Fuchsia Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Fuchsia. Here they are! All 100 of them:

You’re here!” Isabelle danced up to them in delight, carrying a glass of fuchsia liquid, which she thrust at Clary. “Have some of this!” Clary squinted at it. “Is it going to turn me into a rodent?” “Where is the trust? I think it’s strawberry juice,” Isabelle said. “Anyways, it’s yummy. Jace?” She offered him the glass. “I am a man,” he told her, “and men do not consume pink beverages. Get thee gone, woman, and bring me something brown.” “Brown?” Isabelle made a face. “Brown is a manly color,” said Jace, and yanked on a stray lock of Isabelle’s hair with his free hand. “In fact, look – Alec is wearing it.” Alec looked mournfully down at his sweater. “It was black,” he said. “But then it faded.” “You could dress it up with a sequined headband,” Magnus suggested, offering his boyfriend something blue and sparkly. “Just a thought.” “Resist the urge, Alec.” Simon was sitting on the edge of a low wall with Maia beside him, though she appeared to be deep in conversation with Aline. “You’ll look like Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu.” “There are worse things,” Magnus observed.
Cassandra Clare (City of Glass (The Mortal Instruments, #3))
Threat Level Fuchsia. Fuchsia!
Charlie Cochet (Blood & Thunder (THIRDS, #2))
My father once nearly came to blows with a female dinner guest about whether a particular patch of embroidery was fuchsia or magenta. But the infinite gradations of color in a fine sunset - from salmon to canary to midnight blue - left him wordless.
Alison Bechdel (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic)
I believe the defining moment was when certain persons, who shall remain nameless, objected to my fuchsia silk striped waistcoat. I loved that waistcoat. I put my foot down, right then and there; I do not mind telling you!" To punctuate his deeply offended feelings, he stamped one silver-and-pearl-decorated high heel firmly. "No one tells me what I can and cannot wear!" He snapped up a lace fan from where it lay on a hall table and fanned himself vigorously with it for emphasis.
Gail Carriger (Soulless (Parasol Protectorate, #1))
The pup had peed on a Palm Springs golf course, ordered off the menu at Lazy Dog Café and sailed to Catalina Island dressed in a fuchsia bikini. Spoiled in style.
Nancy Mangano (Deadly Decisions)
She liked fuchsia better – a colour with personality.
Elif Shafak (10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World)
Sometimes you stand under the hot gush for so long, looking at your body, counting every bruise. Touching every tender place. Watching the swirl at your feet, the glitter spinning. Like a mermaid shedding her scales. You’re really just trying to get your heart to slow “down. You think, This is my body, and I can make it do things. I can make it spin, flip, fly. After, you stand in front of the steaming mirror, the fuchsia streaks gone, the lashes unsparkled. And it’s just you there, and you look like no one you’ve ever seen before. You don’t look like anybody at all.
Megan Abbott (Dare Me)
I want a big breakfast," said Fuchsia at last. "I want a lot to eat, I'm going to think today.
Mervyn Peake (The Gormenghast Novels (Gormenghast, #1-3))
She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor. The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground. One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.
Jess C. Scott (Jack in the Box)
But Fuchsia might as well have been carved from dark marble. Only her tears moved.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
There is a love that equals in its power the love of man for woman and reaches inwards as deeply. It is the love of a man or a woman for their world. For the world of their center where their lives burn genuinely and with a free flame. The love of the diver for his world of wavering light. His world of pearls and tendrils and his breath at his breast. Born as a plunger into the deeps he is at one with every swarm of lime-green fish, with every colored sponge. As he holds himself to the ocean's faery floor, one hand clasped to a bedded whale's rib, he is complete and infinite. Pulse, power and universe sway in his body. He is in love. The love of the painter standing alone and staring, staring at the great colored surface he is making. Standing with him in the room the rearing canvas stares back with tentative shapes halted in their growth, moving in a new rhythm from floor to ceiling. The twisted tubes, the fresh paint squeezed and smeared across the dry on his palette. The dust beneath the easel. The paint has edged along the brushes' handles. The white light in a northern sky is silent. The window gapes as he inhales his world. His world: a rented room, and turpentine. He moves towards his half-born. He is in Love. The rich soil crumbles through the yeoman's fingers. As the pearl diver murmurs, 'I am home' as he moves dimly in strange water-lights, and as the painter mutters, 'I am me' on his lone raft of floorboards, so the slow landsman on his acre'd marl - says with dark Fuchsia on her twisting staircase, 'I am home.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
And because I was six, I remember believing color was a kind of happiness—so I took the brightest shades in the crayon box and filled my sad cow with purple, orange, red, auburn, magenta, pewter, fuchsia, glittered grey, lime green.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
For in Mexico, ladies and gentlemen, it's always high noon and what glows is fuchsia and what's dead is dead and no feather-dusters.
Henry Miller (Black Spring)
I shall live alone. Always alone. In a house or a tree.' Fuchsia started to chew at a fresh grass blade. 'Someone will come then, if I live alone. Someone from another kind of world - a new world - not from this world, but someone who is different, and he will fall in love with me at once because I live alone and aren't like the other beastly things in this world, and he'll enjoy having me because of my pride.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
Memory in its ordinary way summoned harvested fields, and haycocks and autumn hedges, the first of the fuchsia, the last of the wild sweetpea. It brought the lowing of cattle, old donkeys resting, scampering dogs, and days and places.
William Trevor
But Ma says everyone deserves forgiveness. That's why if Ma was a color, she'd be pink with her sweetness. A tender flower, a bubbly pop of chewing gum, two scoops of strawberry ice cream. Silly in her girly ways, her color deepens with love, until she glows fuchsia - bright and bold, unstoppable. But when she is not fed the riches that life promises, Ma pales, reaming but a tint above white, a color aching in want." -Claudia
Tiffany D. Jackson (Monday's Not Coming)
My grip instinctively tightened around the toy, and I lifted my gaze in time to see Kai’s attention drift from my face to the fuchsia dildo with the agonizing speed of a slow-motion car crash. Silence engulfed the hall.
