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81 " Often I return to the grave after leaving flowers – tulips, lilies, carnations – to find the heads eaten by deer. It’s just as good a use for the flowers as any, and one Paul would have liked. The earth is quickly turned over by worms, the processes of nature marching on, reminding me of what Paul saw and what I now carry deep in my bones, too: the inextricability of life and death, and the ability to cope, to find meaning despite this, because of this. What happened to Paul was tragic, but he was not a tragedy. "
― Paul Kalanithi , When Breath Becomes Air
82 " I am slowly learning to pluck the flowers of my past from the weeds, and place them in the window where I can see them first. ~Call Me Tuesday "
83 " The luminescent flow of a sunbathed garden— illuminating the shifting colors of its inhabitants— echoed in my memory as I opened the antique bookstore door in the shaft of window light. The books, like the flowers of the garden, awaited me with the thrill of a new mystery. "
― Gina Marinello-Sweeney , The Rose and the Sword (The Veritas Chronicles #2)
84 " It felt oily inside her head. There were strings of Xavier Stancliff caught inside of her, holding on and spiderwebbing out as he plotted and waited and thought: this is all the bitch deserves. Swallowing, Sandra pushed herself off the bed. It was late and the room was dark. She could see the bundled lump of Jack beneath his own covers. He’d left the television on and the light flickered down the tiny hall. Shadows danced and Sandra shivered as she left the room.In another life, she would have told Danny and Jack about the man. Danny would have whispered, “It’s alright,” and smoothed back her hair from her face and kissed her, lips dry and coarse on her forehead. Then he and Jack would’ve left while she was sleeping. They would’ve trampled the flowers and climbed into Xavier Stanliff’s window and when Sandra woke up there would have been one less man in the world. "
― Angele Gougeon , Sticks and Stones
85 " Sour MilkYou can't make itturn sweetagain. Onceit was an innocent colorlike the flowers of wild strawberries,and its texture was simplewould pass through a clean cheesecloth,its taste was fresh.And nowwith nothing more guilty that the passage of timeto chide it with,the same substancehas turned sour and lumpy.The sour milkmakes interesting & delicious doughs,can be carried to a further state of bacterial actionto create new foods,can in its own rightbe considered complicated and more interesting in textureto one who studies it closely,like a map of the world.Butto most of us:it is spoiled.Sour.We throw it out,down the drain-not in the backyard-careful not to spill anybecause the smell is strong.A good cook would be shocked with the waste.But we do not live in a world of good cooks.I am the milk.Time passes.You cannot make it turn sweetagain.I sit guiltily on the refrigerator shelftrembling with hope for a cookwho dreams of waffles,biscuits, dumplingsand other delicious breadsfearing the modern housewifewho will lift me off the shelf and with one deft twistof a wrist...you know the rest.You are the milk.When it is your turnremember,there is nothing more than the passage of timewe can chide you with. "
86 " We are the flowers that make up the Creator's vast and beautiful garden. "
87 " Simplicity and humility are the flowers of greatness. "
88 " Bullshit makes the flowers grow and that is beautiful "
― Gregory Hill , Principia Discordia ● Or ● How I Found Goddess and What I Did to Her When I Found Her: The Magnum Opiate of Malaclypse the Younger
89 " Because this painting has never been restored there is a heightened poignance to it somehow; it doesn’t have the feeling of unassailable permanence that paintings in museums do.There is a small crack in the lower left, and a little of the priming between the wooden panel and the oil emulsions of paint has been bared. A bit of abrasion shows, at the rim of a bowl of berries, evidence of time’s power even over this—which, paradoxically, only seems to increase its poetry, its deep resonance. If you could see the notes of a cello, when the bow draws slowly and deeply across its strings, and those resonant reverberations which of all instruments’ are nearest to the sound of the human voice emerge—no, the wrong verb, they seem to come into being all at once, to surround us, suddenly, with presence—if that were made visible, that would be the poetry of Osias Beert.But the still life resides in absolute silence.Portraits often seem pregnant with speech, or as if their subjects have just finished saying something, or will soon speak the thoughts that inform their faces, the thoughts we’re invited to read. Landscapes are full of presences, visible or unseen; soon nymphs or a stag or a band of hikers will make themselves heard.But no word will ever be spoken here, among the flowers and snails, the solid and dependable apples, this heap of rumpled books, this pewter plate on which a few opened oysters lie, giving up their silver.These are resolutely still, immutable, poised for a forward movement that will never occur. The brink upon which still life rests is the brink of time, the edge of something about to happen. Everything that we know crosses this lip, over and over, like water over the edge of a fall, as what might happen does, as any of the endless variations of what might come true does so, and things fall into being, tumble through the progression of existing in time.Painting creates silence. You could examine the objects themselves, the actors in a Dutch still life—this knobbed beaker, this pewter salver, this knife—and, lovely as all antique utilitarian objects are, they are not, would not be, poised on the edge these same things inhabit when they are represented.These things exist—if indeed they are still around at all—in time. It is the act of painting them that makes them perennially poised, an emergent truth about to be articulated, a word waiting to be spoken. Single word that has been forming all these years in the light on the knife’s pearl handle, in the drops of moisture on nearly translucent grapes: At the end of time, will that word be said? "
