Quotes & Sayings About Tulips

Can you revive wilted tulips? — Shannon Mullen

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly, as the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. — Sylvia Plath

I'm going to do an adaptation of the Italian film, Bread and Tulips. I really like that film. — Norman Jewison

You believe
In God, for your part?
that He who makes
Can make good things from ill things, best from worst,
As men plant tulips upon dunghills when
They wish them finest. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

We human beings are at once delicate and intricate and temporal like the tulips in an April field and sturdy, resilient and enduring as Mt. Rainier when the will inspires us. We are individual miracles, those who live in vegetative states and those who wait with them — Benay Nordby

But now, Mr. Bates didn't scream or try to get the truck's license plate, nor did Mrs. Bates, who had once wept when we set off firecrackers in her state-fair tulips - they said nothing, and our parents said nothing, so that we sensed how ancient they were, how accustomed to trauma, depressions, and wars. We realized that the version of the world that they rendered for us was not the world they really believed in, and that for all their caretaking and bitching about crabgrass they didn't give a damn about lawns. — Jeffrey Eugenides

It is the taste of cut steps, bloody fingerprints. Of healed books, smiles on fresh tulips. Of longing and sweet fatigue. — Gwen Calvo

The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. When they are old they turn themselves inside out, explode slowly, the petals thrown like shards. — Margaret Atwood

Gardens come and go, but I find myself getting attached to certain perennials. My tulips are bridesmaids, with fat faces and good posture. Hollyhocks are long necked sisters. Daffodils are young girls running out of a white church, sun shining on their heads. Peonies are pink-haired ladies, so full and stooped you have to tie them up with string. And roses are nothing but (I hate to say it) bitches
pretty show-offs who'll draw blood if you don't handle them just right.
-Vangie Galliard Nepper, From her
"Garden Diary," March 1952 — Michael Lee West

There is no such thing as a Flower Police, so please feel free to experiment. Or stick with one type of flower; for instance, do bunches of white tulips or a mix of flowers that are all yellow in color. Just because it's simple doesn't mean it can't be dramatic! — Clinton Smith

Des, who brought me things I wanted (tulips, wine) to make me do the things he wanted (love him). Nick just wanted me to be happy, that's all, very pure. Maybe I mistook that for laziness. — Gillian Flynn

He's holding an armful of pink tulips and wearing a hungry, focused expression. His blue eyes
travel up and down over my body, and I feel almost shy under his gaze.
"You're a goddess."
He says it like a normal person would say, "Your dress is white. — Liz Reinhardt

A good friend will help you plant your tulips. A great friend will help you plant a gun on the unarmed intruder you just shot. — Brian P. Cleary

The turnip cannot thrive in the tulips patch of soil. — Jessie Burton

If you're in an urban city like New York, the corner markets are fantastic sources for tulips and roses. — Clinton Smith

What are plants doing? What are plants all about? They serve human beings by being decorative, but what is it from its own point of view? It's using up air; it's using up energy. It's really not doing anything except being ornamental. And yet here's this whole vegetable world, cactus plants, trees, roses, tulips, and edible vegetables, like cabbages, celery, lettuce - they're all doing this dance. — Alan Watts

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen. — Sylvia Plath

No militia or political leader is so powerful - his name never so influential - as when he is dead, enshrined on wall posters and gateposts amid naively painted clusters of tulips and roses, the final artistic accolade of every armed martyr in Lebanon. — Robert Fisk

Dirt is chaos, gritty, full of bugs and decay, but from that dirt comes such immense beauty. Roses, tulips, tomatoes, peonies, raspberries, oranges, magnolias...and even me. — R.S. Grey

The Gentle Gardener
I'd like to leave but daffodils to mark my little way,
To leave but tulips red and white behind me as I stray;
I'd like to pass away from earth and feel I'd left behind
But roses and forget-me-nots for all who come to find.
I'd like to sow the barren spots with all the flowers of earth,
To leave a path where those who come should find but gentle mirth;
And when at last I'm called upon to join the heavenly throng
I'd like to feel along my way I'd left no sign of wrong.
And yet the cares are many and the hours of toil are few;
There is not time enough on earth for all I'd like to do;
But, having lived and having toiled, I'd like the world to find
Some little touch of beauty that my soul had left behind. — Edgar A. Guest

