Quotes & Sayings About Milkweed

The wild roses were wide open and brilliant, the blue-eyed grass was in purple flower, and the silvery milkweed was just coming on. — Willa Cather

He tapped my chest. 'Happy is here.' He tapped his own chest. 'Here.'
I looked down past my chin. 'Inside?'
'Inside.'
It was getting crowded in there. First angel. Now happy. It seemed there was more to me than cabbage and turnips. — Jerry Spinelli

I found myself wondering, what would it be like to have a strange woman living in your home, nursing your child? My resulting research into the private lives of women in the 18th and 19th centuries inspired me and provided the backbone for [Lady of Milkweed Manor] novel. — Julie Klassen

I wonder if all mothers feel like this the moment they realize their daughters are growing up- as if it is impossible to believe that the laundry I once folded for her was doll-sized; as if I can still see her dancing in lazy pirouettes along the lip of the sandbox. Wasn't it yesterday that her hand was only as big as the sand dollar she found on the beach? That same hand, the one that's holding a boy's; wasn't it just holding mine, tugging so that I might stop and see the spiderweb, the milkweed pod, any of a thousand moments she wanted me to freeze? Time is an optical illusion- never quite as solid or strong as we think it is. You would assume that, given everything, I saw this coming. But watching Kate watch this boy, I see I have a thousand things to learn. — Jodi Picoult

In that latitude the temperature flirted with a hundred degrees for a few of the dog days, but to a child it can hardly ever be too hot. I liked the sun licking the backs of my legs, and the sweat between my shoulder blades, and the violet evenings, with ice cream and fireflies, wherein the long day slowly cooled. I liked the ants piling up dirt like coffee grounds between the bricks of our front walk, and the milkweed spittle in the vacant lot next door. I liked the freedom of shorts, sneakers, and striped T-shirt, with freckles and a short hot-weather haircut.
We love easily in summer, perhaps, because we love our summer selves. — John Updike

Dreams on waking were like empty cocoons of moths or the split-open husks of milkweed pods, dead shells where life had briefly swirled in furious but fragile storm-systems. — Stephen King

Although it is undoubtedly true man was created by God;
it is just as true that man was "made" by Satan."
The Milkweed Prophesy; Epitaph of the Apocalypse — Milkweed L. Augustine

Evil knows its time to end is soon at hand, hence why it is more than determined to succeed. — Milkweed L. Augustine

Can the child who is Dell; be the outer emoodiment of man's quest to save himself? To cure himself? ... Or, to "be" himself? — Milkweed L. Augustine

I spiraled slowly down the steps, the soft way a milkweed seed sometimes twirls to earth. I wanted time for any vague thought to come to mind that mind should want. No new ones came, but the pace seemed a meditative winding, and what I was winding was like yarn on an oblong skein, softly enfolding a quiet center that was myself. — Sena Jeter Naslund

I was once the snake woman
the only person, it seems, in the whole place
who wasn't terrified of them
I used to hunt with two sticks
among milkweed and under porches and logs
for this vein of cool green metal
which would run through my fingers like mercury
or turn to a raw bracelet
gripping my wrist:
I could follow them by their odor
a sick smell, acid, and glandular
part skunk, part inside
of a torn stomach,
the smell of their fear — Margaret Atwood

She walks towards Karen and Karen feels a cool wind against her skin, and the grandmother holds out both of her knobby old hands, and Karen puts out her own hands and touches her, and her hands feel as if sand is falling over them. There's a smell of milkweed flowers and garden soil. The grandmother keeps on walking; her eyes are light blue, and her cheek comes against Karen's, cool grains of dry rice. Then she's like the dots on the comic page, close up, and then she's only a swirl in the air, and then she's gone. — Margaret Atwood

My best friend Zoe has a perfect rear end and stick legs, and long, silky black hair. She is obviously not descended from William Penn. There are no dowdy pilgrims in her ancestry. Whereas I am grounded and mired in this place, she's like milkweed fluff that will take off with the first strong breeze. Stronger than fluff, though. She's like a bullet just waiting for someone to pull the trigger. — Wendy Wunder

