Flowered Quotes & Sayings

She wore a flowered blue dress of the type whores naturally favored, and that thing was so tight that when she moved, the daisies got all mixed up with the azaleas. She walked like a warm room full of smoke. — James McBride

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one's childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said. — Willa Cather

If racism is not the whole of the Tea Party, it is in its heart, along with blind hatred, a total disinterest in the welfare of others, and a full-flowered self-rationalizing refusal to accept the outcomes of elections, or the reality of democracy, or the narrowness of their minds and the equal narrowness of their public support. — Keith Olbermann

She wanted a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her. — Matthew Thomas

LXXIX
When I die, I want your hands on my eyes.
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me once moreL
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you to sniff the sea's aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.
I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else.
to continue to flourish, full-flowered.
So that you can reach everything my love directs you to.
So that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song. — Pablo Neruda

White-flowered shrubs thickened around her and so did sleep; it directed her limbs. Lie down now, sleep said sweetly. Lie down. These are the secret hours of the day, the time that owls and bats take to themselves. The stars change places now; let them. You lie down. — Helen Oyeyemi

Yuvali struggled to put one foot in front of the other. The long leaves of a purple-flowered bush raked her forehead. The flower emerged from bulbous green tubes, unfolding toward the sun. The petals radiated like flecks in an eye, a whirlpool, a sea-shell." Ch.19 — B.T. Lowry

A wise man in China asked his gardener to plant a shrub. The gardener objected that it only flowered once in a hundred years. "In that case," said the wise man, "plant it immediately." [On the importance of fundamental research.] — John Charles Polanyi

The indoor picnic had been laid out in an octagonal-shaped sunroom featuring an atrium set in the center of the stone floor. Here a "white garden" planted with white roses, snowy lilies, and silver magnolias gave off a delicious scent that drifted across the table laden with linen, crystal, and silver. The white linen cloth had been scattered with pink rose petals that matched the flowered Sevres china. — Lisa Kleypas

Eccentricty had flowered into madness. — Laurie R. King

He also flowered intellectually during his last two years in high school and found himself at the intersection, as he had begun to see it, of those who were geekily immersed in electronics and those who were into literature and creative endeavors. "I started to listen to music a whole lot, and I started to read more outside of just science and technology - Shakespeare, Plato. I loved King Lear. — Walter Isaacson

The rose that with you earthly eyes you see, has flowered in God from all eternity. — Angelus Silesius

And the skies: in one day the sky could travel from green at dawn to a noon-time blue so severe it was almost black to hot silver in the afternoon to roiling burgundy at sunset. Just before night it flowered in yawning, imperial violets. Wedges of mauve, cauldrons of peach - skies more like drugs than colors. — Anthony Doerr

a fully flowered narcissist. — Russell Banks

Kippenger suppressed a grin
I could've sworn he did. Without looking at anyone, he said, "Jargon wrote, 'You'll get nothing from me, ever, you dog-breath, rotted corpse of a king.'"
Vargas flowered at me. In return, I smiled and looked around the room, rather proud of myself for that. — Jennifer A. Nielsen

I see now that when Norma flowered in our garden I became a weed, allowed to exist only where I would not be seen, in corners and dark places. — Daniel Keyes

To her the earth was composed of hardships and insults. She felt instant admiration for a man who openly defied it. She thought that if the grim angel of death should clutch his heart, Pete would shrug his shoulders and say, "Oh, ev'ryt'ing goes."
She anticipated that he would come again shortly. She spent some of her week's pay in the purchase of flowered cretonne for a lambrequin. She made it with infinite care, and hung it to the slightly careening mantel over the stove in the kitchen. She studied it with painful anxiety from different points in the room. She wanted it to look well on Sunday night when, perhaps, Jimmie's friend would come. On Sunday night, however, Pete did not appear.
Afterwards the girl looked at it with a sense of humiliation. She was now convinced that Pete was superior to admiration for lambrequins. — Stephen Crane

