Neon Colors Quotes

The world is exploding in emerald, sage, and lusty chartreuse - neon green with so much yellow in it. It is an explosive green that, if one could watch it moment by moment throughout the day, would grow in every dimension.

Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.

I agreed. By this time the drink was beginning to cut the acid and my hallucinations were down to a tolerable level. The room service waiter had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, but I was no longer seeing huge pterodactyls lumbering around the corridors in pools of fresh blood. The only problem now was a gigantic neon sign outside the window, blocking our view of the mountains -- millions of colored balls running around a very complicated track, strange symbols & filigree, giving off a loud hum.... "Look outside," I said. "Why?" "There's a big ... machine in the sky, ... some kind of electric snake ... coming straight at us." "Shoot it," said my attorney. "Not yet," I said. "I want to study its habits.

It's my uniform. Everyone in my company wears it." "It's hideous." Rose felt her hackles rise. The neon green uniform was hideous, but she didn't appreciate him pointing it out. She opened her mouth. "Yet despite it, you look lovely," he said. "Flattery will get you nowhere," she told him. "It's not flattery," he said coldly. "Flattery requires exaggeration. I'm merely stating a fact. You're a beautiful woman wearing an ugly sack of unnatural color.

He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn't be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.

The evening sky was streaked with purple, the color of torn plums, and a light rain had started to fall when I came to the end of the blacktop road that cut through twenty miles of thick, almost impenetrable scrub oak and pine and stopped at the front gate of Angola penitentiary.

But I knew the way the people in the town thought about things. They always had some time left over from their life to bother about other people and what they did. They thought they had to get together to help other people out, like the time they got together about the woman who let a colored man borrow her car and told her the best place for her was up north with all the other nigger lovers, and the time they got the veterans with overseas wives out. If you were different from anybody in town, you had to get out. That's why everybody was so much alike. The way they talked, what they did, what they liked, what they hated. If somebody got to hate something and he was the right person, everybody had to hate it too, or people began to hate the ones who didn't hate it. They used to tell us in school to think for yourself, but you couldn't do that in the town. You had to think what your father thought all his life, and that was what everybody thought.

Discard anything that creates visual noise. The objects I have at home are white, beige, gray, and the colors of wood, pleasing to the eye and in harmony among themselves. The balance is disrupted when I have something in a flashy neon color or a primary color that’s too bold; they stand out too much and disturb the peaceful atmosphere.

The city was alive to a nonsensical degree. Every color was so absurdly saturated that I thought it was all kind of like a dream, more a painting or an art deco interpretation of a city than an actual city.

The tiny puncture wounds left by their fangs oozed the neon colors of their skins. Pus dyed bright pink, yellow, and blue dripped down her fingers.

Everyone had always told Feyi growing up that she should stay away from bright colors, that they would be too garish against her dark skin, so it was a delight to stop listening to all of them, to lean into pastels and neons and metallics, rainbows cascading down her back.

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.

I looked over at the colorful pile of small shoes. Their neon colors glowed dimly in the shadows. I raised the curtain of the mosque to bring light into this dark place. Herat’s warm winds covered us in the dust. I believe that on that day in that sacred place, God smiled on us and loved us more than ever before.

Outside the Bar Del Prado, night was coming on like a hopeless, drunken come-on, tequila on its breath, red neon signs and, outside the shops, strings of colored Christmas lights hung from the eaves like the sad, close-lipped smiles of boys who would lure you in with their loneliness, that melancholia you'd try and try to fix.

America is not a young land. It is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting...But there is no drag like U.S. drag. You can't see it, you don't know where it comes from. Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street--every block of houses has its own bar and drug store and market and liquor store. You walk in and it hits you. But where does it come from? Not the bartender, not the customers nor the cream colored plastic, nor the dim neon. Not even the tv.

No one’s ever come up with a universal color scheme for the apocalypse, and if ours wanted to come in neon and peppermint stripe, well. That was okay.

He perceived the pain in colors: the red of a neon bar sign, the green of a traffic light on a wet night, the blue of an empty video screen.

You don't feel your own power at all right now, and I understand. Yours is not the kind that wants to announce itself. It is slow and quiet and tucks in behind things waiting to be discovered. Some people have power that is thick and neon-colored and races around the room making sure everyone pays attention. It's fascinating but it's not yours. You are learning how to hold yourself up and believe in the strength of your own conviction. That is not an easy thing to do, and you are doing the best you can. Keep going. I'm very proud of you.

It also must be hard to have a wife like Mrs. Indianapolis. She’s in the fashion industry. She’s not a model or designer, but she is a buyer—not for a retail outlet, but for her four closets, whose combined square footage is probably comparable to Rhode Island. If an article of clothing is leopard print or neon colored, Mrs. Indianapolis either owns it, or soon will.

I let the lights and the faces come at me. I let the nerves tap out signals to my brain center. I let go. The pink, green, and yellow neons flashed on and off with a definite rhythm, each with its own particular tempo. Together they screamed out a syncopated color rhapsody. The faces; the cafés; the speed of light, steel cars. Swift; quick. Red; green. Flash; off. Stop; go.