I love tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every movement weighs down the air with patchouli. Their faint, delicate scent is refinement itself; and is there anything in the world more charming than the sprightly way they hold up their little faces to the sun. I have heard them called bold and flaunting, but to me they seem modest grace itself, only always on the alert to enjoy life as much as they can and not be afraid of looking the sun or anything else above them in the face. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

Augustus Waters was sitting on the front step as we pulled into the driveway. He was holding a bouquet of bright orange tulips just beginning to bloom. — John Green

Also, he detested people who bought fast horses that they were unskilled to ride. Furthermore, he detested: recreational sailing vessels; surveyors; cheaply made shoes; French (the language, the food, the populace); nervous clerks; tiny porcelain plates which broke in a man's damned hand; poetry (but not songs!); the stooped backs of cowards; thieving sons of whores; a lying tongue; the sound of a violin; the army (any army); tulips ("onions with airs!"); blue jays; the drinking of coffee ("a damned, dirty Dutch habit!"); — Elizabeth Gilbert

The bubble logic driving tulipomania has since acquired a name: "the greater fool theory." Although by any conventional measure it is folly to pay thousands for a tulip bulb (or for that matter an Internet stock), as long as there is an even greater fool out there willing to pay even more, doing so is the most logical thing in the world. — Michael Pollan

Death, I now see, may not come when I am 85 and weary, or after I have solved all my problems or met all my deadlines. It will come whenever it damn well pleases; all I can control is the time between. So when I see something I want, I grab it. If the tulips are particularly yellow, I buy them. — Joyce Wadler

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

With the signs of the Disc zodiac. There were sixty-four of them, from Wezen the Double-headed Kangaroo to Gahoolie, the Vase of Tulips (a constellation of great religious significance whose meaning, alas, was now lost). — Terry Pratchett

Certain miracles that I beheld there have haunted my memory ever since: a gray April morning of sirocco, when the almond blossoms, the flaming tulips, the young green of the vines, hung as if painted on the motionless air; a summer night when the roses had an unearthly pallor under a half-eaten moon, whose ghostliness was somehow one with their perfume and with the phosphorescence of dew tipping their petals; a day when the trees stood part submerged in fog, into which leaves dropped slowly, slowly, one after another, and sank out of sight. — Harrison Gray Otis Dwight

Tulips, I thought, staring at the jumble of letters before me. Had the ancient Greeks known them under a different name, if they'd had tulips at all? The letter psi, in Greek, is shaped like a tulip. All of a sudden, in the dense alphabet forest of the page, little black tulips began to pop up in a quick, random pattern like falling raindrops. — Donna Tartt

June brings tulips, lilies, roses,
Fills the children's hands with posies. — Sara Coleridge

How can you be content to be in the world like tulips in a garden, to make a fine show, and be good for nothing. — Mary Astell

In early spring, every petal of tulips sing a song of love and life, dance with joy and happiness to enjoy her short life of dazzling beauty. — Debasish Mridha

Wouldn't it be better if the Elves would just shut up and go away? Hey, what if they stopped throwing a fit at you walking across their backyard. It's not like you ate their tulips or dug holes in their lawn. You didn't piss on any trees when I wasn't looking, did you?" The thundercloud that had darkened his face broke apart. He laughed. "I would have if I'd thought about it. — Thea Harrison

The tulips are too red ... they hurt me. — Sylvia Plath

3 whole Catfish, Wrapped separately
Veet (It's for Shaving your legs Only you don't Need A razor. It's with all the Girly
cosmetic stuff)
Vaseline
six pack, Mountain Dew
One dozen Tulips
one Bottle Of water
Tissues
One Can of blue Spray paint — John Green

The oppressed martyrs of our culture have shed blood that nourish the red tulips of our nation. — Mahmud Tarzi

Tulips are the only flowers that continue to grow, up to an inch or more, after they're cut. — Sarah Jio

The significance of the rose? I thought. Who gives a shit? What's the significance of the white tulips? That was a question worth answering. — John Green

Shayna wasn't so lucky. She waved as she passed her. "Looking good, Mrs. Mancuso."
No. She wasn't. Mrs. Mancuso's neck skin dragged a path between the tulips. "Go to church and get some morals, hussy! — Cecy Robson

I'm taking notes for the Good Boyfriend app on my smartphone. Velvety dark chocolate, check. What are your favorite flowers?" "Tulips. There's a Good Boyfriend App?" She was laughing openly again. "If there isn't, there should be. An alarm goes off on birthdays and important anniversaries, and there's a little Google map of the female anatomy so you know exactly where to flick your tongue during oral sex. — Linda Barlow

The fountain is my speech. The tulips are my speech. The grass and trees are my speech. — George T. Delacorte Jr.

