Emerald

EM-er-uhld

noun

a bright green precious stone, typically pure and transparent, that is valued as a gem.

The emerald is known for its rich green color, which symbolizes rebirth, love, and fertility. It is one of the four precious gemstones along with diamond, ruby, and sapphire.

If a cherub, on pinions of silver descending, Had brought me a gem from the fretwork of heaven; And smiles, with his star-cheering voice sweetly blending, The blessings of Tighe had melodiously given; It had not created a warmer emotion Than the present, fair nymphs, I was blest with from you; Than the shell, from the bright golden sands of the ocean, Which the emerald waves at your feet gladly threw.

John Keats

Poetry

Ser Jaime lost a hundred golden dragons, the queen lost an emerald pendant, and I lost my knife.

George R. R. Martin

A Game Of Thrones

There were four rings on her fingers: a wedding band, two diamonds, and a cat's-eye emerald: “Uh, I'm not dangerous,” he said.

King, Stephen

The Stand

Cars that were usually gleaming stood dusty in their drives and lawns that were once emerald green lay parched and yellowing; the use of hosepipes had been banned due to drought.

J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

She hands her bowl to Ruth, who settles the windmill inside it, up to its little wooden neck in emerald peas.

Gregory Maguire

Confessions of an Ugly Step Sister

Everything is grey—except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers.

Bram Stoker

Dracula

One of the noble peers, who was familiar with the Arabic language, having studied it during the famous Egyptian campaign, followed with his eye as the translator read aloud: “ ‘I, El-Kobbir, a slave-merchant, and purveyor of the harem of his highness, acknowledge having received for transmission to the sublime emperor, from the French lord, the Count of Monte Cristo, an emerald valued at eight hundred thousand francs; as the ransom of a young Christian slave of eleven years of age, named Haydée, the acknowledged daughter of the late lord Ali Tepelini, pasha of Yanina, and of Vasiliki, his favorite; she having been sold to me seven years previously, with her mother, who had died on arriving at Constantinople, by a French colonel in the service of the Vizier Ali Tepelini, named Fernand Mondego.

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo

So beautiful…worth more than this building, I imagine.” He slipped the emerald in his pocket.

Rick Riordan

The Son of Neptune

It is surprising that they are caught here—that in this deep and capacious spring, far beneath the rattling teams and chaises and tinkling sleighs that travel the Walden road, this great gold and emerald fish swims.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

It was a smart, expensive-looking machine, enamelled a pure lemon yellow and upholstered in emerald green leather.

Aldous Huxley

Crome Yellow

He was aware of a titanic green flash, so bright that for one moment it was as if the Emerald City of Oz had exploded all around him.

Stephen King

Insomnia

A Prairie Sunset Shot gold, maroon and violet, dazzling silver, emerald, fawn, The earth’s whole amplitude and Nature’s multiform power consign’d for once to colors; The light, the general air possess’d by them—colors till now unknown, No limit, confine—not the Western sky alone—the high meridian—North, South, all, Pure luminous color fighting the silent shadows to the last.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

With that flowing blonde hair, emerald green eyes, her body tall and lush .

Suzanne Collins

Hunger Games 1 - The Hunger Games

VI If my virtue be a dancer’s virtue, and if I have often sprung with both feet into golden-emerald rapture: If my wickedness be a laughing wickedness, at home among rose-banks and hedges of lilies: —For in laughter is all evil present, but it is sanctified and absolved by its own bliss:— And if it be my Alpha and Omega that everything heavy shall become light, everybody a dancer, and every spirit a bird: and verily, that is my Alpha and Omega!— Oh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings—the ring of the return?

Friedrich Nietzsche

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Save one white girl, who deemed it would not be So dread a thing to feel a sea-god’s arms Crushing her breasts in amorous tyranny, And longed to listen to those subtle charms Insidious lovers weave when they would win Some fencèd fortress, and stole back again, nor thought it sin To yield her treasure unto one so fair, And lay beside him, thirsty with love’s drouth, Called him soft names, played with his tangled hair, And with hot lips made havoc of his mouth Afraid he might not wake, and then afraid Lest he might wake too soon, fled back, and then, fond renegade, Returned to fresh assault, and all day long Sat at his side, and laughed at her new toy, And held his hand, and sang her sweetest song, Then frowned to see how froward was the boy Who would not with her maidenhood entwine, Nor knew that three days since his eyes had looked on Proserpine, Nor knew what sacrilege his lips had done, But said, “He will awake, I know him well, He will awake at evening when the sun Hangs his red shield on Corinth’s citadel, This sleep is but a cruel treachery To make me love him more, and in some cavern of the sea Deeper than ever falls the fisher’s line Already a huge Triton blows his horn, And weaves a garland from the crystalline And drifting ocean-tendrils to adorn The emerald pillars of our bridal bed, For sphered in foaming silver, and with coral-crownèd head, We two will sit upon a throne of pearl, And a blue wave will be our canopy, And at our feet the water-snakes will curl In all their amethystine panoply Of diamonded mail, and we will mark The mullets swimming by the mast of some storm-foundered bark, Vermilion-finned with eyes of bossy gold Like flakes of crimson light, and the great deep His glassy-portaled chamber will unfold, And we will see the painted dolphins sleep Cradled by murmuring halcyons on the rocks Where Proteus in quaint suit of green pastures his monstrous flocks.