Tuck watched the sun bubble into the ocean. Columns of vertical cumulus clouds turned to cones of pink cotton candy, then as the sun became a red wafer on the horizon, they turned candy-apple red, with purple rays reaching out of them like searchlights. The water was neon over wet asphalt, blood-spattered gunmetal—colors from the cover of a detective novel where heroes drink hard and beauty is always treacherous.

He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what if felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or a burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened it couldn't be any other way. Neon lights: Motel 6, Dairy Queen. Colors so bright, they nearly broke my heart.

The infestation,” Dr. Pam says. She presses a button and zooms in on the front part of Chris’s brain. The pukish color intensifies, glowing neon bright. “This is the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain—the part that makes us human.

He closed his eyes. Found the ridged face of the power stud. And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information. Please, he prayed, now- A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Now- Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of the military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

Human skin is confined to a dull color palette of cream, beige, taupe, and brown when people are alive, but all bets are off once someone is dead. Decomposition allows skin to flower into vivid pastels and neons. This woman happened to be orange.

You ought to make something for Easter. You know. Eggs and stuff. Chocolate hens, rabbits, things like that. Like the shops in Agen." I remember them from my childhood; the Paris chocolateries with their baskets of foil-wrapped eggs, shelves of rabbits and hens, bells, marzipan fruits and marrons glacés, amourettes and filigree nests filled with petits fours and caramels, and a thousand and one epiphanies of spun-sugar magic carpet rides more suited to an Arabian harem than the solemnities of the Passion. "I remember my mother telling me about the Easter chocolates." There was never enough money to buy those exquisite things, but I always had my own cornet-surprise, a paper cone containing my Easter gifts, coins, paper flowers, hard-boiled eggs painted in bright enamel colors, a box of colored papier-mâché- painted with chickens, bunnies, smiling children among the buttercups, the same every year and stored carefully for the next time- encasing a tiny packet of chocolate raisins wrapped in cellophane, each one to be savored, long and lingeringly, in the lost hours of those strange nights between cities, with the neon glow of hotel signs blink-blinking between the shutters and my mother's breathing, slow and somehow eternal, in the umbrous silence.

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it’s tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you’re offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you’re using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world’s fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman’s shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit’s cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black.

To You" What is more beautiful than night and someone in your arms that’s what we love about art it seems to prefer us and stays if the moon or a gasping candle sheds a little light or even dark you become a landscape in a landscape with rocks and craggy mountains and valleys full of sweaty ferns breathing and lifting into the clouds which have actually come low as a blanket of aspirations’ blue for once not a melancholy color because it is looking back at us there’s no need for vistas we are one in the complicated foreground of space the architects are most courageous because it stands for all to see and for a long long time just as the words “I’ll always love you" impulsively appear in the dark sky and we are happy and stick by them like a couple of painters in neon allowing the light to glow there over the river

surprisingly dramatic glow some minerals gave off when illuminated with ultraviolet light, or “black light.” In daylight, for instance, the mineral fluorite is a drab, chalky color; in a dark room under UV light, though, fluorite glows a brilliant blue; the mineral calcite shines bright red; and aragonite gives off a neon green. If you’ve ever stepped into a teenager’s cavelike room decorated with black-light posters (less common now than they were in the 1970s, when my three sons were growing up), you’ve seen another version of UV fluorescence in action.

The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.

And then the darkness gives way to white neon. An Art Deco font, burning into the night, announces our arrival at the CINEMA LE CHAMPO. The letters dwarf me. Cinema. Has there ever been a more beautiful word? My heart soars as we pass the colorful film posters and walk through the gleaming glass doors. The lobby is smaller than what I’m used to, and though it’s missing the tang of artificially buttered popcorn, there’s something in the air I recognize, something both musty and comforting.

I love the way the rain melts the colors together, like a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. There is a moment, just after sunset, when the shops turn on their lights and steam starts to fog up the windows of the cafés. In French, this twilight time implies a hint of danger. It's called entre chien et loup, between the dog and the wolf. It was just beginning to get dark as we walked through the small garden of Palais Royal. We watched as carefully dressed children in toggled peacoats and striped woolen mittens finished the same game of improvised soccer we had seen in the Place Sainte Marthe. Behind the Palais Royal the wide avenues around the Louvre gave way to narrow streets, small boutiques, and bistros. It started to drizzle. Gwendal turned a corner, and tucked in between two storefronts, barely wider than a set of double doors, I found myself staring down a corridor of fairy lights. A series of arches stretched into the distance, topped with panes of glass, like a greenhouse, that echoed the plip-plop of the rain. It was as if we'd stepped through the witch's wardrobe, the phantom tollbooth, what have you, into another era. The Passage Vivienne was nineteenth-century Paris's answer to a shopping mall, a small interior street lined with boutiques and tearooms where ladies could browse at their leisure without wetting the bustles of their long dresses or the plumes of their new hats. It was certainly a far cry from the shopping malls of my youth, with their piped-in Muzak and neon food courts. Plaster reliefs of Greek goddesses in diaphanous tunics lined the walls. Three-pronged brass lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains. About halfway down, there was an antique store selling nothing but old kitchenware- ridged ceramic bowls for hot chocolate, burnished copper molds in the shape of fish, and a pewter mold for madeleines, so worn around the edges it might have belonged to Proust himself. At the end of the gallery, underneath a clock held aloft by two busty angels, was a bookstore. There were gold stencils on the glass door. Maison fondée en 1826.

