Flowering Quotes (page 19)
Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and wine, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confounds the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together.
Virginia Woolf
To Lucy it was an admirable study, the contrast between the man who threw his whole soul into a certain aim, which he pursued with a savage intensity, knowing that the end was a dreadful, lonely death; and the man who was making up his mind deliberately to gather what was beautiful in life, and to cultivate its graces as though it were a flower garden.
W. Somerset Maugham
[Hers] was an existence between heaven and earth... beyond her stretched as far as the eye could see... an immense space of joys and passions...[But] did not love, like flowers, need a special soil, a particular temperature? Sighs by moonlight, long embraces, tears cried into yielding hands...the fevers of the flesh and the langours of tenderness...
Gustave Flaubert
He foresaw his pale body reclined in it at full, naked, in a womb of warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved. He saw his trunk and limbs riprippled over and sustained, buoyed lightly upward, lemonyellow: his navel, bud of flesh: and saw the dark tangled curls of his bush floating, floating hair of the stream around the limp father of thousands, a languid floating flower.
James Joyce
Evading all the boredom, all the vast chagrin / That load their heaviness upon this fog-bound life, / Happy is he who on a stalwart wing can knife / Across the haze to meadows shining and serene! Happy is he whose thoughts soar like the lark to sing, / As through the morning skies, in freedom, he ascends, / - Who, gazing down on life, completely comprehends / The language of the flowers and every speechless thing!
Charles Baudelaire
Beautiful she is, sir! Lovely! Sometimes Luke a great tree in flower, sometimes like a white daffadowdilly, small and slender like. Hard as di'monds, soft as moonlight. Warm as sunlight, cold as frost in the stars. Proud and far-off as a snow-mountain, and as merry as any lass I ever saw with daisies in her hair in springtime.
J. R. R. Tolkien
The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.
John Greenleaf Whittier