From Her Book Roses Quotes & Sayings

Optimism is America's birthright ... There is no social problem Americans
dare not attack. No problem, that is, except one: about marriage,
and marriage alone, we despair. — Maggie Gallagher

I think the reason why I don't read so much, is because as I have observed, whole books all boil down to a drop of essence. You can read a book full of ten thousand words and at the end, sum it up in one sentence; I am more for the one sentence. I am more for the essence. It's like how you need a truckload of roses to extract one drop of rose oil; I don't want to bother with the truckload of roses because I would rather walk away with the drop of rose oil. So in my mind, I have written two hundred books. Why? Because I have with me two hundred vials with one drop of essence in each! — C. JoyBell C.

Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh. — Judah Ben Saul Ibn Tibbon

Friendship is a sheltering tree." Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Nina Post

You're ruining that book!" He pointed to the page I'd torn out. "That's a perfectly good book!" Holding his gaze, I reached down and ripped another page out. "I'm making roses." "Well, it's my book." "Sorry." I tore out another. — Kate Avery Ellison

What is the most precious, the most exciting smell awaiting you in the house when you return to it after a dozen years or so? The smell of roses, you think? No, mouldering books. — Andrei Sinyavsky

I feel as if I had opened a book and found roses of yesterday sweet and fragrant, between its leaves. — L.M. Montgomery

I drove out of Dartmouth and after a while Start Bay emerged out of the brightening gloom like the end of a set of parentheses in a book about the natural world. Inside the parentheses was a story about the sea. Outside them, the land: green, red and brown fields, and hills curling over the landscape. I saw small, delicate clumps of snowdrops, big rough patches of gorse, and along the thin road, houses with yellow roses and mimosa growing in their gardens. — Scarlett Thomas

....one of those long, romantic novels, six hundred and fifty pages of small print, translated from French or German or Hungarian or something -- because few of the English ones have the exact feeling I mean. And you read one page of it or even one phrase of it, and then you gobble up all the rest and go about in a dream for weeks afterwards, for months afterwards -- perhaps all your life, who knows? -- surrounded by those six hundred and fifty pages, the houses, the streets, the snow, the river, the roses, the girls, the sun, the ladies' dresses and the gentlemen's voices, the old, wicked, hard-hearted women and the old, sad women, the waltz music -- everything. What is not there you put in afterwards, for it is alive, this book, and it grows in your head. 'The house I was living in when I read that book,' you think, or 'This colour reminds me of that book. — Jean Rhys

I had to make water " I said. It was the classic female excuse and no male in recorded history had ever questioned it.
"I see " the Inspector said and left it at that.
Later I would have a quick piddle behind the caravan for insurance purposes. No one would be any the wiser. — Alan Bradley

There are no coincidences. If something happens and we don't understand the reason, that doesn't mean there is no reason. It means that the reason will later be revealed, likely not in this life. — Jacquelyn Mitchard

Lucy happily settled down to work. First she sent for papyrus and handmade a book leaf by leaf, binding the leaves together between board covers. Then she filled each page from memory, drew English roses budding and Chinese roses in full bloom, peppercorn-pink Bourbon roses climbing walls and silvery musk roses drowsing in flowerbeds. She took every rose she'd ever seen, made them as lifelike as she could (where she shaded each petal the rough paper turned silken), and in these lasting forms she offered them to Safiye. — Helen Oyeyemi

Sometimes you can be good at something that you still find really hard. Sometimes, to be good at something, you just need to keep showing the fuck up. — Junot Diaz

The year is a book, isn't it, Marilla? Spring's pages are written in Mayflowers and violets, summer's in roses, autumn's in red maple leaves, and winter in holly and evergreen. — L.M. Montgomery

When I was living in Mexico and writing a book called 'Aztec,' I had to make a deliberate effort to ignore a lot of the 'typically Mexican landscape' around me - banana and citrus groves, roses and carnations, burros and toros - because they did not exist in Mexico in the 15th century, the time of my book. — Gary Jennings