Well?” he prompted. “What are you doing here, especially without a Tony Manero polyester special on?” Lassiter, the Fallen Angel, smiled in a way that didn’t include his strangely colored, pupil-less eyes; the expression only affected the lower part of his face. “Oh, you know, leisure suits are so last week for me.” “Moving on to eighties New Age? I don’t have any neon to lend you.” “Nah, I have another new costume to wear.” “Good for you. Scary for the rest of us. Just tell me you aren’t going to pull a Borat on the beach.

I got dressed to go hunt for someone, anyone, to help. The elevator door opened. You wouldn’t believe the band of degenerates that tumbled out. They looked like those horrible runaways who gather across from the Westlake Center. There were a half-dozen of them, full of the most unspeakable piercings, neon-colored hair shaved in unflattering patches, blurry tattoos top-to-bottom. One fellow had a line across his neck imprinted with the words CUT HERE. One gal wore a leather jacket, on the back of which was safety-pinned a teddy bear with a bloody tampon string hanging out of it. I couldn’t make this up.

A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft.” PROLOGUE The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar. This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats. First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility. Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful. Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama. Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for. Cosita would become a Drone!

As we strolled, I noticed the soft light and its effect on the buildings around us. Like an aging screen actress shot in soft light to conceal her age lines, this magical twilight softened the avenues of Paris and produced an elegant scene not unlike a movie. Lining the street ahead of us, the buildings were constructed of solid white stone and more than one hundred years old, but all traces of age or dirt were diffused by the twilight, while their classic French architecture was center stage and highlighted. Fifty Parisians, the bluish cobblestones of the sidewalk, glowing neon, and a colorful outdoor flower stand completed the scene in front of us. Overwhelmed and in awe of the setting, I stopped and stared silently ahead.

A kiss instead of a salutation, disrobing, the neon signs nullifying the effect of the extinguished lamp, the double bed with its superannauted spring squealing piteously, impatient hugs and kisses, the first cold contact of the skin of their bodies after the sweat had dried, the smell of flesh and pomade, endless groping for satisfaction filled with impatience for the same bodies, little screams belying masculine vanity, hands wet with hair oil.. Then the pitiable perspiration, the groping under pillows for cigarettes and matches, the faintly shining whites of eyes. Then the endless conversation surging as over a broken dam, and the descent to the childish play of satisfied, tests of strength in the dark night, stabs at wrestling, various other inanities....

The New York sidewalk led us along a little corner park rimmed with yellow-orange and violet pansies that seemed to be smiling, their faces upturned, and past a bagel shop that smelled of sesame and salt, delicious warm air. We passed an empty wine bar with a pink chandelier, whimsical and dim inside, and a neighborhood diner with its blue neon sign huge and lit up, little white line-cook hats—the city seemed in my vision like a multifaceted gem, spectacular. I wished I could keep everything I witnessed like a photograph, to forever hold this electric aliveness. The colors of the flowers and the clothing were crisp and rosy, hyper-bright against the subdued sun-drenched pigments of the streets and the brick buildings, all seeming faded, softer than real. Pops of coral and red—a scarf, a lady’s lips—were pops of life.

On Claud, though, the look is very cool.) For example, today she was wearing a neon green tank top under a white oversized man’s shirt and fuschia pink stirrup pants. The shirt was rolled at the sleeves and belted with a colorful woven belt. Claud finished the outfit with dangly ceramic-bead earrings she’d made herself in pottery class. She’s super artistic. She paints, sketches, draws, sculpts. You name it! Besides art and cool clothing, Claudia loves junk food. Her parents disapprove of Ho-Ho’s and Twinkies and stuff like that, so she hides them all over her room. You never know when you’re going to pick up a pillow and find a bag of potato chips or something behind it. The other thing she stashes away are her Nancy Drew books. Her parents don’t approve of those, either. They don’t think the mysteries are “intellectual” enough. Claudia couldn’t care less if the books are “intellectual.” One thing Claud is not interested in is school work. Although she can’t spell for anything, she’s definitely not dumb. She just doesn’t like school. And, unfortunately, her grades show it. She’s the complete

