In literary descriptions the color orange serves as a vivid and versatile device that infuses scenes and characters with warmth and dynamism. Writers employ orange to animate sensory details—for example, a character’s lids are rendered in an intense orange hue ([1]), while elsewhere orange light bathes a dusty floor at sundown, evoking both energy and melancholy ([2], [3]). The hue is also woven into elaborate ornamental detail, as in the brilliantly dyed head-dress featuring green, crimson, and orange feathers ([4]) or when a large, striking orange circle draws the reader’s visual focus ([5]). In lists of colors that build character or scene—juxtaposed with white, red, and others—the hue of orange stands out for its brightness and verve ([6], [7]). Together with its appearance in subtle color shifts in art ([8], [9]) and in evocative natural imagery ([10], [11], [12]), orange emerges in literature as a color that vividly captures both the physical and metaphorical brilliance of its subjects.
- His eyes were hot and his lids were orange over them.
— from The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany
- The sinking sun glowed in the heart of every vivid Brussels rose and bathed the dusty floor with orange lights.
— from Carnival by Compton MacKenzie
- The sun had gone down behind the oaks, flinging glorious rose-color and orange shadows along the edges of the slate-blue clouds.
— from Main-Travelled Roads by Hamlin Garland
- On the scalp, which a war club had crushed, sat a very beautiful head-dress of gull feathers, brilliantly dyed in green and crimson and orange.
— from The Portal of Dreams by Charles Neville Buck
- A large orange circle surrounds the eye, and within it is a second circle of cobalt-blue.
— from The Western World
Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North
and South America by William Henry Giles Kingston
- It may be white, yellow, orange, pink or red.
— from Many-Storied Mountains: The Life of Glacier National Park by Greg Beaumont
- His first colour, as here, was red; then came orange,
— from Six Lectures on Light
Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 by John Tyndall
- Iodine, on the other hand, gives with antimony a carmelite brown, changing to orange.
— from Poisons, Their Effects and Detection
A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts by Alexander Wynter Blyth
- The general colour above is buffish orange, minutely speckled and vermiculated with grey.
— from Birds of Britain by J. Lewis (John Lewis) Bonhote
- Others were specked and splashed with scarlet, or barred with orange, or dashed with glistening green.
— from Mother Carey's Chicken: Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle by George Manville Fenn
- He proudly hears the mighty organ swell, While orange buds, and bridal robes, appear, And people stop, the merry notes to hear.
— from Canada and Other Poems by T. F. (Thomas Frederick) Young
- It is a common habit with artists to introduce very warm effects into all sunlight by the use of orange or yellow in the warm colors.
— from Elementary Color by Milton Bradley