Literary notes about bilious green (AI summary)
"Bilious green" has been used in literature to evoke a sense of unease and decay through its association with bile and sickness. Authors often deploy the color to accentuate unsettling features in characters—as in the contrasting depiction of a bilious green eye alongside a brown one [1, 2, 3]—or to color entire environments with a sickly pallor, such as gloomy swamps or dank interiors [4, 5, 6]. In other instances, the hue is explicitly likened to bile, reinforcing its connotation with morbidity and corruption [7, 8]. Whether applied to human features or to landscapes, "bilious green" imbues the scene with a disturbingly unnatural quality that heightens the overall atmosphere of discomfort.
- His bilious brown eye looked disconcerted, and his bilious green eye followed its example.
— from No Name by Wilkie Collins - This time his bilious green eye took the initiative, and set his bilious brown eye the example of recovered serenity.
— from No Name by Wilkie Collins - This time his bilious green eye took the initiative, and set his bilious brown eye the example of recovered serenity.
— from No Name by Wilkie Collins - Or else a lost and deeply wounded one, In a wild swamp all bilious greens, Came on a corpse a bare branch dangling on; The ghastliest of scenes!
— from Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 93, December 3, 1887 by Various - In the strangely thickening gloom the resplendent plates had taken on a dull coating of bilious green.
— from Hear Me, Pilate! by LeGette Blythe - So were the shabby green window-curtains, the bilious green paper on the walls, the dismal green baldaquin above my head.
— from Mademoiselle Miss, and Other Stories by Henry Harland - Resembling bile, especially in color: a bilious green.
— from Mother's Remedies Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers of the United States and Canada by Thomas Jefferson Ritter - "A bilious green."
— from Berry and Co. by Dornford Yates
