Beautiful Vase Quotes

Beauty doesn't have to be about anything. What's a vase about? What's a sunset or a flower about? What, for that matter, is Mozart's Twenty-third Piano Concerto about?

There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter. Which are you?

There’s something amazing about this life. The very same worldly attribute that causes us pain is also what gives us relief: Nothing here lasts. What does that mean? It means that the breathtakingly beautiful rose in my vase will wither tomorrow. It means that my youth will neglect me. But it also means that the sadness I feel today will change tomorrow. My pain will die. My laughter won’t last forever but neither will my tears. We say this life isn’t perfect. And it isn’t. It isn’t perfectly good. But, it also isn’t perfectly bad, either.

A person of high, rare mental gifts who is forced into a job which is merely useful is like a valuable vase decorated with the most beautiful painting and then used as a kitchen pot.

Some broken vases can still hold beautiful flowers

Music. A flower in a vase on the tray. A January rose, it wouldn't last long, all big and full-blown like that. He loved things like this, fragile, that wouldn't last. She touched its silver-mauve petals, a hundred layers like an old-fashioned petticoat. The Japanese would say that's their elegance, the brevity of their beauty.

However," he continued when she remained silent, her throat a knot of emotion, "it seems Montgomery could not help himself when it came to this vase. I'm afraid he has a weakness for beautiful things and has been known to relocate an item if he feels it is not being accorded the proper appreciation. Once he 'relocated' an ancient sculpture from the home of another archangel.

Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.

I don't know the first thing about holding together a family, especially one that resembles an heirloom vase, shattered but glued back together for its beauty, and no one mentions that you can see the cracks as plain as day.

I believe in roses. And I believe in putting roses into a vase and sitting the vase on the table. I believe in getting lost and being found, I believe in going barefoot, and in laughter! My religion is to laugh at myself, whenever I can! I believe in the sunlight and in grey skies with big, beautiful clouds!

The author squares man's depravity with still being made in the image of God with this word picture. A vase that has held beautiful roses though now broken, will nevertheless hold something of the fragrance it once contained.

Kintsugi is a pottery technique. When something breaks, like a vase, they glue it back together with melted gold. Instead of making the cracks invisible, they make them beautiful. To celebrate the history of the object. What it's been through. And I was just... Thinking of us like that. My heart full of gold veins, instead of cracks.

Emilienne wore Maman's wedding dress. Just after the ceremony, Emilienne glanced in the mirror. She saw not her own reflection but a tall empty vase.

Tell me we'll be naming our children Beautiful and nothing else.

A thought that is almost beautiful – a thought that you speak not, but that you cherish within you at this moment, will irradiate you as though you were a transparent vase.

I worship you like night's pavilion, O vase of sadness, o great silent one, And love you more since you escape from me, And since you seem, my night's sublimity, To mock me and increase the leagues that lie Between my arms and blue immensity. I move to the attack, besiege, assail, Like eager worms after a funeral. I even love, o beast implacable, The coldness which makes you more beautiful.

-You know how to call me although such a noise now would only confuse the air Neither of us can forget the steps we danced the words you stretched to call me out of dust Yes I long for you not just as a leaf for weather or vase for hands but with a narrow human longing that makes a man refuse any fields but his own I wait for you at an unexpected place in your journey like the rusted key or the feather you do not pick up.- -I WILL NEVER FIND THE FACES FOR ALL GOODBYES I'VE MADE.- For Anyone Dressed in Marble The miracle we all are waiting for is waiting till the Parthenon falls down and House of Birthdays is a house no more and fathers are unpoisoned by renown. The medals and the records of abuse can't help us on our pilgrimage to lust, but like whips certain perverts never use, compel our flesh in paralysing trust. I see an orphan, lawless and serene, standing in a corner of the sky, body something like bodies that have been, but not the scar of naming in his eye. Bred close to the ovens, he's burnt inside. Light, wind, cold, dark -- they use him like a bride. I Had It for a Moment I had it for a moment I knew why I must thank you I saw powerful governing men in black suits I saw them undressed in the arms of young mistresses the men more naked than the naked women the men crying quietly No that is not it I'm losing why I must thank you which means I'm left with pure longing How old are you Do you like your thighs I had it for a moment I had a reason for letting the picture of your mouth destroy my conversation Something on the radio the end of a Mexican song I saw the musicians getting paid they are not even surprised they knew it was only a job Now I've lost it completely A lot of people think you are beautiful How do I feel about that I have no feeling about that I had a wonderful reason for not merely courting you It was tied up with the newspapers I saw secret arrangements in high offices I saw men who loved their worldliness even though they had looked through big electric telescopes they still thought their worldliness was serious not just a hobby a taste a harmless affectation they thought the cosmos listened I was suddenly fearful one of their obscure regulations could separate us I was ready to beg for mercy Now I'm getting into humiliation I've lost why I began this I wanted to talk about your eyes I know nothing about your eyes and you've noticed how little I know I want you somewhere safe far from high offices I'll study you later So many people want to cry quietly beside you

Stars are attributed w/ intelligence they don't have, beauty they haven't worked for, loyaly & love they are incapable of reciprocating, and strength they do not possess. They are treated like a beautiful vase of cut flowers. When wilted, simply replaced w/ new blooms.

The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.

In Plaster I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints. 
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality -- She lay in bed with me like a dead body 
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was 
 Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints. I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold. I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer. 
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior! 
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist. 
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her: She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages. 

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful. 
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose 
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain, And it was I who attracted everybody's attention, 
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed. 
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up -- 
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality. 

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it. 
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun 
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice 
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience: She humored my weakness like the best of nurses, 
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly. In time our relationship grew more intense. 

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish. 
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself, 
As if my habits offended her in some way. She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded. 
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces 
Simply because she looked after me so badly. Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal. She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior, 
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful -- Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse! 
And secretly she began to hope I'd die. Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely, 
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water. 

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her. She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp -- I had forgotten how to walk or sit, So I was careful not to upset her in any way 
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself. Living with her was like living with my own coffin: Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully. I used to think we might make a go of it together -- 
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close. 
Now I see it must be one or the other of us. She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy, 
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit. I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her, 
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me. --written 26 Feburary 1961

This is terrific. What a gorgeous kitchen. You’ve decorated it so beautifully. Now you’re going to have to clear all the counters. Vases. Books. Knickknacks. Get rid of all that stuff. I mean, it is just beautiful. Beautiful. I love what you’ve done with this house. Make sure you put it all away.” ~Real estate agent (p.76)

It was our beautiful life together, amazing vacations and grand gestures and freshly cut flowers in handmade vases, that had held us together for so long.

