without light
dark, dusky, unlighted, unilluminated, unlit, obscure, tenebrous, stygian, caliginous, fuliginous, sunless
having or showing forth little light
dim, dingy, murky, darkish
shadowy
shady, gloomy, umbral, umbrageous, tenebrous
emanating light
shining, beaming, bright, illuminated, illumined, luminous, irradiated, radiant, lucent, lustrous, luminiferous, luminant, luminative, luminificent, illuminant
lighted
alit, lit, lit up, alight, aglow, irradiated, illuminated, lightened, ablaze
very bright
brilliant, glaring, blazing, blinding, refulgent, effulgent, fulgurant, resplendent
sparkling
glittering, scintillating, scintillescent, coruscating, twinkling, clinquant
sparkling or shining in a subdued way
shimmering, shimmery
giving off reflected light
glinting, gleaming
shining or glossy with reflected light
glistening
flashing
flickering, fulgurant, fulgurating
flashing occasionally or fitfully
winking
flashing regularly
blinking, stroboscopic
flashing weakly or going out
fluttering, guttering, sputtering, dimming
showing deflected light rays or distortion of image
refracted, refractive
burning unsteadily or suddenly
flaring, blazing
giving off flame-like light
flickering, wavering, lambent
flame-colored
flammeous
glowing
aglow, lucent, lambent, shimmering
electromagnetic radiation having wavelengths longer than those of visible light (or beyond the red end of the spectrum)
infrared light
electromagnetic radiation having wavelengths shorter than those of visible light (or beyond the violet end of the spectrum)
ultraviolet light
glowing or luminescent with absorbed radiation in a continuing way
phosphorescent
glowing or luminescent with electromagnetic radiation
fluorescent
visible or glowing at night
noctilucent
glowing whitely with light or intense heat
incandescent, candescent
giving off a reddish or golden glow
rutilant
having a milky or cloudy iridescence (like an opal)
opalescent, opaline
having a pearly iridescence (like a pearl)
nacreous, pearlescent
transparent
sheer, clear, lucid, pellucid, limpid
not transparent
untransparent, nontransparent, opaque, adiaphanous, impervious, cloudy, beclouded
admitting the passage of (or letting show through) light
translucent, diaphanous, pellucid, sheer
transparent in water or when wet
hydrophanous
without color
colorless, hueless, achromatic, achromic, untinged
any of three groups of colors from which all other colors can be obtained by mixing
primary colors (including the so-called additive, physiological, or light primaries red, green, and blue; the subtractive or colorant primaries yellow, magenta, and cyan; and psychological primaries red, yellow, green, and blue as well as the achromatic black and white)
colored
colorful, hued, toned, painted, chromatic, pigmented, tinctured (dyed or stained)
slightly or weakly colored
tinged, tinted, tinctured
having one color or hue
monochrome, monochromatic, monochromous, monochromic, monotone
of a color or colors that are relatively muted and do not attract attention
neutral
having many colors
many-colored, multicolored, parti-colored, variegated, motley, varicolored, versicolor, versicolored, polychromatic, polychrome, polychromic, kaleidoscopic, prismatic
rainbow-like
iridescent, iridian
changeable in or showing a shift or play of color
iridescent
highly or brilliantly colored
prismatic
having altered or poor coloration
discolored
white as chalk
chalk white, cretaceous, chalky
leached-out white
blanched, etiolated
not pure white or slightly grayish
off-white (e.g., oyster, cream, eggshell)
thinly or translucently white
bone white
bluish white
alabaster, pearl
yellowish white
eggshell, cream, ivory, bone
grayish white
oyster, platinum, tattletale gray
silvery white
argent
bright or vivid red
crimson, scarlet, vermilion, vermeil, cardinal, carmine, geranium, cinnabar, apple red, tomato, lobster red, beet red, fire-engine red, fiery
moderate red
cherry, cerise, blood red
brick red
lateritious
rust red
rufous, ferruginous
orangish red
poppy, persimmon
dark red
wine, wine red, maroon, ruby, cranberry, garnet, currant, puce
brownish red
burgundy
grayish or bluish red
strawberry
purplish red
raspberry, magenta, grape, raisin, claret, amaranthine, Tyrian purple
red or rosy
blush
pink
rose, rosy, carnation
deep pink
melon
vivid or glowing pink