It was a gringo; in the remote corners of the world the short-sleeved flowered tourist shirt, the steel-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and bulldog shoes had become the uniform of earnest American enterprise. Moon recognized the man as the new missionary. His head was cropped too close, so that his white skull gleamed, and the red skin of his neck and jaw was riddled with old acne; his face was bald with anxiety and tiresome small agonies. — Peter Matthiessen

My God, I have come with the seeds of questions. I planted them, and they never flowered. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Weetzie could not even cry and make Kleenex roses. She remembered the day her father, Charlie, had driven away in the smashed yellow T-bird, leaving her mother Brandy-Lynn clutching her flowered robe with one hand and an empty glass in the other, and leaving Weetzie holding her arms crossed over her chest that was taking its time to develope into anything — Francesca Lia Block

Most of the big shore places were closed now. And there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of the ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away till gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes, A fresh green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams. For a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent. Face to face, for the last time in history, with something commensurate to its capacity for wonder. — F Scott Fitzgerald

The flowered trim on the hems [of the dress] seemed superfluous, even frivolous, but at the same time it comforted her, as though the idea that a seamstress had thought to adorn clothing so innocently implied that somewhere, innocence was safe. — Gael Baudino

There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain. — Isak Dinesen

Bill looks different without a suit. He was wearing his old graduate school T-shirt. Which was Brown. The school. Not the color. His girlfriend was wearing sandals and a nice flowered dress. She even had hair under her arms. No kidding! — Stephen Chbosky

The devil stole into the Garden of Eden. He carried with him the disease - amor deliria nervosa - in the form of a seed. It grew and flowered into a magnificent apple tree, which bore apples as bright as blood.
-From Genesis: A Complete History of the World and the Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD, Harvard University — Lauren Oliver

Shrinking in a corner,
pressed into the wall;
do they know I'm present,
am I here at all?
Is there a written rule book,
that tells you how to be
all the right things to talk about
that everyone has but me?
Slowly I am withering
a flowered deprived of sun;
longing to belong to
somewhere or someone. — Lang Leav

The skins matched all the tones of chocolate, coffee and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a Matisse, or a Braque. — Anais Nin

Sometimes you fall, spinning through space, grasping for the things that keep you on this earth. Sometimes you catch them. They can be the hands of the people you love. They can be your pets- pups with funny names, cats with ferocious old souls. The thing that keeps you here can be your art. It can be things you have collected and invested with a certain sense of meaning. A flowered, buckled treasure chest of secrets. Shoes that make you taller and, therefore, closer to the heavens. A suit that belonged to your fairy godmother. A dress that makes you feel a little like the Goddess herself.
Sometimes you keep falling; you don't catch anything.
Sometimes you fall, spinning through space, grasping for the things that keep you here. Sometimes you catch them. Sometimes you don't.
Sometimes they catch you. — Francesca Lia Block

Percy! he bellowed. He dropped his broom and ran at me. If you've never been charged by an enthusiastic Cyclops wearing a flowered apron and rubber cleaning gloves, I'm telling you, it'll wake you up quick. — Rick Riordan

Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile. — Herman Melville

the black church helped African Americans survive the harshest forms of oppression and developed a revolutionary appeal for universal communal spirituality. The black church didn't just theorize about democracy, it practiced democracy. From its roots there flowered the civil rights movement - creative, inclusive, and nonviolent. — U.S. Department Of State

Cassava No man had touched her, but a boy-child grew in the belly of the chief's daughter. They called him Mani. A few days after birth he was already running and talking. From the forest's farthest corners people came to meet the prodigious Mani. Mani caught no disease, but on reaching the age of one, he said, "I'm going to die," and he died. A little time passed, and on Mani's grave sprouted a plant never before seen, which the mother watered every morning. The plant grew, flowered, and gave fruit. The birds that picked at it flew strangely, fluttering in mad spirals and singing like crazy. One day the ground where Mani lay split open. The chief thrust his hand in and pulled out a big, fleshy root. He grated it with a stone, made a dough, wrung it out, and with the warmth of the fire cooked bread for everyone. They called the root mani oca, "house of Mani," and manioc is its name in the Amazon basin and other places. (174) — Eduardo Galeano