I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time.

Even artificial flowers have a vase. Life is Beautiful. (Même les fleurs artificielles Ont un vase. La vie est belle.)

It was the first thing I noticed about him. He could admire a lady as though he were admiring a beautiful porcelain vase, without making her feel he was affixing a price tag.

There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil.

When the Devil was a woman, When Lilith wound Her ebony hair in heavy braids, And framed Her pale features all 'round With Botticelli's tangled thoughts, When she, smiling softly, Ringed all her slim fingers In golden bands with brilliant stones, When she leafed through Villiers And loved Huysmans, When she fathomed Maeterlinck's silence And bathed her Soul In Gabriel d'Annunzio's colors, She even laughed And as she laughed, The little princess of serpents sprang Out of her mouth. Then the most beautiful of she-devils Sought after the serpent, She seized the Queen of Serpents With her ringed finger, So that she wound and hissed Hissed, hissed And spit venom. In a heavy copper vase; Damp earth, Black damp earth She scattered upon it. Lightly her great hands caressed This heavy copper vase All around, Her pale lips lightly sang Her ancient curse. Like a children's rhyme her curses chimed, Soft and languid Languid as the kisses, That the damp earth drank From her mouth, But life arose in the vase, And tempted by her languid kisses, And tempted by those sweet tones, From the black earth slowly there crept, Orchids - When the most beloved Adorns her pale features before the mirror All 'round with Botticelli's adders, There creep sideways from the copper vase, Orchids- Devil's blossoms which the ancient earth, Wed by Lilith's curse To serpent's venom, has borne to the light Orchids- The Devil's blossoms- "The Diary Of An Orange Tree

In Japanese culture it is said that if a vase is accidently broken and then glued back together, it becomes even more beautiful... regardless of its defects. It can be the same with people.

There are certain kinds of flowers-have you ever noticed?-that are beautiful and fragrant as long as they grow in the garden. But if you put them in vases, even silver vases, they wilt and die" (272)

The gusty wind Khazri swept through Baku, scouring every crevice, leaving behind air so pristine that it sparkled in the ginger sun like my mama’s favorite crystal vase.

In a room as big as loneliness my heart which is as big as love looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase at the sapling you planted in our garden and the song of canaries which sing to the size of a window. from “Another Birth (Tavalodi Digar in Farsi)

In a room as big as loneliness my heart which is as big as love looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase at the saplings you planted in our garden and the song of canaries which sing to the size of a window. Ah…this is my lot this is my lot my lot is a sky that is taken away at the drop of a curtain my lot is going down a flight of disused stairs to regain something amid putrefaction and nostalgia my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me I love your hands.

Amphora,” he murmured against the wide, sweet curve of her lips. His hands slid over the wide, sweet curve of her hips, cupping smoothness cool and solid, timeless and graceful as the swell of ancient pottery, promising abundance. “Like a Grecian vase. God, you’ve got the most beautiful arse!” “Jug-butt, huh?

If you put pussy willows in water, they’ll blossom and then die. Just put them in the vase alone, and they’ll stay beautiful forever.

Trust is like a glass vase, beautiful except there is no way of putting it back together when it breaks.

There are two kinds of flowers when it comes to women,” Eve said. “The kind that sit safe in a beautiful vase, or the kind that survive in any conditions . . . even in evil. Lili was the latter.

The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth's crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing colour and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can't make it anything but fragile. If you drop in on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn't possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?

I learned to sleep through the day so that I would not be tired when he returned; he always needed to talk then, to tell me down to the last detail about the faces and the wounds and the movements of men. And I wanted to be able to listen, to digest the bloody images, to paint them flat and unremarkable onto the vase of posterity. To release him from it and make him Achilles again.

The thing is, flowers die when you pick them. As soon as you cut them and put them in a vase, the clock’s on. You’re displaying them as something beautiful, and the whole time they’re decomposing. Sometimes I think our marriage was like that. As soon as it began, it was beginning to end.

Delta glanced at the artwork, the leather-bound books in the glass-fronted bookshelves, the fresh flowers in assorted vases. "This is stunning," she said, moved by the beauty all around her. "Your home is beautiful." Valois squeezed her hand in acknowledgement. "Thank you. You'll fit right in then.

Severin frowned at the leafy green twigs shoved in a vase that Elle had brought him that day. She had run out of flowers, and resorted to clipping branches from bushes. He could see the flattened leaves the maddening girl had no doubt rubbed. She is like a burr—once she brushes you, she is difficult to dislodge. He

When she finally opened her eyes, she did so to the surprising sight of Prince Severin placing a vase of daisies at her bedside. My invasion into his life must be succeeding, or he would have sent the flowers with a servant. Right? Her head was such a muddied mess Elle wasn’t sure how she felt about the possibility,

We also lose the pleasure of the sensory world around us. Instead of enjoying the beauty of a flower, we imagine only how it would look in a vase on our kitchen table. Instead of smelling the morning air and looking at the sky, we consult the weather app on our smartphone, neck bent, oblivious to the world around us.

What use is a defenseless flower except to shove in a vase and let wither until its once-beautiful petals fall off?

If you place two flowers in the same vase, they will not argue over who is more beautiful.

