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“I was killing time and pain at a nearby bar called The Ear, so named because the two ribs of the ‘B’ in the neon sign that read ‘Bar’ had burned out years ago. So had most of the patrons.”

—Kinky Friedman, Blast From the Past, 1998.

“‘The sun is the greatest, the most resplendent, and the most wonderful of heavenly luminaries, but you cannot contemplate and examine it simply with unprotected eyes. You have to use a piece of artificial glass that is many millions of times smaller and darker than the sun. But through this little piece of glass you can examine the magnificent monarch of stars, delight in it, and endure its fiery rays. Holy Scripture also is a dazzling sun, and this book, The Philokalia, is the piece of glass which we use to enable us to contemplate the sun in its imperial splendor.’”

—Anonymous, The Way of a Pilgrim, first published in 1884, translated by R.M. French, 1965. ‘The Love of Spiritual Beauty’, or The Philokalia, is a collection of mystical writings by the Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

"There were dim lights burning far off on the highway, on the river. There were lights even beyond those, stretching miles off in the night; he wanted to go there, to see what was there. There were lights like that stretching across the country, across all states and cities and places, and things happening everywhere even now. "Even now, even now," he kept thinking. There were bridges swooping across rivers and Mississippis, cities at night casting halo-glows in the sky seen from far-off, there were giant water tanks waiting by the railroad tracks in Oklahoma, there were saloons with checkercloth and sawdust and fans overhead, there were girls waiting in Colorado and Utah and Iowa towns, there were crap games in the alley and a game in the back of the lunch-cart, there was soft odorous air in New Orleans and Key West and Los Angeles, there was music at night by the sea and people laughing, and cars going by on a highway, and soft neon lights glowing, and an old shack in Nevada seen across the wastes. . . . Joe had to go see it all, even now, even now."

"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

"It was the night of the full moon. Flaring like a white-hot coin, so brilliant that it hurt one"s eyes, the moon swam rapidly upwards in a sky of smoky blue, across which drifted a few wisps of yellowish cloud. The stars were all invisible. The croton bushes, by day hideous things like jaundiced laurels, were changed by the moon into jagged black-and-white designs like fantastic woodcuts. . . .

"Look at the moon, just look at it!" Flory said. "It"s like a white sun. It"s brighter than an English winter day."

Elizabeth looked up into the branches of the frangipani tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow. Even Elizabeth, indifferent to such things, was astonished."

"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.

"Battalions are trucked into the city to rehearse for the elaborate military parades. Security is heightened, government buildings are spruced up and repainted, and billboards promoting the army are hoisted above major intersections and roundabouts. The oversized boards look more like movie advertisements than army propaganda. Painted in soothing pastel colours, they depict handsome soldiers in pistachio green uniforms marching down pale yellow roads and cheered by crowds of onlookers. Above the parade, a fleet of pink fighter planes glides placidly through a postcard-perfect blue sky."

—Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.

"Tun Lin refers to the years under Ne Win as "the time of the green spectacles". To look at something through green spectacles, he explained, is to look at a thing that is bad and be forced to think of it as good. The phrase has a curious history. The battles and bombs of the Second World War devastated Burma"s paddy fields and plantations, and by the time the Japanese army eventually occupied the country farmers found it hard to grow any edible produce. Even the farm animals and pack-horses refused to eat the parched grain, because of its unhealthy-looking white colour. The Japanese, fearful that the donkeys they needed to transport munitions in the mountainous terrain of Upper Burma would starve, came up with an ingenious solution. They fashioned spectacles out of green-tinted glass and wire and hooked them around the donkeys" ears. "The donkeys saw that the grain was green and happily ate it," explained Tun Lin. "That"s what we had to do during our years in Burma"s Animal Farm. The entire nation was forced to wear green spectacles just like those donkeys."

"Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.

"All these book collections . . . had one thing in common: they were gradually disappearing. Their pages were being glued together by damp and mildew. Pull any book from a shelf in Burma and it will be followed by a sprinking of powder-like dust, the work of white ants relentlessly munching their way through thousands of texts all around the country."

"Emma Larkin, Finding George Orwell In Burma, 2005.

"They went out into the glaring white sunlight. The heat rolled from the earth like the breath of an oven. The flowers, oppressive to the eyes, blazed with not a petal stirring, in a debauch of sun. The glare sent a weariness through one"s bones. There was something horrible in it"horrible to think of that blue, blinding sky, stretching on and on over Burma and India, over Siam, Cambodia, China, cloudless and inerminable."

"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.

"In the borders beside the path swaths of English flowers"phlox and larkspur, hollyhock and petunia"not yet slain by the sun, rioted in vast size and richness. The petunias were huge, like trees almost. There was no lawn, but instead a shrubbery of native trees and bushes"gold mohur trees like vast umbrellas of blood-red bloom, frangipanis with creamy, stalkless flowers, purple bougainvillea, scarlet hibiscus and the pink Chinese rose, bilious-green crotons, feathery fronds of tamarind. The clash of colours hurt one"s eyes in the glare."

"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.

