Quotes & Sayings About Vases

There are certain kinds of flowers-have you ever noticed?-that are beautiful and fragrant as long as they grow in the garden. But if you put them in vases, even silver vases, they wilt and die (272) — Jorge Amado

If it's red, French, costs too much, and tastes like the water that's left in the vase after the flowers have died and rotted, it's probably Burgundy. — Jay McInerney

The big vases, that could not hide the vacancies her pretty — Louisa May Alcott

The spectacle shop was old, long, and narrow, with a glass front and a small thin door that opened onto a somewhat busy avenue in the antiques district on the South side of Lovat. It was a quiet enough area, away from the rougher warrens, but not particularly elevated. Across the cramped street hawkers sold vases, while up the road outside a rug merchant's shop a man sold antique suits. There was also Dubois' new storefront to the East; he dealt in religious artifacts and trinkets. The shopkeep hadn't liked when he had moved in; it had somehow changed the feel of the warren. Odd folks had started showing up shortly after Saint Olmstead Religious Antiques opened: black-clad priests, Hasturians in yellow robes, and a few Deeper cultists dressed in their gray sackcloth rags. It had set the entire warren on edge. — K.M. Alexander

The door opened, held by the butler, and Lord Montagu swept into the room, his presence overwhelming the space. She could swear even the flowers in their vases perked up and listed in his direction. Honest to Pete. — Angela Quarles

Driving a Porsche in London is like bringing a Ming vase to a football game. — Douglas Adams

Oriental vases and French tapestries and paintings filled their huge mansion, as did the magnificent carpets for which their compound was famous. A vast feast of minted chicken, lamb kabobs, and sweet saffron rice that is served at weddings had been laid out on cloths on the floor of the dining room... — Sattareh Farman Farmaian

Aristotle said that some minds are not vases to be filled, but fires to be lit. — Craig Johnson

Twice ten fat oxen to the ships she sends; Besides a hundred boars, a hundred lambs, With bleating cries, attend their milky dams; And jars of gen'rous wine and spacious bowls She gives, to cheer the sailors' drooping souls. Now purple hangings clothe the palace walls, And sumptuous feasts are made in splendid halls: On Tyrian carpets, richly wrought, they dine; With loads of massy plate the sideboards shine, And antique vases, all of gold embossed (The gold itself inferior to the cost), Of curious work, where on the sides were seen The fights and figures of illustrious men, From their first founder to the present queen. — Virgil

Fresh flowers bloomed from vases, sweetly scenting the air. Again, he had no idea. Fine. He'd requested those. That shit smelled good. — Gena Showalter

I had to get by the flower beds he's planted, the flowers in vases, candles, the potpourri in the powder room - "
"Mother of God! Potpourri in the powder room. We need to get a posse together ASAP, go get him. He can be deprogrammed. Don't lose hope. — Nora Roberts

All flowers are flirtatious - particularly if they carry hyphenated names. The more hyphens in the name, the flirtier the flower. The one-hyphen flowers - black-eyed Susan; lady-smock; musk-rose - may give you only a shy glance and then drop their eyes; the two-hyphen flowers - forget-me-not; flower-de-luce - keep glancing. Flowers with three or more hyphens flirt all over the garden and continue even when they are cut and arranged in vases. John-go-to-bed-at-noon does not go there simply to sleep. — Willard R. Espy

In their censures of luxury, the fathers are extremely minute and circumstantial;89 and among the various articles which excite their pious indignation, we may enumerate false hair, garments of any colour except white, instruments of music, vases of gold or silver, downy pillows (as Jacob reposed his head on a stone), white bread, foreign wines, public salutations, the use of warm baths, and the practice of shaving the beard, which, according to the expression of Tertullian, is a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator. — Edward Gibbon

Dead flowers stood rotting in the massive Chinese vases and a shut-up heaviness overweighed the room: the air almost too stale to breathe, the exact, suffocating feel of our apartment when Mrs. Barbour took me back to Sutton Place to get some things I needed. It was a stillness I knew; this was a house closed in on itself when someone died. — Donna Tartt