If the reader possesses any wealth and a comfortable life, he'll step out of himself to see how the other sometimes lives. If he's poor, he won't be reading me because reading me is superfluous for anyone who has a slight permanent hunger. Here I'm playing the role of a safety valve for you and from the massacring life of the average middle class. I'm well aware that it's frightening to step out of oneself, but everything new is frightening. Though the anonymous girl in this story is so ancient that she could be a biblical figure. She was subterranean and had never flowered: I'm lying: she was grass. — Clarice Lispector

You know those afternoons," he asks, drawing a shaking breath, "where you're just going along, doing fine, and then afternoon comes and it feels like you've just got the wind knocked out of you and everything is wrong?" He sighs and slowly pushes himself so he's sitting upright. His shoulders are slumped. "That's all," he says. "It's just one of those afternoons."
We are silent for a minute. Then he lies back down on the couch.
I should say I love him. I should say it will be all right. But it won't.
I walk down the hall to my bedroom. I lie down on my side and stare at the wall, the blue-flowered wallpaper next to my nose. Despite my best efforts, I start to cry.
I know those afternoons. — Marya Hornbacher

The door opened to reveal a room with walls consisting mostly of inset mahogany bookcases covered by leaded glass doors. Intricate plasterwork adorned the ceiling in a flowered medallion style that matched the thick Aubusson carpet on the floor.
"Are all of these books for sale?" Amanda asked in a hushed voice, feeling as if she had entered a king's treasure room.
Fretwell nodded. "You'll find everything from antiques to zoology. We have a wide selection of antique maps and celestial charts, original folios and manuscripts..." He gestured around them, as if the extensive rows of books were self-explanatory.
"I would love to lock myself in here for a week," she said impulsively. — Lisa Kleypas

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes
a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Now she could look back down the long years and see herself in green flowered dimity, standing in the sunshine at Tara, thrilled by the young horseman with his blond hair shining like a silver helmet. She could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers. And so he, too, would have become cheap if, in those first far-away days, she had ever had the satisfaction of refusing to marry him. If she had ever had him at her mercy, seen him grown passionate, importunate, jealous, sulky, pleading, like the other boys, the wild infatuation which had possessed her would have passed, blowing away as lightly as mist before sunshine and light wind when she met a new man. — Margaret Mitchell

Many countries in the Middle East are artificial creations. European colonialists drew their national borders in the nineteenth or twentieth century, often with little regard for local history and tradition, and their leaders have had to concoct outlandish myths in order to give citizens a sense of nationhood. Just the opposite is true of Iran. This is one of the world's oldest nations, heir to a tradition that reaches back thousands of years, to periods when great conquerors extended their rule across continents, poets and artists created works of exquisite beauty, and one of the world's most extraordinary religious traditions took root and flowered. — Stephen Kinzer

After its hothouse incubation in the seventies, appropriation breathed important new life into art. This life flowered spectacularly over the decades - even if it's now close to aesthetic kudzu. — Jerry Saltz

An elaborate system of etiquette and social standards flowered around the home phone: how long a child might be allowed to stay on the phone, how late one could call without being impolite, and of course, the dread implications of a late night call which violated that norm. — John Battelle

When I arrived back at Intro to Basic Art again later that week, I thought for a moment we had a new student who didn't know about the assigned seats. Sitting at my table was a girl in a long flowered dress, very vintage-hippie. She actually was wearing real flowers in her hair, and hardly any make up. I sat down, ready to explain to this poor lost soul that the seat was already taken, when I looked again and realized it was the same girl. I ended up not saying anything at all; I couldn't think of anything that wouldn't be rude or just plain stupid. — J.M. Richards

She remembered that once, when she was a little girl, she had seen a pretty young woman with golden hair down to her knees in a long flowered dress, and had said to her, without thinking, "Are you a princess?" The girl had laughed very kindly at her and asked her what her name was. Blanche remembered going away from her, led by her mother's hand, thinking to herself that the girl really was a princess, but in disguise. And she had resolved that someday, she would dress as though she were a princess in disguise. — Regina Doman

In the time of swords and periwigs and full-skirted coats with flowered lappets - when gentlemen wore ruffles, and gold-laced waistcoats of paduasoy and taffeta - there lived a tailor in Gloucester. — Beatrix Potter