hot pink, shocking pink
yellowish pink
seashell, coral, flesh-colored, flesh-toned, peach, salmon
whitish-to-yellowish pink
shell
moderate orange
apricot, pumpkin
medium dark orange
burnt orange
moderate reddish orange
flamingo
reddish orange
tangerine, carrot, grenadine, Chinese red
dark reddish orange
burnt sienna
brownish orange
terra-cotta, Titian, tawny
yellowish or turning yellow
flavescent
bright or vivid yellow
goldenrod, daffodil
light yellow
canary
pale yellow
straw yellow, flaxen, primrose, ocher
moderate yellow
brass
dark yellow
old gold
orange yellow
champagne, saffron
greenish yellow
citron, lemon, mustard, lime
grayish yellow
buckskin, oatmeal, parchment, honey yellow, chamois
brownish yellow
amber, buff, gold
pinkish yellow
apricot, peach
greenish or turning green
virescent
slightly green or greenish
viridescent
bright or vivid green
emerald, smaragdine
clear light green
apple green
pale green
celadon
dark green
forest green, evergreen, bottle green, marine green, peacock green, British racing green
bluish green
aquamarine, turquoise, jade green
pale yellow green
glaucous
golden green
chrysochlorous
yellowish green
Kelly green, leek green, hunter green, Nile green, absinthe green, pistachio, verdigris, pea green, grass green, sea green, verdant green, leaf green, malachite, moss green, lime green, cobalt green, zinc green
dull yellow green
ocher green
grayish olive
olive drab
greenish olive
olive green, avocado
brilliant yellow green
chartreuse, Paris green
grayish green
sage green, reseda, loden
bright or vivid blue
ultramarine
pale blue
baby blue, sky blue, aquamarine, powder blue, Persian blue, Wedgwood blue, cerulean, azure, lapis lazuli
deep blue
royal blue
greenish blue
turquoise, peacock blue, cobalt, Prussian blue, aqua, teal blue, china blue, Nile blue, cyan
purplish blue
sapphire, moonstone blue, gentian, hyacinth, violet, marine
reddish blue
violet
grayish blue
Dresden blue, shadow blue, delft blue, robin’s egg, steel blue, Copenhagen blue, electric blue (or electric green), slate blue
dark grayish blue
navy
violet blue
periwinkle
light purple
orchid
pale purple
lavender
moderate purple
lilac, amethyst
dark purple
aubergine, eggplant, mulberry, sloe
reddish lavender
heliotrope
reddish purple
fuchsia, raspberry, plum
bluish purple
mauve
brownish purple
puce
brown or brownish colors in general
earth tones, umber
having a brownish tinge
infuscate
bright or vivid brown
café au lait
moderate brown
auburn, coffee, cocoa, saddle tan, saddle brown
dark brown
chocolate, nut brown
light or yellowish brown
tan, khaki, beige, fawn, caramel, sienna (raw sienna), fox, bister, bistre, camel, ecru, sand, tawny
golden brown
butterscotch
yellowish brown
ginger
reddish brown
mahogany, umber, chestnut, bay, cinnamon, henna, russet, copper, walnut, oxblood, roan, rosewood
dark reddish brown
burnt umber
grayish brown
nutmeg, sepia, dun, sandalwood
metallic or greenish brown
bronze
mottled brown and yellow
tortoiseshell
grayish
grizzled, grizzly, hoary
pale gray
ash gray
moderate gray
platinum
dark gray
field gray, charcoal, Oxford gray
bluish gray
battleship gray, steel gray, slate, Wedgwood blue, pearl, pewter, gunmetal
purplish gray
dove
brownish gray
smoke, mouse gray, taupe, fuscous, dun
yellowish gray
sand
black
ebony, ebon, sable, jet, onyx, ink black, coal black, anthracite
glossy black
raven, japan
purplish black
sooty black, elderberry, slate black, mulberry, murrey
black and white finely mixed
salt and pepper, pepper and salt
washed-out
cool
pastel
slate
bleeding
vibrant
deep
bright
vivid
rich
faded
clashing
muted
warm
electric
unsaturated
discordant
garish
fluorescent
dusky
dazzling
pure
brilliant
faint
medium
dark
moderate
burnt
dusty
light
soft
hot
neon
glowing
metallic
streaky
drab
lustrous
antique
mellow
dun
smoky
riot (of)
dull
bleached-out
gaudy
saturated
pale
strong
Day-Glo
phosphorescent
She came in chilled from the sea-mist that I felt on my cheek, in turn; she stroked the scrapey shadow that by five comes upon me, grizzled old bear that I am. The smell of the water-soaked air clung to her. A vibration in the dusk about her, a deep-sea coruscation, bright, unseen. She had left her mind looking out, I think. Her eyes were still full of it; slowly, slowly she seemed to see me again, from a depth.