"The merchandise was foreign-looking, queer and poor. There were vast pomelos hanging on strings like green moons, red bananas, baskets of heliotrope-colored prawns the size of lobsters, brittle dried fish ties in bundles, crimson chilis, ducks split open and cured ike hams, green coco-nuts, the larvae of the rhinoceros beetle, sections of sugar-cane, dahs, lacquered sandals, check silk longyis, aphrodisiacs in the form of large, soap-like pills, glazed earthenware jars four feet high, Chinese sweetmeats made of garlic and sugar, green and white cigars, purple brinjals, persimmon-seed necklaces, chickens cheeping in wicker cages, brass Buddhas, heart-shaped betel leaves, bottles of Kruschen salts, switches of false hair, red clay cooking-pots, steel shoes for bullocks, papier-mache marionettes, strips of alligator hide with magical properties. Elizabeth"s head was beginning to swim. At the other end of the bazaar the sun gleamed through a priest"s umbrella, blood-red, as though through the ear of a giant."

"George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.

"Fanquist was one of those take-a-second-look dames. You know what I mean, don"t you" An all-metal blonde with a build-up that does things to you, and a figure that weakens your resistance."

"James Hadley Chase, Get A Load Of This, 1942.

"The phone must have rung 15 times before Booker got out of the Jacuzzi, put on his green satin robe that matched the emerald pinned to his left earlobe and picked up the phone. Booker said: "Who"s this"" A woman"s voice said, "You sitting down"" The phone was on a table next to a green leather wingback chair. Booker loved green."

"Elmore Leonard, Freaky Deaky, 1988.

This weblog has inspired something interesting! After browsing through the color quotes that are semi-regularly posted here, Craig Conley, author of One Letter Words, A Dictionary, devised a set of rebus-like roll-over quotes which are difficult to describe but easy to experience. Click here to check out Colourful Allusions, vol. 1 at COLOURlovers.com.

"He looked very tired and at the same time enthusiastic, if the combination can be imagined. Red rimmed his eyes, blue shadowed his jaws, but he had a triumphant look on his face, the look of a man who has done his job well and expects a kind word."

"Cornell Woolrich, Dead On Her Feet, 1935.

"When [George] Scott entered [Shan] territory over a century ago . . . [l]ocal people drew maps for [him]. A few months before I had sat in a reading room at Cambridge University Library marvelling over some that had survived. They were as big as bed sheets, and thickly painted on rough paper or mould-speckled linen which crackled as I unfolded it. Some were quite beautiful. The rivers were painted ruby-red; the mountains, which were often given strange, curly peaks, were done in electric greens and purples; pagodas were painted gold. The maps were surreal, magical, like illustrations from a Dr Seuss book, yet utterly true to the wonder inspired by the real scenery now unfolding before me."

"Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma"In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.

"The country"s most famous comedian was a man called Zaganar. In 1990 he joked that he"d just bought a new colour television, but when he got it home and turned it on it only had two colours: green and orange. Zaganar, whose name means "tweezers", was poking fun at the endless airtime devoted to showing generals in uniforms making meritorious donations to orange-robed monks. He was arrested after the show, and spent the next five years in the notorious Insein Prison in Rangoon"s northern suburbs. (And yes, Insein is pronounced "Insane".)"

"Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma"In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.

"In the evening after dinner the whole family liked to bask in the flood of moonlight on the balcony of the house. The young night was pollinated with stars, and the full moon looked to me like a huge lollipop as it rose in the east over the purple hills and shed light on our unlit town. The nights of the full moon were magical for us, and filled us with excitement, for we were not brought up with electricity. The moonlight seemed to give a sort of warmth on a cold night and coolness on a hot night. It even seemed to heal sorrows and spiritual wounds."

"Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.

"When [Mindon] died without an obvious heir in 1878, one of his queens intrigued to raise to the throne one Thibaw, an insignificant son of the king"s who had spent most of his life in a Buddhist monastery. She and her supporters hoped to rule the country with Thibaw as a puppet. . . .

It had been an immemorial tradition when a new king succeeded for there to be a "purging of the realm according to custom""i.e. a massacre of the previous ruler"s kinsmen. Since Thibaw was distant from the throne, he had to kill eighty-three members of the royal family. The killings were spread over two days and were carried out by members of the Royal Guard. As was customary, the princesses were strangled while the princes were sewn into red velvet sacks and gently beaten to death with paddles"it being taboo to shed royal blood."

"Pascal Knoo Thwe, From the Land of Green Ghosts: A Burmese Odyssey, 2002.

"The lights of Philadelphia burn in oncoming night beyond. Everyone is going off to eat, there will be drinking in bars, and parties, and wild hilarities. And the football players, taking showers or combing their hair or being rubbed down by some consoling trainer, are thinking of the soft sweet girl awaiting them for the dance.

This was when Peter saw the joys of his college life"always on the Saturday night when the game was over and night spread it rewarding darkness over all."

