Quotes about daisy

A collection of quotes on the topic of daisy, love, herring, flowers.

Quotes about daisy

“I lift my heart as spring lifts up
A yellow daisy to the rain;
My heart will be a lovely cup
Altho' it holds but pain.

For I shall learn from flower and leaf
That color every drop they hold,
To change the lifeless wine of grief
To living gold.”

Sara Teasdale Rivers to the Sea

"Alchemy"
Rivers to the Sea (1915)

Pain, Spring, Heart, Learning

“So she was considering in her own mind… whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up & picking the daisies…”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Pleasure

“We haven’t met for many years, said Daisy, her voice as matter-of-fact as it could ever be.
"Five years next November."
The automatic quality set us all back at least another minute.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“Tread Lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.”

Oscar Wilde Requiescat

Requiescat, st. 1 (1881)

“The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it -- they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

To the Person Sitting in Darkness http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/sitting.html (1901)

Money, People, Game, Suffering

“Patience is… clearly not fatalistic, shoulder-shrugging resignation. It is the acceptance of a divine rhythm to life; it is obedience prolonged. Patience stoutly resists pulling up the daisies to see how the roots are doing.”

Neal A. Maxwell (1926–2004) Mormon leader

Life, Patience

“I remember her telling me once that rabbits were the gnomes in attendance to the Fairy Queen and that the stars were God's daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

God, Star, Perfection

“Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Sun

“Oh, Daisy, it's revolting the way I want to fawn all over him. I'm afraid I'm going to do something dreadfully silly today. Burst into song or something. For God's sake, don't let me.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: It Happened One Autumn

God, Way

“Deep in the meadow, hidden far away
A cloak of leaves, a moonbeam ray
Forget your woes and let your troubles lay
And when again it's morning, they'll wash away.

Here it's safe, here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from every harm

The final lines are barely audible.

Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Katniss Everdeen, Rue's song, p. 235
Source: The Hunger Games trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008)

Love, Dreams, Forgetting

“But I don't love you, Daisy, and you can't begin to know how sorry I am about that because if I could chose anyone in this world to love, it'd be you.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Kiss an Angel

Love, World

“What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon?” cried Daisy, “and the day after that, and the next thirty years?”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

“The cemetery is an open space among the ruins covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Adonaïs

Preface
Source: Adonais (1821)

Love, Death, Thinking, Winter

“I'm not short," Daisy muttered. "Short women are never mysterious, or elegant, or pursued by handsome men. And they're always treated like children. I refuse to be short.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Secrets of a Summer Night

Women, Men, Children

“The brief silence that follows is as tender as a
rainstorm of daisies.”

Mathias Malzieu book La Mécanique du cœur

Source: La Mécanique du cœur

Silence

“Daisy had known the novel was silly even as she had read it, but that had not detracted one bit from her enjoyment.”

Lisa Kleypas (1964) American writer

Source: Scandal in Spring

Reading

“I’ve been thinking I’d like to be Daisy; I’d like to have someone like Gatsby stare at my house for whole years and never stop dreaming of me”

Koren Zailckas (1980) American writer

Source: Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood

Dreams, Thinking, Housing

“Daisies are like sunshine to the ground.”

Drew Barrymore (1975) American actress, director and producer

“The officer looked at Daisy while she was speaking, in a way that every young girl wants to be looked at sometime, and because it seemed romantic to me I have remembered the incident ever since.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Way, Girl

“She (Daisy) dug her nails into her palms and told herself she had no choice. "I, Theodosia…" She gulped for air. "… take thee Alexander…" She gulped again. "… to be my awful wedded husband…”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Kiss an Angel

Wedding

“I love you, Daisy. I love you so much I hurt.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Kiss an Angel

Love, Hurt

“Tumbling-hair
picker of buttercups
violets
dandelions
And the big bullying daisies
through the field wonderful
with eyes a little sorry
Another comes
also picking flowers”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Source: Poems, 1905 1962

Flowers

“And at our feet unbroken lay
The glass that had whirled us thither away:
And in the grass, among the flowers
We sat and wished all sorts of things:
O, we were wealthier than kings!
We ruled the world for several hours!

And then, it seemed, we knew not why,
All the daisies began to die.
We wished them alive again; but soon
The trees all fled up towards the moon
Like peacocks through the sunlit air:
And the butterflies flapped into silver fish;
And each wish spoiled another wish;
Till we threw the glass down in despair;
For, getting whatever you want to get,
Is like drinking tea from a fishing net.”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

Part III : The Mystic Ruby
The Flower of Old Japan and Other Poems (1907), The Flower of Old Japan

World, Flowers, Drink, Fish

“What for? I don't go to the Daisy or any of that. We don't give parties under a striped awning out over the lawn for two hundred people, four of whom we like.”

