You know, that stuff about pink elephants, that’s the bunk. It’s little animals. Little tiny turkeys in straw hats. Midget monkeys coming through the keyholes.
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
The word “conservative” is used by the BBC as a portmanteau word of abuse for anyone whose views differ from the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the nineteen-sixties.
—Norman Tebbit (b. 1931)
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
—Sylvia Plath (1932–1963)