When we say "transformation," it means that nothing of the old has remained. Something totally new has flowered within you. Now you look at a rose plant that is full of thorns. Springtime came and rose flowers burst out - it is a transformation. The thorns are still there - there are more thorns than flowers - but we do not call it a thorn plant. We call it a rose plant because of that single rose. Everyone's attention goes more towards that single rose than a hundred thorns that are on the plant, isn't it? So all the thorns in you, maybe you cannot remove them right now, but if one rose flower blossoms, everyone is willing to overlook those things. — Jaggi Vasudev

For an instant she felt them, their identities, almost their substance, pass over her head like a wave. At some time she would be - or no, already she was like that too; she was one of them, her body the same, identical, merged with that other flesh that choked the air in the flowered room with its sweet organic scent; she felt suffocated by this thick sargasso-sea of femininity. — Margaret Atwood

When I return to that house it will be with my son in my arms. I shall have a red coat on him and red-flowered trousers and on his head a hat with a small gilded Buddha sewn on the front and on his feet tiger-faced shoes. And I will wear new shoes and a new coat of black sateen and I will go into the kitchen where I spent my days and I will go into the great hall where the Old One sits with her opium, and I will show myself and my son to all of them. — Pearl S. Buck

The drama's altar isn't on the stage: it is candle-sticked and flowered in the box office. There is the gold, though there be no frankincense or myrrh; and the gospel for the day always The Play will Run for a Year. The Dove of Inspiration, of the desire for inspiration, has flown away from it; and on it's roof, now, the commonplace crow caws candidly. — Sean O'Casey

In December 1998, I considered myself an expert on love. I was almost a year into a relationship, one that had grown more slowly than I had wished, but once it flowered it was much more stimulating than any marriage or relationship I had known. — Jane Smiley

To be unpopular, you must look the part. Remember four words: plastic flowered swim cap. — Jennifer Ziegler

Pictures can be devastating. Who allowed John Kerry to get himself photographed windsurfing in a flowered swimsuit? Anyone in the real world in that operation? — Jack Germond

I noticed Xander had subtly adjusted his posture. He slouched slightly to the side, let his head hang, and then looked up through his bangs to gaze at something in the middle distance. Uber James Dean. Xander managed to pull it off as if he was looking at nothing, just having deep thoughts about the far away adventures he would be having if he wasn't stuck waiting for a flowered suitcase at Hopkins International. I casually let my eyes slide across the room. There had to be cute girls somewhere close at hand. Otherwise Xander wouldn't have broken out his middle distance gazing Tyrone Power eyes. — Adrianne Ambrose

It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds — Virginia Woolf

She had worn a sequined, strapless wedding gown, and left her bridesmaid to wear brightly flowered dresses to fit for a kind of pornographic milkmaid: low-cut and laced up the midriff with a sort of shoelace. What Scarlet O'Hara might have done with a shower curtain, if she were trying to snag a plumber. — Lorrie Moore

Wicca's temples are flowered-splashed meadows, forest, beaches, and deserts. — Scott Cunningham

...and all the stars flowered in the sky. — J.R.R. Tolkien

All Heaven and Earth
Flowered white obliterate...
Snow...unceasing snow — Basho Matsuo

To be the other woman
is to be a season
that is always about to end,
when the air is flowered
with jasmine and peach,
and the weather day after day
is flawless,
and the forecast
is hurricane. — Linda Pastan

Harry had never in all his life had such a Christmas dinner. A hundred fat, roast turkeys; mountains of roast and boiled potatoes; platters of chipolatas; tureens of buttered peas, silver boats of thick, rich gravy and cranberry sauce - and stacks of wizard crackers every few feet along the table. These fantastic party favors were nothing like the feeble Muggle ones the Dursleys usually bought, with their little plastic toys and their flimsy paper hats inside. Harry pulled a wizard cracker with Fred and it didn't just bang, it went off with a blast like a cannon and engulfed them all in a cloud of blue smoke, while from the inside exploded a rear admiral's hat and several live, white mice. Up at the High Table, Dumbledore had swapped his pointed wizard's hat for a flowered bonnet, and was chuckling merrily at a joke Professor Flitwick had just read him. Flaming — J.K. Rowling