Sometimes I do just have to stop and hit myself in the head with my diamond-encrusted vase. — Andrej Pejic

I remembered watching the film from Alfred Hitchcock, 'Dial M for Murder,' and he shot almost all of that movie in one room. There was a genius in what Hitchcock did by manipulating things in that room so that you could see the distances between things like the tables and the vases because of how he used perspective. — Dario Argento

Poetical spaces too can be painted like a vase. — Guity Novin

I liken an affair to the shattering of a Waterford crystal vase. You can glue it back together, but it will never be the same again. — John M. Gottman

At Pappachi's funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used to him than because she loved him. She was used to having him slouching around the pickle factory, and was used to being beaten from time to time. Ammu said that human beings were creatures of habit, and it was amazing the kinds of things they could get used to. You only had to look around you, Ammu said, to see that beatings with brass vases were the least of them. — Arundhati Roy

It is necessary that the object that the artist is shaping, whether it be a vase of clay or a fishing boat, be significant of something other than itself. This object must be a sign as well as an object; a meaning must animate it, and make it say more than it is. — Jacques Maritain

< ... > out of love of symmetry, just as people put two vases above a fireplace. — Guy De Maupassant

Someone who has seen a house collapse knows only too clearly what frail things little vases of flowers and pictures and white walls are. He knows only too well what a house is made of. — Natalia Ginzburg

When in doubt, I always, always buy clear vases. You really can't go wrong with minimalist clear vases, especially when you're sending someone flowers. The flowers are the star of the show and need to shine! — Khloe Kardashian

In the last book of the Iliad (24.602ff.), Achilles urges Priam to eat: even Niobe, he says, after all her children had been slaughtered by the gods, took food eventually. Both Priam and Achilles have been bereaved of their dearest, and yet they gather themselves, and eat, and sleep, and go on living. (...) ...there are two early Lucanian vases with mourners by a grave stele with the same inscription "spoken" by the tomb: "On my back I grow mallow and thick-rooted asphodel: / in my bosom I hold Oedipus, son of Laios." Even Oedipus, the great king of Thebes, archetype of tragedy, experienced a catastrophic fall and descended into the deepest pit of horrors; yet ordinary plants grow on his tomb. We are not so different. — Oliver Taplin

Healthy relationships, even those that eventually end with breakups, aren't a mistake. They're a chance to grow and learn, about who you are, who you want to be, what kind of relationships are worth your time and energy. I hate this assumption that when people end a romantic relationship they leave a piece of their heart behind, they shatter and will be unable to offer their next partner their whole, pure self. People aren't puzzles or vases. People have an endless capacity both to learn and to love. People also aren't property. They do not become less valuable or tarnished by use. — Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

Alone with everybody the flesh covers the bone and they put a mind in there and sometimes a soul, and the women break vases against the walls and them men drink too much and nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds. flesh covers the bone and the flesh searches for more than flesh. there's no chance at all: we are all trapped by a singular fate. nobody ever finds the one. the city dumps fill the junkyards fill the madhouses fill the hospitals fill the graveyards fill nothing else fills. — Charles Bukowski

It was intended to be a vase, it has turned out a pot. — Horace

Are you kidding me? The woman leaves priceless Ming vases and Picassos lying about like they came off a sale rack at some discount store and she fills a hidden safe with musty old books? — Alexandra Ivy

Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library. — Haruki Murakami

Never think that success is down to your own performance alone. If you start listening only to yourself you take the first step back towards the bottom. The flowers of victory belong in many vases. — Michael Schumacher

Laura could see how hard her mother tried to focus on the needs of the moment... She knew that strategy very well; it was the one she had used for years. You must keep your gaze on the immediate scene: the plates that needed clearing, the dresses that needed ironing, the vases that needed fresh water, while the clouds above you gathered and dispersed and gathered again. — Natasha Walter

Friendship is a vase, which, when it is flawed by heat, or violence, or accident, may as well be broken at once; it can never be trusted after. — Walter Savage Landor

