Sad preacher nailed upon the coloured door of time

 "Beyond the shimmering forms of the graves the afternoon sky was empty, a pale colourless radiant void."

"... the sun went down towards the sea and the evening made the landward colours seethe with vividness and then faded them into a luminous blue midsummer dark."

-- Iris Murdoch, The Nice and the Good

"... I had paused at a courtyard of lemon-scented spotted gums (Corymbia citriodora), standing about like so many tall and elegant legs in shimmeringly worsted stockings of silver, blush, titanium, flaxen, and rose-gold." — Ashley Hay, "The Forest at the Edge of Time", Australian Book Review October 2015.

"The whole country was lighted by a searing light with the intensity many times that of the midday sun. It was golden, purple, violet, gray and blue. It lighted every peak, crevasse and ridge of the nearby mountain range with a clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined. It was that beauty the great poets dream about but describe most poorly and inadequately." — Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell

"It was so brilliant purple, with all the radioactive glowing." — Frank Oppenheimer

"... there was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green." — Isidor I. Rabi

(And Hiroshima: "The mushroom cloud itself was a spectacular sight, a bubbling mass of purple-gray smoke and you could see it has a red core in it and everything was burning inside..." — Staff Sergeant George Caron)

"After about ten minutes I was bashed in the eye by an emerald worm hanging like a jewel from a thread in the canopy, and it was then that I began to notice the butterflies: tiny lilac ones, yellow ones with polka dots and black wing tips, large ebony ones with a blaze of lime across the wing, iridescent ones as blue as lapis lazuli; huge chocolate ones with rows of butter dots, inky-blue ones, shimmering violet in the light, big ginger ones like flying biscuits, gargantuan swallowtails dipping and tumbling, and, my favourite, a velvety brown one smutted with red under-wings which it flashed like naughty knickers."
- Natacha Du Pont De Bie, Ant Egg Soup: The Adventures of a Food Tourist in Laos

"It was the floor which held Carson's gaze. The dull grey of the circular wall gave place here to a mosaic of varicoloured stone, in which blues and greens and purples predominated - indeed, there were none of the warmer colours. There must have been thousands of bits of coloured stone making up that pattern, for none was larger than a walnut. And the mosaic seemed to follow some definite pattern, unfamiliar to Carson; there were curves of purple and violet mingled with angled lines of green and blue, intertwining in fantastic arabesques. There were circles, triangles, a pentagram, and other, less familiar, figures. Most of the lines and figures radiated from a definite point: the centre of the chamber, where there was a circular disc of dead black stone perhaps two feet in diameter."
- Henry Kuttner, The Salem Horror

"Seigel put up a hotel-casino such as Las Vegas had never seen and called it the Flamingo... Everybody drove out on Route 91 just to gape... Such colors! All the new electrochemical pastels of the Florida littoral: tangerine, broiling magenta, livid pink, incarnadine, fuchsia demure, Congo ruby, methyl green, viridine, aquamarine, phenosafranine, incandescent orange, scarlet-fever purple, cyanic blue, tesselated bronze, hospital fruit-basket orange."

- Tom Wolfe, "Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can't Hear You! Too noisy) Las Vegas!!!" in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.