"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

"As they sped downtown past 59th Street, they began to see pepole in multitudes, they began to see a sea of heads weaving underneath lights unlike the lights they had already seen. These lights were a blazing daytime in themselves, a magical universe of lights sparkling and throbbing with the intensity of a flash explosion. They were white like the hard white light of a blowtorch, they were the Great White Way itself."

"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

"It was Friday night. I was tooling home from the Mexican border in a light blue convertible and a dark blue mood."

"Ross Macdonald, The Singing Pigeon, 1953.

"I must have dozed for a few minutes. A dream rushed by the threshhold of my consciousness, making a gentle noise. Death was in the the dream. He drove a black Cadillac loaded with flowers."

"Ross Macdonald, The Singing Pigeon, 1953.

"Then, a golden mystery upheaved itself on the horizon, a beautiful winking wonder that blazed in the sun, of a shape that was neither Muslim dome nor Hindu temple-spire. It stood upon a green knoll, and below it were lines of warehouses, sheds, and mills. Under what new god, thought I, are we irrepressible English sitting now""

"Rudyard Kipling describing the Shwedagon Pagoda in From Sea to Sea and Other Sketches"Letters of Travel vol. 1, 1899.

"He had expected somehow that Washington would be a scene of great international excitement with diplomats, ambassadors, foreign generals rushing by with eager entourages towards some indistinct place in the city blazing with light, all a-murmur with rumors, great preparations, mighty pronouncements. But it was just a lot of soldiers and sailors and Marines passing in the dusk, and sad girls strolling, and birds singing in the park, and trolleys clanging mournfully across the lowering darkness, and the lights coming on. Something was lost and forgotten, like sunsets vanished, and old names and dust, and the remembrance of history books, Civil War songs, and brown daguerreotype portraits of dead families."

"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

"And then they lay back with their arms as pillows and looked up at the milky stars and talked.

"You look at those things long enough and you"re knocked out," said Buddy, staring astonishedly at the stars. "They"re so far off, you know""

"What do you expect!"

"I mean they"re so far, so far gone! Deep! You look up there long enough and it"s just like looking into a big hole, you"re afraid you"ll fall in it"like when you drink too much.""

"Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

''Yow!'

The boy's 'Yow!' echoes across the field like the sound of a horn. They build a snowman and riddle it with snowballs, and now dusk is coming and March sky is mad and lowering with angry, purple clouds. In a moment the sun is going to break through and flame in all the windows of Galloway, the mill windows will be a thousand red flambeaux, something will slant across the skies and over the river.

'Yow!''

'Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

'The streetlamp at the corner-store sways shadows in a big black dance, the store sign swings and creaks in the wind, leaves fly, apples thud to the ground in the orchards, the stars are blazing in the somber sky'everything is raw, smoky, and terrific.'

'Jack Kerouac, The Town and the City, 1950.

'. . . Oh say can you see in the dark you
observe Minerva nerveless in Nirvana because
Zeus rides reindeer thru Bethlehem's blue sky.
It's Buddha sits in Mary's belly waving Kuan
Yin's white hand at the Jang-tze that Mao sees,
tongue of Kali licking Krishna's soft blue lips.'

'Allen Ginsberg, Holy Ghost on the Nod over the Body of Bliss, 1966, from Collected Poems 1947'1997.

'Six women dancing together on a red stage naked
The leaves are green on all the trees in Paris now
I will be home in two months and look you in the eyes'

'Allen Ginsberg, Message, 1958, from Collected Poems 1947'1997.

'from 11 Great Colour Legends, at COLOURlovers.com. Click here for the whole article.

'[Neal] and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'At night in this part of the West the stars, as I had seen them in Wyoming, are big as Roman Candles and as lonely as the Prince who's lost his ancestral home and journeys across the spaces trying to find it again, and knows he never will.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'I was suddenly left with nothing in my hands but a handful of crazy stars.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away, blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary Potato Patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour and it would come streaming through Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'Great snowstorms overtook them. In Missouri, at night, Neal had to drive with his scarf-wrapped head stuck out the window with snowglasses that made him look like a monk peering into the manuscripts of the snow because the windshield was covered with an inch of ice.'

'Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll, 2007.

'More and more as I grow older I see the beautiful dream of life expanding till it is much more important than gray life itself'a dark, red dream the color of the cockatoo.'

'Jack Kerouac, Journal, July 4, 1949; quoted by John Leland in Why Kerouac Matters, 2007.

''So there was a old woman told my mammy once that if a woman showed her belly to the full moon after she had done caught, it would be a gal.''

'William Faulkner, Spotted Horses, 1940.

'The development of papyrus, a paperlike substrate for manuscripts, was a major step forward in Egyptian visual communications. . . . Eight different papyrus grades were made for uses ranging from royal proclamations to daily accounting. The finished sheets had an upper surface of horizontal fibers called the recto and a bottom surface of vertical fibers called the verso. The tallest papyrus sheets measured 49 centimeters (19 inches), and up to twenty sheets would be pasted together and rolled into a scroll, with the recto side facing inward. . . .'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

''The colours of life in youth and age appear different, as the face of nature in spring and winter.''

'Samuel Johnson, Rasselas, 1759.