Quotes & Sayings About Poppies

Quantin crept closer to the knoll. A pungent smell passed through his nostrils up into his brain. Attracted by the poppies' scarlet smears, he was about to take another step when he felt a hand on his elbow. A man in a poppy-red jacket, his pupils dilated, smiled warningly.
"No strangers allowed. Go away."
"I don't understand ... "
"Understanding is strictly forbidden. Even dreams have the right to dream. Isn't that so? Now go away. — Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky

The sepia tone of November has become blood-soaked with paper poppies festooning the lapels of our politicians, newsreaders and business leaders ... I will no longer allow my obligation as a veteran to remember those who died in the great wars to be co-opted by current or former politicians to justify our folly in Iraq, our morally dubious war on terror and our elimination of one's right to privacy. — Harry Leslie Smith

Immersed this spring in research for this chapter, I was sorely tempted to plant one of the hybrid cannabis seeds I'd seen for sale in Amsterdam. I immediately thought better of it, however. So I planted lots of opium poppies instead. I hasten to add that I've no plans to do anything with my poppies except admire them - first their fleeting tissue-paper blooms, then their swelling blue-green seedpods, fat with milky alkaloid. (Unless, of course, simply walking among the poppies is enough to have an effect, as it was for Dorothy in Oz.) — Michael Pollan

In Europe and Australia, there is something called the Tall Poppy Syndrome: People like to cut the tall poppies. They don't want you to succeed, and they cut you down - especially people from your own social class. — Mark Burnett

I think you can hear, when you listen to someone's music, whether or not they're enjoying making it - it's so great to hear music where you can tell the person making it was just having a blast. That's really important to me as far as my process goes. That's probably why my music ends up being so poppy! — Grimes

He ran his fingers over the moist ends of her hair and across her face. Her eyes were wet. Jesus Christ. How many nights had he heard Lily crying. As some parents sleep through fire, thunderstorms, and voices at the back door only to wake at a child's whisper, so Everett heard Lily crying at night. Her muffled sobs seemed to have broken his dreams for years. He had heard her even at Fort Lewis, even in Georgia, finally at Bliss. That was Lily crying in the wings whenever the priest came to tear up his mother's grave. Lily cried in the twilight field where he picked wild poppies with Martha; Lily's was the cry he heard those nights the kiln burned, the levee broke, the ranch went to nothing. — Joan Didion

When Tarquin the Proud was asked what was the best mode of governing a conquered city, he replied only by beating down with his staff all the tallest poppies in his garden. — Livy

The walls were hung with rich tapestries representing the Triumph of Beauty. A large press, inlaid with agate and lapis-lazuli, filled one corner, and facing the window stood a curiously wrought cabinet with lacquer panels of powdered and mosaiced gold, on which were placed some delicate goblets of Venetian glass, and a cup of dark-veined onyx. Pale poppies were broidered on the silk coverlet of the bed, as though they had fallen from the tired hands of sleep, and tall reeds of fluted ivory bare up the velvet canopy, from which great tufts of ostrich plumes sprang, like white foam, to the pallid silver of the fretted ceiling. A laughing Narcissus in green bronze held a polished mirror above its head. On the table stood a flat bowl of amethyst. — Oscar Wilde

The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below — John McCrae

The poppies hung Dew-dabbled on their stalks. — John Keats

Screen'd is this nook o'er the high, half-reap'd field,
And here till sundown, Shepherd, will I be.
Through the thick corn the scarlet poppies peep,
And round green roots and yellowing stalks I see
Pale blue convolvulus in tendrils creep:
And air-swept lindens yield
Their scent, and rustle down their perfumed showers
Of bloom on the bent grass where I am laid,
And bower me from the August sun with shade;
And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers ... — Matthew Arnold

They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more. — Czeslaw Milosz

I love color. It must submit to me. And I love art. I kneel before it, and it must become mine. Everything around me glows with passion. Every day reveals a new red flower, glowing, scarlet red. Everyone around me carries them. Some wear them quietly hidden in their hearts. And they are like poppies just opening, of which one can see only here and there a hint of red petal peeking out from the green bud. — Paula Modersohn-Becker