This earth is one of the rare spots in the cosmos where mind has flowered. Man is a product of nearly three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution of our planet. — Julian Huxley

He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her needles, glancing round about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climed high, not for a second should he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect, there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a rosy-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote, demanding sympathy. — Virginia Woolf

Morris wondered what domestic catastrophe would make a man sell even the plaster gnomes from his garden.It was a horrid piece of evidence for mutability; Mutability, goddess of the auction room, dusty-fingered Mutability, the old-age pensioner goddess. And she ruled over the casserole containing the half-empty packet of sugar no one would ever finish, now; and the dropsical white tea-pot with the brown tidemark left in by years of the-making by dead women in flowered aprons ( withered and dead, all the chintz flowers); over all the odd, disjointed fragments of other people's lives. — Angela Carter

Now I find the stack of chapters I called Under Magnolia. Why, after many years, even open these flowered folders? Dare alla luce, the Tuscans say at the birth of a baby, to give to the light. — Frances Mayes

An irrelevant and poignant sensation of pleasure rose in him, like a tree that grew up and flowered all in one moment with its roots in his loins and its flowers in his mind. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Before the downpour, Al had thought Lou looked alluring in her pale pink T-shirt and simple flowered skirt. Her soft brown waves bounced around her shoulders with the humidity. She was simply beautiful. But with the addition of water, she evolved into a siren. Her thin cotton clothes clung to every curve. She slicked her hair away from her face, as if emerging from an enchanted lake. — Amy E. Reichert

All around Molly there flowed and flowered a light as impossible as snow set afire, while thousands of cloven hooves sang by like cymbals. She stood very still, neither weeping nor laughing, for her joy was too great for her body to understand. — Peter S. Beagle

All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. ("Where The Woodbine Twineth") — Davis Grubb

In the large cities that received new Americans, there flowered a golden age of restaurants, manned by the available talent from abroad and fueled by the restless wealth of the newly rich. — David Joseph Schwartz

Learning that flowered in days of yore In these our times is thought a bore. Once knowledge was a well to drink of; Now having fun is all men think of. — John Guy

If there is one thing I despise, it is the perverse affectation of rich people who go around dressing as if they were poor, in second-hand clothes, ill-fitting gray wool bonnets, socks full of holes, and flowered shirts under threadbare sweaters. Not only is it ugly, it is also insulting: nothing is more despicable than a rich man's scorn for a poor man's longing. — Muriel Barbery

I am dead to them, even though I once flowered. — Sylvia Plath

The world has enough beautiful mountains and meadows, spectacular skies and serene lakes. It has enough lush forests, flowered fields and sandy beaches. It has plenty of stars and the promise of a new sunrise and sunset every day. What the world needs more of is people to appreciate and enjoy it. — Michael Josephson

His father had never planted an orchard. No growing thing was graceless, but that scowling, snarling man, Hiram Linden, had seemed purposely to avoid all crops that flowered in beauty. All were utilitarian, sown with surliness and harvested with oaths. Ase was the first Linden of three generations to consider the earth and its bounty with reverence and affection, to long to adorn it as best he might during his tenure. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers. — May Sarton

I would pore for hours over the stalls of worn necklaces, sets of gilt spoons, sugar tongs in the shape of hen's feet or midget hands, clocks that didn't work, flowered china, spotty mirrors and ponderous furniture, the flotsam left by those receding centuries in which, more and more, I was living. — Margaret Atwood

His stepmother -wearing a nightgown for comfort and a flowered hat for looks- had spent her days sitting in their parlor window in Baltimore drinking sherry out of a coffee cup. — John Cheever

Reviving Spring, a toast to thy fresh lips! Thy blush is music, and e'en heaven lurks In thy thick perfumed hair that hangs about Thy flowered shoulders like enchanted rain; Thy sigh is song and thy soft breath a balm, Dispelling death
soft loosing his cold grip, Unravelling darkness in the heart of pain, As o'er dank waters rings the laugh of dawn. — William Batchelder Greene