts in and says the reds and black are ups but he didn’t say it too assuredly.

“You know for sure?” I ask.

“No, but I think so,” he answers.

“Well, I think the pinks are up,” says Neutron.

“How come?”

“’Cause I associate pink with lightness, and the others seem hard colored, like they might knock you out.”

“He’s got a point,” chimes in Marc.

“Bullshit,” I yell, ‘what kind of lamebrain theory is that? Nembutols are light yellow, and they knock you on your ass.’”

—Jim Carroll, from The Basketball Diaries, winter 1965, published in 1978.

desert lilies

“Just such a pleasure to tie up above that mainline with a woman’s silk stocking and hit the mark and watch the blood rise into the dropper like a certain desert lily I remember I saw once in my child’s encyclopedia, so red . . . yeah, I shoot desert lilies in my arm.”

—Jim Carroll, from The Basketball Diaries, winter 1966, published in 1978.

cook, main, and bingo!

“(you see one dangerous convenience of using junk over a period of years is that you eventually lose any paranoia over the possibility of getting bad dope, like you don’t go through all that bull crap of taste on the tongue or ‘better not shoot it all at once’ etc. crap like when you were first starting. After a while you become such a drooling fiend it’s just dump it all in, cook, main, and bingo! And if an abscess pops up like an oozing golf ball or if you o.d. or if it turns out it was “Drano” you were banging into your arm, just send the flowers of your own choice . . . blue to match the skin color).”

—Jim Carroll, from The Basketball Diaries, winter 1966, published in 1978.

Al Jolson

“Zelda [Fitzgerald] was very beautiful and was tanned a lovely gold color and her hair was a beautiful dark gold and she was very friendly. Her hawk’s eyes were clear and calm. I knew everything was all right and was going to turn out well in the end when she leaned forward and said to me, telling me her great secret, ‘Ernest, don’t you think Al Jolson is greater than Jesus?’”

—Ernest Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast, 1964.

one true sentence

“I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’”

—Ernest Hemingway, from A Moveable Feast, 1964.

The main street of Fort Curtis

“Any description of the main street of Fort Curtis can begin and end inside this very sentence. Beyond that I find only redundancy. The same six words identify the thing to be described and serve to describe it. The main street of Fort Curtis.”

—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.

the bibles in this town

“‘I’ve just realized how few black faces I’ve seen since I got here.’

‘Even the bibles in this town are white,’ she said.”

—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.

a writer of blank pages

“Brand . . . as it turned out, was a writer of blank pages. That’s how I think of him, definitely a novelist, by all means a craftsman of high talent—but one who chose words of the same color as the paper on which they were written.”

—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.

a special place

“[T]he office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain.”

—Don DeLillo, from Americana, 1971.