Pleasures are like poppies spread: You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed. — Robert Burns

And far and wide, in a scarlet tide, The poppy's bonfire spread. — Bayard Taylor

Life has always poppies in her hands. — Oscar Wilde

And I wanted to put my fist through your pretty, pampered face." Galen
"As I recall, you did. And then you kicked me in the ass and sent me sprawling, pampered face first, into a pile of horseshit." Styxx
"And you said not a word about it to anyone. You got up, took your training sword, and faced me as if you landed in a bed of poppies. All the while, shit dripping down you."Galen — Sherrilyn Kenyon

I am poppies in the field
Red and cold
I am sleeping alone
and
I am light
I am light
I am light — Bella Betina

Only with kisses and red poppies can I love you,
with rain-soaked wreaths,
contemplating ashen horses and yellow dogs.
Only with waves at my back can I love you,
between dull explosions of brimstone and reflective waters,
swimming against cemeteries that circulate in certain rivers,
drowned pasture flooding the sad, chalky tombstones,
swimming across submerged hearts
and faded lists of unburied children. — Pablo Neruda

The great events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. In some tiny ivory cell the brain stores the most delicate, and the most fleeting impressions. — Oscar Wilde

There are men in frock coats and top hats with the blood of the world on their hands, and they eat with silver forks and white napkins every day, and they will give up their last breath in a linen-made bed whilst the ones they sent out to die lie forgotten in the earth, mouldering bones with the poppies fat and red above 'em. Ah, mankind. — Paul Kearney

Above all, one could hold onto everything: the suffering to the quick and its whims, the sticky shadows, somber viscosity of the veil drawn taut around cities, everything could be borne, since legal outings of a few hours might take place, I told myself. Of course, I thought, no point pretending one wasn't dead. But on the other hand, rather than yield to the maneuvers of the conservation instinct, strategies that make us flee the pain within by hiding from ourselves within ourselves from whom we flee, its poppies, its hypnotic operations that the powerful currents of day-to-day life reinforce with a thousand vulgar, pressing duties which turn us from our hearts.
do everything, I thought, on the contrary, whatever you can to resist the ingenious temptations of compromises, cling to the suffering, stir up the dread, for the monsters are also the benevolent guardians of the survivor's presence within me — Helene Cixous

They passed a bed of opium poppies, dispetaled now; the round, ripe seedheads were brown and dry - like Polynesian trophies, Denis thought; severed heads stuck on poles. — Aldous Huxley

And the heart sounds like a sour conch,
calls, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten panic,
scattered in the unlucky and disheveled waves:
the sea reports sonorously
on its languid shadows, its green poppies. — Pablo Neruda

The poppies might be wilted and trampled by the throng, but the memory of our fallen will live on and on and on. — David J. Delaney

Final Disposition

Others divided closets full of mother's things.
From the earth, I took her poppies.
I wanted those fandango folds
of red and black chiffon she doted on,
loving the wild and Moorish music of them,
coating her tongue with the thin skin
of their crimson petals.

Snapping her fingers, flamenco dancer,
she'd mock the clack of castanets
in answer to their gypsy cadence.
She would crouch toward the flounce of flowers,
twirl, stamp her foot, then kick it out
as if to lift the ruffles, scarlet
along the hemline of her yard.

And so, I dug up, soil and all,
the thistle-toothed and gray-green clumps
of leaves, the testicle seedpods and hairy stems
both out of season, to transplant them in my less-exotic garden. There, they bloom
her blood's abandon, year after year,
roots holding, their poppy heads nodding
a carefree, opium-ecstatic, possibly forever sleep. — Jane Glazer

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most ... No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice ... but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different ... Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips". — Annie Dillard

I never met a man who was shaken by a field of identical blades of grass. An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind. — Annie Dillard

I dreamed today of bone-white horses, stamping and nuzzling in the bright sunshine, and of orange poppies which swayed and danced in the spring wind.

