The color of life is gray and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty.
 Jack London, The People of the Abyss (1903). copy citation

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Author Jack London
Source The People of the Abyss
Topic life colors
Date 1903
Language English
Reference
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Weblink https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_People_of_the_Abyss

Context

“Multiply this by half a million, and you will be beneath the truth. No more dreary spectacle can be found on this earth than the whole of the awful East, with its Whitechapel, Hoxton, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, and Wapping to the East India Docks. The color of life is gray and drab. Everything is helpless, hopeless, unrelieved, and dirty. Bath-tubs are a thing totally unknown, as mythical as the ambrosia of the gods. The people themselves are dirty, while any attempt at cleanliness becomes howling farce, when it is not pitiful and tragic.” source