Ana Huang (King of Pride (Kings of Sin, #2))
She tossed her long hair and it flapped down her back like a pirate's flag. She stood in about as awkward a manner as could be concieved. Utterly un-feminine – no man couldd have invented it.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
We made it, baby. We’re riding in the back of the black limousine. They have lined the road to shout our names. They have faith in your golden hair & pressed grey suit. They have a good citizen in me. I love my country. I pretend nothing is wrong. I pretend not to see the man & his blond daughter diving for cover, that you’re not saying my name & it’s not coming out like a slaughterhouse. I’m not Jackie O yet & there isn’t a hole in your head, a brief rainbow through a mist of rust. I love my country but who am I kidding? I’m holding your still-hot thoughts in, darling, my sweet, sweet Jack. I’m reaching across the trunk for a shard of your memory, the one where we kiss & the nation glitters. Your slumped back. Your hand letting go. You’re all over the seat now, deepening my fuchsia dress. But I’m a good citizen, surrounded by Jesus & ambulances. I love this country. The twisted faces. My country. The blue sky. Black limousine. My one white glove glistening pink—with all our American dreams.
Ocean Vuong (Night Sky with Exit Wounds)
I hate things! I hate all things! I hate and hate every single tiniest thing. I hate the world.” said Fuchsia aloud, raising herself on her elbows, her face to the sky. “I shall live alone. Always alone. In a house, or in a tree.” Fuchsia started to chew at a fresh grass blade. “Someone will come then, if I live alone. Someone from another kind of world - a new world - not from this world, but someone who is different, and he will fall in love with me at once because I live alone and aren’t like the other beastly things in this world, and he’ll enjoy having me because of my pride.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
More than the fuchsia fennels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor's almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it's the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world's baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I'll take it, the trees seem to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I'll take it all.
Ada Limon (The Carrying)
I paid the taxi driver, got out with my suitcase, surveyed my surroundings, and just as I was turning to ask the driver something or get back into the taxi and return forthwith to Chillán and then to Santiago, it sped off without warning, as if the somewhat ominous solitude of the place had unleashed atavistic fears in the driver's mind. For a moment I too was afraid. I must have been a sorry sight standing there helplessly with my suitcase from the seminary, holding a copy of Farewell's Anthology in one hand. Some birds flew out from behind a clump of trees. They seemed to be screaming the name of that forsaken village, Querquén, but they also seemed to be enquiring who: quién, quién, quién. I said a hasty prayer and headed for a wooden bench, there to recover a composure more in keeping with what I was, or what at the time I considered myself to be. Our Lady, do not abandon your servant, I murmured, while the black birds, about twenty-five centimetres in length, cried quién, quién, quién. Our Lady of Lourdes, do not abandon your poor priest, I murmured, while other birds, about ten centimetres long, brown in colour, or brownish, rather, with white breasts, called out, but not as loudly, quién, quién, quién, Our Lady of Suffering, Our Lady of Insight, Our Lady of Poetry, do not leave your devoted subject at the mercy of the elements, I murmured, while several tiny birds, magenta, black, fuchsia, yellow and blue in colour, wailed quién, quién, quién, at which point a cold wind sprang up suddenly, chilling me to the bone.
Roberto Bolaño (By Night in Chile)
Somebody put a Fascist Toejam cassette, 300 watts of sonic apocalypse, on to the van stereo, Isaiah gallantly handed Prairie up into the lurid fuchsia padding of this rolling orgy room, where she became indistinct among an unreadable pattern of Vomitones and their girlfriends, and quickly, in an arc unexpectedly graceful, they had all turned outward, tached up, engaged, and like a time machine departing for the future, forever too soon for Zoyd, boomed away up the thin, cloudpressed lane.
Thomas Pynchon (Vineland)
When I was little, my granny trained me to say, 'My colors are blush and bashful,' which was adorably cheesy and from Steel Magnolias, of course. Now my colors are more like fuchsia, sunset, and blush, but I've remained a clichéd pink girl for life." Cassie fingered a piece of linen best described as bubblegum pink. "I've avoided Pepto-Bismol at least, so that's a win, right?
Mary Hollis Huddleston (Without a Hitch)
The gorse was in bloom, the fuchsia hedges were already budding; wild green hills, mounds of peat; yes, Ireland is green, very green, but its green is not only the green of meadows, it is the green of moss - certainly here, beyond Roscommon, toward County Mayo - and Moss is the plant of resignation, of forsakenenness. The country is forsaken, it is being slowly but steadily depopulated...
Heinrich Böll
But usually not. Usually she thinks of the path to his house, whether deer had eaten the tops of the fiddleheads, why they don't eat the peppermint saprophytes sprouting along the creek; or she visualizes the approach to the cabin, its large windows, the fuchsias in front of it where Anna's hummingbirds always hover with dirty green plumage and jeweled throats. Sometimes she thinks about her dream, the one in which her mother wakes up with no hands. The cabin smells of oil paint, but also of pine. The painter's touch is sexual and not sexual, as she herself is....When the memory of that time came to her, it was touched by strangeness because it formed no pattern with the other events in her life. It lay in her memory like one piece of broken tile, salmon-coloured or the deep green of wet leaves, beautiful in itself but unusable in the design she was making
Robert Hass (Human Wishes (American Poetry Series))
Watch the road! Don’t look at me, look at the road. Except it’s not really a road. It’s a track. What are these damn bushes, and why are they here?” “It’s fuchsia. Lovely, aren’t they?” They made her think of blood spatter, possibly resulting from a massacre by a battalion of farm animals.
J.D. Robb
If there's anything that still connects me to God, it's color. I've yet to find a man-made color that wasn't first displayed in creation. From the deep fuchsia of a bougainvillea to the shocking chartreuse of the moss that clings to the rocks and trees in the damp coastal mountain range, all are unique to God's imagination. I've seen starfish donning brilliant neon orange and regal purple and wildflowers in every hue of the color wheel. We cannot out create Him.
Ginny L. Yttrup (Words)
When the sun grew hot, they returned indoors where they continued to float through their lives like a pair of astronauts, defying gravity, limited only by the outer walls of their fuchsia spaceship with its pale pistachio doors. It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans. Anjum waited to die. Saddam waited to kill.