—AMY SACKVILLE, Orkney
And there I saw myself as a man might expect, except that my skin was very white, as the old fiend’s had been white, and my eyes had been transformed from their usual blue to a mingling of violet and cobalt that was softly iridescent. My hair had a high luminous sheen, and when I ran my fingers back through it I felt a new and strange vitality there.
—ANNE RICE, The Vampire Lestat
Store windows were filled with silver-painted nude fauns, great glowing puppets, skeletons and witches of every type. Hollowed-out pumpkins lined the gate of Patchin Place: I felt you could lay my head down among them. The streets looked lonely. I looked lonely as I made my way each morning to work, and each evening home to a slighter, darker twilight, my street trading all its colors for blue, while from the west came the bright, streaming lavender sunset on the Hudson.
—ANDREW SEAN GREER, The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells
The advance guard of the expected procession now appeared in the great gateway, a troop of halberdiers. They were dressed in striped hose of black and tawny, velvet caps graced at the sides with silver roses, and doublets of murrey-and-blue cloth embroidered on the front and back with the three feathers, the prince’s blazon, woven in gold. Their halberd staves were covered with crimson velvet, fastened with gilt nails, and ornamented with gold tassels.
—MARK TWAIN, The Prince and the Pauper
The slender crayons and the round pans of paint in the watercolor tin scatter unlikely chips of pigment on the cream-colored sandstone. The ridge bears the palette of a numb moon. The winter sun’s low arc casts ebony shadows of me and the juniper tree, whose shaggy silver bark holds up a rough-needled canopy of brassy green. I place a scarlet crayon on a patch of aquamarine lichen on the slickrock.
—ELLEN MELOY, The Anthropology of Turquoise: Meditations on Landscape, Art, and Spirit
These men who looked steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit their eternally burning black pipes. They and their charcoal hair and soot-colored brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had shaven close; but their heritage showed.
—RAY BRADBURY, Fahrenheit 451
He turned slowly, lifting his head, a solitary ray of sunlight pooling under his hat brim. Even though the glare must have been intense, he didn’t blink. He was a white man with the profile of an Indian and eyes that seemed made of glass and contained no color other than the sun’s refracted brilliance. His complexion made her think of the rind on a cured ham.
—JAMES LEE BURKE, Light of the World
The earth grows wan and weird, defertilized, dehumanized, neither brown nor gray nor beige nor taupe nor ecru, the no color of death reflecting light, sponging up light with its hard, parched shag and shooting it back at us. . . .
—HENRY MILLER, The Colossus of Maroussi
It was a little like working on a puzzle: grouping the cartons into various modular configurations, lining them up in rows, stacking them one on top of another, arranging and rearranging them until they finally began to resemble household objects. One set of sixteen served as the support for my mattress, another set of twelve became a table, others of seven became chairs, another of two became a bedstand, and so on. The overall effect was rather monochromatic, what with that somber light brown everywhere you looked, but I could not help feeling proud of my resourcefulness.
—PAUL AUSTER, Moon Palace
We turned onto a narrow side street, and at once there was an explosion of Mediterranean color: green doorways, turquoise shutters, splashes of soft red and lavender. We parked and walked into the Kasbah, where a few hundred people live, and there the streets were ten-foot-wide footpaths that wound through the ancient mud buildings and into dimly lit tunnels that led to massive wood doors.
—BILL DONAHUE, “Under the Sheltering Sky,” The Best American Travel Writing 2004 (Pico Iyer, ed.)
At Stenness, only three of an original twelve or thirteen stones survive; but the ruins remain impressive, as much because of the peculiar characteristics of the flagstone as because of the massive size of the slabs. All are more than fifteen feet tall, quite broad, but remarkably slender, one waif-like sheet being less than a foot in thickness. The Brodgar stones are of the same flagstone; changing colour according to the light, they sometimes seem a pinkish buff, but the hues are spangled with white and lemon lichen blotches, and sometimes a furry, blue-green lichen growth.
