Orchid quotes by topic: Women and orchids, Orchids features, People and orchids, Love and orchids, Attitude to orchids, Literature and orchids, Men and orchids, Gardening and orchids, Dreams and orchids, Roses and orchids, Sin and orchids, India and orchids, Bloomand orchids, Fragrance and orchids, Orchid hunting, Darwin and orchids, Death and orchids, Money and orchids, etc.
Women and orchids
You yourself: orchid under lots of plastic flowers! (Paul Mommertz)
We girls watch from our boxes like orchids in a greehouse. Sheltered from the past. Blinded to the future. (Holly Bodger)
Orchids, those most beautiful parasitic flowers, paradoxically unpredictable and poisonous, which, unlike North Americans, no Brazilian wears on her bodice. (Blaise Cendrars)
Ribbons a-flutter and orchids a-tremble, Yearly the vigilant Daughters assemble, Affirming in fervid and firm resolutions Their permanent veto on all revolutions. (Marya Mannes)
Angela seemed an orchid, touched with drooping and promising no perfume, with her faded spiritual poses, her conscious… (Anne Douglas Sedgwick)
For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
We all think of Jeannette as the frailest sort of an orchid, beautiful to look at but ready to wither at a touch. (Grace Smith Richmond)
She thought of the orchids spreading across the plains below, choking the life out of other plants, out of the soil itself, selfish and unstoppable. Tally Youngblood was a weed. And, unlike the orchids, she wasn’t even a pretty one. (Scott Westerfeld)
I have become an orchid
washed in on the salt white beach.
Memory,
what can I make of it now
that might please you-
this life, already wasted
and still strewn with miracles? (Mary Ruefle)
Orchids features
Orchids are the ultimate, most complex plants to have developed during evolution. (Richard Rorty)
No plant in the vegetable kingdom has fascinated horticulturists and amateurs so much; Several popular names have always been given to Orchids: “Flowers of Paradise”; “Daughters of the air”; “Flowers of Kings”… (A. Zimmermann, R. Dougoud)
Orchids were not made by an ideal engineer; they are jury-rigged from a limited set of available components. Thus, they must have evolved from ordinary flowers. (Stephen Jay Gould)
It is safe to say that approximately ninety per cent of the orchid flora is endemic. (Oakes Ames)
I most often go to orchids (…). They come, these strange girls, from marshy, hot and unhealthy countries. They are attractive as sirens, deadly as poisons, admirably bizarre, unnerving, frightening. (…). The unimaginable designs of their little bodies throw the intoxicated soul into the paradise of images and ideal pleasures. (Guy de Maupassant)
On a bright morning I was greeted warm
By a host of flowers of the self same hue
Smiling disarmingly from an orchid wild
With their white petals washed in dew. (Valsa George)
People and orchids
Human beings aren’t orchids; we must draw something from the soil we grow in. (Sara Jeannette Duncan)
I don’t want to give the impression that perfectly normal, healthy, thoughtful, and balanced people are not drawn to orchids. I am told they exist. I just didn’t have much luck finding them. (Eric Hansen)
A miracle would offer our woods some prodigious orchid, a thousand hands would immediately reach out to uproot it, wither it; if the blue bird comes to pass, all the guns are aimed; one is surprised afterwards if it is rare! (André Gide)
One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid… One wants… But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one? (Tony Kushner)
When two friends understand each other totally, the words are soft and strong like an orchid’s perfume. (Sara Jeannette Duncan)
But “mankind” has no goal, no idea, no plan, just as little as the species of butterflies or orchids have a goal. “Humanity” is an empty word. (Oswald Spengler)
Love and orchids
Love is an orchid which thrives principally on hot air. (Myrtle Reed)
He bought me so many orchids that I looked like a well-kept grave. (Texas Guinan)
For other people, love is like some rare orchid that can only grow in one place under a certain set of conditions. For me it’s like bindweed. It grows with no encouragement at all, under any conditions, and just strangles everything else. (Scarlett Thomas)
I would need … daisy love, you know, pretty love, sweet love that nonetheless was ubiquitous in roadside ditches in the summertime, and instead I would get orchid love. Love that needed misting and replanting and pruning and fertilizing and died anyway. (Mary Ann Rivers)
Orchids hide in jasmine
Their lilac flowers…
Along the narrow pink alley
You are walking towards me. (Vladimir Nabokov)
Attitude to orchids
The view of orchids should be enjoyed in the same way as one enjoys kissing a woman or listening to poetry. (Jan Satrap)
If I see an orchid that’s fantastically expensive, I’ll buy it. It’s worth it, for no other reason than it gives me pleasure. (Lee Radziwill)
Were they flowers that
fill my little room with fragrance in the moonlight?
Or had dreamlike sweet tales rang through the night? (Christian Wagner)
We are fascinated by flowers that we rarely see.
