blue quotes

The chic old blue-haired ladies†chew in mute chandeliered isolation.

-Truman Capote
Of elderly residents of the Ritz.  Answered Prayers (1986).

The blue ribbon of the turf.

- Benjamin, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield Disraeli
  Of the Derby race. Life of Lord George Bentinck, ch.26.

   In the house of words was a table of colors. They offered themselves in great fountains and each poet took the color he needed: lemon yellow or sun yellow, ocean blue or smoke blue, crimson red, blood red, wine red.

- Eduardo Galeano
The Book of Embraces.

   A Japanese young man, A blue and white young man, Francesca di Rimini, miminy, piminy, Je-ne-sais-quoi young man. 354

- Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck) Gilbert
Bunthorne and Grosvenor's duet, Patience, act 2.

The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush With richness.

-Gerard Manley Hopkins
  'Spring'.

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?

- A(lfred) E(dward) Housman
  A Shropshire Lad, no.40.

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams The blue Mediterranean, where he lay, Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay, And saw in sleep old palaces and towers Quivering within the wave's intenser day, All overgrown with azure moss and flowers So sweet, the sense faints picturing them.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  'Ode to theWestWind', l.29^36.

Higher still and higher From the earth thou springest Like a cloud of fire; The blue deep thou wingest And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest.

- Percy Bysshe Shelley
  'To a Skylark', stanza 2.

   Blue, darkly, deeply, beautifully blue. 805

- Robert Southey
  Madoc,'Lincoya', pt.1, canto 5,1.102.

And drowned in yonder living blue The lark become a sightless song.

-Tennyson
  In Memoriam A.H.H., canto115, l.7^8.

The new moon hangs like an ivory bugle In the naked frosty blue.

- (Philip) Edward Thomas
  'The PennyWhistle'.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.

-Vincent van Gogh
  Letter to EŁ   mile Bernard, Jun.

Had I the heavens'embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light, I would spread the cloths under your feet: But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

-W(illiam) B(utler) Yeats
  'HeWishes for the Cloths of Heaven', complete poem. Collected in TheWind Among the Reeds (1899).