—RICHARD MUIR, The Stones of Britain
As a rule parrots may be termed green birds, the majority of the species having this colour as the basis of their plumage relieved by caps, gorgets, bands and wing-spots of other and brighter hues. Yet this general green tint sometimes changes into light or deep blue, as in some macaws; into pure yellow or rich orange, as in some of the American macaw-parrots (Conurus); into purple, grey, or dove-colour, as in some American, African, and Indian species; into the purest crimson, as in some of the lories; into rosy-white and pure white, as in the cockatoos; and into a deep purple, ashy or black, as in several Papuan, Australian, and Mascarene species.
—ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE, Tropical Nature and Other Essays
Eventually I identified the rocks. The petrified roses were barite, probably from Oklahoma. The scratchy brown mineral was bauxite—aluminum ore. The black glass was obsidian; the booklet of transparent sheets was mica; the goldeny iridescent handful of soft crystals was chalcopyrite, an ore of copper. . . .
—ANNIE DILLARD, An American Childhood
The water splashed over the margin of the pond, the nearer kites were writhing and plunging. The nearer they were, the more contorted and wild. One came down in the pond. Another, after prolonged paroxysms, behind the cast of the Physical Energy of G. F. Watts, O.M., R.A. Only two rode steadily, a tandem, coupled abreast like the happy tug and barge, flown by the child from a double winch. She could just discern them, side by side high above the trees, specks against the east darkening already. The wrack broke behind them as she watched, for a moment they stood out motionless and black, in a glade of limpid viridescent sky.
—SAMUEL BECKETT, Murphy
This disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. She was rich, at least by our standards, as rich as the richest of the white girls, swaddled in comfort and care. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. Patent-leather shoes with buckles, a cheaper version of which we got only at Easter and which had disintegrated by the end of May. Fluffy sweaters the color of lemon drops tucked into skirts with pleats so orderly they astounded us. Brightly colored knee socks with white borders, a brown velvet coat trimmed in white rabbit fur, and a matching muff. There was a hint of spring in her sloe green eyes, something summery in her complexion, and a rich autumn ripeness in her walk.
—TONI MORRISON, The Bluest Eye
The scattered polychrome of the exterior, strewn with blobs and drops as if handfuls of coloured confetti have been thrown at it, evokes the atmosphere of a Venetian carnival with gondolas and crinolines.
—LARA VINCA MASINI, Gaudi
But when his eye was accustomed to the shade within, it withdrew gladly from the glaring sea and glaring tide-rocks to the walls of the chasm itself; to curved and polished sheets of stone, rich brown, with snow-white veins, on which danced for ever a dappled network of pale yellow light; to crusted beds of pink coralline; to caverns in the dark crannies of which hung branching sponges and tufts of purple sea-moss; to strips of clear white sand, bestrewn with shells; to pools, each a gay flower-garden of all hues, where branching seaweed reflected blue light from every point, like a thousand damasked sword blades. . . .
—CHARLES KINGSLEY, Two Years Ago
The smaller man was looking around, with the air of a child just come to a birthday party—at the clumsy old island schooners tied up at the water’s edge, with red sails furled; at the native women in bright dresses and the black ragged crewmen, bargaining loudly over bananas, coconuts, strange huge brown roots, bags of charcoal, and strings of rainbow-colored fish; at the great square red fort, and at the unique cannons atop its slanted seaward wall, pointing impotently to sea; at the fenced statue of Amerigo Vespucci, almost hidden in purple, orange, and pink bougainvillea; at the houses of Queen’s Row, their ancient plaster facades painted in vivid colors sun-bleached to pastels; at the old gray stone church, and the white-washed Georgian brick pile of the Sir Francis Drake Inn.
—HERMAN WOUK, Don’t Stop the Carnival
In college, fiddling in the laboratory for his robotics class on a Saturday night, Jonah breathed in the scent of machine parts and electrical wiring and, especially, underwashed MIT undergraduates, who definitely had their own scent; and it seemed to him that an unspiritual life engineered solely by humans, busy in their fluorescent academic hive, would be perfectly acceptable.
