"At an Old Palace" (《行宫》), in Gems of Chinese Literature, trans. Herbert A. Giles
Variant translations:
Deserted now imperial bowers.
For whom still redden palace flowers?
Some white-haired chambermaids at leisure
Talk of the late emperor's pleasure.
"At an Old Palace", in Song of the Immortals: An Anthology of Classical Chinese Poetry, trans. Yuanchong Xu (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), p. 128
The ancient Palace lies in desolation spread.
The very garden flowers in solitude grow red.
Only some withered dames with whitened hair remain,
Who sit there idly talking of mystic monarchs dead.
"The Ancient Palace", as translated by W. J. B. Fletcher in Lotus and Chrysanthemum: An Anthology of Chinese and Japanese Poetry (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1934), p. 107
“Most of the people are homesick anyway, and a little lonely, and they hide themselves in their hair and are turned into flowers.”
Source: Sculptor's Daughter
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Tove Jansson 35
Finnish children's writer and illustrator 1914–2001Related quotes
“Homesickness is nothing … Fifty percent of the people in the world are homesick all the time.”
“The Bella Lingua” in The Brigadier and the Golf Widow (1964).
“Lonely people keep up a ceaseless flow of commentary on themselves.”
City Aphorisms (1984)
Poem Sweet in her green dell http://www.bartleby.com/101/640.html
“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
“All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.”
" To Virgil http://home.att.net/%7ETennysonPoetry/virg.htm", st. 3 (1882)
Context: Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;
All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.
“Most of the things people say they remember they only imagine anyways.”
Homecoming saga, Earthborn (1995)