We admire orchids
and despise dandelions. (Frantz Wittkamp)
Just as I wonder
whether it’s going to die,
the orchid blossoms
and I can’t explain why it
moves my heart, why such pleasure
comes from one small bud
on a long spindly stem, one
blood red gold flower
opening at mid-summer,
tiny, perfect in its hour. (Sam Hamill)
Literature and orchids
Daudet was no orchid, beautiful and scentless; his writings have always the full flavor of the southern soil. (Brander Matthews)
Here, in this showcase, for the first time in my life I saw a living orchid, Oscar Wilde’s flower, inserted into his buttonhole and has since become a kind of symbol. (Viktor Nekrasov)
His aerial creations resemble the blossoms of the epiphytic orchids, which have no root in the soil, but draw their nourishment from the moisture of the air. (Henry Augustin Beers)
Here is Noël Bernard painted. Difficult, poor childhood, a brief, dazzling, dazzling existence, intuitions of genius, a production feverishly fertilized and hastened by illness, a death on the heights. An orchid in truth. (Alexandre Arnoux)
You should only write rare and secret words. You should look for words in the treasure chambers of the language that have never been in a newspaper or in any Ullstein book. Words that have the lost scent of loneliness. Words that are strange and like orchids on the rootstocks of the eternal forest. (Victor Auburtin)
Men and orchids
He’s like orchids, he lives in a greenhouse, he doesn’t look like anything known. We can possibly like it, if we like what is bizarre. (Marie-Sabine Roger)
Irving was an incomparable orchid, a thing beautiful, lonely, and not quite normal. (Arthur Symons)
He was too much in character with the strange little orchid that decorated his buttonhole. (Hulbert Footner)
There were in it metaphors as monstrous as orchids, and as subtle in color. The life of the senses was described in the terms of mystical philosophy. One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some medieval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. (Charlotte Bronte)
Gardening and orchids
Improve orchids? But is it possible to surpass perfection itself? (Luther Burbank)
Look to every Orchid, even the smallest growing on blocks or in baskets, they all require attention. (William Keane)
…was a long table covered with pots of the most beautiful flowers that I had ever seen; all of them orchids. (Henry Rider Haggard)
The orchids, the roses, the long beds of lilies, violets, carnations—all these he showed her in turn. (Maximilian Foster)
Dreams and orchids
My orchid today is a deformed dream full of attractions. She talks to me about octopus, hoof, silver beard, owl, dry blood… (Colette)
Every night I dream that I am walking along my alleys with an orchid in my hands and looking for someone to brag about what an unusual orchid I have. (Sergey Zhemaitis)
Dreams seem like orchids to me. – Like them, they are colorful and rich. Just like them, they draw their strength from the giant trunk of the life-sap, boast about the blood they have sucked, rejoice in the fleeting minute, the next they are dead and pale. – And when worlds move softly above, don’t you feel it as if it were wafting with scents? Dreams seem like orchids to me. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Roses and orchids
Don’t compare her to sunshine and roses when she’s clearly orchids and moonlight. (Melody Lee)
I hated roses. I hated them for being so trite, so clichéd, a default, all-purpose flower that said I love you, I’m sorry, and get well soon. Give me peonies and tulips, orchids or gardenia. Those were flowers with character. (Justina Chen)
Everywhere it blows all around,
Like a sweet narcosis,
The breath of wild orchids
And tender tea roses. (Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik)
Sin and orchids
It would appear that this elegance is that of the devil: thus certain fat orchids, plants so suspicious that one is tempted to attribute to them the most disturbing human perversions. (Georges Bataille)
Lord Illingworth told me this morning that there was an orchid there as beautiful as the seven deadly sins. (Oscar Wilde)
There was nothing of the opiate poppy, the ominous orchid, or even that velvet voluptuary, the rose. (Rupert Hughes)
India and orchids
Those incredible orchids of India (…) monstrous plants with unexpected exfoliations, inconceivable blooms, having an almost animal organic way of life, obscene attitudes or threatening colors, something like appetites, instincts, almost a will. (Léon Bloy)
I dare not call you a lotus:
He loves midnight and vice.
So, there was an orchid,
an Indian-fabulous flower. (Victor Hoffman)
Bloom and orchids
Spring flowering of nature excites the soul too much. It is better to listen to the cool wind and white clouds of an autumn day, when the scent of orchids is in the air, and the water is clear and bright, like the sky. At such a time, both the soul and the body become cleaner. (Hong Zicheng)
The scent of lilacs woke her up –
the wild orchids are blooming,
some have already
raised their heads proudly to the sun. (Christa Kluge)
Fragrance and orchids
An orchid in a deep forest sends out its fragrance even if no one is around to appreciate it. (Confucius)
As if someone’s tender mouth,
Tender than the delirium of a fairy in love,
This smell of an orchid
Intoxicates, intoxicates, and drinks the will. (Konstantin Balmont)
Orchid hunting
Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation. (Susan Orlean)
Many collectors died in process of searching for new species, and despite persistent reports that the men died from drowning, gunshot and knife wounds, snakebite, trampling by cattle, or blows in the head with blunt instruments, it is generally accepted that in each case the primary cause of death was orchid fever. (Eric Hansen)
Darwin and orchids
Mr. Darwin has written a whole book on the many curious and wonderful ways in which orchids tempt bees and other insects to fertilize them. (Arabella Burton Buckley)
My dear Darwin,—Many thanks for your valuable new edition of the “Orchids,” which I see contains a great deal of new matter of the greatest interest. (Alfred Russel Wallace)
Death and orchids
There were hundreds of varieties of orchids, each with a history of its own. Royalty had been known to die for the sake of orchids. Orchids had an ineffable aura of fatalism. (Haruki Murakami)
I love – oh God, I shouldn’t say this – I’m really good at bringing orchids back from the dead. (Stephen Moyer)
Money and orchids
Buying orchids is as exciting as playing the stock market. (Herbert G. Wells)
Orchids, on the other hand, tend to elude the laws of supply and demand and are priced much more like paintings or sculpture, their value being in the eye of a particular collector. (Margot Berwin)
Black orchids
Dark sides are important. They should be nurtured like nasty black orchids. (Gillian Flynn)
There are no black flowers, claims Hegel. Black orchids grow on Kalimantan. The philosophers know too little about the world they claim to know. (Ulrich Erckenbrecht)
Swamp and orchids
And sometimes it leads to the Southland, to the swamp where the orchid glows… (Robert W. Service)
A native bog orchid with purplish-pink flowers. (Norman Taylor)
Nature and orchids
The orchid is Mother Nature’s masterpiece. (Robyn)
The annihilation of all worlds is like the sigh of an orchid. (Marc Gendron)
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