Sunk in the grass of an empty lot on a spring Saturday, I split the stems of milkweed and thought about ants and peach pits and death and where the world went when I closed my eyes. — Toni Morrison

The box opens and the razors slide out, whisper sweet.
Used to be that my whole body was my canvas-hot cuts licking my ribs, ladder rungs climbing my arms, thick milkweed stalks shooting up my thighs. — Laurie Halse Anderson

This was the ghetto: where children grow down instead of up. — Jerry Spinelli

Everybody has an angel hiding inside. When you die, your angel comes out. You can die, but not your angel. Your angel never dies. — Jerry Spinelli

Who are you?' I didn't understand the question. I'm Uri', he said. 'What's your name?' I gave him my name. 'Stopthief. — Jerry Spinelli

She had never met Caroline's mother, but she knew a thing or two about what happened when someone went far away, how after a time you couldn't see their faces anymore when you closed your eyes or hear exactly how they laughed at a joke, how they seemed less like a real person whom you loved and more like a character in a story. And once that happened, it was easy, too easy, to let them float away like milkweed. — Hannah Barnaby

thought much of women; their grace and beauty, blooming like lotus flowers, floating like milkweed on the wind. — Diana Gabaldon

They don't live here. They live in Heaven.'
Where's that?'
I don't know,' I said. 'Enos says it's right here, on this side of the wall, but I never saw an angel over here. Kuba says it's in Russia. Olek says Washington America.'
What's Washington America?'
Enos says it's a place with no wall and no lice and lots of potatoes. — Jerry Spinelli

Who could believe in the prophecies ... that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds. — Henry David Thoreau

A Storm In April"

Some winters, taking leave,
Deal us a last, hard blow,
Salting the ground like Carthage
Before they will go.

But the bright, milling snow
Which throngs the air today -
It is a way of leaving
So as to stay.

The light flakes do not weigh
The willows down, but sift
Through the white catkins, loose
As petal-drift

Or in an up-draft lift
And glitter at a height,
Dazzling as summer's leaf-stir
Chinked with light.

This storm, if I am right,
Will not be wholly over
Till green fields, here and there,
Turn white with clover,
And through chill air the puffs of milkweed hover. — Richard Wilbur

Afterwards
Mostly you look back and say, "Well, OK. Things might have been different, sure, and it's not too bad, but look - things happen like that, and you did what you could."
You go back and pick up the pieces. There's tomorrow. There's that long bend in the river on the way home. Fluffy bursts of milkweed are floating through shafts of sunlight or disappearing where trees reach out from their deep dark roots.
Maybe people have to go in and out of shadows till they learn that floating, that immensity waiting to receive whatever arrives with trust. Maybe somebody has to explore what happens when one of us wanders over near the edge and falls for awhile. Maybe it was your turn. — William Stafford

94 was a good year to be twelve. Star Wars still had two more years as Box Office King, cartoons were still hand-drawn, and the Disney "D" still looked like a backwards "G." Words like "Columbine," "Al Qaeda" and "Y2K" were not synonymous with "terror," and 9-1-1 was an emergency number instead of a date. At twelve years old, summer still mattered. Monarch caterpillars still crawled beneath every milkweed leaf. Dandelions (or "wishes" as Mara called them) were flowers instead of pests. And divorce was still considered a tragedy. Before Mara, carnivals didn't make me sick. — Jake Vander Ark

There is absolutely no way someone cannot be affected, or cannnot learn vital lessons by being forced to dwell in the margins of a hindering repose as the one loved by so very few.
Dying and Loving It — Milkweed L. Augustine

I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one — Annie Dillard

So many careers came and went through me:
salamander finder, crawfish annoyer, flat-stone creek skipper, cedar chest smeller, railroad car counter, tin can stomper, milkweed blower, mulberry picker, snowball smoother, paper bag popper, steel rail walker, box turtle toucher, dark-sky watcher, best part saver. They didn't last long, these careers of mine, but flashed into and out of existence like mayflies. But while they employed me, I gave them an honest minute's work and was paid in the satisfactions of curiosity met and a job well done. — Jerry Spinelli