Arundhati Roy (The Ministry of Utmost Happiness)
His mind had been working away behind his high forehead. Unimaginative himself he could recognize imagination in her: he had come upon one whose whole nature was the contradiction of his own. He knew that behind her simplicity was something he could never have. Something he despised as impractical. Something which would never carry her to power or riches, but would retard her progress and keep her apart in a world of her own make-believe. To win her favour he must talk in her own language.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
Ah." He paused. "I see where this is going. You want to know my secret pain." "Secret pain?" "Oh, yes. My inner demons. The dark current of torment washing away little grains of my soul. That's what you're after. You think that if you keep me here in your pretty castle and cosset me with sixteen pillows, I'll learn to love myself and cease submitting my body to such horrific abuse." Clio bit her lip, grateful it was too dark for him to see her blush. If she'd been flamingo pink the other day, she must be fuchsia now. "I don't know where you get these ideas." He chuckled. "From every woman I've ever met. You're not the first to try it, and you won't be the last.
Tessa Dare (Say Yes to the Marquess (Castles Ever After, #2))
Friday beneath the sky, its little postcards of melancholy Outside each window, the engines inside the roses at half speed, The huge page of the sea with its one word despair, Fuchsia blossoms littered across the deck, Unblotted tide pools of darkness beneath the ferns … And still I go on looking, match after match in the black air.
Charles Wright (The Southern Cross)
What we eat is an essential part of who we are and how we define ourselves.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
Forked sundew, I die if neglected. Harlequin fuchsia, cure and relief. Wedding bush, constancy.
Holly Ringland (The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart)
She missed the evenings most of all: the grapefruit sun hovering above the prairie, dismissing the day with unpredictable strokes of cantaloupe, fuchsia, and violet.
Emily Habeck (Shark Heart)
It should have raised, if not a red flag, a fuchsia streamer
Brandon Sanderson (Tress of the Emerald Sea)
She traced a finger over a splotch of fuchsia silk on her dress. All those books, with no one to read them.
Sarah J. Maas
They spent the day with Lucia, who promised that the following day she would take them up to Scala, an even tinier, loftier town where her parents now lived. That evening, Mac took her to a restaurant called Il Flauto di Pan- Pan's Flute- perched at the Villa Cimbrone among the gardens and crumbling walls. It was probably the most beautiful restaurant she'd ever seen. The centuries-old villa was embellished with incredible gardens of fuchsia bougainvillea, lemon and cypress trees and flowering herbs that scented the air. Their veranda table had an impossibly gorgeous view of the sea.
Susan Wiggs (The Beekeeper's Ball (Bella Vista Chronicles, #2))
At Loch Mor we walked down a spongy hill to a valley. The sun was dropping then dropped, leaving a sky of frilly reds. The moon appeared too soon. The valley sloped around a teardrop-shaped lake, pink with the bizarre fuchsia bursts of the late-coming sunset. Violet heather bruised the green weedy ground as we jumped down. This was a place conceived in a burst of emotion by a melancholy boy.
Dave Eggers
As his lord stared at the door another figure appeared, a girl of about fifteen with long, rather wild black hair. She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich – her eyes smouldered.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to retie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened herself she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
Learning another cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or dishes, without system or structure.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
there came from the olive groves outside the fuchsia hedge the incessant shimmering cries of the cicadas. If the curious, blurring heat haze produced a sound, it would be exactly the strange, chiming cries of these insects.
Gerald Durrell (My Family and Other Animals (Corfu Trilogy #1))
Dreams were shooting stars streaked fuchsia across bruised, sunset skies, and people didn't move so much as swirl into existence toward him, and music lived under his skin. It wasn't exactly normal, but it was what he'd grown used to.
Talia Hibbert (Get a Life, Chloe Brown (The Brown Sisters, #1))
The emotional, loving, moody child had small chance of developing into a happy woman. Had she as a girl been naturally joyus yet all that had befallen her must surely have driven away the bright birds, one by one, from her breast. As it was, made of more sombre clay, capable of deep happiness, but more easily drawn to the dark than the light, Fuchsia was even more open to the cruel winds of circumstance which appeared to have singled her out for particular punishment.
Mervyn Peake
You have a fuchsia heart. And a fuchsia heart doesn't die, it simply bides its time, taking a backseat to pragmatism, all while leaking helpless drops of color here and there. Hence, teal gables, turquoise earrings, and saffron scarves.
Barbara Delinsky (Not My Daughter)
First, I see her catch the scent. It's a combination of many things; the Christmas tree in the corner; the musty aroma of old house; orange and clove; ground coffee; hot milk; patchouli; cinnamon- and chocolate, of course; intoxicating, rich as Croesus, dark as death. She looks around, sees wall hangings, pictures, bells, ornaments, a dollhouse in the window, rugs on the floor- all in chrome yellow and fuchsia-pink and scarlet and gold and green and white. It's like an opium den in here, she almost says, then wonders at herself for being so fanciful. In fact she has never seen an opium den- unless it was in the pages of the Arabian Nights- but there's something about the place, she thinks. Something almost- magical.
Joanne Harris (The Girl with No Shadow (Chocolat, #2))
They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope.
Sebastian Barry (Annie Dunne (Dunne Family #2))
Teddy was reminded of Paterson, but that polyglot population had appeared healthier, more hopeful, the American mood more fertile then in its promises, and the streets of Silk City with their little yards holding a fuchsia bush or a blue-robed plaster statue of the Virgin more livable than these stacked, stinking, ill-lit dens. He had been a part of the population then, a schoolboy immersed in its details of competition and expectation and childish collusion and hierarchy, alive in its struggle and too absorbed to judge or pity, whereas now he came upon it from outside, from above, as an agent of power and ownership, an enforcer and avenger, the representative of the system which squeezed the lowly by the same iron laws whereby it generation profits for the lucky and strong.