What is the use of beauty in woman? Provided a woman is physically well made and capable of bearing children, she will always be good enough in the opinion of economists. What is the use of music? -- of painting? Who would be fool enough nowadays to prefer Mozart to Carrel, Michael Angelo to the inventor of white mustard? There is nothing really beautiful save what is of no possible use. Everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and man's needs are low and disgusting, like his own poor, wretched nature. The most useful place in a house is the water-closet. For my part, saving these gentry's presence, I am of those to whom superfluities are necessaries, and I am fond of things and people in inverse ratio to the service they render me. I prefer a Chinese vase with its mandarins and dragons, which is perfectly useless to me, to a utensil which I do use, and the particular talent of mine which I set most store by is that which enables me not to guess logogriphs and charades. I would very willingly renounce my rights as a Frenchman and a citizen for the sight of an undoubted painting by Raphael, or of a beautiful nude woman, -- Princess Borghese, for instance, when she posed for Canova, or Julia Grisi when she is entering her bath. I would most willingly consent to the return of that cannibal, Charles X., if he brought me, from his residence in Bohemia, a case of Tokai or Johannisberg; and the electoral laws would be quite liberal enough, to my mind, were some of our streets broader and some other things less broad. Though I am not a dilettante, I prefer the sound of a poor fiddle and tambourines to that of the Speaker's bell. I would sell my breeches for a ring, and my bread for jam. The occupation which best befits civilized man seems to me to be idleness or analytically smoking a pipe or cigar. I think highly of those who play skittles, and also of those who write verse. You may perceive that my principles are not utilitarian, and that I shall never be the editor of a virtuous paper, unless I am converted, which would be very comical. Instead of founding a Monthyon prize for the reward of virtue, I would rather bestow -- like Sardanapalus, that great, misunderstood philosopher -- a large reward to him who should invent a new pleasure; for to me enjoyment seems to be the end of life and the only useful thing on this earth. God willed it to be so, for he created women, perfumes, light, lovely flowers, good wine, spirited horses, lapdogs, and Angora cats; for He did not say to his angels, 'Be virtuous,' but, 'Love,' and gave us lips more sensitive than the rest of the skin that we might kiss women, eyes looking upward that we might behold the light, a subtile sense of smell that we might breathe in the soul of the flowers, muscular limbs that we might press the flanks of stallions and fly swift as thought without railway or steam-kettle, delicate hands that we might stroke the long heads of greyhounds, the velvety fur of cats, and the polished shoulder of not very virtuous creatures, and, finally, granted to us alone the triple and glorious privilege of drinking without being thirsty, striking fire, and making love in all seasons, whereby we are very much more distinguished from brutes than by the custom of reading newspapers and framing constitutions.

I should have said “powder room.” That would evoke the image of me sitting before a beautiful gold mirror, a vase of fresh flowers nearby, freshening my makeup, rather than sitting on a toilet.

…”The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don’t suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse’s. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn’t we?” He appealed to Lucy. “There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine’s great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,’ it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.’ It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets.”…

I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it's a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases -- a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw, -- is, in itself, replication -- the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist. ...Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to.

I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases—a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist. And yes, it was not pizza bagels, all those years ago, that I wanted from Gramoz, but replication. Because his offering extended me into something worthy of generosity, and therefore seen. It was that very moreness that I wanted to prolong, to return to.

The best of people are not those who buy flowers and give them to their loved ones to be placed in pretty vases on bedside tables and mantelpieces. The best of people are those who grow flowers in boxes on their window sills for all those who pass by to see.

Florence’s mother liked to imagine a life of diamonds and gilt for her daughter. But this, this, was the life Florence wanted. A blue-and-white teacup stuffed with clementine peels. A tangle of white ranunculus in a ceramic pitcher on the windowsill. Amanda had once put a vase of those same flowers on her desk at work. The whole place looked like a painting by Vermeer. And it was cold. Chilly gusts rattled the windows in their frames. Someone had told Florence once that glass was actually a liquid that settled slowly, over eons; that was why in old houses the windows were always thicker at the bottom than at the top. Was that true? Florence didn’t care. In the same way she couldn’t understand why people were so determined to expose Maud Dixon’s identity, she couldn’t understand why they needed to pin things down, turn poetry into fact. Wasn’t poetry better? Why would you turn something beautiful into something quotidian?

From his beach bag the man took an old penknife with a red handle and began to etch the signs of the letters onto nice flat pebbles. At the same time, he spoke to Mondo about everything there was in the letters, about everything you could see in them when you looked and when you listened. He spoke about A, which is like a big fly with its wings pulled back; about B, which is funny, with its two tummies; or C and D, which are like the moon, a crescent moon or a half-full moon; and then there was O, which was the full moon in the black sky. H is high, a ladder to climb up trees or to reach the roofs of houses; E and F look like a rake and a shovel; and G is like a fat man sitting in an armchair. I dances on tiptoes, with a little head popping up each time it bounces, whereas J likes to swing. K is broken like an old man, R takes big strides like a soldier, and Y stands tall, its arms up in the air, and it shouts: help! L is a tree on the river's edge, M is a mountain, N is for names, and people waving their hands, P is asleep on one paw, and Q is sitting on its tail; S is always a snake, Z is always a bolt of lightning, T is beautiful, like the mast on a ship, U is like a vase, V and W are birds, birds in flight; and X is a cross to help you remember.

I AM NOT EVIL. Then why do you destroy? CLARIFY. You do heinous things. EXPOUND. You kill. THOSE THAT ARE KILLED BECOME ANOTHER THING. Yes, dead! Destroyed. DEFINE DESTROY. To demolish, damage, ruin, kill. DEFINE CREATE. To give rise to, fashion something from nothing, take raw material and invent something new. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS NOTHING. ALL IS SOMETHING. WHERE DOES YOUR “RAW MATERIAL” COME FROM? WAS IT NOT SOMETHING BEFORE YOU FORCED IT TO BECOME SOMETHING ELSE? Clay is just a lump of clay before an artist molds it into a beautiful vase. LUMP. BEAUTIFUL. OPINION. SUBJECTIVE. THE CLAY WAS SOMETHING. PERHAPS YOU WERE AS UNIMPRESSED WITH IT AS I AM BY HUMANS, YET YOU CANNOT DENY IT WAS ITS ESSENTIAL SELF. YOU SMASHED IT, STRETCHED IT, PULLED IT, SMELTED IT, DYED IT, AND FORCED IT TO BECOME SOMETHING ELSE. YOU IMPOSED YOUR WILL UPON IT. AND YOU CALL THIS CREATION? I TAKE A BEING AND MAKE ITS MOLECULES REST. HOW IS THAT NOT CREATION? IT WAS ONE THING AND IS ANOTHER. ONCE IT ATE, NOW IT IS EATEN. DID I NOT CREATE SUSTENANCE FOR ANOTHER WITH ITS NEW STATE? CAN THERE BE ANY ACT OF CREATION THAT DOES NOT FIRST DESTROY? VILLAGES FALL. CITIES RISE. HUMANS DIE. LIFE SPRINGS FROM THE SOIL WHEREIN THEY LIE. IS NOT ANY ACT OF DESTRUCTION, SHOULD TIME ENOUGH PASS, AN ACT OF CREATION?