Joan era dura en el exterior, pero tenía una verdadera vulnerabilidad cuando llegabas a conocerla. Casi desde el momento en que me uní a The Runaways, había habido un lazo especial entre nosotras. La gente nos había comenzado a llamar “Sal y Pimienta”, no sólo por los contrastantes colores de cabello, sino porque siempre parecíamos estar juntas. En Joan, encontré una amistad mucho más intensa, y mucho más profunda, de lo que había conocido hasta ese punto en mi vida. Éramos niñas: Joan sólo era un año mayor que yo, y me aferraba más a ella que a cualquiera en la banda, y ella hacía lo mismo conmigo. Cuando pienso en Joan y nuestra relación, todavía puedo sentir un distante temblor por dentro. Nuestra amistad fue un regalo de Dios para mí. Era profunda, y por momentos ella era la única que me mantenía cuerda. Joan era perceptiva. Casi como si pudiera leer mi mente. Dios, cómo necesitaba esa clase de conexión. Especialmente cuando me sentía tan desconectada. Creía en ella, y en el sueño que la había conducido tan lejos. Me sentía segura cuando me quedaba cerca de ella, como si fuera arrastrada por la red de seguridad de su resuelta visión de lo que estábamos haciendo. A veces nos mirábamos y yo sentía un cosquilleo en mi estómago. Su sonrisa era tibia y su actitud de amor a la diversión me hacía olvidar cuán extraño y bizarro este mundo nuevo y loco realmente era. Ella era mi ancla. ¿Cómo explico a una persona que era mi mejor amiga, alguien en quien podía confiar como una hermana, alguien que para mí se volvió una fuerte atracción sexual? Bueno, es fácil. Tan fácil como era estar con ella. Podría dejarlo en que tuve momentos con una amiga que aún hoy me hacen temblar. Y fueron algunos de los momentos más satisfactorios de mi joven vida.

Chugjug All the trees and the dead leaves it must be fall-ing in love with you all the sand in my pockets hand i wish you'd start hanging out with me baby won't you come with me there's someplace that i wanna be help me out by holding onto my hand the stars are out, the crowd's thinned out walk with me down to the water and the horizon will be the only thing we'll see all the neon, the phosphorescence it can't be serious right now we roll our jeans up, wade out a little splash around to make the colors grow ah ah maybe we could take a ride down to where the hills collide fireflies are calling out your name and the grass beneath you feet it just smells so sweet no i can't love anymore than i do today all the times that you were scared you were ok cause you'd be here someday na na na na na where'd you get that face na na na na na your dank face

Every girl needs to make an entrance. It’s part of her signature. My hot pink high heels hit the sidewalk and I straightened. My blue jean skirt was brand new and had a bunch of totally rad colorful ruffles on it. My neon green top was spandex and fit like a glove.

He took a stool two away from Enid. She didn’t look up from her drink or glance his way. On the other side of him a guy wearing a porkpie hat was bouncing his head up and down as though to music but no music was playing and he wasn’t wearing earphones. A rainbow of rusted license plates took up most of the back wall—probably plates representing all fifty states, but Simon wasn’t really up for checking. There were neon signs for Miller High Life and Schlitz. An oddly ornate chandelier hung from the ceiling. This place, like the inn, was all dark wood, but that was the only similarity, like this was the poorest of poor cousins of the inn’s rich dark wood. “What’ll you have?” The barmaid’s hair was the color and texture of the hay on that hayride and done in a quasi mullet that reminded Simon of an ’80s hockey player. She was either a hard forty-five or a soft sixty-five, and there was little question she had seen it all at least twice. “What kind of beer do you have?” he asked. “We have Pabst. And Pabst.” “You choose for me.

They're kidding themselves, of course. Our sky can go from lapis to tin in the blink of an eye. Blink again and your latte's diluted. And that's just fine with me. I thrive here on the certainty that no matter how parched my glands, how anhydrous the creek beds, how withered the weeds in the lawn, it's only a matter of time before the rains come home. The rains will steal down from the Sasquatch slopes. They will rise with the geese from the marshes and sloughs. Rain will fall in sweeps, it will fall in drones, it will fall in cascades of cheap Zen jewelry. And it will rain a fever. And it will rain a sacrifice. And it will rain sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem. Rain will primitivize the cities, slowing every wheel, animating every gutter, diffusing commercial neon into smeary blooms of esoteric calligraphy. Rain will dramatize the countryside, sewing pearls into every web, winding silk around every stump, redrawing the horizon line with a badly frayed brush dipped in tea and quicksilver. And it will rain an omen. And it will rain a trance. And it will rain a seizure. And it will rain dangers and pale eggs of the beast. Rain will pour for days unceasing. Flooding will occur. Wells will fill with drowned ants, basements with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics will roam the dripping peninsulas. Moisture will gleam on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their rest in dead tree trunks, will clack their clamshell teeth in the submerged doorways of video parlors. Rivers will swell, sloughs will ferment. Vapors will billow from the troll-infested ditches, challenging windshield wipers, disgusing intentions and golden arches. Water will stream off eaves and umbrellas. It will take on the colors of beer signs and headlamps. It will glisten on the claws of nighttime animals. And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world. Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in the electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes, and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs. And it will rain a miracle. And it will rain a comfort. And it will rain a sense of salvation from the philistinic graspings of the world. Yes, I am here for the weather. And when I am lowered at last into a pit of marvelous mud, a pillow of fern and skunk cabbage beneath my skull, I want my epitaph to read, IT RAINED ON HIS PARADE, AND HE WAS GLAD!