John Updike (In the Beauty of the Lilies)
I smiled as our hands pressed against one another in midair, as though we were pretending to touch through invisible glass. We managed a long stare before Jack finally blushed, retracting his hands. “How old are you, Jack Patrick?” “I turned fourteen this summer,” he said. I gave an impressed nod, indicating this was no small accomplishment. “Well you’re certainly old enough to know what you like.” Principal Deegan’s first-day speech came back to mind; I had to bite my lip not to jokingly add in, Am I right? “Here, let me give you some examples. Do you like it when girls wear lipstick?” He blushed and nodded. “Yeah.” His voice had an embarrassed tone, like he’d just made a vile confession. “Good—do you like lighter lipstick? Darker lipstick? Red?” I wanted to grab his hand again. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to slide my fingers beneath the desk and touch the bare skin of his leg. “Um,” he said. His hand began to scratch at his scalp. “Wait,” I said. “I have an idea.” I walked up to my desk and grabbed my purse and a box of Kleenex. “So what I’m wearing now is called fuchsia. Kind of a bright pink.” I sat and wiped it off, then took the fuchsia tube of lipstick out of my purse along with two others. “Okay, ready?” He nodded with sudden animation—we were about to play a game.
Alissa Nutting (Tampa)
Did he put hands on you?” “Not quite. I think that was going to be next, but O’Brian drew him off. Before that, Clifton got pissy I wasn’t telling him whatever he wanted to know and accused me of being an ass kisser. I responded that I have yet to have the privilege of kissing your ass, which I rate as the best—female variety—in the department.” “That sounds like a pucker-up to me.” Peabody snorted. “It was worth it. He went all puce. Or is it fuchsia? Which is the weird name that means hot pink?” “I have no idea, nor want one.
J.D. Robb (Promises in Death (In Death, #28))
Rebecca and I walk through the saltwater exhibits, where fish congregate in bright splashes like kites against an open sky. They come in the most incredible colors; I have always been amazed by this. What is the point of being fuchsia, or lemon, or violet, when you are stuck under the water where no one can see you?
Jodi Picoult (Songs of the Humpback Whale)
From time to time, a series of soft thumps on the back porch were not evidence of a prowler, merely one of the rocking chairs as a gust of wind bumped it against the house. And the hanging basket of trailing fuchsia swung back and forth, the friction of chain link on hook raising a creak-croak that might have been a hacksaw determinedly chewing through something as hard as bone.
Dean Koontz (Devoted)
But other creatures of the desert do seem to apprehend what is happening. Through the crosshairs of its huge pupils, a tarantula watches Angie’s skin drink in the danger: the pollen from the Joshua mixes with the red blood on her finger. On a fuchsia ledge of limestone, a dozen lizards witness the Leap. They shut their gluey eyes as one, sealing their lucent bodies from contagion, inter-kingdom corruption.
Joe Hill (The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 (The Best American Series))
...Everything's all swish and swanky. It's horrible. And what's with all this pink rubbish you've got strewn around the place?' My aunt held up between her thumb and forefinger the pink cushion she'd been leaning on, as if handling something unspeakably repulsive. 'Pink maximizes your romantic potential!' I cried. My aunt had succeeded in striking a nerve. I clenched my fists tight to hide my fuchsia-painted nails.
Aoko Matsuda (Where the Wild Ladies Are)
As she begins to roll a joint, 1 look over to the fuchsia bushes and keep my attention there, not on the imperfect way she wears the bikini. Too big in places, and too small in others, and yet she wears it so defiantly that it suits her, like it's supposed to fit wrong. Parts of her are burning in the sun; I will not look. The pride, the nonchalance, the honesty of her body. I could never invite imperfection this way. How well she wears it.
Chloe Michelle Howarth (Sunburn)
The villa that Spiro had found was shaped not unlike a brick and was a bright crushed-strawberry pink with green shutters. It crouched in a cathedral-like grove of olives that sloped down the hillside to the sea, and it was surrounded by a pocket-handkerchief-size garden, the flower-beds laid out with a geometrical accuracy so dear to the Victorians, and the whole thing guarded by a tall, thick hedge of fuchsias that rustled mysteriously with birds.
Gerald Durrell (My Family and Other Animals (Corfu Trilogy #1))
The shade of the sky changed ever so slightly in her peripheral vision. She raised her eyes from her toes to the horizon, to witness the sun’s last dance in the daylight as it began to descend slowly, magically into the distant sea. Exotic pastel hues of orange and fuchsia were now painted across the fading expression of the day. It was a calm yet isolating vision to take into her heart, for it made her feel exceedingly small in the grand scheme of things.
Kim Cormack (Enlightenment)
In England we agonised over the demolition of every old shack; in Sichuan, they just went ahead and flattened whole cities! You had to admire the brazen confidence of it, the conviction that the future would be better than the past.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China)
Letters blend to give rise to words  Like colors pave way for the birth of million shades! Evanescence reminisces sepia! Memory takes back to black and white! Music pops hot pink! Dance rocks wine red! Marvelous is miraculous as the indigo! Magnificent is magnanimous like Russian red! Splendid is classy like arctic blue! Resplendent inspires like  strawberry pink! Flamboyance is flowery like fuchsia! Flawless is perfect like flamingo! Extraordinary stands out like lime yellow! Peculiar is unique like cyan! Pleasant pleases like periwinkle! Soothing soothes like lemonade! Opulent glitters gold! Spectacular shimmers silver! Nice is as mild as dulce de leche! Attractive dazzles onyx! Powerful is headstrong like tangerine! Puissance stupefies like scarlet red! Mellifluence is dissolving, like lavender! Sonorous sounds magenta! Lovely cutely blushes! Sweet is peachy! Richness is wealthy like lush green! Poverty is brown as in flower wilt! Candid is frank as candy red! Altruism is selfless like parmesan! But, BEAUTY IS IRIDESCENT! Which
Sivaranjini Senthilvel (Poesy passel!: Painted by an 18 year old's word palette...)
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality: we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surrounding, the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute - or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things - if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused lea age of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those severely regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory - that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and colour, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.
