Quotes & Sayings About Sunflowers

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven's "Ninth Symphony", Van Gogh's "Sunflowers", the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it. — Brennan Manning

Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers. — Joe Hill

Beautiful is who you are — Jessica Edouard

I am working with the enthusiasm of a man from Marseilles eating bouillabaisse, which shouldn't come as a surprise to you because I am busy painting huge sunflowers. — Vincent Van Gogh

There was the gaudy patch of sunflowers beside the west gate of the palace of the Prince of Ombria, that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun. — Patricia A. McKillip

The sunflower is mine, in a way. — Vincent Van Gogh

We're all golden sunflowers inside. — Allen Ginsberg

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds - the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall. — Chuck Jones

There are not too many fables about man's misuse of sunflower seeds. — Richard Brautigan

Sunflowers hellos from gate to gate. The hour at the square. Candy, art, books, look. A warmth given. Beauties with rain forest hair Walk by the clock tower. Sunlight of neon, the keys inside their eyes. No storms. Traffic sounds, salt air. Salt that moves the thirst and destroys all the fears. — Gwen Calvo

I felt rippling wheat field and crows circling within me. I was a vase of sunflowers ready to spit seeds like weapons at the world. I understood how a man could be mad enough to slice off his own ear, just to get back the person he loved most in the world. — Jodi Baker

This is my formula for the fall of things:
we come to a river we always knew we'd have to cross.
It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks
of corn and half-blown sunflowers.
The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself
and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.
Now tell me there is a pause
where we know there should be an end;
then tell me you too imagined it this way
with our shadows never quite touching the river
and the river never quite reaching the sea. — John Glenday

My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums ... — Mary Oliver

I'm now painting with all the elan of a Marseillais eating soup, which won't surprise you when I tell you I'm painting large sunflowers. The idea? To decorate the studio, now there's hope of Gauguin living here. I aim at a dozen panels of sunflowers in the room I've set aside for Gauguin ... — Vincent Van Gogh

This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late. — Toni Morrison

Attention shifted to him like sunflowers turning to the sun. — Khaled Hosseini

Oliver liked to keep the windows and shutters wide open in the afternoon, with just the swelling sheer curtains between us and life beyond, because it was a 'crime' to block away so much sunlight and keep such a landscape from view, especially when you didn't have it all life long, he said. Then the rolling fields of the valley leading up to the hills seemed to sit in a rising mist of olive green: sunflowers, grapevines, swatches of lavender, and those squat and humble olive trees stooping like gnarled, aged scarecrows gawking through our window as we lay naked on my bed, the smell of his sweat, which was the smell of my sweat, and next to me my man-woman whose man-woman I was, and all around us Mafalda's chamomile-scented laundry detergent, which was the torrid afternoon world of our house. — Andre Aciman

Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses. — Toni Morrison

One of the remarkable characteristics of young wild sunflowers, in addition to growing in soil that is not hospitable, is how the young flower bud follows the sun across the sky. In doing so, it receives life-sustaining energy before bursting forth in its glorious yellow color.
Like the young sunflower, when we follow the Savior of the world, the Son of God, we flourish and become glorious despite the many terrible circumstances that surround us. He truly is our light and life. — Quentin L. Cook

If I knew you were going to die, I'd make your last moment on earth last forever. I'd take you to the Eiffel Tower in Paris and make sure that you have the most romantic dinner your life. I'd fill your room with hundreds of wild sunflowers, so that even in death, you may carry the scent of something beautiful. If you were to die I'd make sure to drag you through an amusement park and ride all the crazy rides with you, eat all that ice cream with you, win all those stuffed animals for you.
If you were to die, I'd beat up every single person in the world who has ever hurt you. I'd protect you with my life. I'll protect you with everything I own, everything I have, everything I can give. If I knew you were going to die, I'd cut out my own heart for you. I'd cut it out so you could have it. So that you could live. Because I sure as hell can't live without you. — Anonymous

All farms require a resident dreamer, someone to thumb through seed catalogs in the cold days of late January, imagining summer fields of squash and cucumbers, tomatoes and sunflowers. Fall harvests are the reward of winter dreams. Someone must decide where the next fence should be placed, or conceive of a clever new way to organize the market stand. On a farm, there's no shortage of little dreams needing to be dreamed. — Forrest Pritchard

Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop. — Jo Walton

I imagine I sow cuttings of Anna-Louise's hair, like the fine stems of dried flowers, and watch sunflowers grow from the cuttings. I imagine I bury a pocket calculator with liquid crystals spelling her name, then watch the earth shoot forth lightning bolts. 'We should open up a seafood house together,' Anna-Louise says when she wants to torture me. Now that's love. — Douglas Coupland

Divinity, not machines. Standing among the sunflowers, I craved divinity. — Michael Paterniti