I should like to freeze in time all those I do love, keep them somehow safe from the ravages of the passing years ... Rather like flowers pressed between the pages of a book! — Sharon Kay Penman

I relinquished myself to existence pure and simple, thinking absolutely nothing - as if my mind were merely an echo chamber for the music, as if it contained only ether or at most a vaguely pleasant odor as of roses preserved between the pages of a book, their significance long forgotten. The tongue of the road gobbled me up and I allowed myself to sink like a tasty mouthful all the way to the bottom of a marvelous, rejuvenating vacuity. Later, it would occur to me it's the emptiness we mistakenly call Innocence. — Sol Luckman

Roses! I swear you men have all your romance from the same worn book. Flowers are a good thing, a sweet thing to give a lady. But it is always roses, always red, and always perfect hothouse blooms when they can come by them. — Patrick Rothfuss

At the end of the 1400s, the world changed. Two key dates can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of printing, William Caxton issued the first imaginative book to be published in England - Sir Thomas Malory's retelling of the Arthurian legends as Le Morte D'Arthur. In 1492, Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas opened European eyes to the existence of the New World. New worlds, both geographical and spiritual, are the key to the Renaissance, the 'rebirth' of learning and culture, which reached its peak in Italy in the early sixteenth century and in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603. — Ronald Carter

Many books belong to sunshine, and should be read out of doors. Clover, violets, and hedge roses breathe from their leaves; they are most lovable in cool lanes, along field paths, or upon stiles overhung by hawthorn, while the blackbird pipes, and the nightingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse. — Robert Aris Willmott

A book should be a garden that fits in the hands. Word-petals of color. Stems of strength. roots of truth. Turn a page and turn the seasons. Read the sentence and enjoy the roses. — Max Lucado

Envoi"

Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie
And build her glories their longevity.

Tell her that sheds
Such treasure in the air,
Recking naught else but that her graces give
Life to the moment,
I would bid them live
As roses might, in magic amber laid,
Red overwrought with orange and all made
One substance and one colour
Braving time.

Tell her that goes
With song upon her lips
But sings not out the song, nor knows
The maker of it, some other mouth,
May be as fair as hers,
Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,
When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid,
Siftings on siftings in oblivion,
Till change hath broken down
All things save Beauty alone. — Ezra Pound

Despite the feeling that we're directly experiencing the world out there, our reality is ultimately built in the dark, in a foreign language of electrochemical signals. The activity churning across vast neural networks gets turned into your story of this, your private experience of the world: the feeling of this book in your hands, the light in the room, the smell of roses, the sound of others speaking. — David Eagleman

Hitchcock used to believe that if there were three or four memorable scenes in a film that would be enough to drive it, but I don't know if that's true or not. — Clint Eastwood

Wisdom is awaken spirit. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Quinces are ripe...when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. they are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. but even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate--useless...until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak-up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. to answer your questionlove is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched. ~The Book of Salt — Monique Truong

Life and death- what paltry words, what tarnished bookends,what unjust summation for drawing breath one moment and failing to release it the next. — Rebecca Rasmussen

There's nothing like privacy. You know, I like people. It's nice that they might like my books and all that ... but I'm not the book, see? I'm the guy who wrote it, but I don't want them to come up and throw roses on me or anything. I want them to let me breathe. — Charles Bukowski

AND I WENT TO THE LIBRARY, I'M SNEAKING IN THE LIBRARY,
LOOKING THROUGH THE BOOKS, AND YOU KNOW,
LIKE I'M COVERING THE BOOK WITH LIKE SOMETHING ELSE.
AND THEN IT'S LIKE,
"ADMIRE IT, IT'S A BEAUTIFUL FLOWER,
YOU KNOW, IT'S LIKE ROSES."
. I'M LIKE, WE'R E NOT LOOKING AT THE SAME THING
I TOOK PHOTOS OF IT. — Eve Ensler