George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss)
Fuchsia took three paces forward in the first of the attics and then paused a moment to re-tie a string above her knee. Over her head vague rafters loomed and while she straightened her-self she noticed them and unconsciously loved them. This was the lumber room. Though very long and lofty it looked relatively smaller than it was, for the fantastic piles of every imaginable kind of thing, from the great organ to the lost and painted head of a broken toy lion that must one day have been the plaything of one of Fuchsia's ancestors, spread from every wall until only an avenue was left to the adjacent room. This high, narrow avenue wound down the centre of the first attic before suddenly turning at a sharp angle to the right. The fact that this room was filled with lumber did not mean that she ignored it and used it only as a place of transit. Oh no, for it was here that many long afternoons had been spent as she crawled deep into the recesses and found for herself many a strange cavern among the incongruous relics of the past. She knew of ways through the centre of what appeared to be hills of furniture, boxes, musical instruments and toys, kites, pictures, bamboo armour and helmets, flags and relics of every kind, as an Indian knows his green and secret trail. Within reach of her hand the hide and head of a skinned baboon hung dustily over a broken drum that rose above the dim ranges of this attic medley. Huge and impregnable they looked in the warm still half-light, but Fuchsia, had she wished to, could have disappeared awkwardly but very suddenly into these fantastic mountains, reached their centre and lain down upon an ancient couch with a picture book at her elbow and been entirely lost to view within a few moments.
Mervyn Peake (The Gormenghast Novels (Gormenghast, #1-3))
Cleo was like those little bluebirds of happiness in Cinderella, flitting around until Natalie had been transformed into a princess. A fraudulent one, to be sure, but a princess nonetheless. The silk dress from her mother's closet had been transformed into a couture masterpiece by the sartorial skills of Cleo's talented aunt. The sheath now fit like an extremely flattering glove. Its color, and the bright handwork accents, echoed the colors of the precious vase---jade green, turquoise, marigold, and fuchsia with veins of cobalt blue. She paired it with the gold-heeled sandals, the vintage watch, and a gold snake belt borrowed from Cleo.
Susan Wiggs (The Lost and Found Bookshop (Bella Vista Chronicles, #3))
it takes several years of quite dedicated Chinese eating, in my experience, to begin to appreciate texture for itself. And that is what you must do if you wish to become a Chinese gourmet, because many of the grandest Chinese delicacies, not to mention many of the most exquisite pleasures of everyday Chinese eating, are essentially about texture.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China)
She was gauche in movement and in a sense, ugly of face, but with how small a twist might she not suddenly have become beautiful. Her sullen mouth was full and rich — her eyes smouldered. A yellow scarf hung loosely around her neck. Her shapeless dress was a flaming red. For all the straightness of her back she walked with a slouch. "Come here," said Lord Groan as she was about to pass him and the doctor. "Yes father," she said huskily. "Where have you been for the last fortnight, Fuchsia?" "Oh, here and there, father," she said, staring at her shoes. She tossed her long hair and it flapped down her back like a pirate's flag. She stood in about as awkward a manner as could be conceived. Utterly unfeminine — no man could have invented it.
Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan (Gormenghast, #1))
Think, for a moment, of the words we use to describe some of the textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy, crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are picking lettuce
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China)
Oliver was able to get most of the paint off the floor by using the plastic putty knife, but the carpets and armchair cover did not fare so well: even after all the blotting, they still had large spots of pinkish hues. Everyone crossed their fingers that the color would fade once everything had dried. It was at that point that Papa brought Mama downstairs to examine the fuchsia paint job. The Vanderbeekers gathered around and waited for the verdict. “It’s terrible,” Mama finally said. “We can’t keep it like this.” She exchanged glances with Papa, then murmured, “I think we need to dip into the Fiver Account.” “Not the Fiver Account!” Papa whispered in horror. “What’s the Fiver Account?” Laney asked. She had really good ears. Mama and Papa looked at each other for a long moment; then Mama finally said, “For the past two years, we’ve been putting any five-dollar bills we get into a can we nailed into the corner of our
Karina Yan Glaser (The Vanderbeekers to the Rescue)
Sichuan pepper is the original Chinese pepper, used long before the more familiar black or white pepper stole in over the tortuous land routes of the old Silk Road. It is not hot to taste, like the chilli, but makes your lips cool and tingly. In Chinese they call it ma, this sensation; the same word is used for pins-and-needles and anaesthesia. The strange, fizzing effect of Sichuan pepper, paired with the heat of chillies, is one of the hallmarks of modern Sichuanese cookery. The
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
If we want to experience the glory of God in our lives continually, we will always need to be seekers of His presence. Have we experienced the presence of God in certain places or through particular devotional and worship patterns? Are we expecting always to find our Beloved there? If we are sensing a lack of His presence, it may be that He wants us to seek Him in new ways or with greater intensity. Seeking Him reveals our true desire for His glory. Perhaps He hides Himself simply so that He can take delight in our desire for Him. Many
Fuchsia T. Pickett (Placed In His Glory: God Invites You to Experience Him in Untold Intimacy and Splendor)
And the sound of my own washer and dryer interfered with my sleep. So I just threw away my dirty underpants. All the old pairs reminded me of Trevor, anyway. For a while, tacky lingerie from Victoria’s Secret kept showing up in the mail—frilly fuchsia and lime green thongs and teddies and baby-doll nightgowns, each sealed in a clear plastic Baggie. I stuffed the little Baggies into the closet and went commando. An occasional package from Barneys or Saks provided me with men’s pajamas and other things I couldn’t remember ordering—cashmere socks, graphic T-shirts, designer jeans. I took a shower once a week at most. I stopped tweezing, stopped bleaching, stopped waxing, stopped brushing my hair. No moisturizing or exfoliating. No shaving. I left the apartment infrequently. I had all my bills on automatic payment plans. I’d already paid a year of property taxes on my apartment and on my dead parents’ old house upstate. Rent money from the tenants in that house showed up in my checking account by direct deposit every month. Unemployment was rolling in as long as I made the weekly call into the automated service and pressed “1” for “yes” when the robot asked if I’d made a sincere effort to find a job.