Tokyo." Mr. Fuchigami's voice inflates with pride. "Formerly Edo, almost destroyed by the 1923 Great Kantō earthquake, then again in 1944 by nighttime firebombing raids. Tens of thousands were killed." The chamberlain grows silent. "Kishikaisei." "What does that mean?" There's a skip in my chest. We've entered the city now. The high-rises are no longer cut out shapes against the skyline, but looming gray giants. Every possible surface is covered in signs---neon and plastic or painted banners---they all scream for attention. It's noisy, too. There is a cacophony of pop tunes, car horns, advertising jingles, and trains coasting over rails. Nothing is understated. "Roughly translated, 'wake from death and return to life.' Against hopeless circumstances, Tokyo has risen. It is home to more than thirty-five million people." He pauses. "And, in addition, the oldest monarchy in the world." The awe returns tenfold. I clutch the windowsill and press my nose to the glass. There are verdant parks, tidy residential buildings, upmarket shops, galleries, and restaurants. For each sleek, new modern construction, there is one low-slung wooden building with a blue tiled roof and glowing lanterns. It's all so dense. Houses lean against one another like drunk uncles. Mr. Fuchigami narrates Tokyo's history. A city built and rebuilt, born and reborn. I imagine cutting into it like a slice of cake, dissecting the layers. I can almost see it. Ash from the Edo fires with remnants of samurai armor, calligraphy pens, and chipped tea porcelain. Bones from when the shogunate fell. Dust from the Great Earthquake and more debris from the World War II air raids. Still, the city thrives. It is alive and sprawling with neon-colored veins. Children in plaid skirts and little red ties dash between business personnel in staid suits. Two women in crimson kimonos and matching parasols duck into a teahouse.

My brother was twelve and learning algebra; I was nineteen and learning how to look people in the eye. I was learning other things, too: how to distinguish packs of cigarettes by color, the names of the blacks and yellows and reds. I was memorizing the refrain of every pop song on the radio. But mostly I was learning that the only way for the night to end is for the night to end. There was no way to speed up a lonely hour.

Jasmine’s our resident sarcastic, snappy weirdo who bounces between Sci-Fi and Sci-Fi erotica. Younger than anyone else and still in college, she changes her hair color with just about every book she writes, often as a hint to her theme for her upcoming book. Like when she put a book in a Matrix-like universe, her hair was a bright neon green. As I walk in, I see that she’s still rocking her natural blonde, which probably means she’s between books.

Moscow swam in color. Hazy floodlights of Red Square mixed with the neon of casinos in Revolution Square. Light wormed its way from the underground mall in the Manezh. Spotlights crowned new towers of glass and polished stone, each tower capped by a spire. Gilded domes still floated around the Garden Ring, but all night earth-movers tore at the old city and dug widening pools of light to raise a modern, vertical Moscow more like Houston or Dubai.

Later, I sat down drunk on the corner of Carondelet and Canal Streets, listening for the rumble of the streetcar that would take me back uptown to my apartment, watching the evening sun bleed from the streets, the city shifting into night, when it truly became New Orleans: the music, the constant festival, the smell of late evening dinners pouring out, layering the beer-soaked streets, prostitutes, clubs with DJs, rowdy gay bars, dirty strip clubs, the insane out for a walk, college students vomiting in trash cans, daiquiri bars lit up like supermarkets, washing-machine-sized mixers built into the wall spinning every color of daiquiri, lone trumpet players, grown women crying, clawing at men in suits, portrait painters, spangers (spare change beggars), gutter punks with dogs, kids tap-dancing with spinning bike wheels on their heads, the golden cowboy frozen on a milk crate, his golden gun pointed at a child in the crowd, fortune-tellers, psycho preachers, mumblers, fighters, rock-faced college boys out for a date rape, club chicks wearing silver miniskirts, horse-drawn carriages, plastic cups piling against the high curbs of Bourbon Street, jazz music pressing up against rock-and-roll cover bands, murderers, scam artists, hippies selling anything, magic shows and people on unicycles, flying cockroaches the size of pocket rockets, rats without fear, men in drag, business execs wandering drunk in packs, deciding not to tell their wives, sluts sucking dick on open balconies, cops on horseback looking down blouses, cars wading across the river of drunks on Bourbon Street, the people screaming at them, pouring drinks on the hood, putting their asses to the window, whole bars of people laughing, shot girls with test tubes of neon-colored booze, bouncers dragging skinny white boys out by their necks, college girls rubbing each other’s backs after vomiting tequila, T-shirts, drinks sold in a green two-foot tube with a small souvenir grenade in the bottom, people stumbling, tripping, falling, laughing on the sidewalk in the filth, laughing too hard to stand back up, thin rivers of piss leaking out from corners, brides with dirty dresses, men in G-strings, mangy dogs, balloon animals, camcorders, twenty-four-hour 3-4-1, free admission, amateur night, black-eyed strippers, drunk bicyclers, clouds of termites like brown mist surrounding streetlamps, ventriloquists, bikers, people sitting on mailboxes, coffee with chicory, soul singers, the shoeless, the drunks, the blissful, the ignorant, the beaten, the assholes, the cheaters, the douche bags, the comedians, the holy, the broken, the affluent, the beggars, the forgotten, and the soft spring air pregnant with every scent created by such a town.

