Quotes about lilac (27 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why, remember how

in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)

in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if, remember yes

in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)

and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me, remember me”

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

Dreams , Time , Forgetting

“The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Flowers , Tree , Light , Summer

“I've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy.”

Erich Maria Remarque book Three Comrades

Source: Three Comrades

Life , Beauty , Happiness

“Going to see the river man,
Going to tell him all I can
About the plan
For lilac time.
If he tells me all he knows
'Bout the way his river flows,
And all night shows
In summertime.”

Nick Drake (1948–1974) British singer-songwriter

River Man
Song lyrics, Five Leaves Left (1969)
Variant: Going to see the river man.
Going to tell him all I can
About the ban
On feeling free.If he tells me all he knows
About the way his river flows,
I don't suppose
It's meant for me.

Way , Time , Night

“A black cat among roses,
phlox, lilac-misted under a quarter moon,
the sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock. The garden is very still.
It is dazed with moonlight,
contented with perfume…”

Amy Lowell (1874–1925) US writer

Cats , Night

“Now that the lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Source: Collected Poems, 1909-1962

“Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,
Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac tree
From which a small wood-owl calls.”

Johannes Bobrowski (1917–1965) German author

Tree , Winter , Animals

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

T.S. Eliot book The Waste Land

Source: The Waste Land (1922), Line 1 et seq.

Spring , Memory , Dead

“I cannot understand why my arm is not a lilac tree.”

Leonard Cohen book Beautiful Losers

Source: Beautiful Losers

Understanding , Tree

“I imagine the earth when I am no more:
Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.
Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,
Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.”

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator

Women , People , Books , Imagination

“You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Preguntaréis: ¿Y dónde están las lilas?
¿Y la metafísica cubierta de amapolas?
¿Y la lluvia que a menudo golpeaba
sus palabras llenándolas
de agujeros y pájaros?
Explico Algunos Cosas (I'm Explaining a Few Things or I Explain a Few Things), Tercera Residencia (Third Residence), IV, stanza 1.
Alternate translation by Donald D. Walsh:
You will ask: And where are the lilacs?
And the metaphysical blanket of poppies?
And the rain that often struck
your words filling them
with holes and birds?
Residencia en la Tierra (Residence on Earth) (1933)

Bird

“Like a Long Magnolia Blossom Bending to the Wind. Under heavy silence. Of a house in mourning. Only the cry of cicadas. Ma'am, ma'am, ma'am. Seem to long for you who is now gone. Under the August sun. The Indian Lilacs turn crimson. As if trying to heal the wounds of the mind. My wife has departed alone. Only I am left. Like a lone magnolia blossom bending to the wind. Where can I appeal. The sadness of a broken heart.”

Park Chung-hee (1917–1979) Korean Army general and the leader of South Korea from 1961 to 1979

Poem (August 1974), as quoted in Brothers at War: The Unending Conflict in Korea https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9781846680670 (2013), by Sheila Miyoshi Jager, London: Profile Books, p. 414.
1970s

Sadness , Silence , Sun , Heart

“Go down to Kew in lilac-time, in lilac-time, in lilac-time;
Go down to Kew in lilac-time (it isn't far from London!)
And you shall wander hand in hand with love in summer's wonderland;
Go down to Kew in lilac-time”

Alfred Noyes (1880–1958) English poet

it isn't far from London!
The Barrel Organ
Poems (1906)

Love , Time , Summer

“The true beloveds of this world are in their lover's eyes lilacs opening, ship lights, school bells, a landscape, remembered conversations, friends, a child's Sunday, lost voices, one's favorite suit, autumn and all seasons, memory, yes, it being the earth and water of existence, memory.”

Truman Capote book Other Voices, Other Rooms

Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948)

World , School , Lovers , Autumn

“Moons waxed and waned, the lilacs bloomed and died,
In the broad river ebbed and flowed the tide,
Ships went to sea, and ships came home from sea,
And the slow years sailed by and ceased to be.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Lady Wentworth.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Home , Sea

“Your joy is only moment’s exhalation,
at most a blink of eye is your dejection.
As sweetly falls your silent sleep’s protection
you sink in soft earth’s breast, like wheat’s oblation.