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labor of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs. Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it; and is not the striving after something better and better in our surroundings the grand characteristic that distinguishes man from the brute, or, to satisfy a scrupulous accuracy of definition, that distinguishes the British man from the foreign brute? But heaven knows where that striving might lead us, if our affections had not a trick of twining round those old inferior things; if the loves and sanctities of our life had no deep immovable roots in memory. One's delight in an elderberry bush overhanging the confused leafage of a hedgerow bank, as a more gladdening sight than the finest cistus or fuchsia spreading itself on the softest undulating turf, is an entirely unjustifiable preference to a nursery-gardener, or to any of those regulated minds who are free from the weakness of any attachment that does not rest on a demonstrable superiority of qualities. And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory; that it is no novelty in my life, speaking to me merely through my present sensibilities to form and color, but the long companion of my existence, that wove itself into my joys when joys were vivid.
George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss [with Biographical Introduction])
Every few months or so at home, Pops had to have Taiwanese ’Mian. Not the Dan-Dan Mian you get at Szechuan restaurants or in Fuchsia Dunlop’s book, but Taiwanese Dan-Dan. The trademark of ours is the use of clear pork bone stock, sesame paste, and crushed peanuts on top. You can add chili oil if you want, but I take it clean because when done right, you taste the essence of pork and the bitterness of sesame paste; the texture is somewhere between soup and ragout. Creamy, smooth, and still soupy. A little za cai (pickled radish) on top, chopped scallions, and you’re done. I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship. Did this old man invent Dan-Dan Mian? No. But did he perfect it with techniques and standards never before seen? Absolutely. He took a dish people were making in homes, made it better than anyone else, put it on front street, and established a standard. That’s professional cooking. To take something that already speaks to us, do it at the highest level, and force everyone else to step up, too. Food at its best uplifts the whole community, makes everyone rise to its standard. That’s what that Dan-Dan Mian did. If I had the honor of cooking my father’s last meal, I wouldn’t think twice. Dan-Dan Mian with a bullet, no question.
Eddie Huang (Fresh Off the Boat)
Overall look: Soft and delicate   Hair: Most often blonde or golden grey   Skintone: Light, ivory to soft beige, peachy tones. Very little contrast between hair and skin   Eyes: Blue, blue-green, aqua, light green IF you are a Light Spring you should avoid dark and dusty colors, which would make you look pale, tired and even pathetic. Spring women who need to look strong, for example chairing a meeting, can do so by wearing mid-tone grey or light navy, not deeper shades. If you are a Light Spring and you wear too much contrast, say a light blouse and dark jacket, or a dress with lots of bold colors against a white background, you ‘disappear’ because our eye is drawn to the colors you are wearing. See your Light Spring palette opposite. Your neutrals can be worn singly or mixed with others in a print or weave. The ivory, camel and blue-greys are good investment shades that will work with any others in your palette. Your best pinks will be warm—see the peaches, corals and apricots—but also rose pink. Never go as far as fuchsia, which is too strong and would drain all the life from your skin. Periwinkle blue toned with a light blue blouse is a smart, striking alternative to navy and white for work. Why wear black in the evening when you will sparkle in violet (also, warm pink and emerald turquoise will turn heads)? For leisure wear, team camel with clear bright red or khaki with salmon.   Make-Up Tips Foundation: Ivory, porcelain Lipstick: Peach, salmon, coral, clear red Blush: Salmon, peach Eyeshadow for blue eyes: Highlighter Champagne, melon, apricot, soft pink Contour Soft grey, violet, teal blue, soft blues, cocoa Eyeshadow for blue-green and aqua eyes: Highlighter Apricot, lemon, champagne Contour Cocoa or honey brown, spruce or moss green, teal blue Eyeshadow for green eyes: Highlighter Pale aqua, apricot, champagne Contour Cocoa or honey brown, teal blue, violet, spruce.
Mary Spillane (Color Me Beautiful's Looking Your Best: Color, Makeup and Style)
That is Andrema, the lyricist- the lover- he whose quill would pulse as he wrote and fill with a blush of blue, like a bruised nail. His verses, Fuschia, his verses open out like flowers of glass, and at their centre, between the brittle petals lies a pool of indigo, translucent and as huge as doom. His voice is unmuffled- it is like a bell, clearly ringing in the night of our confusions; but the clarity of imponderable depth- depth- so that his lines float on for evermore, Fuchsia- on and on, for evermore.
Mervyn Peake (The Gormenghast Novels (Gormenghast, #1-3))
In cooking as with love, it's not easy to ensure that both ingredients reach their climaxes of perfection simultaneously.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food)
The honey-and-thyme ice cream was a hit, and so was the pastis sorbet. We decided we needed to change the name of our ras-el-hanout ice cream with grilled almonds. Even the adults wrinkled their noses at the idea of couscous-spice ice cream, but everyone loved it when it was called One Thousand and One Nights. The kids were attracted to the bright colors, so in addition to the strawberry sorbet (Gwendal was right), we had a lot of takers for our fuchsia beetroot sorbet.
Elizabeth Bard (Picnic in Provence: A Memoir with Recipes)
Fuchsia Deer
Daniel Kualo (Villagers Companion Guide : for Animal Crossing New Horizons (Animal Crossing New Horizons Guides))
Meg quickened her pace when she saw a meadow peek out over the next hilltop. As she got closer, the sun seemed to pull away from the clouds and the grass under her feet turned a bright green. She heard definite sounds of a party in the distance and quickened her pace. The air started to smell sweeter. Were those apricots she smelled? Or figs? And there were trees again! She hadn't realized how much she missed them till she saw them growing there along the path. They had perfect little green leaves and flowers budding on branches. And at the side of the road was a woman kneeling over a garden tending to a bed of hydrangeas blooming in rich fuchsias, blues, and whites. "Those are gorgeous!" Meg said in surprise. They were the most colorful things she'd seen in the Underworld and the vibrancy warmed her heart for a moment. "I can't believe anything like that grows down here!" The woman looked up at her and smiled, her eyes dark yet warm. "Thanks. I wasn't sure if it was possible myself, but with deep rooting and some good soil, it seems anything is." "You planted these?" Meg said in awe. The woman looked pleased as she glanced at the colorful beds of blooms in the nearby meadows. "You could say that. I love the drama of it all- the seeds being sown, the elements working for and against them, the flower erupting against all odds, then the death of the bloom. So much more exciting than my old life.