The earliest surviving manuscript containing Artephius' 'Ars Sintrillia' is from the seventeenth century, titled 'Artetti ac Mininii Apologia in Artem Magicam' under the heading 'De Scientia Praeteritorum Praesentium ac Futuorum'. This describes the use of three vases of different materials filled with water, wine and oil in which there are semi-precious stones. These are arranged in several ways with candles, and by the reflection of the rays of the sun, moon and stars into the liquids from several instruments, including a sword, make possible various kinds of divination, especially knowledge of the past, present and future — Nicholas Clulee

And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in a while, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. — Haruki Murakami

Living and working for four decades in a Bologna apartment and studio he shared with his unwed sisters, Morandi painted little but bottles, boxes, jars, and vases. Yet like that of Chardin and the underappreciated William Nicholson, Morandi's work seems to slow down time and show you things you've never seen before. — Jerry Saltz

The thoughts you think will irradiate you as though you are a transparent vase. — Maurice Maeterlinck

It seemed to her that the dullness and the boredom of her childhood, her youth, were stored here in the room under the worn dusty red rugs, in the bloated brassware, amongst the dried grasses in the swollen vases, behind the yellowed photographs in the oval frames-everything, everything that she had so hated as a child and that was still preserved here as if this were the storeroom of some dull, uninviting provincial museum. — Anita Desai

Don't keep excessive amounts of anything. Those glass vases that come from florists. Those ketchup packets that come with take-out food. A house with two adults probably doesn't need fifteen mismatched souvenir coffee cups. — Gretchen Rubin

It was strange. She would have thought that she'd sense John's presence, feel him in the air, see him in the surroundings they'd shared for two years. But instead, he was simply gone, and the influx of women had changed the tone of the house entirely. Francesca supposed that was a good thing; she needed the support of women right now.
But it was odd, living among women. There were more flowers now - vases everywhere, it seemed. And there was no longer any lingering smell of John's cheroot, or the sandalwood soap he'd favored.
Kilmartin House now smelled of lavender and rose-water, and every whiff of it broke Francesca's heart. — Julia Quinn

... a tiny room, furnished in early MFI, of which every surface was covered in china ornaments and plaster knick-knacks whose only virtue was that they were small, and therefore of limited individual horribleness. Cumulatively, they were like an infestation. Little vases, ashtrays, animals, shepherdesses, tramps, boots, tobys, ruined castles, civic shields of seaside towns, thimbles, bambis, pink goggle-eyed puppies sitting up and begging, scooped-out swans plainly meant to double as soap dishes, donkeys with empry panniers which ought to have held pin-cushions or perhaps bunches of violets -- all jostled together in a sad visual cacophony of bad taste and birthday presents and fading holiday memories, too many to be loved, justifying themselves by their sheer weight of numbers as 'collections' do. — Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

But it is not for the perfect vase or the polished gem to choose their owners. — Mary Renault

Dashiell Hammett took murder out of theVenetian vase and dropped it into the alley. — Raymond Chandler

Improvement depends far less upon length of tasks and hours of application than is supposed. Children can take in but a little each day; they are like vases with a narrow neck; you may pour little or pour much, but much will not enter at a time. — Jules Michelet

To see Stephen Spender fumbling with our rich and delicate language is to experience all the horror of seeing a Sevres vase in the hands of a chimpanzee. — Evelyn Waugh

Love is a broken vase whose shape everyone remembers differently. — Anis Mojgani

Spoons and skimmers you can be undistinguishably together; but vases and statues require each a pedestal for itself. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I marched into the shop and bought the vases. — Diana Gabaldon

Clay is used to make vases, but it is the emptiness they contain that makes them useful. — Laozi

Take one flower that you like and get lots of them. And don't try to 'arrange' them. It's surprisingly hard to do a flower arrangement the way a florist does one. Instead, bunch them all together or put them in a series of small vases all down the table. — Ina Garten

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me. — Amy Hempel

As we cleared the passage we found mixed with the rubble broken potsherds, jar seals, and numerous fragments of small objects; water skins lying on the floor together with alabaster jars, whole and broken, and coloured pottery vases; all pertaining to some disturbed burial, but telling us nothing to whom they belonged further than by their type which was of the late XVIIIth Dyn. These were disturbing elements as they pointed towards plundering. — Howard Carter

Gamache loved to see inside the homes of people involved in a case. To look at the choices they made for their most intimate space. The colors, the decorations. The aromas. Were there books? What sort?