It’s been a hard day. And I’m tired and alone. And white. Dear God, when did I become this impossibly glow-in-the-dark neon white, so that everyone stares at me and no one knows me? My skin color has made me the enemy, a walking advertisement for entitlement and privilege except I don’t feel like any of those things. I feel like I’ve always felt. Broken. As if the whole rest of the world knows something I don’t. Feels things I can’t. Connects in ways I’ve never learned how.

Hollywood Boulevard at night was a dream in neon. Mickey cruised along the strip, colorful lights blurring by like hallucinations. On his right, the El Capitan Theatre lured customers in like a Vegas casino, while the Walk of Fame preserved stardom on his left. Tourists bustled beneath the blinking signs like extras in the giant story of this land of stories, hoping for a real-life glimpse of that other world just behind the veneer of this place. In the ’50s, Hollywood Boulevard had looked different—less buildings, less vehicles, less pedestrians—but the aura of the strip, the energy, hadn’t changed at all.

There's a shade of color for everyone. Whether you're as vibrant as neon pink or as cool as midnight blue, there's a hue that’s uniquely you. Embrace your colors and paint your own masterpiece. After all, the rainbow wouldn’t be complete without every quirky shade! So, go on—be your own brilliant color in this beautifully diverse world. Let your true colors shine because the world needs your unique sparkle. Don't blend in when you were born to stand out—paint the town with your individuality!

(Verse 1) In the glow of a **dawn's early light**, With the dew on the grass, shining so bright, A cup of coffee, a **gentle breeze**, These little things, oh how they please. (Chorus) **Grab your hat and dance in the rain,** **Kick off your boots, forget the pain,** **Laugh with friends, under the sun's reign,** **Life's a sweet ride, hop on the train!** **Raise your glass to the stars above,** **Sing with heart, push and shove,** **Every little moment, fit like a glove,** **It's the simple things that we love!** (Verse 2) A **dog's wagging tail**, a **porch swing's sway**, The **colors of flowers** that brighten the day, A **song on the radio** that takes you back, To the **sweet old memories** that never lack. (Bridge) **Lights down low, we're just starting up,** **Fill up the tank, let's raise our cup,** **To the moments that feel like a live wire,** **Simple sparks igniting our fire.** **Sync to the beat of the city's pulse,** **Every little win, every single result,** **We're living loud in the here and now,** **In the simple life, we take our bow.** (Verse 3) **Under the wide-open sky so blue,** **Life's painting scenes, each one anew,** **A simple hello, a wave goodbye,** **In these little things, our dreams fly high.** **With every sunrise, we start again,** **Finding joy in the whisper of the wind,** **A hearty laugh, a warm embrace,** **In the simple life, we find our grace.** (Chorus) **Turn it up, let the bass line roll,** **Simple life's got that rock 'n' roll soul,** **Snap your fingers, tap your feet,** **Living for the moment, life's so sweet.** **Catch the vibe, let it take control,** **These little things are how we roll,** **From the heartland to the city's grip,** **It's the simple life that makes us flip.** (Verse 4) **The jukebox plays a tune that's bittersweet,** **Echoing tales of love and deceit,** **But in the neon glow, we find our truth,** **In simple things, we reclaim our youth.** **A twist of fate, a turn of the key,** **Life's full of surprises, as we can see,** **A chance encounter, a new beginning,** **In the simple life, we keep on winning.**

The northern lights appeared overhead, cascading in swirls of yellow, green, red, and purple. Impossible, magical color; lights fell like silken scarves across the sky, skeins of yellow, neon-green, shocking pink. The electric-bright moon seemed to watch it all.

The second map is of Sardinia itself: the main island with its many islets. It is not a floating green mountain with a defining valley that splices along the south by southwest, as a topographical map would show. Instead, this map is as colorful as a neon strip of nightlife you might download on a cell phone for the latest cultural events. In fact, devised as a geoportal and online app by a volunteer organization called Nurnet in 2013, the map pinpoints the thousands of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments across the islands with the fanfare of an open museum. As part of Nurnet’s mission to “promote a different image of Sardinia in the world,” the map is nothing less than astounding. If you actually illuminated all of these ancient monuments, from the Neolithic array of Stonehenge-like dolmens and menhir stone formations to the thousands of burial tombs, Bronze Age towers and complexes called nuraghes or nuraghi, the entire island would light up like a prehistoric hotspot. The vastness of the uninterrupted cycles of civilizations and their architectural marvels still standing today would be incomparable with any place in Europe on that first Mediterranean map. The Sardinians call it the “endless museum.

It’s frosty and blue like a Slurpee with cherries, gummy fish and neon-colored umbrella straws hanging off the rim of the half-gallon fish bowl. I lean forward and take a sip, ready to drown my sorrows in this cocktail.