For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into it forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void.

The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth’s crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing color, and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can’t make it anything but fragile. If you drop it on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn’t it possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?

What would you like for your own life, Kate, if you could choose?” “Anything?” “Of course anything.” “That’s really easy, Aunty Ivy.” “Go on then.” “A straw hat...with a bright scarlet ribbon tied around the top and a bow at the back. A tea-dress like girls used to wear, with big red poppies all over the fabric. A pair of flat, white pumps, comfortable but really pretty. A bicycle with a basket on the front. In the basket is a loaf of fresh bread, cheese, fruit oh...and a bottle of sparkly wine, you know, like posh people drink. “I’m cycling down a lane. There are no lorries or cars or bicycles. No people – just me. The sun is shining through the trees, making patterns on the ground. At the end of the lane is a gate, sort of hidden between the bushes and trees. I stop at the gate, get off the bike and wheel it into the garden. “In the garden there are flowers of all kinds, especially roses. They’re my favourite. I walk down the little path to a cottage. It’s not big, just big enough. The front door needs painting and has a little stained glass window at the top. I take the food out of the basket and go through the door. “Inside, everything is clean, pretty and bright. There are vases of flowers on every surface and it smells sweet, like lemon cake. At the end of the room are French windows. They need painting too, but it doesn’t matter. I go through the French windows into a beautiful garden. Even more flowers there...and a veranda. On the veranda is an old rocking chair with patchwork cushions and next to it a little table that has an oriental tablecloth with gold tassels. I put the food on the table and pour the wine into a glass. I’d sit in the rocking chair and close my eyes and think to myself... this is my place.” From A DISH OF STONES

Is it always this awkward?" Sara asked. Her voice was hushed. Derek turned to look at her, his gaze falling to the white rose in her hands. She had taken it from the arrangement of hothouse flowers. Nervously her fingers ruffled the fragile petals. Self-consciously Sara sniffed the pale blossom and began to insert it back into the huge vase. "It's nice to have roses in January," she murmured. "Nothing in the world has such a lovely scent." She was so innocently beautiful, with the disordered waves of her hair falling around her face. His muscles tightened in response. He would like to have her painted this way, standing by the table with her head turned toward him, the white flower caught in her fingers. "Bring it here," he said. She obeyed, coming to him and handing him the rose. He closed his fingers around the plump head of the flower and pulled gently, freeing the petals from their tenuous moorings. Tossing aside the desecrated stem, he opened his hand over the bed. The petals scattered in a fragrant shower. Sara drew in a quick breath, staring at him as if mesmerized.

It may be that there is no solution or it may be that I'm not clever enough to find it. Ramakrishna looked upon the world as the sport of God. "It is like a game," he said. "In this game there are joy and sorrow, virtue and vice, knowledge and ignorance, good and evil., The game cannot continue if sin and suffering are altogether eliminated from the creation." I would reject that with all my strength. The best I can suggest is that when the Absolute manifested itself in the world evil was the natural correlation of good. You could never have had the stupendous beauty of the Himalayas without the unimaginable horror of a convulsion of the earth's crust. The Chinese craftsman who makes a vase in what they call eggshell porcelain can give it a lovely shape, ornament it with a beautiful design, stain it a ravishing colour, and give it a perfect glaze, but from its very nature he can't make it anything but fragile. If you drop it on the floor it will break into a dozen fragments. Isn't it possible in the same way that the values we cherish in the world can only exist in combination with evil?

-"Do you know what it's like to be condemned to love?" -"But isn't it always like that?" Svetlana asked, trembling with indignation. "When people love each other, when they find each other out of thousands and millions of people. It's always destiny!" Once again I sensed that infinitely naive girl in her, the girl who couldn't hate anything except herself. The girl who was already beginning to disappear. -"No, Sveta, haven't you ever heard love compared to a flower?" -"Yes." -"A flower can be grown, Sveta. But it can be bought too, or given as a gift." -"Did Anton buy it?" -"No," I said, a bit too sharply. "It was a gift. From destiny." -"What difference does that make? If it is love?" -"Sveta, cut flowers are beautiful, but they don't live for long. They're already dying, even the ones that are carefully placed in a crystal vase and given fresh water.

But the first time I saw you. Rio. I took that down to the gardens. I pressed it into the leaves of a silver maple and recited it to the Waterloo Vase. It didn’t fit in any rooms. You were talking with Nora and June, happy and animated and fully alive, a person living in dimensions I couldn’t access, and so beautiful. Your hair was longer then. You weren’t even a president’s son yet, but you weren’t afraid. You had a yellow ipê-amarelo in your pocket.

Love is Heaven on a Hinge Memory enfolds upon her's sovereignty of sleep; her beauty manifests not as pleasing proportion but as an arcane assemblage of Ming porcelain, clues pieced together to reveal the numinous Yin within. Tangrams of facile shapes recollect into priceless chinoiserie excavated with a toothbrush beneath the clay noses of a thousand entombed sentinels. She reposes within my niche, an ingenuous vase, her dreams fulcromed by my lever. My right arm, her nocturnal tiara, diademed in jewels of sweat, perfumed in muskiness and ferment, heralded in the dulcet wail of snores. Beneath the bay window of her oneiric realm frogs belch Chopin's Impromptus, chanticleers trumpet Hayden cicadas chirp Mozart's Elvira Madigan. Under the mask of night my niche becomes her royal box at the Viennese Opera: concertinas of Chinese silk, the empyreal music of limns, the fateful reprise of heaven on a hinge.

I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time. To gaze at what pleases—a fresco, a peach-red mountain range, a boy, the mole on his jaw—is, in itself, replication—the image prolonged in the eye, making more of it, making it last. Staring into the mirror, I replicate myself into a future where I might not exist.