Tulips come up in spring for no reason. Of course, you planted bulbs and now in April the earth warms up. But why? For no reason except gravity. Why gravity? For no reason. And why did you plant red tulip bulbs to begin with? For beauty, which is itself and has no reason. So the world is empty. Things rise and fall for no reason. And what a great opportunity that is! You can start writing again at any minute. Let go of all your failures and sit down and write something great. Or write something terrible and feel great about it. — Natalie Goldberg

In Holland, everyone is an expert in painting and in tulips. — Albert Camus

Its treasures, as I love them, are imprinted in my memory; and if they are wrongly memorized
a lily where there are tulips, the boy's torn hat rakish at the wrong angle
then this only makes the pictures more mine. — Claire Messud

So Recklessly Exposed

December and January, gone.
Tulips coming up. It's time to watch
how trees stagger in the wind
and roses never rest.

Wisteria and Jasmine twist on themselves.
Violet kneels to Hyacinth, who bows.

Narcissus winks, wondering what will
the lightheaded Willow say
of such slow dancing by Cypress.

Painters come outdoors with brushes.
I love their hands.

The birds sing suddenly and all at once.
The soul says Ya Hu, quietly.

A dove calls, Where, ku?
Soul, you will find it.

Now the roses show their breasts.
No one hides when the Friend arrives.

The Rose speaks openly to the Nightingale.
Notice how the Green Lily has several tongues
but still keeps her secret.

Now the Nightingale sings this love
that is so recklessly exposed, like you. — Jalaluddin Rumi

Some tulips last so long you could almost dust them off, and others you can't trust over night. — Constance Spry

The gate clicks behind me. The tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer wine cups by chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? They are, after all, empty. — Margaret Atwood

Had been keeping Diddy, his pet tarantula, in an empty terra-cotta pot Helmut used to grow tulips. Hanna's parents nervously stood up and walked over to the doctor. "Your daughter is still unconscious," Dr. Geist said quietly. "Not much has changed. — Sara Shepard

The train ran out into a steep green meadow and Jacob saw striped tulips growing and heard a bird singing, in Italy. There were trees laced together with vines - as Virgil said. Virgil's bees had gone about the plains of Lombardy. It was the custom of the ancients to train vines between elms. Then at Milan there were sharp-winged hawks, of a bright brown, cutting figures over the roofs. — Virginia Woolf

And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy. Anyhow there was no bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment. — Virginia Woolf

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

[P]enmanship as pretty as a row of tulips — Pat Conroy

This is what history is: all those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, colored into blossom, spent. — Mark Doty

But my attention's elsewhere, drawn to that warm wonderful pull, the familiar loving essence that only belongs to one person - only belongs to him
Watching as Damen cuts through the water, board tucked under his arm, body so sculpted, so bronzed, Rembrandt would weep. Water sluicing behind him like a hot knife through butter, cleanly, fluidly, as though parting the sea.
My lips part, desperate to speak, to call out his name and bring him back to me. But just as I'm about to, my eyes meet his and I see what he sees: me - hair tangled and wet - clothes twisted and clinging - frolicking in the ocean on a hot sunny day with Jude's tanned strong arms still wrapped around me.
I release myself from Jude's grip, but it's too late. Damen's already seen me.
Already moved on.
Leaving me hollow, breathless, as I watch him retreat.
No tulips, no telepathic message, just a sad, empty void left behind in his place. — Alyson Noel

It's different and bold. It stands out amongst a blank world of black, white, and gray. Orange is the early morning sun stretching across the sky and the color of a burning ember standing tall in the middle of a beach bonfire. It's leaves in the fall, carrots in Nana's vegetable soup on a cold winter day, tulips in the spring, and the ladybugs in the middle of the grassy park on a hot summer afternoon. Orange is life. It's unexpected but beautiful. — Aly Martinez

Guarded within the old red wall's embrace, Marshalled like soldiers in gay company, The tulips stand arrayed. Here infantry Wheels out into the sunlight. — Amy Lowell

The tulips have found me out. — Florence Ripley Mastin

How much more beautiful is the moon, Slanting down the gauffered branches of a plum-tree; The moon Wavering across a bed of tulips; The moon, Still, Upon your face. You shine, Beloved, You and the moon. But which is the reflection? — Amy Lowell