Post-its scattered around the house, the colors switching between neon shades depending on the task or mood. It’s a game we’ve played together for years. Pink Post-its have sexy stuff, blue are happy notes, green includes need-to-do-or-buy items, and yellow has sweet messages she finds on Pinterest.

THE SATURN RINGS ROUNDABOUT MOTEL was located beneath an overpass on Route 22. The neon sign advertised hourly rates, free Wi-Fi, and color television, as if some rivals might only be using black-and-white ones. The motel was, as the name suggested, round, but that wasn’t the first thing you noticed. The first thing you noticed was the filth. The Saturn Rings was the kind of seedy and dirty place that made you want to dunk your whole body in a giant bottle of hand sanitizer. Myron’s

The crowd began to murmur in the indistinguishable syllables of backstage banter. As the ball ascended, so did the volume of the murmurs. Words could be made out. Then phrases. “Lovely golf stroke.” “Super golf shot.” “Beautiful golf shot.” “Truly fine golf stroke.” They always said golf stroke, like someone might mistake it for a swim stroke, or—as Myron was currently contemplating in this blazing heat—a sunstroke. “Mr. Bolitar?” Myron took the periscope away from his eyes. He was tempted to yell “Up periscope,” but feared some at stately, snooty Merion Golf Club would view the act as immature. Especially during the U.S. Open. He looked down at a ruddy-faced man of about seventy. “Your pants,” Myron said. “Pardon me?” “You’re afraid of getting hit by a golf cart, right?” They were orange and yellow in a hue slightly more luminous than a bursting supernova. To be fair, the man’s clothing hardly stood out. Most in the crowd seemed to have woken up wondering what apparel they possessed that would clash with, say, the free world. Orange and green tints found exclusively in several of your tackiest neon signs adorned many. Yellow and some strange shades of purple were also quite big—usually together—like a color scheme rejected by a Midwest high school cheerleading squad. It was as if being surrounded by all this God-given natural beauty made one want to do all in his power to offset it. Or maybe there was something else at work here. Maybe the ugly clothes had a more functional origin. Maybe in the old days, when animals roamed free, golfers dressed this way to ward off dangerous wildlife. Good

(T)he tones: bombastic, intense. The fruit of the hours Mel spent nerding out over her color key game, a massive shade chart occupying the screen of her desktop Mac, aiming for that grainy, ghostly seventies neon, the look of K-tel record sleeves and Colecovision graphics. After all, isn’t that the future we envision for ourselves: all brighter colors and dramatic graphics, everything at its ultimate zenith?

I am going to tell a story: Once Upon A Time there was a man and a woman. The man and the woman were dreaming. The man and the woman dreamed each other and when they finished dreaming they had invented each other. So I am going to tell the story of a dream: Once upon a time there was a couple: the ideal couple, the perfect couple, the archetypal couple, who would combine in their two faces the features of all the lovers of history, all those who might have been able to fall in love with each other, all those ever imagined by the poets, and all those unimagined yet. They were (or would be) Abelard and Héloïse, Venus and Tannhäuser, Hamlet and Ophelia, Agathe and Ulrich, Solomon and the Shulamite maiden, the Consul and Yvonne, Daphnis and Chloe, Percy and Mary Shelley, the narrator and Albertine, Jocasta and Oedipus, Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, Pygmalion and Galatea, Othello and Desdemona, Penelope and Ulysses, Baudelaire and Jeanne Duval, Laura and Petrarch, Humbert Humbert and Lolita, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Alonso Quijano and Dulcinea, Leda and the Swan, Adam and Eve, Wagner and Cosima, Pelléas and Mélisande, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Calisto and Melibea, Faust and Gretchen, Orpheus and Eurydice, Romeo and Juliet, Heathcliff and Cathy, Tristan and Isolde, Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Jason and Medea, Miranda and Ferdinand, Kafka and Milena, Electra and Agamemnon, Don Juan and Thisbe, von Aschenbach and Tadzio, Poe and Annabel Lee, Borges and Matilde Urbach. As the curtain rises they are kissing each other passionately in the middle of a steamy, shadowed park, underneath the pines. Is this not perhaps the ideal beginning of any love story? Not to forget that there is also a unicorn, a tree laden with garnet-colored fruit, and a large neon sign hanging above them both that reads: A Mon Suel Desir. If we look carefully we will notice that the park is surrounded by water on all sides—that is, this is an island. The story might well begin at any moment.

Once ingested the spores germinate and begin consuming the larvae, much like the other diseases mentioned. The larvae eventually die after the cell is capped. Before they die, the larvae turn a brownish/yellow color. This is a sure sign that something is wrong in a colony. Larvae should always be a stunning, nearly neon white. And they should be shiny and glistening, not dull. Once the cell is capped the infected larvae die

Just as I made a turn into my driveway, a gigantic quadrilateral of swirling neon colors—reds, purples, and hot pinks—appeared out of nowhere right smack in the middle of the street. It created a gale that blasted the neighborhood. Trees uprooted and flew into it, along with a couple of cars, a bicycle, and one yodeling cat.

