“I kept looking at the flowers in a vase near me: lavender sweet peas, fragile winged and yet so still, so perfectly poised, apart, and complete. They are self-sufficient, a world in themselves, a whole — perfect. Is that then, perfection? Is what those sweet peas had what I have, occasionally in moments like that? But flowers always have it — poise, completion, fulfillment, perfection; I only occasionally, like that moment. For that moment I and the sweet peas had an understanding.”

Source: Frostbite

The Way to Love (1995)
Context: If you want to know what it means to be happy, look at a flower, a bird, a child; they are perfect images of the kingdom. For they live from moment to moment in the eternal now with no past and no future. So they are spared the guilt and anxiety that so torment human beings and they are full of the sheer joy of living, taking delight not so much in persons or things as in life itself. As long as your happiness is caused or sustained by something or someone outside of you, you are still in the land of the dead. The day you are happy for no reason whatsoever, the day you find yourself taking delight in everything and in nothing, you will know that you have found the land of unending joy called the kingdom.

Variant: There are so many torturous things in this life. Don't let a man who doesn't love you be one of them.
Source: Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

Source: The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013), Chapter 10 (p. 152)

Source: Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532–1564), Fifth Book (1564), Chapter 2.

Source: Simply Perfect

Source: The Name of the Wind

Source: The Book Thief