Thus Beauty, whose completed germination
was hindered by unfinished life’s perfection,
will in your dying see a resurrection –
a thousand-fold its great reanimation.

For when you’re in your grave you’re handed over
to probing roots of lilac and of lime tree,
to buds the sap is drawn above the clover

aflame to burst in summer’s honeyed finery
of blossomed trees, and so your radiant dreaming
will sweet fulfilment find in springtime’s teeming.”

Kaarlo Sarkia (1902–1945) Finnish poet

Life , Beauty , Dreams , Sleep

“Commute with me, my Love, and be merry;
How vain in the City to dwell
When apple-trees blow in Dobbs' Ferry
And lilacs adorn New Rochelle!
White Plains is the Garden of Allah
And Pelham's the Pearl of the Sea;
There's bliss in the name of Valhalla --
Oh, fly to the Suburbs with me!”

Arthur Guiterman (1871–1943) United States writer

The Passionate Suburbanite To His Love http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/3074.html

Love , Tree , Flying , Sea

“When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed,
And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Memories of President Lincoln, 1
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Star , Spring , Night

“You can do plein-air painting indoors, [to his pupil then, Berthe Morisot ] by painting white in the morning, lilac during the day and orange tones in the evening.”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

quote of Manet, recorded bij Berthe Morisot; in Manet by Himself, ed. Juliet Wilson Bareau Little Brown 2000, London; p. 303
1850 - 1875

Painting

“Perhaps he's just a vehicle
To bear us to the hills of Truth
That's Truth spelled with a great big T
And peddled in the mystic's booth
There are oh so many miracles
That the western sky exposes
Why go looking for lilacs
When you're lying in a bed of roses?”

Joan Baez (1941) American singer

Caruso
Gulf Winds (1976)

Truth , Lying

“Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into the soluble dark.”

Thomas Wolfe book Look Homeward, Angel

Source: Look Homeward, Angel (1929), p. 142

Light

“Some people I know were telling me of a curious experience which they had recently; they put a collection of old and rejected household articles in their car and drove to a dump to dispose of them. While busy at the dump, they were accosted by a strange figure, a woman of tall and stately presence, wearing a paper crown and carrying a staff in her hand, who strode majestically through the avenues of ashes, tin cans, dishonoured wash-boilers and superannuated bathtubs, attended by a rabble of admiring children. This apparition hailed my friends in a strange, incoherent, but musical language, and her breath was richly perfumed with bay-rum, or it may have been lilac lotion; she was in fact as high as a kite and as mimsy as a borogrove. Having said her say, she strode off in queenly style, and she and her raffish crew were soon lost in the mazes of the dump… My theory is that this was Titania, the fairy queen, fallen upon evil days, but magnificent in ruin; or it may simply have been some rumdumb old bag with a sense of humour. In either case the matter is worth investigating.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Children , People , Music , Cars

“Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe

An odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change

Lovers , Passion , Night , Dead

“I'm unpacking the bags and setting up
And planting lilacs and buttercups”

Leslie Feist (1976) Canadian musician

"Mushaboom"
Let It Die (2004)
Context: Helping the kids out of their coats
But wait the babies haven't been born
I'm unpacking the bags and setting up
And planting lilacs and buttercups
But in the meantime I've got it hard
Second floor living without a yard.

“They got alchemy.
They turn the roses into gold
They turn the lilac into honey
They're making love for the peaches.

And they'll do it,
Do it for you.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Singles and rarities

Love , Making love

“Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breathe”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Change
Context: p>Tonight the lilacs magnify
The easy passion, the ever-ready love
Of the lover that lies within us and we breatheAn odor evoking nothing, absolute.
We encounter in the dead middle of the night
The purple odor, the abundant bloom.</p

Love , Lovers , Passion

“And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth
This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

Ash-Wednesday (1930)

Sea , Tree , Time , Dreams