—MEG WOLITZER, The Interestings
Ahead of them lay the Nile, bathed in mist like a white sea; behind them lay the dark desert, like a petrified purple ocean. At last, a streak of orange light appeared to the east; and gradually the white sea in front of them became an immense expanse of fertile green, while the purple ocean behind turned shimmering white.
—JULIAN BARNES, Flaubert’s Parrot
The picture was her final treasure waiting to be packed for the journey. In whatever room she had called her own since childhood, there it had also lived and looked at her, not quite familiar, not quite smiling, but in its prim colonial hues delicate as some pressed flower. Its pale oval, of color blue and rose and flaxen, in a battered, pretty gold frame, unconquerably pervaded any surroundings with a something like last year’s lavender.
—OWEN WISTER, The Virginian
The sight was dazzling. The entire Greensward, the magnificent vision that was Manhattan’s great public space, was laid out in its entirety—in the original silver version—upon a landscaped green suede base, with bright blue paint shimmering as we lighted it, in all the places in the Park that were filled with water.
—LINDA FAIRSTEIN, Death Angel
From the basic blackness of the flesh of the tribe there broke or erupted a wave of red color, and the people all arose on the white stone of the grandstands and waved red objects, waved or flaunted. Crimson was the holy-day color of the Wariri. The amazons saluted with purple banners, the king’s colors. His purple umbrella was raised, and its taut head swayed.
—SAUL BELLOW, Henderson the Rain King
She woke before dawn coughing. She could make out the shape of the glass of water on the table but it was too far to reach and after a while she managed to stop coughing without drinking.
She lay still as the room grew light. The blue ceiling turned grey then light grey. It was thoroughly quiet. It seemed to be the beginning of something more than just day. For a few long moments she lay and felt—what was it? The dawn light put her in mind of creation. It must have been this way on the actual first day of the world. A thin yellow light spread out and all the sorrows which sat in her seemed suddenly to lift up and fly off and were replaced with the most inappropriate hope.
—SUSAN MINOT, Evening
Thundery day along Greenback. All the willows standing still with their leaves pricked. Dusty green. Pale lilac shadows. Tarred road reflecting the sky. Blue to make you jump. A great cloud over on the Surrey shore. Yellow as soap and solid as a cushion. Shaped like a tower about a mile high and half a mile thick, with a little Scotch pepper pot in front. Dresden blue behind full of sunlight floating like gold dust. River roughed up with little waves like the flat side of a cheese grater. Dark copper under the cloud, dark lead under the blue. I could use that cloud in the Fall, I thought. It’s a solid square. To give weight in the top left-hand corner, opposite the Tower. Salmon on pink. It’s an idea worth trying.
—JOYCE CARY, The Horse’s Mouth
But the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times—especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon).
—JOHN IRVING, A Prayer for Owen Meany
The mountains were covered with a rug of trees, green, yellow, scarlet and orange, but their bare tops were scarfed and beribboned with snow. From carved rocky outcrops, waterfalls drifted like skeins of white lawn, and in the fields we could see the amber glint of rivers and the occasional mirror-like flash of a mountain lake. . . .
—GERALD DURRELL AND LEE DURRELL, Durrell in Russia
Above the field the swollen palpitating tangle of light frayed and thinned out into hot darkness, but the thirty thousand pairs of eyes hanging on the inner slopes of the arena did not look up into the dark but stared down into the pit of light, where men in red silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets hurled themselves against men in blue silky-glittering shorts and gold helmets and spilled and tumbled on the bright arsenical-green turf like spilled dolls, and a whistle sliced chillingly through the thick air like that scimitar through a sofa cushion.
—ROBERT PENN WARREN, All the King’s Men
I haven’t (the seeing eye), unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I want to return—towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples.
—FORD MADOX FORD, The Good Soldier
Newts are the most common of salamanders. Their skin is a lighted green, like water in a sunlit pond, and rows of very bright red dots line their backs. They have gills as larvae; as they grow they turn a luminescent red, lose their gills, and walk out of the water to spend a few years padding around in damp places on the forest floor. Their feet look like fingered baby hands, and they walk in the same leg patterns as all four-footed creatures—dogs, mules, and, for that matter, lesser pandas.
—ANNIE DILLARD, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Then he saw his old house, no longer green, though to my family and me it would always be “the green house.” The new owners had painted it a lavendery mauve and installed a pool and, just off to the side, near the basement window, a gazebo made of redwood, which overflowed with hanging ivy and children’s toys.