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war’s brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the “hat trick” with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers’ knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table. It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetry, all art, all religion had preached this gospel and this promise. Now that ideal had broken like a china vase dashed to hard ground. The contrast between That and This was devastating. It was, in an enormous world-shaking way, like a highly dignified man in a silk hat, morning coat, creased trousers, spats, and patent boots suddenly slipping on a piece of orange-peel and sitting, all of a heap, with silk hat flying, in a filthy gutter. The war-time humor of the soul roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled. So we laughed merrily, I remember, when a military chaplain (Eton, Christ Church, and Christian service) described how an English sergeant stood round the traverse of a German trench, in a night raid, and as the Germans came his way, thinking to escape, he cleft one skull after another with a steel-studded bludgeon a weapon which he had made with loving craftsmanship on the model of Blunderbore’s club in the pictures of a fairy-tale. So we laughed at the adventures of a young barrister (a brilliant fellow in the Oxford “Union”) whose pleasure it was to creep out o’ nights into No Man’s Land and lie doggo in a shell-hole close to the enemy’s barbed wire, until presently, after an hour’s waiting or two, a German soldier would crawl out to fetch in a corpse. The English barrister lay with his rifle ready. Where there had been one corpse there were two. Each night he made a notch on his rifle three notches one night to check the number of his victims. Then he came back to breakfast in his dugout with a hearty appetite.

Jordan considered. “He knows how to look. Really look, when a woman is talking.” “Ah.” Her stepmother sighed. “Some men ogle, some men look. The first makes us bristle, and the second makes us melt, and men are at an utter loss knowing the difference. But we do, and we know it at once.” “Exactly.” Jordan handed her a plate to dry. “Did Dad know how to look?” “It was the first thing I noticed about him. He could admire a lady as though he were admiring a beautiful porcelain vase, without making her feel he was affixing a price tag.

But the first time I saw you. Rio. I took that down to the gardens. I pressed it into the leaves of a silver maple and recited it to the Waterloo Vase. It didn’t fit in any rooms. You were talking with Nora and June, happy and animated and fully alive, a person living in dimensions I couldn’t access, and so beautiful. Your hair was longer then. You weren’t even a president’s son yet, but you weren’t afraid. You had a yellow ipê-amarelo in your pocket. I thought, this is the most incredible thing I have ever seen, and I had better keep it a safe distance away from me. I thought, if someone like that ever loved me, it would set me on fire. And then I was a careless fool, and I fell in love with you anyway. When you rang me at truly shocking hours of the night, I loved you. When you kissed me in disgusting public toilets and pouted in hotel bars and made me happy in ways in which it had never even occurred to me that a mangled-up, locked-up person like me could be happy, I loved you. And then, inexplicably, you had the absolute audacity to love me back. Can you believe it? Sometimes, even now, I still can’t.

She didn’t think she would have bothered if she hadn’t been what people call “very beautiful except for.” This is a special group of citizens living under special laws. Nobody knows what to do with them. We mostly want to stare at them like the optical illusion of a vase made out of the silhouette of two people kissing. Now it is a vase … now it could only be two people kissing … oh, but it is so completely a vase. It is both! Can the world sustain such a contradiction? And this was even better, because as the illusion of prettiness and horribleness flipped back and forth, we flipped with it. We were uglier than her, then suddenly we were lucky not to be her, but then again, at this angle she was too lovely to bear. She was both, we were both, and the world continued to spin.

Perhaps, if I had a new fountain pen instead of this wreck, or a fresh bouquet of, say, twenty beautifully sharpened pencils in a slim vase, and a ream of ivory smooth paper instead of these, let me see, thirteen, fourteen more or less frumpled sheets . . . I might start writing the unknown thing I want to write; unknown, except for a vague shoe-shaped outline, the infusorial quiver of which I feel in my restless bones, a feeling of shchekotiki . . . half-tingle, half-tickles, when you are trying to remember something or understand something or find something, and probably your bladder is full, and your nerves are on edge, but the combination is on the whole not unpleasant ( if not protracted) and produces a minor orgasm or 'petit éternuement intérieur' when at last you find the picture-puzzle piece which exactly fits the gap.

Simple." Braydyn took a deep breath. "Those other lasses are vases and she's a flower pot." "Dude, what the hell are you talking about? Vases and flower pots?" Mitch furrowed his brow in confusion. "Vases are usually beautiful and purely decorative. They're sleek and sometimes expensive. But they are also the place flowers go te die. They can only bring life to the flower for so long before its empty shell eventually kills it. And if they're not used te temporarily hold flowers, then they're empty and meant for nothing more than te look pretty on someone's shelf or mantel." Bradyn leaned back in his chair, placed his hands on the back on his head and smiled, before continuing. "Now, a flower pot can be bonnie, painted, or even a little fancy. They can also be chipped and round and even plain. But they're filled with rich soil and if treated right, they are the places where flowers go te grow. Payton is a flower pot. Those other lasses are vases. I have no need for a vase.

my love thy hair is one kingdom the king whereof is darkness thy forehead is a flight of flowers thy head is a quick forest filled with sleeping birds thy breasts are swarms of white bees upon the bough of thy body thy body to me is April in whose armpits is the approach of spring thy thighs are white horses yoked to a chariot of kings they are the striking of a good minstrel between them is always a pleasant song. my love thy head is a casket of the cool jewel of thy mind the hair of thy head is one warrior innocent of defeat thy hair upon thy shoulders is an army with victory and with trumpets thy legs are the trees of dreaming whose fruit is the very eatage of forgetfulness thy lips are satraps in scariet in whose kiss is the combining of kings thy wrists are holy which are the keepers of the keys of thy blood thy feet upon thy ankles are flowers in vases of silver in thy beauty is the dilemma of flutes thy eyes are the betrayal of bells comprehended through incense

No matter how many times I walk this same path, I never get bored of it. The central Realms—home to most of the residents and buildings—are set up like a grid, with walking paths crisscrossing each other at even intervals. On either side of the paths trees loom high and streams weave their way between them. When I was younger, before I started delivering the pies, I could usually be found in one of the distant fields with Kal or Bren, watching the clouds change color. The sky here is without color, but the clouds more than make up for it. I learned in school that on the planets, clouds and trees and water are solid objects, providing some sort of purpose in nature. In The Realms, they are more like suggestions of such things, until someone wants to use them. A lake becomes a lake when someone wants to go fishing. A flower becomes a flower when someone wants to water it, or admire it, or put it in a vase. Even then it’s not a “real” flower, like the type that grows in the soil of many of the terrestrial planets. But that doesn’t make it any less beautiful.