He thought of the grammar of Gaelic, in which you did not say you were in love withsomeone, but that you "had love toward" her, as if itwere a physical thing you could present and hold - a bundle of tulips, a golden ring, a parcel of tenderness. — Jodi Picoult

Honey, no matter where you are, I'm with you.
When the breeze brushes your cheek, that's me.
When the stars sparkle and shine, that's me.
When the tulips bloom in the spring, that's me.
The little things.
She's there,
in the little things. — Lisa Schroeder

On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage. — Meg Rosoff

Ladies, like variegated tulips, show
'Tis to their changes half their charms we owe. — Alexander Pope

Jane,' she said, climbing down from the chair. 'Remember last year when I built that model wind tower for you and you wrote those poems for me?'
And you said you'd never switch homework assignments with me again.'
For good reason. My teacher had a hard time believing I wrote Tra-la the joy of tulips blooming, Ha-ha the thrill of bumblebees zooming. I'm alive and I dance, I'm alive though death is always looming. When I finally convinced her that I had, she asked me if I needed to talk to the school counselor. — Jeanne Birdsall

On my first day shooting '13 Going on 30,' Jennifer Garner had yellow tulips sent to my trailer. I'll never forget them. — Christa B. Allen

We get so caught up weeding the yard that we completely miss the tulips that nature gives us for a few precious weeks. We postpone joy. — Amit Sood

The industrial towns of the North are ugly because they happen to have been built at a time when modern methods of steel-construction and smoke-abatement were unknown, and when everyone was too busy making money to think about anything else. ...But since the war, industry has tended to shift southward and in doing so has grown almost comely. The typical post-war factory is not a gaunt barrack or an awful chaos of blackness and belching chimneys; it is a glittering white structure of concrete, glass and steel, surrounded by green lawns and beds of tulips. ...As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. — George Orwell

After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world. I mean disassociated. Take a top hat. You think you see it as it really is. But you don't because you associate it with other things and ideas.If you had never heard of one before, and suddenly saw it alone, you'd be frightened, or you'd laugh. That is the effect absinthe has, and that is why it drives men mad. Three nights I sat up all night drinking absinthe, and thinking that I was singularly clear-headed and sane. The waiter came in and began watering the sawdust.The most wonderful flowers, tulips, lilies and roses, sprang up, and made a garden in the cafe. "Don't you see them?" I said to him. "Mais non, monsieur, il n'y a rien. — Oscar Wilde

But I have always thought that these tulips must have had names. They were red, and orange and red, and red and orange and yellow, like the ember in a nursery fire of a winter's evening. I remember them. — Neil Gaiman

Within my heart a garden grows,
wild with violets and fragrant rose.
bright daffodils line the narrow path,
my footsteps silent as i pass.
sweet tulips nod their heads in rest;
i kneel in prayer to seek gods best.
for round my garden a fence stands firm
to guard my heart so i can learn
who should enter, and who should wait
on the other side of my locked gate.
i clasp the key around my neck
and wonder if the time is yet.
if i unlocked the gate today,
would you come in? or run away? — Robin Jones Gunn

Flowers heal me. Tulips make me happy. I keep myself surrounded by them as soon as they start coming to the island from Canada, and after that when they come from the fields in La Connor, not far from where I live. — Rebecca Wells

A row of daffodils and red tulips nestled against the walkway beneath my feet. Stray weeds peeked up through the cracks in the concrete, a reminder that that nature had the final say. No matter how much mankind bulldozed or built, all was vulnerable to Mother Nature's whims. — Pamela Crane

Tiptoe through the tulips with me. — Al Dubin

Every band is allowed to do things how they want - including getting on stage in pink pasiley suits and doing TIP TOE THROUGH THE TULIPS. — J.E. Haldeman

I could hear you, talking to the daffodils and tulips, whispering to the fairies that lived inside their petals. Each separate flower had a different family inside it. — Lucy Christopher

An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,
This art of writing billet-doux
In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies. — Leigh Hunt

I really hope you like this," he says again, and flings open the door.
It's a glass room, a greenhouse, I realize. Within are tulips, hundreds, of all colors. Tulips bloom in the middle of July in Desi's lake house. In their own special room for a very special girl.
"I know tulips are your favorite, but the season is so short," Desi said. "So I fixed that for you. They'll bloom year-round. — Gillian Flynn

