flowers

I always found the extraordinary loss of life in the First World War very moving. I remember learning about it as a very young child, as an eight- or nine-year-old, asking my teachers what poppies were for. Every year the teachers would suddenly wear these red paper flowers in their lapels, and I would say 'What does that mean?'

In my dreams and visions, I seemed to see a line, and on the other side of that line were green fields, and lovely flowers, and beautiful white ladies, who stretched out their arms to me over the line, but I couldn't reach them no-how. I always fell before I got to the line.

I like to be bought flowers and taken out for dinner. I like a man to be a gentleman. I don't like to be treated as if I am brainless. I like to be respected and to give respect.

Hope is the only bee that makes honey without flowers.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Flowers may beckon towards us but they speak toward heaven and God.

If of thy mortal goods thoU art bereft And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left Sell one and with the dole Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.

Say it with flowers.

Flowers of all hue and without thorn the rose.

One thing is certain and the rest is lies The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd And the great star early droop'd in the western sky the night I mourn'd - and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled That every Hyacinth the Garden wears Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.

But ne'er the rose without the thorn.

In Flanders' fields the poppies blow Between the crosses row on row That mark our place and in the sky The larks still bravely singing fly Scarce heard among the guns below.

Tis the last rose of summer. Left blooming alone.

Flowers are words Which even a babe may understand.

Consider the lilies of the field how they grow they toil not neither do they spin.

Where flowers degenerate man cannot live.