Sunflowers for Sarita is a fast-paced, high caliber romantic suspense. I couldn't stop reading! — Mary Alice Monroe

Let the sunflowers of thy soul bloom in the sunshine. — Lailah Gifty Akita

From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else
as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers. — Daniel Quinn

At the very moment Mrs. Bentley was smiling down upon them with her yellow mask face, around a corner like an elfin band came an ice-cream wagon. It jingled out icy melodies, as crisp and rimmed as crystal wine-glasses tapped by an expert, summoning all. The children sat up, turning their heads, like sunflowers after the sun. (Season of Disbelief) — Ray Bradbury

Not only does a lens distort forms, but the ordinary plate makes an unholy mess of colour in its tone relations. Yellow becomes black, and blue white. Black sunflowers against a white sky - what a travesty! — Walter J. Phillips

The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems. — Richard Rohr

That, too, was in the air itself -- a whisper of apology when the smell of the soil carried. There should be pumpkins in the fields, or sunflowers, or the peppers you saw up north. Instead, it was the smell of old earth that the breezes caught, sometimes a tinge of death. Too hard to forget. — Christian Crews

Big doesn't necessarily mean better. Sunflowers aren't better than violets. — Edna Ferber

He says tools but somebody will mention the cutting edges of things and one will see billhook, scythe, fauchard, debris, wood chips and sketches all entangled like words in summertime, when crickets and corn, lives and vines, sunflowers and stormy hours touch and quench one another. — Nicole Brossard

Sunflowers, Not Facing the Sun (A Poem)
I stand tall
As gracious as one could be
Blooming to my best
As slender as it touches my being
Everyone else is facing the sun
Bending towards its unfathomable galore
They and I are both undoubtedly
Grown on the benevolence of life's essence
The brighter side mercilessly feeding desires unbound
By daunting the "courage to know" with each spin
Though, I am not able to face the sun the way they do
Yet, I learn from the knowledge bred within me
Beyond achievement markers, but an adverse ability
An opportunity to exercise my special self
From the cherubic attire of my blessed soul
To the unfathomable mystery the drape of this world hides
That I, by not facing the sun
Hunt the gems in the milieu of the human existence — Annie Ali

Sunflowers are like people to me. — Joan Mitchell

Ants, ants crawl my drunken arms as our schoolboys scream for Willie Mays instead of Bach, ants crawl my drunken arms through the drink I reach for surfboards and sinks, for sunflowers and the typewriter falls like a heart-attack from the table or a dead Sunday bull, and the ants crawl into my mouth and down my throat, — Charles Bukowski

... we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're all blessed by our own seed & golden hairy naked accomplishment
(Sunflower Sutra) — Allen Ginsberg

A wise quote can only change a wise man! Therefore, wise sayings are for the wise men, not for the fools! The sunflowers turn their face toward the Sun, the fools, toward the darkness! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

The earth paints a portrait of the sun at dawn with sunflowers in bloom. Unhappy with the portrait, she erases it and paints it again and again. — Rabindranath Tagore

I don't do a lot when I'm in Gascony. I swim and play the odd game of golf, but mainly I sit around. We're set an hour-and-a-half from the Pyrenees and an hour-and-a-half from the Bay of Biscay, so we get plenty of storms. But we're surrounded by vines and sunflowers - it's lovely. — Terry Wogan

Some of the world's most talented people are introverts. Without them we wouldn't have the Apple computer, the theory of relativity or Van Gogh's sunflowers. — Susan Cain

Sobs force their way out of my throat. I feel like I'm trapped in a disaster movie where everything is shriveling into darkness and ash. Sunflowers are being uprooted. Puppies are being trampled. Whole cities are crumbling to dust. — Paula Stokes

Let's really look at one another! ... It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed ... Wait! One more look. Good-bye , Good-bye world. Good-bye, Grover's Corners ... Mama and Papa. Good-bye to clocks ticking ... and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths ... and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth,you are too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it
every,every minute? (Emily) — Thornton Wilder

For time and eternity there have been fathers like Nathan who simply can see no way to have a daughter but to own her like a plot of land. To work her, plow her under, rain down a dreadful poison upon her. Miraculously, it causes these girls to grow. They elongate on the pale slender stalks of their longing, like sunflowers with heavy heads. You can shield them with your body and soul, trying to absorb that awful rain, but they'll still move toward him. Without cease they'll bend to his light. — Barbara Kingsolver

I love sunflowers. They're one of my favorite flowers. — Bethany Mota

Americans who visit Tuscany or Umbria love the landscape: the silvery olive groves, the fields of sunflowers, the vineyards, the stone houses and barns. — Anthony Lewis