Everyone, from almost every tradition, agrees on five things. Rule 1: We are all family. Rule 2: You reap exactly what you sow, that is, you cannot grow tulips from zucchini seeds. Rule 3: Try to breathe every few minutes or so. Rule 4: It helps beyond words to plant bulbs in the dark of winter. Rule 5: It is immoral to hit first. [pp.313-314] — Anne Lamott

Hope.
It's like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It's a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it's the only thing in the world keeping me afloat. — Tahereh Mafi

UTOPIA When the train stops, the woman said, you must get on it. But how will I know, the child asked, it is the right train? It will be the right train, said the woman, because it is the right time. A train approached the station; clouds of grayish smoke streamed from the chimney. How terrified I am, the child thinks, clutching the yellow tulips she will give to her grandmother. Her hair has been tightly braided to withstand the journey. Then, without a word, she gets on the train, from which a strange sound comes, not in a language like the one she speaks, something more like a moan or a cry. — Louise Gluck

Life isn't a tiptoe through the tulips. — Shannon Hoon

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

Others said May was best, that sweet green time when lilacs bloomed and gardens along Main Street were filled with sugary pink peonies and Dutch tulips. — Alice Hoffman

And so you paint pagodas and carp and phoenixes, but you also paint English country houses, and churches and coats of arms, the crucifixion, inscriptions in Persian and Arabic, carnations and tulips, mottos in Latin and knights in armour and Andromeda. v — Edmund De Waal

The idea of windmills conjures up pleasant images - of Holland and tulips, of rural America with windmill blades slowly turning, pumping water at the farm well ... But the windmills we are talking about today are not your grandmother's windmills. Each one is typically 100 yards tall, two stories taller than the Stature of Liberty, taller than a football field is long. — Lamar Alexander

Brush your teeth with gasoline.
Sleep all day and climb trees at night.
Be a monk and drink buckshot and beer.
Hold your head under water and play the violin.
Do a belly dance before pink candles.
Kill your dog.
Run for mayor.
Live in a barrel.
Break your head with a hatchet.
Plant tulips in the rain.

But don't write any more poetry. — Charles Bukowski

Margaret quirked her lips, looking much like the imp their mother used to call her. "What flower would ye pick for Katherine Campbell?"
Callum snorted. "I wouldna pick flowers."
"Ye let her take a bite out of ye." Maggie looked up at him, then cut him off when he opened his mouth to speak. "Ye fancy her. What flower would ye pick for her?"
"Tulips," he mumbled, ignoring her knowing smirk. — Paula Quinn

New rule: Tulips aren't flowers. They're some kind of gay onion. — Bill Maher

Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all. — Tom Stoppard

Deep in the drilled-in mud of the fields behind me, our bulbs are wrapped in their brittle skins with their messages of color stored inside. Blue iris, yellow crocus, tulips of all colors. — Anna Smaill

Purple as tulips in May, mauve into lush velvet, purple as the stain blackberries leave on the lips, on the hands, the purple of ripe grapes sunlit and warm as flesh ... — Marge Piercy

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, as my friend suggested, I stand before Zeus (whether I die naturally, or under sentence of History)I will repeat all this that I have written as my defense.Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zius will be merciful toward people who have given themselves entirely to these hobbies, even though they are only amusing and pointless diversions. I shall say to him : "It is not my fault that you made me a poet, and that you gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me." And perhaps Zeus, who does not call stamp-collectors and tulip-growers silly, will forgive. — Czeslaw Milosz

Right now, I couldn't have cared less if someone had waltzed across the room in a large flower costume with a sign saying GET YOUR BLACK TULIPS HERE. Every nerve in my body was on man-alert, screaming, incoming! — Lauren Willig

He has an armload of irises and daisies and tulips and he presents them to me. "I didn't know what kind of flowers you like."
"I like them all."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
He tries to hand them to me, but then remembers the cast. "I'll put them in water."
Betty swoops in the room ridiculously fast and she grabs the flowers out of Nick's hands. "I'll take care of them. You lovebirds just sit on the couch and think swooning things at each other. — Carrie Jones

The tulips are too excitable; it is winter here
Look at how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands
I am nobody, I have nothing to do with explosions
I have given my name and my dayclothes to the nurses, and my history to the anesthetist, and my body to the surgeons — Sylvia Plath