(Do not look back.) — Neil Gaiman

Through the dancing poppies stole A breeze, most softly lulling to my soul. — John Keats

Your flaunting poppies of self-conceit will be pulled up by the roots, your — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I was told by journalists who can't publish it that there are in Mexico, close to the U.S. border, big areas that used to be devoted to agriculture that are now devoted to poppies. They say you can't get in there because they're guarded, first by the cartels, but also by the army, which goes hand in hand with the cartels. — Noam Chomsky

And after that they had gone through many streets they came to a little door that was set in a wall that was covered with a pomegranate tree. And the old man touched the door with a ring of graved jaspar and it opened, and they went down five steps of brass into a garden filled with black poppies and green jars of burnt clay. — Oscar Wilde

He knew the way to take a woman when he sent me the 8 big poppies because mine was the 8th — James Joyce

A girl who never smiles has such power - what men will do to turn up but one corner of her mouth! She already wears her red war-gown and her circlet of cinnabar poppies. They bring out the color in her grimace. — Catherynne M Valente

I could understand the moon leaning across a bar on skid row
and asking for a drink, but I couldn't understand anything about
myself,
I was murdered, I was shit, I was a tentful of dogs,
I was poppies mowed down by machine-gun fire
I was a hotshot wasp in a web
I was less and less and still reaching for
something, and I thought of her corny remark
a night or so ago:
You have wounded eyes. — Charles Bukowski

Carrying a poppy he passes through the quarrel. — Kobayashi Issa

It's going to be really interesting to see what the heroin market does in the next two years or so. One thing you can be pretty sure of. The Afghan peasants who grow poppies won't get rich. The money will end up in places like Dubai. — Bruce Sterling

The greatest events of life often leave one unmoved; they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow out in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. We reject the burden of their memory, and have anodynes against them. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us. — Oscar Wilde

Beneath and around the dead and ruined chaparral rise the most amazingly beautiful flowers. Tulips and wind poppies and flame poppies, whispering bells and suncups. These are flowers that grow only after a burn. Only in a land once dead. You never see them otherwise

When my eyes closed I can see those flowers now. They are a promise: that the land will regrow, that even after a disaster life continues, that wonders abound. k — Frances Wood

Ask yourself my love whether you are not very cruel to have so entrammelled me, so destroyed my freedom. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write immediately, and do all you can to console me in it - make it rich as a draught of poppies to intoxicate me - write the softest words and kiss them that I may at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a brighter word than bright, a fairer word than fair. — John Keats

The mown grass is growing again nearly to our knees; we will take a second crop of hay from this field, rich and green and starred with moon daisies, buttercups and the bright, blowsy heads of poppies. — Philippa Gregory

Scattered with poppies, the golden-green waves of the cornfields faded. The red sun seemed to tip one end of a pair of scales below the horizon, and simultaneously to lift an orange moon at the other. Only two days off the full, it rose behind a wood, swiftly losing its flush as it floated up, until the wheat loomed out of the twilight like a metallic and prickly sea. — Patrick Leigh Fermor

Poorly secured nuclear material in the former Soviet Union, or secrets from a scientist in Pakistan could help build a bomb that detonates in Paris. The poppies in Afghanistan become the heroin in Berlin. The poverty and violence in Somalia breeds the terror of tomorrow. — Barack Obama

By the time writing was invented, the Greeks and Egyptians had already learned to extract opium from poppies to facilitate sleep. — Kat Duff

But the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. — Thomas Browne

Something wild and foreign issued a cry within her, shattering through the pain in her head, and thoughts of poppies and cages faded away.
She must do what was necessary to save the crown - and her future. — Sarah J. Maas

Yea, she hath passed hereby, and blessed the sheaves,
And the great garths, and stacks, and quiet farms,
And all the tawny, and the crimson leaves.
Yea, she hath passed with poppies in her arms,
Under the star of dusk, through stealing mist,
And blessed the earth, and gone, while no man wist.
With slow, reluctant feet, and weary eyes,
And eye-lids heavy with the coming sleep,
With small breasts lifted up in stress of sighs,
She passed, as shadows pass, among the sheep;
While the earth dreamed, and only I was ware
Of that faint fragrance blown from her soft hair.
The land lay steeped in peace of silent dreams;
There was no sound amid the sacred boughs.
Nor any mournful music in her streams:
Only I saw the shadow on her brows,
Only I knew her for the yearly slain,
And wept, and weep until she come again. — Frederic Manning

