“There was a fine sunset over the hills of Granada. I imagined it lighting up the Alhambra. The clouds were like great wings of gold and yellow and rose-colour, with a smaller minute sprinkle in one spot, like a shower of glowing stones from a volcano. You see very faint imitations of such lustre in England.”

Leigh Hunt, Visit to Italy, 1828

“As the sun goes down he begins to fling his parting rays across all the sky, from horizon to zenith. He paints the clouds with his fiery pigments, and they glow with gorgeous colors from lake to river. Golden and yellow near the track of his disappearance, the hues change to boundless masses of pink, and crimson, and scarlet, and purple, further up the dome of the sky… Fiery as are the colors this sun-painter flings athwart his majestic easel, yet are they by so much the more quickly burned out and faded. The sunset is gorgeous only to be perishable and transitory. Gold changes to crimson, crimson deepens to purple, and soon the glory of the heavens is passed away. We turn and journey silently down to the lake.”

“Letter from Lake Oscawana,” New York Times, October 13th, 1865.

“Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day’s end. They were manifesting as the earth’s bright-colored nerve endings, the sun’s descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird’s distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.”

George Saunders, Escape from Spiderhead

“ The farmhouse where Rachel lived had a wrap-around porch like an apron. It had been built on a hill, and it looked down a long green slope of Christmas trees towards the town and Jellicoh College. It looked old-fashioned and a little forlorn. On one side of the house was a small barn, and behind the barn was an oval pond, dark and fringed with pine trees. It winked in the twilight like a glossy lidless eye. The sun was rolling down the grassy rim of the hill towards the pond, and the exaggerated shadows of Christmas trees, long and pointed as witches’ hats, stitched black triangles across the purple-grey lawn. House, barn, and hill were luminous in the fleet purple light.”

Kelly Link, Water Off a Black Dog’s Back