How did it feel?

He'd been in shacks in the middle of nowhere, carpets worn, upholstery torn, wallpaper peeling off. But stepping in he'd also noticed the smell of fresh coffee and bread. Walls were taken up with immense smiling graduation photos and on rusty pocked TV trays stood modest chipped vases with cheery daffodils or pussy willows or some tiny wild flower picked by worn hands for eyes that would adore it.

And he'd been in mansions that felt like mausoleums. — Louise Penny

It was a small room, and it was as crowded with coffee- and end-tables, chairs and hassocks and bookcases, as a second-hand furniture store. The horizontal surfaces were littered with gewgaws, shells and framed photographs, vases and pincushions and doilies. If the lady had come down in the world, she'd brought a lot down with her. My sensation of stepping into the past was getting too strong for comfort. The half-armed chair closed on me like a hand. — Ross Macdonald

Delta glanced at the artwork, the leather-bound books in the glass-fronted bookshelves, the fresh flowers in assorted vases.
"This is stunning," she said, moved by the beauty all around her. "Your home is beautiful."
Valois squeezed her hand in acknowledgement. "Thank you. You'll fit right in then. — Brooke Templar

The hallway was lined with numbered doors, odd numbers on one side and even numbers on the other, and large ornamental vases, too large to hold flowers and too small to hold spies. — Lemony Snicket

I love all things, not only the grand but the infinitely small: thimble, spurs, plates, flower vases ... — Pablo Neruda

Ephemeral and useless, flowers exemplify the gratuitousness of occasions that mean expenses and luxury; blooming in vases, doomed to a rapid death, flowers are ceremonial bonfires, incense and myrrh, libation, sacrifice. — Simone De Beauvoir

Trust is like a vase.. once it's broken, though you can fix it, the vase will never be same again. — Walter Inglis Anderson

I look for myself but find no one. I belong to the chrysanthemum hour of bright flowers placed in tall vases. I should make an ornament of my soul. — Fernando Pessoa

Some broken vases can still hold beautiful flowers — Munia Khan

When we think of design, we usually imagine things that are chosen because they are designed. Vases or comic books or architecture ... It turns out, though, that most of what we make or design is actually aimed at a public that is there for something else. The design is important, but the design is not the point. Call it "public design" ... Public design is for individuals who have to fill out our tax form, interact with our website or check into our hotel room despite the way it's designed, not because of it. — Seth Godin

The corridor smelled of water in the bottoms of purple vases and the piano was banging just beyond this emptiness. — John Hawkes

There was a Sears, Roebuck catalogue painfully twisted and shellacked and tied with a red cord. The white card beneath it said, An inexpensive doorstop." ... There were catsup bottles made into bud vases, closthespins decorated with crepe paper butterflies for use as curtin hold-backers, crocheted bags for silverware, bouquets of crepe paper and velvet flowers, an enormous funeral set piece of white organdy gardenias and dark green oilcloth leaves with REST IN PEACE spelled out in white pipe cleaners, embroidered pictures, burned wood match boxes, and fancy pillows by the hundreds. The pillows embraced every sentiment from FRANKY AND JOHNNY WERE LOVERS in black beads on a cerise satin background to the Twenty-Third Psalm in white on black velvet. It was an impressive exhibit of what loneliness can do to people. — Betty McDonald

One night, returning to the house, he went into his father's shed. He stared at the unsold pots and the vases on the shelves, at their shapes and their designs, the illustrations of landscapes. He wondered what would become of them. He reached for one, then hesitated. He thought of them staying here, untouched, through the seasons and the years. He thought of the ones people had purchased, scattered throughout the country. He imagined that somewhere underneath the glaze and the paint there remained his father's hands. That they contained the heat of a kiln and a home that no longer existed. He wondered whether he would be able to recognize them if he saw them again. — Paul Yoon

I love little children too but I don't cut off their heads and stick them in vases. — George Bernard Shaw

