#lower

Becky was a weed.  Nobody ever wanted them taking over the bigger, prettier plants.  People went to all extremes to make them go away.  They sprayed poison, pulled until the roots gave way. They felt only like their garden was complete when every tendril was extirpated.  This was how she felt from birth. ↗

— Ruth McLeod-Kearns

#death #drama #family #flowers #love

Intelligence is one of the the greatest human gifts. But all too often, a search for knowledge drives out the search for love. This is something else I've discovered for myself very recently. I present it to you as a hypothesis: Intelligence without the ability to give and receive affection leads to moral breakdown, to neurosis, and possibly even psychosis. And I say that the mind absorbed in and involved in itself as a self-centered end, to the exclusion of human relationships, can onlly lead to violence and pain. ↗

— Daniel Keyes

#intelligence

I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own. ↗

— John Bartlett

#ownership #thread #men

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

#mormons #sunflowers #freedom

Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you. ↗

— Tomoko Yamashita

#coffee #fireworks #flowers #love #maisen

Thy love wakes thirst for Heaven in one and all: Leper, pimp, outcast, fool and criminal, Satan, O pity my long wretchedness! ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#the-flowers-of-evil #the-litanies-of-satan #love

Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare, and left the flushed print in a poppy there. ↗

— Francis Thompson

#love #nature-writing #summer #love

Moss is selected to be the emblem of maternal love, because, like that love, it glads the heart when the winter of adversity overtakes us, and when summer friends have deserted us. ↗

— Henrietta Dumont

#love

The sun is a flower, and it burns my goddamn nostrils like the scent of love, which I haven’t tasted since I put on my midnight-black blindfold. I’m just naturally romantic, I guess.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#love #romance #romantic #love

I take my metal canister of tea off the shelf. It is my own mixture of dried lavender blossoms and lemon balm, harvested from my garden and hung in the storeroom to dry. Weed helped me hang these stalks, I think. His hands touched these tender leaves, just as they touch me. ↗

— Maryrose Wood

#love #passion #tears #love