Quotes about sunflower

A collection of quotes on the topic of sunflower, sun, look, turn.

Quotes about sunflower

Allen Ginsberg photo

“We're all golden sunflowers inside.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Vincent Van Gogh photo

“The sunflower is mine, in a way.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Way
Allen Ginsberg photo

“Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Source: Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems

Way, Sun

“The sunflower keeps its eye on the sun with its back turned to the shade. We die facing life with our backs to death, as if we were walking out of a room backwards.”

Malcolm de Chazal (1902–1981) Mauritian artist

Sens-plastique

Life, Death, Sun

“I started in, got it [former Monet's house, where he lived 1878 - 1881 in Vetheuil; [Mitchell bought the house and used it mainly first in the weekends] in summer of 67, Yeah, well, and then I started... I was still painting at Fremicourt and I remember starting the 'Sunflowers' [series, c. 1969-72], which I saw in Vetheuil and painted them in Fremicourt, you see... The thing about [the studio in] Fremicourt, also about St. Marks: I had to roll [large] paintings to get them out, which was a real drag, because of thickness [of the paint which cracked]. And when I started painting in Vetheuil, you can just take the [stretched] paintings out [in open air]. Well, that really changed unconsciously an awful lot of... Walk them out stretched, it's great.”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

second side of the first tape
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

Change, Summer, Painting, Housing
Joe Hill photo

“Who knows what may lie around the next corner? There may be a window somewhere ahead. It may look out on a field of sunflowers.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: 20th Century Ghosts

Lie
Jerry Spinelli photo

“Her smile put the sunflower to shame.”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

For Her, Smile
Jo Walton photo

“Bibliotropic," Hugh said. "Like sunflowers are heliotropic, they naturally turn towards the sun. We naturally turn towards the bookshop.”

Jo Walton book Among Others

Source: Among Others

Nature, Sun
Mikhail Bulgakov photo

“Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it.”

Mikhail Bulgakov book The Master and Margarita

Source: The Master and Margarita

Jeffrey Eugenides photo

“She kept her face to the floor, moving in her personal oblivion, her sunflower eyes fixed on the predicament of her life we would never understand.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Life, Understanding, Personality
Richard Rohr photo

“The morning glories and the sunflowers turn naturally toward the light, but we have to be taught, it seems.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Nature, Light
Allen Ginsberg photo

“Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!”

Allen Ginsberg book Howl and Other Poems

Source: Howl and Other Poems

Love, Soul

“My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird - equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums…”

Mary Oliver (1935–2019) American writer

"Messenger"
Variant: My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness
Source: Thirst (2006)

World

“My will broke at the sound of his voice, and my head turned
with as much inevitability as a sunflower turning its face to
the sun.”

Patricia Briggs book Silver Borne

Source: Silver Borne

Sun

“Never look directly at the sun. Instead, look at the sunflower.”

Vera Nazarian (1966) American writer

Source: The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

Sun
Jerry Spinelli photo

“I faced the gaudy sunflower on her canvas bag -- it looked hand-painted and at last my eyes fell into hers. I said, 'Thanks for the card.' Her smile put the sunflower to shame. She walked off.”

Jerry Spinelli book Stargirl

Source: Stargirl

Smile, Painting
Ian McCulloch photo

“How can you not sell the first three Bunnymen albums? It's like, how can you not sell the Mona Lisa, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch?”

Ian McCulloch (1959) singer, musician

Spin magazine (2008)

“Do you see it?
Do you see that sunflower, raising its head
Glaring at the sun?
Its head almost eclipses the sun
Yet even when there is no sun
Its head still glows.”

Mang Ke (1951) Chinese writer

"Sunflower in the Sun" ( trans. Jonathan Stalling and Yibing Huang https://english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter_2010/prose/PushOpenTheWindow.htm)

Sun
Thomas Moore photo

“No, the heart that has truly lov'd never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close;
As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turn'd when he rose.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

Believe me, if all those endearing young Charms.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: No, the heart that has truly lov'd never forgets,
But as truly loves on to the close;
As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets
The same look which she turn'd when he rose.

Love, God, Flowers, Sun
Jack Kerouac photo

“The mad road, lonely, leading around the bend into the openings of space towards the horizon Wasatch snows promised us in the vision of the West, spine heights at the world's end, coast of blue Pacific starry night — nobone halfbanana moons sloping in the tangled night sky, the torments of great formations in mist, the huddled invisible insect in the car racing onwards, illuminate. — The raw cut, the drag, the butte, the star, the draw, the sunflower in the grass — orangebutted west lands of Arcadia, forlorn sands of the isolate earth, dewy exposures to infinity in black space, home of the rattlesnake and the gopher the level of the world, low and flat: the charging restless mute unvoiced road keening in a seizure of tarpaulin power into the route.”

Jack Kerouac book Visions of Cody

Visions of Cody (1960)

World, Cars, Home, Star
Willa Cather photo

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world.
In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”

Willa Cather book My Ántonia

Book IV, Ch. 4
My Antonia (1918)

World, Way, Mountain, Boy
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo

“Fame is the scentless sunflower, with gaudy crown of gold;
But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) Poet, essayist, physician

No Time like the old Time; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Friendship
Natalie Merchant photo

“I saw my first Henry Darger collage/paintings in the early 1980’s when the tale of Henry’s life was just emerging through rumor and scattered fragments of his book. He lived and died a recluse in Chicago where no one knew of his writings or paintings. There was a folk art gallery in New Orleans that had acquired a small pile of Realms of the Unreal illustrations. I was on tour with REM at the time, Michael Stipe and I visited the gallery where we had a first look at these images of seven little horrified girls pursued by a purple and orange winged cats or evil professors on horseback or resting peacefully under giant sunflowers. I was completely captivated and intrigued.”

Natalie Merchant (1963) American singer-songwriter

Quotes from NatalieMerchant.com

Life, Books, Art, Girl
Martin Firrell photo

“The road to freedom is bordered with sunflowers.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

after Willa Cather, in her novel "My Antonia".
"The Question Mark Inside" (2008)

Freedom
David Foster Wallace photo

“Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A. M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree, Time, Business, Past
Dylan Moran photo

“Perfume is a good example of a product gone all wrong. When I was a child, it was a semi-exotic thing and it was called something stupid like "Fleur de Fleur" and you would give it to your mother or aunty at Christmas and it was advertised by some dopey looking woman in a field of sunflowers and she looked like she'd been hit by a tractor because she was going *flails with arms*. She couldn’t just get over how nice she smelled. Now, because we’re so jaded, we’ve consumed so much, our attention can only be grabbed in a violent way. So it’s always advertised by these constipated, exo-keletal bitches who are sneering at you and it’s called something horrible like "Homicide"! "Dysentery!"”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

"Urban Dysentery" for boys and girls!

On consumerism.
What It Is (2009)

Way, Christmas, Bitch, Stupidity