― Mark Doty , Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
90 " When the young womanleans over the sky,about to water the flowers as well as the weeds,her white front splits openuntil her milk runs. "
― Günter Grass
91 " The flowers must have been the latest generation of perennials, whose ancestors were first planted by a woman who lived in the ruins when the ruins were a raw, unpainted house inhabited by herself and a smoky, serious husband and perhaps a pair or silent, serious daughters, and the flowers were an act of resistance against the raw, bare lot with its raw house sticking up from the raw earth like an act of sheer, inevitable, necessary madness because human beings have to live somewhere and in something and here is just as outrageous as there because in either place (in any place) it seems like an interruption, an intrusion on something that, no matter how many times she read in her Bible, Let them have dominion, seemed marred, dispelled, vanquished once people arrived with their catastrophic voices and saws and plows and began to sing and hammer and carve and erect. So the flowers were maybe a balm or, if not a balm, some sort of gesture signifying the balm she would apply were it in her power to offer redress. "
― Paul Harding
92 " People who have fallacious objectives are like the barren soil. The flowers grow from soil which is composed of the right objectives. "
― Idries Shah , Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi Way
93 " I heard the breeze whisper your name to the trees. And the flowers giggled smiling at the leaves. I and my loneliness keep talking about you. "
― Avijeet Das
94 " You're only here for a short visit. Don't hurry, don't worry. And be sure to smell the flowers along the way. "
95 " The gnostic is Muslim in that his whole being is surrendered to God; he has no separate individual existence of his own. He is like the birds and the flowers in his yielding to the Creator; like them, like all the elements of the cosmos, he reflects the Divine to his own degree. He reflects it actively, however, they passively; his participation is a conscious one. "
― Seyyed Hossein Nasr
96 " When I was younger, my mom loved to garden. But the flowers would never grow. She just kept trying.''I don't understand.''Because you can't.''What does this have to do with anything?'I don't fiddle with my fingers and there's no apology on the tip of my tongue when I say, 'I am my mother's son. "
― Ellie Lieberman
97 " Turn around….you’ve got grass and dead flowers…”My fingers naturally began to comb through my long, black strands, shaking things loose as Sarti carefully removed more stubborn pieces. The flowers had been left over from my forced marriage to Thaddeus. The grass, from a sensual night with Kresh the eve of my honeymoon. Devilish irony. "
98 " No one in hundreds of years has had that kind of power -- the power to control the elements. Not since the slaughter of the 1600's ... She has saved her greatest warrior for the moment when you are most needed. It is you, Isi, not us; you are the one destined to save the planet. We boys are just window dressing while you are the last knight of the Earth, pulled from her core and given from her heart to save us all. Haven't you noticed it? The flowers turn their faces to you, as if you were the sun. The most timid and previously abused bird curls up in your arms, as if it were her most natural place. When you are sad, the sky shares your sorrow and darkens in empathy. When you are happy, the moon throws herself into eclipse and the stars themselves wink at you to celebrate your joy. You are her daughter, the daughter of Earth, and she smiles when she sees you. "
99 " It had been more or less the same for Jilly. Except that she had her parents there to field any phone calls, to accept the flowers at the door and pick up the cards that dropped like tears through the letterbox. She sat before her dressing table mirror in bra and pants and let time drip away, watching a face she didn’t recognise and feeling raw emotions eat away at the drugs she was on. The emotions were gradually winning. "
― Andrew Barrett , The Third Rule (Eddie Collins #1)
100 " I feel there will be a time. A time when there will be no agony. I will never cry. There will come a time when my smile will be genuine. You will be able to tell. I feel there will come a time when the winds will carry all the wrinkles away when the rain will bring beauty with it when the sun shine will carry the birds my way. When the flowers will be welcome in this world. The pain I feel will not stay forever. Nothing will last. The good brought bad with it. I know the bad has already begun. What I know more is that the good is hidden in it. It is never gone. It will never go. And I will wait! "
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