Brian Keith (1921–1997) actor

PhotoplayMagazine.com
Brian Keith on his handsomeness

People

“Mostpeople have been heard
screaming for international
measures that render hell rational —i thank heaven somebody's crazy
enough to give me a daisy”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

30
73 poems (1963)

Hell

“Myriads of daisies have shone forth in flower
Near the lark's nest, and in their natural hour
Have passed away; less happy than the one
That by the unwilling ploughshare died to prove
The tender charm of poetry and love.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833, "There!" said a Stripling, l. 10 (1833).

Love, Flowers, Nature, Happiness

“Meadows trim, with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks, and rivers wide;
Towers and balements it sees
Bosomed high in tufted trees,
Where perhaps some beauty lies,
The cynosure of neighboring eyes.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Source: L'Allegro (1631), Line 75

Beauty, Tree

“I got better and Daisy didn't and I can't explain why. Maybe I was just flirting with madness the way I flirted with my teachers and classmates. I wasn't convinced I was crazy, though I feared I was. Some people say that having any conscious opinion on the matter is a mark of sanity, but I'm not sure that's true. I still think about it. I'll always have to think about it.”

Susanna Kaysen book Girl, Interrupted

Girl, Interrupted (1994)

People, Fear, Way, Thinking

“Buttercups and Daisies—
Oh, the pretty flowers,
Coming ere the spring time,
To tell of sunny hours.”

Mary Howitt (1799–1888) English poet, and author

"Buttercups and Daisies," http://books.google.com/books?id=jrwkAAAAMAAJ&q=%22Buttercups+and+daisies+Oh+the+pretty+flowers+Coming+ere+the+Spring+time+To+tell+of+sunny+hours%22&pg=PA119#v=onepage The Christmas Library: Birds and flowers and other country things, Volume 1 http://books.google.com/books?id=ezkGfAEACAAJ&q=%22Buttercups+and+daisies+Oh+the+pretty+flowers+Coming+ere+the+Spring+time+To+tell+of+sunny+hours%22 (1837).

Spring, Flowers, Time

“Of all the floures in the mede,
Than love I most these floures white and rede,
Soch that men callen daisies in our toun.”

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) English poet

Prologue of the Legend of Good Women, line 41
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Love, Men

“I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.”

P.G. Wodehouse book The Inimitable Jeeves

The Inimitable Jeeves (1923)

“That well by reason men it call may
The daisie, or els the eye of the day,
The emprise, and floure of floures all.”

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343–1400) English poet

Prologue of the Legend of Good Women, line 183
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Men

“He flips to a drawing of a spindly boy wearing oversized glasses, hugging an ABC primer, and sniffing a daisy. This is the enemy. " The first [mistake] is to assume that he is a sort of cretinoid idiot, who can't see, think, or anything. It might be a fair, if dangerous, assumption that the enemy is at least as stupid as we are."”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

pg: 11
The Worlds of Herman Kahn: the intuitive science of thermonuclear war.

Stupidity, Boy, Thinking, Drawing

“There grew pied wind-flowers and violets,
Daisies, those pearl’d Arcturi of the earth,
The constellated flower that never sets;
Faint oxlips; tender bluebells at whose birth
The sod scarce heaved; and that tall flower that wets
Its mother’s face with heaven-collected tears,
When the low wind, its playmate’s voice, it hears.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

The Question http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/1907.html (1820), st. 2

Flowers, Birth, Tear

“If all the wisdom of the world and all its art—all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it has snatched from heaven—were gathered together and divided into heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths were flashed forth in the brilliant salon amid the ripple of light laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely down on the leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the crowded street; and that to the daisied field—the heap that would tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of all—these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there, from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Wisdom, Men, Pain, Truth

“We're all monsters," said Daisy with enthusiasm. "It's the Age of Monsters.”

Paul Bowles book Let It Come Down

Source: Let It Come Down (1952), p. 238

Age

“Small service is true service while it lasts.
Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one:
The daisy, by the shadow that it casts,
Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

To a Child. Written in her Album (1834).