This is terrific. What a gorgeous kitchen. You've decorated it so beautifully. Now you're going to have to clear all the counters. Vases. Books. Knickknacks. Get rid of all that stuff. I mean, it is just beautiful. Beautiful. I love what you've done with this house. Make sure you put it all away." ~Real estate agent (p.76) — Dominique Browning

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young
men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents - punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and vases - for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West."
--from "The Glass-Cut Bowl" by F. Scott Fitzgerald — Diana Secker Tesdell

The girls Iris went through wound up cracked vases no longer fit for flowers, leaky dust collectors. After Iris, girls left town or started fucking boys. She ruined everyone. — Michelle Tea

Flowers are an education in a vase. — Robert Genn

He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer depth and involution of the current nerdism binge would be hard to convey to anyone. Intellectually, he is juggling half a dozen lit torches, Ming vases, live puppies, and running chainsaws. In this frame of mind he cannot bring himself to give a shit about the fact that this incredibly powerful billionaire has gone to a lot of trouble to come and F2F with him. — Neal Stephenson

However the problem wasn't with the vase, or even that the vases kept breaking. The problem was that I kept putting them on the edges of tables. — Yasmin Mogahed

There were vases of silk roses carefully centered on crocheted doilies, figurines of puppies carrying roses in their mouths on lace doilies, and delicate rose-covered tea sets placed on paper doilies. And that was just the start of it. It all had a really old feel to it as well, like I'd been transported back to the 1890s.
Adrian stood behind us, just outside the door, and I was pretty sure I heard him mutter, Needs more rabbits. — Richelle Mead

The flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh. — Charles Bukowski

A child is not a vase to be filled, but a fire to be lit. — Francois Rabelais

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

You send me all these roses.
Every time I think the last bouquet has arrived, finally, another turns up.
I'm running out of vases.
I didn't know roses came in so many colors.
You say they're the perfect symbols of love because they have thorns and love is pain.
I say life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
And you don't get it.
You say you love me, but you don't speak my language.
You don't even realize I'm an orchid girl. — Erin Morgenstern

(Paris, keeper of Promiscuity, enjoyed romance novels), and weird silver lamps that twisted and curved over the chairs; he had no idea who those were for. Fresh flowers bloomed from vases, sweetly scenting the air. Again, he had no idea. Fine. He'd requested those. That shit smelled good. Gideon — Gena Showalter

And look at all I've accumulated---a house! piles of clothing! two children! an ex-husband! books! boxes of letters! dishes! tiny shampoos from fancy hotels! vases! canned goods! jewelry! computers! acres of old journals! couches! bedsteads! toys galore! stuffed animals! and heaps of memories like wet rags, bunches of them, hanging off me, weighing me down. — Martha Tod Dudman

The other four houses yielded jewelry, wallets, credit cards, laptops, iPads and Kindles, even a couple of expensive looking vases ...
"You didn't do anything stupid like writing IOUs and signing your name, did you?"
"That's an excellent idea," said Danny. He stepped back through the gate, waited for a count of five, and then returned to Eric. Now Eric was standing, and when he saw Danny he visibly sagged with relief. "What kind of moron are you?"
"The fun-loving kind," said Danny. "I'm not an idiot, of course I didn't sign my name to IOUs."
"Good."
"I signed yours. — Orson Scott Card

We ate, we slept, we formed our kaleidoscopic relationships and marched ever forward. We licked chocolate from our fingers. We arranged flowers in vases. We inspected our backsides when we tried on new clothes. We gave ourselves over to art. We elected officials and complained. We stood up for home runs. We marked life passages in ceremonies we attended with impatience and pride. We reached out for new love when what we had died, confessing our unworthiness, confessing our great need. We felt at times that perhaps we really were visitors from another planet. We occasionally wondered if it was true that each of us was making everything up. But this was a wobbly saucer; this was thinking we could not endure; we went back to our elegant denial of unbreachable isolation, to refusing the lesson of being born alone and dying that way, too. We went back to loving, to eating, to sleeping, to marching and marching and marching along. — Elizabeth Berg

I do not much care for nature, and believe that flowers belong in vases rather than loose and untidy on the ground. — Gore Vidal