A sea captain when he stands upon the bridge, or looks out from his deck-house, thinks much about God and about the world. Away in the valley yonder among the corn and the poppies men may well forget all things except the warmth of the sun upon the face, and the kind shadow under the hedge; but he who journeys through storm and darkness must needs think and think. — William Butler Yeats

The tea kettle whistled, and Melissa poured it over the tea at the bottom of the glass pot. While it steeped, Melissa opened the back door to her favorite sight in her corner of the world - her herb and butterfly garden. Blue and purple lupine, shocking pink four o'clocks, orange poppies, and sunny-yellow damiana greeted her, still shaded by the fig tree on the east side of the garden. — Leslie Leigh

Opium: that terrible truth serum. Dark secrets guarded for a lifetime can be divulged with carefree folly after a sip of the black smoke. — Roman Payne

His thumbs ran over my cheeks. Our foreheads touched. My dreamscape scorched. He set fire to the poppies — Samantha Shannon

Mother, he is a gentleman.
He is a builder with bricks of moonlight.
He knows the secret places of the earth.
He washes the sleep from the eyes of the souls.
He lets them look on beauty.
He lets them tell him they hate him.
In the mornings, I gather berries and apples.
I scrub his back with rind.
I weave spider-spit, eyelash.
He talks in his sleep: pudding, fire, discus,
the things he misses.
He breathes, Your body is my orchard.
I am undulating grass.
I am a field of wheat he parts with his fingers.
Poppies bloom in my veins.
When he kisses me, he tastes pomegranate.
The night crawls nearer.
The moans of the dead roll and swell.
Mother, we are well. — Tara Mae Mulroy

I was sick of fast, aggressive music; I felt like I needed to make a poppy thing. But, right now, I feel like I need to make a Hawkwind/Sabbath record. It gets boring if you just do the same thing all the time. — Ty Segall

88. People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I've been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it's the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris. — Roman Payne

We are slumberous poppies,
Lords of Lethe downs,
Some awake and some asleep,
Sleeping in our crowns.
What perchance our dreams may know,
Let our serious may know. — Leigh Hunt

All panegyrics are mingled with an infusion of poppy. — Jonathan Swift

English Bohemianism is a curiously unluscious fruit ... Inside this hothouse, huge lascivious orchids slide sensuously up the sweating windows, passion-flowers cross-pollinate in wild heliotrope abandon, lotuses writhe with poppies in the sweet warm beds, kumquats ripen, open and plop flatly to the floor-and outside, in a neat, trimly-hoed kitchen-garden, English bohemians sit in cold orderly rows, like carrots. — Alan Coren

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers. — John Keats

Poppies in July
Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.
And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.
A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!
There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?
If I could bleed, or sleep!
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!
Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.
But colorless. Colorless. — Sylvia Plath

And in the space that he had occupied in her memory she allowed a field of poppies to bloom. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The little prince, who was present at the first appearance of a huge bud, felt
at once that some sort of miraculous apparition must emerge from it. But
the flower was not satisfied to complete the preparations for her beauty in the
shelter of her green chamber. She chose her colours with the greatest care. She
adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to go out into the world all
rumpled, like the field poppies. It was only in the full radiance of her beauty
that she wished to appear. Oh, yes! She was a coquettish creature! And her
mysterious adornment lasted for days and days. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief. — Hope Mirrlees

But the flower continued her beauty preparations in the shelter of her green chamber, selecting her colors with greatest care and dressing quite deliberately,adjusting her petals one by one.She had no desire to emerge all rumpled, like the poppies. She wished to appear only with full radiance of her beauty. Oh yes, she was quite vain! — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