Jen Calonita (Go the Distance)
The morning of the next day opened drearily, the sun appearing only after protracted periods of half-light, and then only as a pale paper disc, more like the moon than itself, as, for a few moments at a time it floated across some corridor of cloud. Slow, lack-lustre veils descended with almost imperceptible motion over Gormenghast, blurring its countless windows, as with a dripping smoke. The mountain appeared and disappeared a score of times during the morning as the drifts obscured it or lifted from its sides. As the day advanced the gauzes thinned, and it was in the late afternoon that the clouds finally dispersed to leave in their place an expanse of translucence, that stain, chill and secret, in the throat of a lily, a sky so peerless, that as Fuchsia stared into its glacid depths she began unwittingly to break and re-break the flower-stem in her hands.
Mervyn Peake (The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy)
She has planted all the hummers’ favorites here: tubular red and yellow columbine, tall hollyhock, crimson fuchsias and salvias, orange lion’s mane, dainty coral bells, penstemon, sticky monkey, gooseberry, and currant.
Sy Montgomery (The Hummingbirds' Gift: Wonder, Beauty, and Renewal on Wings)
A successful dish, as my cooking school teachers always used to say, must hit all the targets of se, xiang, wei, xing – colour, fragrance, flavour and form. It should first delight the eyes with its beauty, then the nose with its scent, the tongue with its tastes and the palate with its material qualities. Kougan – literally 'mouthfeel' – is an essential part of the enjoyment of eating, which is an all-embracing sensory experience.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food)
A Chinese chef can look at an initially unattractive item like a jellyfish and ask: what can I do with this? What are its downsides and what are its potential assets? Clearly, it is colourless, almost invisible and, aside from an edge of unattractive fishiness, virtually without flavour. But what does it have going for it? Perhaps its brisk, slippery mouthfeel – something anyone Chinese would enjoy. The question then becomes: how can I compensate for its deficiencies and make the most of its assets? With jellyfish, the answer usually is to clean it thoroughly, dispelling any hint of unpleasant fishiness, preserve its vibrant texture, and prepare it with accompanying ingredients that provide what it lacks: salt and sesame oil or vinegar for flavour, slivered cucumber or spring onions, perhaps, for colour. And lo – something overlooked by every other food culture in the world becomes a delectable salad. The same dispassionate, analytical approach can be applied to anything.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food)
Appetite for food and sex is human nature, shi se xing ye,' as the philosopher Gaozi said. Or, as the popular saying derived from the Book of Rites puts it: 'Eat, drink, man, woman' (yin shi nan nü). We are all animals, blessed with tongues, stomachs and sexual desires, in need of comfort and affection.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food)
PAUL: You're blushing. HILDY: I am not. PAUL: Yeah, right. You're just naturally fuchsia.
Vicki Grant (36 Questions That Changed My Mind About You)
was pink. Hot pink, baby pink, fuchsia – you name it. To some degree I was trying to use the colour as a statement of femininity. It’s crazy to think that I, of all people, fell into this stereotypical trap. At this stage I was trying everything out, and I guess I didn’t have the luxury of going mad for pink as a little girl.
Rhyannon Styles (The New Girl: A Trans Girl Tells It Like It Is)
I am alone', she said, her chin in her hands and her elbows on the sill. 'I am quite alone, like I enjoy it. Now I can think for there's no one to provoke me here. Not in my room. No one to tell me what I ought to do because I'm a Lady. Oh no. I do just what I like here. Fuchsia is quite alright here. None of them knows where I go to. Flay doesn't know. Father doesn't know. Mother doesn't know. None of them knows. Even Nannie doesn't know. Only I know. I know where I go, I go here. This is where I go.
Mervyn Peake (The Gormenghast Novels (Gormenghast, #1-3))
The glare of the green landscape and the air, the air that was everywhere, in us and making way for us, and we rode and were aware only of each other and ourselves for those couple of miles, and for those couple of miles I was myself, back in the neighborhood of Chacarita, where I moved with my mom after we realized my dad was never going to move out first, that we would have to leave him, and I saw on either side of me the big ugly high-rises and squat goldenrod houses and fuchsia and blue and inscrutable notes scrawled on the walls, graffiti intermingling with the shimmering, shadowing little leaves of the tipas, and as I rode I slowed at the oleander at Facultad de Medicina, those delicate pink flowers that rose over the fence in utter opulence and the lush stiff leaves that reached out through the bars that were freshly painted bright green. Then there it was: the Great Mamamushi. I slowed, and Freddie slowed. We parked our bikes. I was out of breath and all the air on Earth was in my blood, and we kissed again, and I turned around, and he put his arms around my waist, and I leaned into him, and we beheld it: a tree that was almost too much to be true, that truly was incredible, with its trunk that was almost eight meters around, a staggering circumference, glittered over by dragonflies, heavy, petite, iridescent incarnations of Irena's genius, when suddenly a flock of impossible parrots exploded out of the alders, and we looked up to see them shattering the sky. "All the oaks on this trail have their own names," I explained to Freddie. "This one is my favorite. Can you believe it's still growing?" He put his face against mine. He didn't say anything. For a while we just stood like that, together, watching the Great Mamamushi grow.
Jennifer Croft (The Extinction of Irena Rey)
Trying to categorize Chinese regional cuisines makes me dizzy. You can travel and travel and travel around China and taste new foods every single day, which is pretty much what I have been doing for the last thirty years. And after all this time, I still find myself in the same state of wonder and bewilderment. Chinese cuisine is like a fractal pattern that becomes more and more intricate the more closely you examine it, to a seemingly infinite degree. The more I know, the less I feel I know. When it comes to Chinese food, I see myself increasingly as a small insect scaling a great mountain of human ingenuity.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Invitation to a Banquet: The Story of Chinese Food)
Sesame oil, soy sauce and ginger may already be on your shopping list and mainstream supermarkets are now stocking Chinese brown rice vinegar and cooking wine; just add Sichuanese chilli bean paste and fermented black beans and you will open up whole new dimensions of taste.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking)
I continuously see signs related to my dream home on a daily basis. My favorite book growing up as a child was the Secret Garden. I always wished I had a home that was filled with all the beautiful plants described in that book. And guess what? My new house is engulfed in pink, red, orange, white, and yellow roses. I also have fuchsia camellias everywhere. Birds of paradise line my backyard along with an entire wall covered in green vine. There are also palm trees. I never asked for a pool, but it also has this nine-foot-deep, blue, 40,000-gallon pool, which is a bonus that this house has that the black kitchen house didn’t. But the kicker is that one day I was walking around the landscape and noticed that I have a lemon tree in my backyard. This home is everything that I asked for and more.