Yet, on the whole, I think the Greeks were very wise in this matter of physical training. Young girls frequently appeared in public, not with the boys, but in groups apart. There was scarcely a festival, a sacrifice, or a procession without its bands of maidens, the daughters of the chief citizens. Crowned with flowers, chanting hymns, forming the chorus of the dance, bearing baskets, vases, offerings, they presented a charming spectacle to the depraved senses of the Greeks, a spectacle well fitted to efface the evil effects of their unseemly gymnastics. When the Greek women married, they disappeared from public life; within the four walls of their home they devoted themselves to the care of their household and family. This is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and reason. These women gave birth to the healthiest, strongest, and best proportioned men who ever lived, and except in certain islands of ill repute, no women in the whole world, not even the Roman matrons, were ever at once so wise and so charming, so beautiful and so virtuous, as the women of ancient Greece.

The next room was a great round ballroom. Its walls were arrayed in gold-painted moldings; its floor was a swirling mosaic of blue and gold; its dome was painted with the loves of all the gods, a vast tangle of plump limbs and writhing fabric. The air was cool, still, and hugely silent. My footsteps were only a soft tap-tap-tap, but they echoed through the room. After that came what seemed like a hundred more rooms and hallways. In every one, the air was different: hot or cold, fresh or stuffy, smelling of rosemary, incense, pomegranates, old paper, pickled fish, cedarwood. None of the rooms frightened me like the first hallway. But sometimes--especially when sunlight glowed through a window--I thought I heard the faint laughter. Finally, at the end of a long hallway with a cherrywood wainscot and lace-hung windows between the doors, we came to my room. I could see why the Gentle Lord called it the "bridal suite": the walls were papered with a silver pattern of hearts and doves, and most of the room was taken up by a huge canopied bed, more than big enough for two. The four posts were shaped like four maidens, coiffed and dressed in gauzy robes that clung to their bodies, their faces serene. They were exactly like the caryatids holding up the porch of a temple. The bed curtains were great falls of white lace, woven through with crimson ribbons. A vase of roses sat on the bedside table. Their red petals had blossomed wide to expose their gold centers, and their musk wove through the air. It was a bed that had been built for pleasure, just like my dress, and as I stared at it I felt hot and cold at once.

Imagine you have a beautiful crystal vase. Then imagine that you accidentally knock it off the table and it shatters into pieces on the floor. We all understand it isn’t the vase’s fault that it was pushed off the table and shattered. But still, it is broken. It is worthless. You don’t want it anymore, so you sweep it up and throw away the pieces. That is how I felt. It wasn’t my fault, but I was broken. No one would want me anymore.

I had a great many adventures on my trip." She glanced back at him, her eyelashes fluttering in womanly enticement. "You'd be astonished to hear them all." How did she do that? Beckon him with a glance, ensuring that he would trail after her like a lovesick swain? Two days ago she'd scarcely had the courage to look him in the eyes. A few kisses- a few very good kisses- and she was flirting. She added, "Someday I'll tell you... if you ask nicely." A cascade of climbing roses blossomed on trellises they passed, and she stopped and, with tender fingers, lifted a blossom. She smiled down at the furling petals, then, closing her eyes, she sniffed it deeply. "I love roses, especially yellow roses. They're not cherished like red roses, but they're invariably cheerful. Add them to a bouquet of lavender, and they make a heavenly smell and a beautiful display. Put them in a vase by themselves, and they nod and smile at everyone who passes.

I struck out into the night searching for you. For the entire night, I searched through stormy gales, frigid blizzards and scorching deserts. Condition much greater than what any man could have bore on his own. But you were all I could think about. You were my motivation. You were in every step I trounced, every breath I rasped, every shout, pleading for you to come back. When morning came and the darkness of night cleared, I saw you. Deep on the horizon, you were walking, your back turned to me. I called out to you, and you turned, looking at me with those big, beautiful eyes...and you turned and continued to walk away. My heart shattered like a vase as I realized that the reality that had been beating within my heart all this time couldn't be denied. Everything I had ever thought about you was wrong, everything I thought we has shared was a lie...and I was the only one to blame. I could neither apologize, nor beg for your forgiveness. I had ruined everything. All I could do was stand helplessly, watching your silhouette fade into the early morning sunrise.

I struck out into the night searching for you. For the entire night, I searched through stormy gales, frigid blizzards and scorching deserts. Condition much greater than what any man could have bore on his own. But you were all I could think about. You were my motivation. You were in every step I trounced, every breath I rasped, every shout, pleading for you to come back. When morning came and the darkness of night cleared, I saw you. Deep on the horizon, you were walking, your back turned to me. I called out to you, and you turned, looking at me with those big, beautiful eyes...and you turned and continued to walk away. My heart shattered like a vase as I realized that the reality that had been beating within my heart all this time couldn't be denied. Everything I had ever thought about you was wrong, everything I thought we has shared was a lie...and I was the only one to blame. I could neither apologize, nor beg for your forgiveness. I had ruined everything. All I could do was stand helplessly, watching your silhouette fade into the early morning sunrise.

Fifty years earlier, before its sandstone blocks were carried off to serve as the foundations of a factory in a nearby town, the ruins of a little temple had stood upon that hill. And it was there, in the footings of a vanished temple, by the remnants of a prehistoric shrine, that Quibell and Green uncovered a vast agglomeration of courtly objects, a cache such as had not been seen before and has never since been equalled in all of Egypt: a pair of beautiful life-sized pharaonic statues made of sheets of beaten copper; a golden image of a hawk with glittering obsidian eyes still standing in its ancient shrine; two splendidly engraved cosmetic palettes; some prehistoric slaughtering knives; a remarkable collection of stone vases; a heap of mace heads piled like potatoes, some of which were vividly engraved in a manner similar to the cosmetic palettes. And in amongst all this, suffused by ground-water and penetrated by the roots of thorn and halfa grass, lay a mass of ivories which, Quibell remarked, ‘resembled potted salmon’, but on inspection proved to be hundreds of separate and delicately carved objects from the time of the first kings but which were so cemented and decayed that they are still under restoration to this day.