Sun

“I have been overcome by the beauty and richness of our life together, those early mornings setting out, those evenings gleaming with rivers and lakes below us, still holding the last light. … Those fields of daisies we landed on, and dusty fields and desert stretches. Memories of many skies and earths beneath us — many days, many nights of stars.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1906–2001) American aviator and author

War Within and Without (1980)

Life, Beauty, Star, Light

“Yes, the novel is about concrete living relationships, a man's love for a woman, a woman's betrayal of that love. But it is also about wealth, its great attraction as well as its destructive power, the carelessness that comes with it, and, yes, it is about the American dream, a dream of power and wealth, the beguiling light of Daisy's house and the port of entry to America. It is also about loss, about the perishability of dreams once they are transformed into hard reality. It is the longing, its immateriality, that makes the dream pure.”

Azar Nafisi book Reading Lolita in Tehran

Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003)

Love, Dreams, Reality, Light

“Her style was plain and poetic as rain on a daisy--she was particularly gifted at the description of empty land and horses. She lived in the basement of my house for a hundred dollars a month, and I was desperately in love with her.”

Michael Chabon book Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys (1995)

Love, Horse, Housing

“Where is the subject that does not branch out into infinity? For every grain of sand is a mystery; so is every daisy in summer, and so is every snow-flake in winter. Both upwards and downwards, and all around us, science and speculation pass into mystery at last.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 421.

Science, Winter, Summer

“Daisy had learned not to pay much heed to techno-fads. To her fell the task of preserving as much as possible, so that when humanity finally did fall, it wouldn’t take everything else to the grave with it.”

David Brin book Earth

Part VIII (p. 471)
Earth (1990)

Learning

“California girls, we're unforgettable,
Daisy Dukes, bikinis on top.
Sun-kissed skin, so hot will melt your popsicle,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
California girls, we're undeniable,
Fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock.
West coast represent, now put your hands up,
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.”

Katy Perry (1984) American singer, songwriter and actress

California Gurls, written by Katy Perry, Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin, Benjamin Levin, Bonnie McKee, and Calvin Broadus
Song lyrics, Teenage Dream (2010)

Girl, Kiss, Sun

“Daisy was a consciously happy young woman without any of the usual endowments that make for conscious happiness, money apart. She was not pretty, she was not clever, she had no friends, no talents, nor even an imagination to make her think she was happy when she was really miserable. As she was never miserable, she had no need of an imagination.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"Daisy and Venison" from Progress of Stories (Deya, Majorca: Seizin Press; London, Constable, 1935)

Money, Imagination, Thinking, Happiness

“The moon, full-orbed, forsakes her watery cave,
And lifts her lovely head above the wave;
The snowy splendours of her modest ray
Stream o'er the glistening waves, and quivering play;
Around her, glittering on the heaven's arched brow,
Unnumbered stars, enclosed in azure, glow,
Thick as the dew-drops of the April dawn,
Or May-flowers crowding o'er the daisy lawn;
The canvas whitens in the silvery beam,
And with a mild pale-red the pendants gleam;
The masts' tall shadows tremble o'er the deep;
The peaceful winds a holy silence keep;
The watchman's carol, echoed from the prows,
Alone, at times, awakes the still repose.”

William Julius Mickle (1734–1788) British writer

Book I, lines 417–430 (pp. 23–24)
The Lusiad; Or, The Discovery of India: an Epic Poem (1776)

Love, Peace, Star, Flowers

“I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2005
Context: I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9-11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief.
With a huge gaping hole in lower Manhattan, I'm not sure why we have to keep reminding people, but we are at war. (Perhaps it's because of the media blackout on images of the 9-11 attack. We're not allowed to see those because seeing planes plowing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might make us feel angry and jingoistic.)
Among the things that war entails are: killing people (sometimes innocent), destroying buildings (sometimes innocent) and spying on people (sometimes innocent).
That is why war is a bad thing. But once a war starts, it is going to be finished one way or another, and I have a preference for it coming out one way rather than the other.

Thinking, Sport

“I'd rather be my honest self
Than any made-up daisy.”

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) American novelist, short story writer and poet

"Discontent", in St. Nicholas Magazine, Vol. 3 (February 1876), p. 247
Context: "Dear robin," said this sad young flower,
"Perhaps you'd not mind trying
To find a nice white frill for me,
Some day when you are flying?" "You silly thing!" the robin said;
"I think you must be crazy!
I'd rather be my honest self
Than any made-up daisy. "You're nicer in your own bright gown,
The little children love you;
Be the best buttercup you can,
And think no flower above you. "Though swallows leave me out of sight,
We'd better keep our places;
Perhaps the world would all go wrong
With one too many daisies. "Look bravely up into the sky,
And be content with knowing
That God wished for a buttercup
Just here, where you are growing."