Lauren Simmons (Make Money Move: A Guide to Financial Wellness)
With a deep breath, I extend my arms, beginning with an adagio, syncing with the melody of the flowers. When I find comfort in the rhythm, I dip into a cambré, sweeping my body into a whirlpool as I rise. I hesitate as plumes of color emerge from the ground, encompassing me in a veil of fuchsia, amber, and gold. The colors gather me, and I move with them like the language of fire--- hot, quick steps, languid and elegant. The forest begins to change, and my eyes widen. When I began my bourrée steps, foxgloves sprout like lace-crafted trumpets, marrying the sound of blooming hibiscuses, rattling like tambourines. With every step I take, more flowers grow, kissing the earth with their velvet lips. I almost swear I hear the ground sing back, harmonizing with the forest's song. I guess the angel was right. With a glimmer of confidence, I burst into a grand jeté, and golden hummingbirds mimic me, tracing my every move as I dive into a piqué manège. Damien's eyes glisten, and it fills my spirit.With every chassé, the forest unravels in color. Fireflies come to life and kiss my cheeks, circling my body in a lattice as I pirouette. New colors rise from the ground--- topaz, lazuli, and chartreuse--- dancing with me like my own ensemble, I transition into my fouettés, leaning into an arabesque, as if to touch the rising moon. I lose all sense of self, leaping into the air. My body transcends into a wind-like creature, moving wildly with mild grace. New life sprouts, as if this world belongs to me and not the angels. Tiny stars emerge in a trail behind my feet, and I climb them like stairs. Damien smiles. I reach for his hand and lift him onto the steps. His hands wrap around my waist, and together we spin higher into the sky. My grip around his shoulders tenses as we rise closer and closer to the Heavens. I can feel Luna radiating over me. I'm in command. Here, I'm free. I wish I could hold on to this moment forever.
Kiana Krystle (Dance of the Starlit Sea)
He circles the shrines, scanning each of them. There's one made in exclusively soft shades of pink, with a bouquet of blush roses at the center. It's surrounded by oysters, each one nestling a pearl. Smooth, heart-shaped rose quartz surrounds the perimeter in a perfect circle. Sliced guava reveals its rosy flesh, next to clamshells full of cherry blossoms. Another is built from a large shell in the center, filled with water that reflects the moon. White magnolias float on the surface, along with golden glitter that sparkles like starlight. Oranges with long stems and blossoms surround the shell, paired with sliced mango drizzled with honey. I swear I know who some of these belong to. The one with green grapes and pears decorated with golden butterfly appliqué must be Genevieve's. Beside it is one crafted from fuchsia carnations and obnoxiously large peonies, with different berries in porcelain dishes painted with bright pink flowers. So obviously Amelia's.
Kiana Krystle (Dance of the Starlit Sea)
a passionate appreciation of food was respectable, even desirable, in the traditional scholar-gentleman.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
Sometimes my reticence over a particular food was overcome through simple drunkenness. The Chengdu equivalent of the late-night döner kebab in 1994 was fried rabbit-heads, a snack I’d heard about from a Canadian friend. I’d seen the rabbit-heads sitting ominously in glass cabinets, earless and skinless, staring out with beady rabbit eyes and pointy teeth. The idea of eating one was utterly revolting. But one night, after a long dancing session, I fetched up at a street stall bedraggled and hungry. My reason befuddled by alcohol, I ate my first rabbit-head, cleft in half and tossed in a wok with chilli and spring onion. I won’t begin to describe the silky richness of the flesh along the jaw, the melting softness of the eyeball, the luxuriant smoothness of the brain. Suffice it to say that from that day on I ate stir-fried rabbit-heads almost every Saturday night. (Later
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China)
Are you afraid of chilli heat?’ (Ni pa bu pa la?) is the customary warning for travellers on their way to Sichuan.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
university textbooks I’d encountered in my few weeks of class were deathly dull and totally impractical. Instead of introducing us to useful words like ‘stir-fry’ and ‘braise’, ‘bamboo shoot’ and ‘quail’, they had required us to learn by rote long lists of largely irrelevant Chinese characters:
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
Sichuanese dialect is like Mandarin put through a mangle. So the Mandarin ‘sh’ becomes ‘s’, vowels are stretched out like warm toffee, there are pirate-like rolling ‘r’ sounds at the end of sentences, and no one can tell the difference between ‘n’ and ‘l’ or ‘f’ and ‘h’ (the province of Hunan, for example, is known in Sichuan, helpfully, as ‘Fulan’).
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
learning the tones of Mandarin Chinese is difficult enough to begin with: you must distinguish between the flat first tone (m), the rising second tone (má ), the dipping third tone (m), and the fast-falling fourth tone (mà ), not to mention the unobstrusive neutral tone (ma). If you have no sense of tones when speaking Mandarin, people won’t understand you, and you may find yourself making mistakes like asking for a kiss (qng wn) when all you wanted was an answer to a question (qng wèn). But in Sichuanese even the standard tones are all
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
The cleaver is not just for cutting. Invert it and its blunt spine can be used to pound meat to a paste for meatballs: a time-consuming method, but the purée it produces is perfectly smooth and voluptuous. The nub of the handle can stand in for a pestle, to crush a few peppercorns in a pot. The flat of the blade, slammed down on the board, can be used to smash unpeeled ginger, so that its juices permeate a soup or marinade.
Fuchsia Dunlop (Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)
THE UNIVERSE, I once noted, is not only stranger than you can imagine, it secretly dresses in studded-leather feety pajamas and spiked fuchsia pasties.
Michael Dicerto (Milky Way Marmalade)