When the cities are gone, he thought, and all the ruckus has died away, when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways, when the Kremlin and the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents and other such shitheads, when the glass-aluminum skyscraper tombs of Phoenix Arizona barely show above the sand dunes, why then, why then, why then by God maybe free men and wild women on horses, free women and wild men, can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom - goddammit! - herding the feral cattle into box canyons, and gorge on bloody meat and bleeding fucking internal organs, and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon! - by God, yes! Until, he reflected soberly, and bitterly, and sadly, until the next age of ice and iron comes down, and the engineers and the farmers — Edward Abbey

And to this day I love endless landscapes, big horizons, sunflowers, and narcissi. — Gisela Hausmann

Geez, where's the fire? Something happen at school? Another failed run-in with Baseball Stud?"
Peyton choked and sputtered beside me, but Faith continued despite her distress. "I already told you what you have to do. Find out whichever locker is his, stake it out, and when that Diamond Doll floozie leaves his side, offer to be his bat girl instead."
She giggled as she said it, wiggling her eyebrows for innuendo, and Peyton's face blazed five shades of red. I couldn't wipe the smile from my face if someone paid me to.
As Peyton's mouth opened and closed like a fish, I leaned close to her ear, inhaling the intoxicating scent of sunflowers, and murmured, "I'd love it if you did that. — Rachel Harris

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. — Mary Oliver

In your hands
The dog, the donkey, surely they know
They are alive.
Who would argue otherwise?
But now, after years of consideration,
I am getting beyond that.
What about the sunflowers? What about
The tulips, and the pines?
Listen, all you have to do is start and
There'll be no stopping.
What about mountains? What about water
Slipping over rocks?
And speaking of stones, what about
The little ones you can
Hold in your hands, their heartbeats
So secret, so hidden it may take years
Before, finally, you hear them? — Mary Oliver

When the cities are gone and all the ruckus has died away. when sunflowers push up through the concrete and asphalt of the forgotten interstate freeways. when the Kremlin & the Pentagon are turned into nursing homes for generals, presidents, & other such shit heads. when the glass-aluminum sky scraper tombs of Phoenix, AZ barely show above the sand dunes. why then, by God, maybe free men & wild women on horses can roam the sagebrush canyonlands in freedom ... and dance all night to the music of fiddles! banjos! steel guitars! by the light of a reborn moon! — Edward Abbey

Another voice rages.
I hate that boy! I hate me! I am so incredibly stupid!
A sunflower leans over the fence, smiling
How dare you!
I rip off its head and throw it in the gutter.
The smart thing to do is to keep going on. Walk away quickly and no one will know what I've done. But I can't move because my eyes are locked on the slowly opening front door - locked on Mrs Muir.
'I'm sorry.' My tiny voice sounds so pathetically lame, but I've still got more lameness for her. 'I never do this sort of thing. I like sunflowers. I was just angry about something - nothing to do with you or the flower. I'm really, really sorry.'
'Oh, you are upset! Well, never mind'. Mrs Muir comes closer to me. 'Goodness, we all get cross. The main thing is: did it make you feel any better?'
'No. Yes. Maybe. A little bit.'
'Would you like to do another one? There's more out the back, too. You go for your life dear. I don't mind at all - they need a good pruning. — Bill Condon

Sunflowers and seashells and logarithmic spirals (said Kerewin); sweep of galaxies and the singing curve of the universe (said Kerewin); the oscilating wave thrumming in the nothingness of every atom's heart (said Kerewin); did you think I could build a square house? So the round shell house holds them all in its spiralling embrace. Noise and riot, peace and quiet, all is music in this sphere. — Keri Hulme

The American Indian is of the soil, whether it be the region of forests, plains, pueblos, or mesas. He fits into the landscape, for the hand that fashioned the continent also fashioned the man for his surroundings. He once grew as naturally as the wild sunflowers, he belongs just as the buffalo belonged ... — Luther Standing Bear

People want to be with the sunflowers, those who rise and face the sky. Who prefers fungus, moss, things that grow in the world's dank and shadowed places?

No one. — Lia Riley

What do sunflowers talk about after dusk
when the wind goes down and the moon comes up? — David Etter

When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can. — D.H. Lawrence

The new country lay open before me: there were no fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake's story but, insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom. — Willa Cather

Mount Pleasant was an older town, where no two houses, standing side by side, seemed to come out of the same architectural style, with nineteenth-century Victorians up against pastel-colored postwar ramblers. Most of the houses had traditional flower gardens with marigolds and zinnias, and some with head-high sunflowers. — John Sandford

A small patch of sunflowers came into view. Dozens of tall stalks topped with heavy golden flower heads swayed in they hot breeze. From a distance they looked like a group of ladies with their heads hung low, as if embarrassed that they'd arrived at a party wearing identical hats. — Beth Hoffman

Not sunflowers, not roses, but rocks in patterned sand grow here. And bloom. - ROBERT HAYDEN, Approximations — Taiye Selasi