Entering the room, Lily was struck by the changes that had been wrought since she had last been there on the night of her abduction. Though his massive four-poster bed remained, the coverings were now a mixture of midnight blue and a mysterious smoky gray. In fact, various shades of gray had been added throughout the room. The two heavy leather chairs had been beautifully reupholstered in a dove-gray damask, a plush rug in a light and misty color was laid before the fireplace, and on a delicate table between them stood a large vase of lilies, infusing the room with their delicate scent. "Do you see?" the earl asked from behind her. Once they entered the bedroom, he had released her hand to close the door, ensconcing them together in the private space. Lily turned to watch him walk toward one of the new chairs. He ran his fingers over the fabric. "The color of your eyes when you are quiet and content," he stated in a low voice, then he crossed to the bed where he smoothed his palm over a velvet coverlet. "This is the darker shade your eyes become when you are aroused- with emotion or desire." He looked at her, and Lily's world expanded on a sudden breath at what she saw in the depth of his gaze. They both seemed rooted in place, standing in the center of his bedroom, staring at each other with their breaths coming fast and their focus locked upon each other, as though they were equally afraid the other might disappear. "You exist in everything. You have become a part of me," he murmured thickly. "I cannot breathe without you.

The vase with Tulips at the hospital was beautiful.

Roses Four roses drinking from a blue vase. The first one I name Moment of Gladness, the second, Wresting Beauty from Fear. All year I watched her disappearing, the sweet fat of her hips, her laughter, her will, as though a whelk had drilled through her shell, sucked out the flesh. Death woke me each morning with its bird impersonation. But now she has cut these Clouds of Glory and a honeyed musk sublimes from their petals, veined fine as an infant’s eyelids, and spiraling like any embryo—fish, snake, or human. And she has carried them to me, saturated in the colors they have not swallowed, the blush and gold, the razzle-dazzle red. Riven from the dirt to cling here briefly. And now, as though to signify our fortune, a tiny insect journeys across the kingdom of one ivory petal and into the heart of the blossom. O, Small Mercies sliced from the root. I listen as they sip the blue water.

The door of her dressing-room opened and a face covered with a gas mask peered round it. Robin turned round and scowled. She did not associate much with the foot soldiers of the cast. But he eased in, carrying a splendid bunch of red roses. “To match your beauty,” he said, his voice muffled behind the mask. Robin suddenly beamed. “You are a love. What beautiful flowers!” “I see you’ve a vase over there. I’ll just pop them in for you.” “You haven’t told me your name,” said Robin.

Defiled or immaculate. Dirty or pure. These are concepts we form in our mind. A beautiful rose we have just cut and placed in our vase is pure. It smells so good, so fresh. A garbage can is the opposite. It smells horrible, and it is filled with rotten things. But that is only when we look on the surface. If we look more deeply we will see that in just five or six days, the rose will become part of the garbage. We do not need to wait five days to see it. If we just look at the rose, and we look deeply, we can see it now. And if we look into the garbage can, we see that in a few months its contents can be transformed into lovely vegetables, and even a rose. If you are a good organic gardener, looking at a rose you can see the garbage, and looking at the garbage you can see a rose. Roses and garbage inter-are. Without a rose, we cannot have garbage; and without garbage, we cannot have a rose. They need each other very much. The rose and the garbage are equal.

He told Gilberte he would let her play one game, that he could wait a quarter of an hour, and sitting down like anyone else on an iron chair, paid for his ticket with the same hand which Philippe VII25 had so often held in his own, while we began playing on the lawn, putting to flight the pigeons whose beautiful heart-shaped iridescent bodies, like the lilacs of the bird kingdom, went to seek refuge as though in so many sanctuaries, one on the large stone vase to which its beak, by disappearing into it, imparted the gesture, and assigned the purpose, of offering in abundance the fruits or seeds which the bird seemed to be pecking from it, another on the forehead of the statue, which it seemed to crown with one of those enameled objects whose polychrome varies the monotony of the stone in certain ancient works of art, and with an attribute which, when the goddess carries it, earns her a particular epithet, and makes her, as does for a mortal woman a different first name, a new divinity.

He told Gilberte he would let her play one game, that he could wait a quarter of an hour, and sitting down like anyone else on an iron chair, paid for his ticket with the same hand which Philippe VII had so often held in his own, while we began playing on the lawn, putting to flight the pigeons whose beautiful heart-shaped iridescent bodies, like the lilacs of the bird kingdom, went to seek refuge as though in so many sanctuaries, one on the large stone vase to which its beak, by disappearing into it, imparted the gesture, and assigned the purpose, of offering in abundance the fruits or seeds which the bird seemed to be pecking from it, another on the forehead of the statue, which it seemed to crown with one of those enameled objects whose polychrome varies the monotony of the stone in certain ancient works of art, and with an attribute which, when the goddess carries it, earns her a particular epithet, and makes her, as does for a mortal woman a different first name, a new divinity.

I had always allowed myself to cry in private. But outside my doors, I was a rock. A machine. Holding myself rigid so as not to break. Any cracks or flaws at all and I would be done. Broken. I refused to be broken at work, or with my family. Only alone. Only at home. But now I started to wonder if maybe being broken wasn’t a flaw. Maybe it was a beautiful shard of glass that could one day be made into a vase again. Maybe the flaw gave it character. It couldn’t be whole again, but it could be pieced back together—each unique shard helping to press and hold the others into place, some glue around the edges. Almost like new.

I read that beauty has historically demanded replication. We make more of anything we find aesthetically pleasing, whether it’s a vase, a painting, a chalice, a poem. We reproduce it in order to keep it, extend it through space and time.

Roslyn was like a beautiful vase that has been broken and shattered yet by patience, craft, and cunning meticulously restored, fragment by fragment, bit by bit, with tweezers and glue, you see only the restored vase and have no knowledge of the shattered vase, still less of the monomaniacal energy that has gone into its restoration. The illusion of wholeness, of beauty. Delusion?

The silence sings, the stillness sways, a lingering kiss blossoms into dawn. Sunlight fills an empty vase with music; a thousand golden melodies spill from the Beloved's heart as something hidden whispers: This… is how beautiful you are.

Kane picked up the vase and brought the flowers to his nose, breathing them in. Most people said calla lilies had no fragrance. He always disagreed, picking up the faintest of clean, sweet, floral scents. Pain slashed again across his heart as he recalled sending a similar bouquet to Avery after his first dinner at La Bella Luna. The tears started to roll down his cheeks as he looked closer at the blooms. There was no way whoever sent them could have known this arrangement was his favorite or that it had been the one he'd chosen to use when he'd apologized to Avery all those years ago. The pain of Avery's loss rolled through him again, becoming too much. He closed the front door behind him and set the flowers on the nearest end table, grabbing a tissue from the box beside them. It was then he noticed a notecard hidden among the flowers, having missed it amid the beautiful blooms.