She drove downtown and turned left off Fifth Street into East Fremont Street. Up ahead was what most people think of when Las Vegas is mentioned. It was a blaze of lights and color and neon: gambling halls jammed up against each other on both sides of Fremont from Second on up to Main, for two solid blocks. Overshadowing all the rest was the big sign above the Golden Nugget on the left and, beyond that, the huge mechanical cowboy pointed the way to the Pioneer Club with his animated hand and thumb. And the Las Vegas Club, the Monte Carlo, the Frontier Club, and all the rest. Colleen drove through slowly because the place was full of men and women and cowboys. A guy blew a bugle at us as we crossed First Street and we had to wait a few seconds for a man on a horse to get out of our way at Main where Colleen turned right and then swung back to head out of town. Then she drove like the wind all the way to Hoover Dam.

I'm moved by letters and words in the way that you may be moved by the colors of a sunset or a field of wildflowers or the inside of a slaughterhouse." Ms. Cordell, almost as obligingly and patiently as Mr. Roland had, explained that sometimes a letter would dominate a word, causing the other letters around them to cower and become dim. The u in "instructions," for example. Because of its location right in the middle of the word, it's neon-pink glow was the star of the show. The letters in "techniques," however, were more of an ensemble production. The new-grass green of the t gave way to the lemon-pie filling e followed by c, with its black Labrador sheen. Ms. Cordell then abruptly stopped her description of the cooperative spirit of "techniques." She must have seen the look in the interviewer's eyes, which I could clearly see too, because the camera was documenting it. I saw there a mixture of fascination and disbelief and pity. I know it was the pity that made Ms. Cordell silent. Forget about the interviewer. Better yet, pity her. She has only five senses. Go on, Ms. Cordell, tell me what the word techniques does to you. It makes me taste cheesecake, graham cracker crust and everything, I wanted to tell her.

Here, the ads don’t follow any sort of color theory. They’re jumbled, a mishmash of neon and flashing lights. As if they weren’t made by any sort of central government, but by a number of smaller, independent groups.

She designed the cakes and I worked out the recipes. The first year we each created a signature cake. Genie's was called the Goddess: really tall, all white on the outside, wrapped in mountains of coconut and whipped cream, with a passion-fruit heart." "And yours was called the Shrinking Violet. Unassuming on the outside but pretty special once you worked your way in." She reached over and squeezed my wrist. "Wish I'd thought of that. You'd understand if you knew my sister." By now I was a little drunk. "One year Genie came up with Melting Cakes. You know, like flourless chocolate, the kind that are melted in the middle? They were gorgeous neon colors, and I made the flavors intense- blood orange, blueberry, lime, hibiscus, and caramel.

Everything seems neon lit when I look back at that time, like the track suits that made color exhausting and the parachute pants that gave all the boys who wore them airplane eyes. Sometimes I'll even remember an old man in greasy overalls and instead of mechanic's blue, I see them bright yellow and glowing. That's the art of the '80s. It's also the damage of it. Perhaps because they belonged to me, I will say that the '80s were as best as any time to grow up in. I think too they were a good time to meet the devil. Particularly that June day in 1984, when the sky seemed to be made on the kitchen counter, the clouds scattering like spilled flour.

Neon flickered in brilliant colors on the really fancy buildings, while the older blocks and the ones under scaffolding were dark and unlit. Everywhere the lights created fantastic, glittering shapes that changed as they flashed on and off, as if there were monsters living inside. The streets felt menacing, different from daytime, the cars transformed into roaming wild beasts, leopards and tigers, the people like brightly colored birds.

The moon hung low, a bloody slash of color against the deepest ink of night. There were no stars to be seen. Clouds, thick and a shade lighter than the sky, moved at a lazy crawl, casting long, malevolent shadows against the backdrop of the Black Hills Forest. Trees, their skeletal branches extended to the sky in prayerful worship, swayed in a strong breeze. The wind was chilly, nipping at my nose with a frostbitten kiss. The only light for miles came off the neon pulse

Along the pavement-colored hall doors stood half open on either side, all the way down; each one was numbered in bright bald tin, each one stood just so much ajar in the gas-lit corridor. Just enough to reveal half-dressed men and women waiting for the rain or about to make love or already through loving and about to get drunk; or already half drunk and beginning to argue about how soon it was going to rain or whose turn it was to run down for whisky or whether it was time to make love again or forget it for once and just wait for rain.

My breakfast nearly came up as I stared at the huge, colorful banner strung overhead between two pine trees. ERIC RICHARDS: WELCOME TO CAMP PINETREE!!! “Who put that there?” I gasped to Lettie, who had been sitting with me at breakfast. Eric’s name was painted in neon colors and underlined six times. “Cabins five and six. Isn’t it great?” Lettie looked proud. “I wanted to tell you, but the rest of the girls wanted it to be a surprise.” It was a surprise all right--just like getting hit in the head with a baseball bat.

Such details can be a way to add joyful color to your wardrobe even if you’re reluctant to wear anything too bright. A pop of neon under a collar or stripes on a rolled cuff can be just enough.