In general I strive for greatness and rational achievement, but I admit to you I've a terrible fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a weakness for the fumes of the poppy - opium and other miserable beauties. — Roman Payne

Every step you take, a million doors open in front of you like poppies; your next step closes them, and another million bloom. You get on a train, you pick up a lamp, you speak, you don't. What decides why one thing gets picked to be the way it will be? Accident? Fate? Some weakness in ourselves? Forget your harps, your tin-foil angels - the only heaven worth having would be the heaven of answers. — Mark Slouka

He felt that if he brooded on what he had gone through he would sicken or grow mad. There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses. But this was not one of them. It was a thing to be driven out of the mind, to be drugged with poppies, to be strangled lest it might strangle one itself. — Oscar Wilde

The sermon is now the true poppy of literature. — David Swing

In November, when our nation remembers her fallen soldiers and honours the lost youth of my generation, the Prime Minister, government leaders and the hollow men of business affix paper poppies to their lapels and afford the dead of war two minutes' silence. Afterwards, they speak golden platitudes about the struggle and the heroism of that time. Yet the words they speak are meaningless because they have surrendered the values my generation built after the horrors of the Second World War. — Harry Leslie Smith

Ironically, the memory of the women heroes of World War I was largely eclipsed by the very women they had inspired. The more blatant evil enacted into law by Nazi Germany during the Second World War ensured that those who fought against it would continue to fascinate long after the first war had become a vague, unpleasant memory - one brought to mind only by fading photographs of serious, helmeted young men standing in sandbagged trenches or smiling young women in ankle-length nursing uniforms, or by the presence of poppies in Remembrance Day ceremonies. — Kathryn J. Atwood

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach. — Philip Larkin

A little downy girl still wearing poppies
still eating popcorn in the colored gloam
where tawny Indians took paid croppers
because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die — Vladimir Nabokov

Poppies bleed petals of sheer excess. You and I, this sweet battle ground. — Janet Fitch

As often is the case after a powerful, destructive storm, it was an achingly beautiful day. Even so late in the summer, I could still hear the occasional skylark singing, and the fields were speckled with red poppies. — Patrice Kindl

When you go for a walk, take seeds with you, poppies, rainbow chard, rocket. Plant them among the weeds in patches of wasteland. See what happens. — Tom Hodgkinson

You English words?
I know you:
You are light as dreams,
Tough as oak,
Precious as gold,
As poppies and corn,
Or an old cloak:
Sweet as our birds
To the ear,
As the burnet rose
In the heat
Of Midsummer — Edward Thomas

Let us arise and go now
to the Isle of Manisfree
and live the true blue simple life
of wisdom and wonderment
where all things grow
straight up
aslant and singing
in the yellow sun
poppies out of cowpods
thinking angels out of turds.
I must arise and go now
to the Isle of Manisfree
way up behind the broken words
and woods of Arcady. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?' — Tom Hiddleston

She chose her colors carefully. She dressed slowly, she adjusted her petals one by one. She did not wish to present herself all rumpled like the poppies. She would appear in the full radiance of her beauty. Oh, yes! She was very flirtatious! And her mysterious adornment lasted for days and days. Then one morning, exactly at sunrise, she suddenly showed herself. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

- I picked these last night. I want you to have them.
- Th-thanks. What kind of flowers are these? They're pretty.
- The flowers themselves aren't important. It would be better if the blossoms fell off right away.
- What!?
- They're poppies. When the petals fall off, you can cut the seed pods to make opium. Basically, these are the raw materials for heroin. If you sell that in the city, you should bring in an impressive amount of money. — Shouji Gatou

Scarlet the poppies
Blue the corn-flowers,
Golden the wheat.
Gold for the Eternal:
Blue for Our Lady:
Red for the five
Wounds of her Son. — Adelaide Crapsey

Such a blush In the midst of brown was born, Like red poppies grown with corn. — Thomas Hood

I am rich, thank you very much. And you are excused for being shortsighted. It is Americans, you British, and all the other Westerners who think they know what's right and what's wrong, who make money from the sale of heroin and opium with one hand, and yet pay mullahs to preach that growing poppies is against the Koran with the other." He laughed. "Hypocrites all! — Deborah Rodriguez