—ALICE SEBOLD, The Lovely Bones
Light, line, and color as sensual pleasures, came later and were as crude as the rest. The New England light is glare, and the atmosphere harshens color. The boy was a full man before he ever knew what was meant by atmosphere; his idea of pleasure in light was the blaze of a New England sun. His idea of color was a peony, with the dew of early morning on its petals. The intense blue of the sea, as he saw it a mile or two away, from the Quincy hills; the cumuli in a June afternoon sky; the strong reds and greens and purples of colored prints and children’s picture-books, as the American colors then ran; these were ideals. The opposites or antipathies were the cold grays of November evenings, and the thick, muddy thaws of Boston winter.
—HENRY ADAMS, The Education of Henry Adams
I jiggled my brush in the water jar. The liquid turned the color of my first urine in the morning. I stroked my purple cake, and a bruise-colored cat and then a brown stick cat darted out.
I was so much to myself as I worked that I did not hear her warning shout or the slapping of her Island thongs on the linoleum as she swooped down upon me. Her crimson nails clawed my sheet off its board and crumpled it into a ball. “You, you defy me!” she cried out. Her face had turned the muddy red of my water jar. She lifted me by the forearm, hurried me across the room through a door into a dark parlor, and plunked me down on a stiff cane-back chair.
Her green eyes glared at me like a cat’s. They were speckled with brown as if something alive had gotten caught and fossilized in the irises.
—JULIA ALVAREZ, How the García Girls Lost Their Accent
The smallest of the tree flocks consisted of about fifteen gobblers. They were huge, wary birds. They were the most beautiful wild things that he had seen. Most were dark, purple-breasted, with a long beard, and a small cunning red head, dark in the back, flecked with brown, and they had a spread of reddish-white tail that dazzled Clint.
—ZANE GREY, Fighting Caravans
But in the alleyways behind the marketplace, fruit and meat rotted in crates. Rats crawled; pigeons crowded and pecked each other savagely trailing feathers and lice. This was reality, and though living with Ernest was giving me more tolerance for the real than ever before, it made me feel sick even so. It was like looking into the gutters at the Place de la Contrescarpe, where colored dyes ran freely from the flower vendors’ carts: brief false lushness, and ugliness underneath.
—PAULA MCLAIN, The Paris Wife
I looked off at the blue forms of the mountains, growing less transparent and cloudlike, shifting their positions, rolling from side to side off the road, coming back and centering in our path, and then sliding off the road again, but strengthening all the time. We went through some brush and then out across a huge flat field that ran before us for miles, going straight at the bulging range of hills, which was now turning mile by mile from blue to a light green-gold, the color of billions of hardwood leaves.
—JAMES DICKEY, Deliverance
Instead of the shades of pink and peach that I would have expected—Rubens has a lot to answer for—her body displayed, disconcertingly, a range of muted tints from magnesium white to silver and tin, a scumbled sort of yellow, pale ochre, and even in places a faint greenishness and, in the hollows, a shadowing of mossy mauve.
—JOHN BANVILLE, Ancient Light
The pink dusty road before us, the scrub and the dark pines, lay always between these depths of blue. The sea was calm; as one looked down, it drowned the eye like a second zenith, but bluer still; bluer than lapis, or sapphire, or whatever flower is bluest; and then again, in the dark clear shadows round the deep roots of the rocks, green and grape-purple, like the ring-dove’s sheen.
—MARY RENAULT, The King Must Die
The light fell upon the pages of his coloring book, across his child’s hands. Coloring excited him, not the act of filling in space, but choosing colors that no one else would select. In the green of the hills he saw red. Purple snow, green skin, silver sun. He liked the effect it had on others, that it disturbed his siblings. He discovered he had a talent for sketching. He was a natural draftsman and secretly he twisted and abstracted his images, feeling his growing powers. He was an artist, and he knew it. It was not a childish notion. He merely acknowledged what was his.
—PATTI SMITH, Just Kids
Weighing only about seven pounds, the southern gray fox is smaller than the better-known red fox. Its grizzled, salt-and-pepper-gray body, with rusty red along the sides and neck, is about two feet long; the black-tipped bushy gray tail, with a black streak along its top, adds another twelve or fourteen inches to the fox’s length. He stands not much more than a foot above the ground at the shoulders, and when he trots, his paw marks along his trail are about eleven inches apart.