In Kenneth Grahame’s classic The Wind in the Willows, there is a chapter, “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” in which the characters Mole and Rat meet the animals’ deity, the god Pan, and hear him playing his pipes. They are stunned: “Rat,” he found breath to whisper, shaking. “Are you afraid?” “Afraid?” murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. “Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet—and yet—O, Mole, I am afraid!”177 That captures the concept of the “fear of God” as well as anything I know. We could say that fear of punishment is a self-absorbed kind of fear. It happens to people wrapped up in themselves. Those who believe the gospel—who believe that they are the recipients of undeserved but unshakable grace—grow in a paradoxically loving yet joyful fear. Because of unutterable love and joy in God, we tremble with the privilege of being in his presence and with an intense longing to honor him when we are there. We are deeply afraid of grieving him. To put it another way—you would be quite afraid if someone put a beautiful, priceless, ancient Ming dynasty vase in your hands. You wouldn’t be trembling with fear about the vase hurting you but about your hurting it. Of course, we can’t really harm God, but a Christian should be intensely concerned not to grieve or dishonor the one who is so glorious and who did so much for us.

One of the biggest challenges we face as writers is describing something that almost everyone considers beautiful—a sunset, a rose, a new baby, the ocean. Although we want to write descriptions that are evocative and memorable, we end up filling our stories with phrases like “velvety petals” or “sparkling waves.” When this happens to me, it’s usually because I’ve proceeded, as my uncle used to say, “bass-ackwards.” Rather than beginning with the image itself, I’ve begun with a label, judgment or conclusion about my subject, then merely provided details that back up my label. Let’s say I want to describe a vase of tulips. My first thought is beautiful, springlike, fresh. Already I’ve jumped to conclusions, providing labels before I’ve taken the time to consider my subject, the tulips themselves. My description is bound to fail. It will be no more than a series of clichéd, forgettable details concocted to support my judgment about the tulips. But if I look before I leap, bringing forth the qualities of the tulips rather than merely labeling or explaining them, I might come up with a more memorable description, like Richard Selzer’s description of a vase of tulips delivered to a seriously ill man: …

Ah, the clues. There’s only one clue. Only one,” said Hortensia. Prudencia gathered her hair at the nape of her neck and drew her chair closer. “And that is . . . ?” she asked. “Harmony, of course. The Ancient Greeks’ άρμουια, the Romans’ harmonia. Herminia would explain it better, she knows so much about this sort of thing . . . Well, how to express it? I think the classical definition refers to balance in the proportions of parts of a whole. As in the sculpture of a beautiful face or body, in the manner in which you arrange flowers in a vase, combining them in ten different ways until you achieve something that satisfies your soul. As a highly qualified woman, you no doubt know that harmony comes from the Greek άρμόζω, which means ‘to fit together,’ ‘to connect.’ That’s the definitive clue, dear, the one that’ll help you solve your detective story.” Miss Prim considered this as she took a bite of apple tart.

Salmon with Violets SERVES 4 I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows … A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, 2.1 THE BEAUTIFUL COLORS, the presentation, and the wonderful light flavors of this dish typify the sophistication of Elizabethan cuisine. Many types of edible flowers were used in cooking, both for their visual appeal and for their taste. Flowers were not set out onto the table in vases, but rather the dinner platters and the food itself were considered the decoration and were enhanced with flowers. Cookbooks of the time even list instructions on salads “for shewe only” with details on creating large elaborate “flowers” made of various cut vegetables and herbs.

I remember the pissaladière. We stood there watching them cook and eating that soft, oily bread. Back then I was so poor I was living on bread and cheese, and the flavor of olives and anchovies went straight through me." He stopped, and when he spoke again, his voice was lower, as if he was summoning the words from the air. "The wine was flowing, and the celery was crisp. Richard had found some old farmer who gave him a great ripe wheel of Brie that dripped off the edges of the bread. Richard and that crazy chef kept arguing, but it wasn't a fight, it was a seduction." Stella wanted to ask what they had argued about, but she was afraid to interrupt the rhythm of his words. "Richard wanted to keep it simple--- you know how he is--- but that chef had his own ideas. I remember he started dicing fish and mixing it with onions, tomatoes, and little bits of celery. 'Limes!' he said. 'I must have limes!' None of us had ever heard of ceviche, and we were astonished. Then Richard concocted a chicken gratin with a cheese custard on top, and the chef made the most beautiful salad I'd ever seen. He threw everything into it--- pieces of lemon, bits of cheese, and then he took the violets out of the vase and tossed in the petals. It was beautiful.

just because you’ve split up doesn’t mean your marriage isn’t something to be proud of.’ She thinks for a minute. ‘If a jumper unravels or a vase breaks after twenty years, it doesn’t wipe out the comfort or the beauty that thing provided for all the time it was in one piece.

You really think the vase will be more beautiful now?" "Oh yeah," he says. "More character." "Good," I say. Levi continues gluing with quiet concentration. His large, knobby hands are just like my father's. "People are like this too, you know," he says eventually. "We break. We put ourselves back together. The cracks are the best part. You don't have to hide them.

I pointed to the vase. “Why didn’t you use that one?” “I’ve never put anything in it.” “Why not?” “The first time my third husband invited me to his parents’, it was for an interminable Sunday lunch. I needed a break and stepped from the room.” “I can understand that.” “When I returned, his mother was criticizing me: ‘She’s cold. Too intellectual. So old she’s barren.’ Before he could reply, I told them I was leaving. The next day, he came by my office with that vase. When he said it reminded him of me, I replied, ‘Cold, hard, and empty?’ ” “What did he reply?” “That it was a work of beauty. Full of life, yet able to hold so much. Perfect all by itself.

She does have a certain charm about her, even I have to admit. Beautiful and damaged, like a rose in a vase. Lovely and doomed to die. She looks at me with those eyes.

I lie splayed out on the bed, staring numbly at the world's most beautiful bedroom. I've been given the Duchess Suite, a relic from the days when husbands and wives slept in separate rooms. The bedroom's damask walls are painted robin's-egg blue, the same shade as Tiffany's famous little boxes, with matching curtains framing the French windows. The ceiling above my bed is gilded in a mosaic pattern, and impressionist paintings grace the walls. Delicate white-and-gold furniture softens the room's edges, and the freshly cut peonies in a vase on my bedside table lend the air a sweet smell.