“The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.”

— Scott Westerfeld , book Uglies

Source: Uglies

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Scott Westerfeld 147

American science fiction writer 1963

Hans Christian von Baeyer (1938) American physicist

Source: Information, The New Language of Science (2003), Chapter 21, The Qubit, Information in the quantum age, p. 187

“Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

30 December 1850
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: Each bud flowers but once and each flower has but its minute of perfect beauty; so, in the garden of the soul each feeling has, as it were, its flowering instant, its one and only moment of expansive grace and radiant kingship. Each star passes but once in the night through the meridian over our heads and shines there but an instant; so, in the heaven of the mind each thought touches its zenith but once, and in that moment all its brilliancy and all its greatness culminate. Artist, poet, or thinker, if you want to fix and immortalize your ideas or your feelings, seize them at this precise and fleeting moment, for it is their highest point. Before it, you have but vague outlines or dim presentiments of them. After it you will have only weakened reminiscence or powerless regret; that moment is the moment of your ideal.

“These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

“There are a lot more roses and tulips around today, in a lot more places, then there were before people took an interest in them. For a flower the path to world domination passes through humanity’s ever-shifting ideals of beauty.”

Michael Pollan book The Botany of Desire

Source: The Botany of Desire (2001), Chapter 2 (p. 79)

“I remember the birds and the animals and going down to the river with my dog to play…My grandparents and uncles who farmed in Puerto de Luna were so beautiful, I wanted to keep them around, to contain them.”

Rudolfo Anaya (1937) Novelist, poet

On his childhood in “Rudolfo Anaya: Man of visions” https://www.abqjournal.com/1074636/man-of.html in Albuquerque Journal (2017 Oct 7)

“The past is pervasive; it seeps into everything;… And yet because the past is irreplaceable and cannot be done again, it was that very past, not the present or the future, that was so delicate, so vulnerable, so dreadfully easy to erase.”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Things I Didn't Know (2006)

“Remember, my dear Evelina, nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things.”

Frances Burney book Evelina

Letter XXXIX
Evelina (1778)

“All is so calm and chaste, so like a dream.
That looking at this masterpiece of God, I ask myself
Where is there a painter, an artist so supreme,So profoundly wise as to unfurl
A canvas with a more arresting scene,
More delicate and beautiful in this World?”

Florbela Espanca (1894–1930) Portuguese poet

Tudo é tranquilo e casto e sonhador...
Olhando esta paisagem que é uma tela
De Deus, eu penso então: Onde há pintor<p>Onde há artista de saber profundo,
Que possa imaginar coisa mais bela,
Mais delicada e linda neste Mundo?
Juvenilia: versos inéditos de Florbela Espanca (1946), p. 56
Translated by John D. Godinho
Juvenília (1931), No meu Alentejo

“Nudity in a picture is such a delicate thing, and it is so rarely right. But it can be right if it's done by people with beautiful vision and if it becomes part of the melody of the situation. The body, after all, is a beautiful and secret thing.”

Nastassja Kinski (1961) German actress

As quoted in Denise Worrell (1989), Icons: Intimate Portraits.

“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 (1968) American writer

Source: North of Beautiful

“The flowers were so beautiful, so delicate and unthreatening, but they choked everything around them.”

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Scott Westerfeld 147

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