Daisy Pearce Quotes

This Cinderella ecology isn’t so new in Britain. The last windfall of sites for rare natives and exotic invaders happened after bombs dropped on London and elsewhere in World War II. The profusion of unexpected species that populated the craters was so great that it was rumored they had been dropped with the bombs as biological weapons of war.7 The Moroccan poppy and the American willow herb were both first spotted in Britain in the remains of bombed-out buildings in the City of London and subsequently spread across Britain. Those were good times for thorn apple from North America and rosebay willow herb from the Yukon, which was nicknamed “bombweed” by Cockney Londoners. Some were newcomers, but many were old arrivals. The daisy-like gallant soldier, its common name a corruption of its Latin name Galinsoga parviflora, came to Kew Gardens from Peru in the 1790s but proliferated unexpectedly in the bomb craters.

The Tudors believed that a vein ran from the fourth finger of the left hand directly to the heart.

Yes, I had your key. You insisted that we go back to yours. This was

Carmel snorts. ‘“The joy of children”?’ she repeats. ‘Your fanny is going to look like roadkill.

I wonder what it must be like to watch the person you've spent your life with - your love, your comfort - fading away. It must be a soft pain, slowly blooming. Flowers and thorns.

We choose how much power we give others over us, Alice. Right now, you're handing over all the power to nothing more than broken glass and bad intentions.

The idea that grief gets heavier the longer you carry it alone is one that has helped me.

Sometimes

a flicker of movement catches my eye. My heart ratchets up, throat tight. My head turns toward the fireplace where I could have sworn a clutch of pale fingers has quickly withdrawn into the black throat of the chimney; nails dirty and rimed with soot, skin limpid and gray. My pulse ticks at the back of my eyeballs, my breath fish-hooked in my throat. There is nothing there. No. No. I’m tired. My mind is playing tricks on me. Still, though. Still. It’s as if my synapses have been deadened and cauterized. I stare at the fireplace and when Alice turns her head stiffly and looks at me I wonder if she knows just how frightened I am. “Did you see her, Mina?” she whispers. “No,” I say. “I didn’t see a thing.

Sometimes I wonder how our many-chambered hearts can stand the loss all these years, why it doesn’t simply stop beating. I wonder how the grief can still twist inside you like a stitch in your side when you least expect it.