When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies. — Sylvia Plath

Then, all of a sudden, those pea-green lawns where the first scarlet poppies were flowering, those canary-yellow fields which striped the tawny hills sloping down to a sea full of azure glints, all seemed so trivial to me, so banal, so false, so much in contrast with Ayl's person, with Ayl's world, with Ayl's idea of beauty, that I realized her place could never have been out here. And I realized, with grief and fear, that I had remained out here, that I would never again be able to escape those gilded and silvered gleams, those little clouds that turned from pale blue to pink, those green leaves that yellowed every autumn, and that Ayl's perfect world was lost forever, so lost I couldn't even imagine it any more, and nothing was left that could remind me of it, even remotely, nothing except perhaps that cold wall of gray stone. — Italo Calvino

Trying to remember old dreams. A voice. Who came in.
And meanwhile the rain, all day, all evening,
quiet steady sound. Before it grew too dark
watched the blue iris leaning under the rain,
the flame of the poppies guttered and went out.
A voice. Almost recalled. There have been times
the gods entered. Entered a room, a cave?
A long enclosure where I was, the fourth wall of it
too distant or too dark to see. The birds are silent,
no moths at the lit windows. Only a swaying rosebush
pierces the table's reflection, raindrops gazing from it.
There have been hands laid on my shoulders.
What has been said to me,
how has my life replied?
The rain, the rain ... — Denise Levertov

Central Intelligence cutting Meo opium fields! China Lobby copping poppies in Burma! How long this Addict government support our oil-burner matter-habit — Allen Ginsberg

Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to "cast spells" -- in our vocabulary, "psychoactive" plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladona, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skin of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based "flying ointment" that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the "broomstick" by which these women were said to travel. (119) — Michael Pollan

These too are of a burning color
not orange, not gold, but if pure gold were liquid and could raise a cream, that golden cream might be like the color of the poppies. — John Steinbeck

As for marigolds, poppies, hollyhocks, and valorous sunflowers, we shall never have a garden without them, both for their own sake, and for the sake of old-fashioned folks, who used to love them. — Henry Ward Beecher

There's no new direction. It's not more poppy or more rocky. They're just rock'n'roll tunes. I'll never change the music I write. — Noel Gallagher

Or, bide thou where the poppy blows
With windflowers fail and fair. — William C. Bryant

She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door
every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum. — Claire Vaye Watkins

The finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the little shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibrating with music, as a flower shakes out its perfume or a star shakes out its light. Only listen, and they soothe all care, as though the silken-soft leaves of poppies had been made vocal and poured into the ear. — James Lane Allen

I am utterly, consummately intense, wearing sunflowers and poppies and dahlias in my buttonhole. — Harry Graf Kessler

I look down at the picture in my hand. It's home, the image slightly dog-eared after two years in various grab bags and holdalls. There's the house, white walls covered in the blue flowers she loves, red poppies stretching away in the background. There's my mother, small and fair, hair falling out of its bun as usual, glasses - one of her many eccentricities - perched on her nose. — Amie Kaufman

I'm not a big disco guy. Some of that English techno-poppy stuff wouldn't get me in the mood either. — Jon Bon Jovi

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?
You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns. — Sylvia Plath

We owned a garden on a hill,
We planted rose and daffodil,
Flowers that English poets sing,
And hoped for glory in the Spring.
We planted yellow hollyhocks,
And humble sweetly-smelling stocks,
And columbine for carnival,
And dreamt of Summer's festival.
And Autumn not to be outdone
As heiress of the summer sun,
Should doubly wreathe her tawny head
With poppies and with creepers red.
We waited then for all to grow,
We planted wallflowers in a row.
And lavender and borage blue, -
Alas! we waited, I and you,
But love was all that ever grew. — Vita Sackville-West

Yes, linseed oil. I used to use poppy oil, but I have heard that poppy oil is given to cracking pigment too, so I use it no longer. — Edward Hopper