—JOHN K. TERRES, From Laurel Hill to Siler’s Bog: The Walking Adventures of a Naturalist
I have depended on Central Park for its usefulness, but its incidental beauty has often taken my breath away. I may look up from catching the flash of a scarlet tanager out of the corner of my eye, a tanager perched in the high branches of one of the huge cherry trees on the West Side, and my eyes hit the shimmering towers of midtown—the Plaza Hotel and the General Motors Building floating just above the Sheep Meadow.
—SUSAN CHEEVER, “My Little Bit of Country,” Central Park: An Anthology (Andrew Blauner, ed.)
Caracals flicking their long sharp-tipped and slender ears are a delight to watch. They are often pitch-black with a long tassel of hair. The outside of the ears is covered with silver hair while the inside is light grey. A black spot on either side of the face near the muzzle, and a black line from the eye to the nose, with some white on the chin and at the base of the ear, make the caracal’s face one of the most beautiful of the African felines.
—VIVIAN J. WILSON, Orphans of the Wild: An African Naturalist in Pursuit of a Dream
Mother’s yellow station wagon slid like a Monopoly icon along the gray road that cut between fields of Iowa corn, which was chlorophyll green and punctuated in the distance by gargantuan silver silos and gleaming, unrusted tractors glazed cinnamon red.
—MARY KARR, Lit: A Memoir
Like a woman’s wispy dress that has slipped off its hanger, the city shimmered and fell in fantastic folds, not held up by anything, a discarnate iridescence limply suspended in the azure autumnal air. Beyond the nacrine desert of the square, across which a car sped now and then with a new metropolitan trumpeting, great pink edifices loomed, and suddenly a sunbeam, a gleam of glass, would stab him painfully in the pupil.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV, King, Queen, Knave
He has saved up enough money to go anywhere he wants, and there is no question that he has had his fill of the Florida sun—which, after much study, he now believes does the soul more harm than good. It is a Machiavellian sun in his opinion, a hypocritical sun, and the light it generates does not illuminate things but obscures them—blinding you with its constant, overbright effulgences, pounding on you with its blasts of vaporous humidity, destabilizing you with its miragelike reflections and shimmering waves of nothingness. It is all glitter and dazzle, but it offers no substance, no tranquillity, no respite.
—PAUL AUSTER, Sunset Park
Off to my left, in that vast bowl of stillness that contains the meandering river, tens of square miles of tundra browns and sedge meadow greens seem to snap before me, as immediate as the pages of my notebook, because of unscattered light in the dustless air. The land seems guileless. Creatures down there take a few steps, then pause and gaze about. Two sandhill cranes stand still by the river. Three Peary caribou, slightly built and the silver color of the moon, browse a cutbank in that restive way of deer. Tundra melt ponds, their bright dark blue waters oblique to the sun, stand out boldly in the plain. In the center of the large ponds, beneath the surface of the water, gleam cores of aquamarine ice, like the constricted heart of winter.
—BARRY LOPEZ, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape
A riot of color in one, very clean but tight packed. Tufted hot pink bedspread such as it was inconceivable Martha would buy, with many figural wildly colored pillows in a similar vein heaped on top, posters as from a travel agency hung on the walls, bedside table bristling with photographs of grinning toothy children in imitation metal frames. The other room used such a different palette as to seem a different planet. Robin’s-Egg Blue, Cappuccino, and Leaf would have been fitting names for the paint.
—SUSAN CHOI, My Education
The houses of the central village were quite unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration of the mountain villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness; here and there their parti-coloured façade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary window broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity; smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown. . . .
—H. G. WELLS, “The Country of the Blind,” The Country of the Blind and Other Stories
Ahead, the shadowed purple line of the Ballon d’Alsace, highest point in the Vosges, was hidden in mist. Patrols who ventured to the top could see down below the red-roofed villages of the lost territory, the gray church spires, and the tiny, gleaming line of the Moselle where, young and near its source, it was narrow enough to be waded. Squares of white potato blossom alternated with strips of scarlet-runner beans and gray-green-purple rows of cabbages. Haycocks like small fat pyramids dotted the fields as if arranged by a painter.
—BARBARA W. TUCHMAN, The Guns of August