Oscar Wilde

Poetry

In the reign of Augustus and his successors, duties were imposed on every kind of merchandise, which through a thousand channels flowed to the great centre of opulence and luxury; and in whatsoever manner the law was expressed, it was the Roman purchaser, and not the provincial merchant, who paid the tax.589 The rate of the customs varied from the eighth to the fortieth part of the value of the commodity; and we have a right to suppose that the variation was directed by the unalterable maxims of policy: that a higher duty was fixed on the articles of luxury than on those of necessity, and that the productions raised or manufactured by the labor of the subjects of the empire were treated with more indulgence than was shown to the pernicious, or at least the unpopular, commerce of Arabia and India.590 There is still extant a long but imperfect catalogue of Eastern commodities, which about the time of Alexander Severus were subject to the payment of duties: cinnamon, myrrh, pepper, ginger, and the whole tribe of aromatics; a great variety of precious stones, among which the diamond was the most remarkable for its price, and the emerald for its beauty;591 Parthian and Babylonian leather, cottons, silks, both raw and manufactured, ebony, ivory, and eunuchs.592 We may observe that the use and value of those effeminate slaves gradually rose with the decline of the empire.

Edward Gibbon

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

The Citizen Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald muffler.

James Joyce

Ulysses

He was looking at Mr. Nancy, an old black man with a pencil mustache, in his check sports jacket and his lemon-yellow gloves, riding a carousel lion as it rose and lowered, high in the air; and, at the same time, in the same place, he saw a jeweled spider as high as a horse, its eyes an emerald nebula, strutting, staring down at him; and simultaneously he was looking at an extraordinarily tall man with teak-colored skin and three sets of arms, wearing a flowing ostrich-feather headdress, his face painted with red stripes, riding an irritated golden lion, two of his six hands holding on tightly to the beast’s mane; and he was also seeing a young black boy, dressed in rags, his left foot all swollen and crawling with blackflies; and last of all, and behind all these things, Shadow was looking at a tiny brown spider, hiding under a withered ocher leaf.

Unknown

American Gods

The Mask “Put off that mask of burning gold With emerald eyes.” “O no, my dear, you make so bold To find if hearts be wild and wise, And yet not cold.” “I would but find what’s there to find, Love or deceit.” “It was the mask engaged your mind, And after set your heart to beat, Not what’s behind.” “But lest you are my enemy, I must enquire.” “O no, my dear, let all that be, What matter, so there is but fire In you, in me?” Upon a House Shaken by the Land Agitation How should the world be luckier if this house, Where passion and precision have been one Time out of mind, became too ruinous To breed the lidless eye that loves the sun?

W. B. Yeats

Poetry

Fantastically whirled the professionals, a young man in sleek evening-clothes and a slim mad girl in emerald silk, with amber hair flung up as jaggedly as flames.

Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt

Prince Paul was beside himself with gratitude.” “Did he give him an emerald tie pin the size of a plover’s egg?” I inquired sarcastically.

Agatha Christie

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

On it goes, shouting, roaring, exulting in its strength, passes through a gorge with sublime display of energy, then suddenly expands on a gently inclined pavement, down which it rushes in thin sheets and folds of lacework into a quiet pool—“Emerald Pool,” as it is called—a stopping-place, a period separating two grand sentences.

John Muir

My First Summer in the Sierra

He went to the Gallapagos, a horrid dry place on the Equator, where he was nearly baked to death; he went to the Georgia Islands, the Orkneys, Emerald Island, Little Nightingale Island, Gough’s Island, Bouvet’s Island, the Crossets, and even to a little speck of an island south of the Cape of Good Hope.

Rudyard Kipling

The Jungle Book

On the tray was a small glass, containing an aggressively emerald-colored liquid.

Gaiman, Neil

Neverwhere

Whatever anyone does or says, I must be good, just as if the gold, or the emerald, or the purple were always saying this.

Marcus Aurelius

Meditations

Jewels danced when he moved his hands; onyx and opal, tiger’s eye and tourmaline, ruby, amethyst, sapphire, emerald, jet and jade, a black diamond, and a green pearl.

Martin, George, R. R.

A Dance With Dragons

“Green, the emerald, is the color of spring; of hope, particularly hope in immortality; and of victory, as the color of the palm and the laurel.

Dante Alighieri

The Divine Comedy

But then came emerald birds Singing about my head.

C. S. Lewis

Poetry