Giant sunflowers, like junkie scarecrows on the nod dozed in one spot with their dry heads dropped upon their breastbones. Their lives extended another day, flies buzzed everything within their range, monotonously eulogizing themselves, like the patriots who persist in praising the glory of a culture long after it is decadent and doomed. — Tom Robbins

I remember one woman making paper flowers to sell, with different herbs ... She made them so fast, and so many ... that as I watched, her first few zinnias became quickly enough a few hundred, and grew in their happiness to the size of sunflowers. The sunflowers themselves grew to the size of pumpkins, the snapdragons grew ominous, and the rosemary fragrant. — Alberto Alvaro Rios

Let crazy life rush headlong on the highway for others; we shall contemplate the sunflowers, watch them sprout, blossom, fade away. Yesterday they were still giants, but now, in autumn, they are thatch on the roof. — Gyula Krudy

What being in the War and being in the Army had shown him was that people tend naturally toward light, toward its source, as sunflowers do in a field.
People lean, either in their dreams or in their actions, toward that place where they suspect their inner lights are coming from. Whether they call it God or conscience or the manual of Army protocol, people sublime toward where their inner fire burns, and given enough fuel for thought and a level playing field to dream on, anyone can leave a fingerprint on the blank of history. That's what
Fos believed. — Marianne Wiggins

Sunflowers waiting for the sunshine. Violets just waiting for dew. Bees just waiting for honey And honey, I'm just waiting for you! — Mitch Albom

She's an old, close-to-the-ground, jelly-belly woman with bald patches showing through her wispy grey hair. It doesn't seem like she's got a lot going for her, but she's still smiling. Been around the sunflowers too long, I'd say. — Bill Condon

But I need to remember that the grief is the settlers' as well. They too will never walk in a tallgrass prairie where sunflowers dance with goldfinches. Their children have also lost the chance to sing at the Maple Dance. They can't drink the water either. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

The road to freedom is bordered with sunflowers. — Martin Firrell

I am painting with the same enthusiasm as a Marseillaise eats bouillabaisse ... I am painting big sunflowers. — Vincent Van Gogh

The happiest field in all the harvest is the field of sunflowers at their peak. Drinking the rays and dancing in the breeze. The saddest field is the same field, six weeks later. Drunk on the sun and burnt with shame, they drop their heads to hide their mane. — R.S. Barrington

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

In April, we cannot see sunflowers in France, so we might say the sunflowers do not exist. But the local farmers have already planted thousands of seeds, and when they look at the bare hills, they may be able to see the sunflowers already. The sunflowers are there. They lack only the conditions of sun, heat, rain and July. Just because we cannot see them does not mean that they do not exist. — Nhat Hanh

These seeds will always be tulips, even if at the moment you cannot tell them apart from other flowers. They will never turn into roses or sunflowers, no matter how much they might desire to. And if they try to deny their own existence, they will live life bitter and die. — Paulo Coelho

As Sidda joined Vivi in staring out into the darkness of the fields, where hundreds of sunflowers grew, she thought: I will never fully know my mother, any more than I will ever know my father or Connor, or myself. I have been missing the point. The point is not knowing another person, or learning to love another person. The point is simply this: how tender can we bear to be? What good manners can we show as we welcome ourselves and others into our hearts? — Rebecca Wells

We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed
by our own seed & hairy naked
accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision. — Allen Ginsberg

She saw our young minds as bright, spiky sunflowers in need of light, and arranged us as close to the TV as possible to maximize our exposure. — Junot Diaz

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

Then summer came. A summer limp with the weight of blossomed things. Heavy sunflowers weeping over fences; iris curling and browning at the edges far away from their purple hearts; ears of corn letting their auburn hair wind down to their stalks. AND THE BOYS. The beautiful, beautiful boys who dotted the landscape like jewels, split the air with their shouts in the field, and thickened the river with their shining wet backs. EVEN THEIR FOOTSTEPS LEFT A SMELL OF SMOKE BEHIND! — Toni Morrison

My head hasn't been very clear these last few days. I suppose that's why sunflowers made me think of heads. I wish mine could be as clean as they are. I was thinking on the train - if only there were some way to get your head cleaned and refinished. Just chop it off - well, maybe that would be a little violent. Just detach it and hand it over to some university hospital as if you were handing over a bundle of laundry. 'Do this up for me, please,' you'd say. And the rest of you would be quietly asleep for three or four days or a week while the hospital was busy cleaning your head and getting rid of the garbage. No tossing and no dreaming. — Yasunari Kawabata

Inside Bag End, Bilbo and Gandalf were sitting at the open window of a small room looking out west on to the garden. The late afternoon was bright and peaceful. The flowers glowed red and golden: snap-dragons and sunflowers, and nasturtians trailing all over the turf walls and peeping in at the round windows. — J.R.R. Tolkien