Dried Flowers In Books Quotes

So what else can I tell you?" I asked. "I mean, to get you to reveal Lily to me." She triangled her fingers under her chin. "Let's see. Are you a bed wetter?" "Am I a...?" "Bed wetter. I am asking if you are a bed wetter." I knew she was trying to get me to blink. But I wouldn't. "No, ma'am. I leave my beds dry." "Not even a little drip every now and then?" "I'm trying hard to see how this is germane." "I'm gauging your honesty. What is the last periodical you read methodically?" "Vogue. Although, in the interest of full disclosure, that's mostly because I was in my mother's bathroom, enduring a rather long bowel movement. You know, the kind that requires Lamaze." "What adjective do you feel the most longing for?" That was easy. "I will admit I have a soft spot for fanciful." "Let's say I have a hundred million dollars and offer it to you. The only condition is that if you take it, a man in China will fall off his bicycle and die. What do you do?" "I don't understand why it matters whether he's in China or not. And of course I wouldn't take the money." The old woman nodded. "Do you think Abraham Lincoln was a homosexual?" "All I can say for sure is that he never made a pass at me." "Are you a museumgoer?" "Is the pope a churchgoer?" "When you see a flower painted by Georgia O'Keefe, what comes to mind?" "That's just a transparent ploy to get me to say the word vagina, isn't it? There. I said it. Vagina.

It’s not so much that nothing means anything but more that it keeps meaning nothing. there’s no release, just gurus and self- appointed gods and hucksters. the more people say, the less there is to say. even the best books are dry sawdust.

I find things hidden in books: dried flowers, locks of hair, tickets, labels, receipt, invoices, photographs, postcards, all manner of cards. I find letters, unpublished works by the ordinary, the anguished, the illiterate. Clumsily written or eloquent, they are love letters, everyday letters, secret letters and mundane letters talking about fruit and babies and tennis matches, from people signing themselves as Majorie or Jean....I can't bring myself to dispose of these snippets and snapshots of lives that once meant (or still do mean) so much.

Much has been said of the aesthetic values of chanoyu- the love of the subdued and austere- most commonly characterized by the term, wabi. Wabi originally suggested an atmosphere of desolation, both in the sense of solitariness and in the sense of the poverty of things. In the long history of various Japanese arts, the sense of wabi gradually came to take on a positive meaning to be recognized for its profound religious sense. ...the related term, sabi,... It was mid-winter, and the water's surface was covered with the withered leaves of the of the lotuses. Suddenly I realized that the flowers had not simply dried up, but that they embodied, in their decomposition, the fullness of life that would emerge again in their natural beauty.

You go through life thinking there's so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don't want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow - it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The dream catcher hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars... You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

... Correspondence, which bears much the same relation to personal intercourse that the books of dried plats I sometimes see do to the living and fresh flowers in the lanes and meadows.

Tomorrow you’ll forget that I have crowned you, that I burned my flowering soul with love, and the whirling carnival of trivial days will ruffle the pages of my books… Would the dry leaves of my words force you to a stop gasping for air? At least let me pave with a parting endearment your retreating path. —Vladimir Mayakovsky, from “Lilichka! (Instead of a Letter),” Backbone Flute: Selected Poetry Of Vladimir Mayakovsky. (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform April 18, 2008)

Things look familiar: the high shelves full of books, jars of green tea, dried flowers—also for tea, big rocks, and crystals that emit strong prana and light. The light trapped inside the crystals makes them brighter, stunning against the dark background of the wooden floor and ceiling.

Every time you open a book for the first time, there is something akin to safe-breaking about it. Yes, that's exactly it: the frantic reader is like a burglar who has spent hours digging a tunnel to enter the strongroom of a bank. He emerges face to face with hundreds of strongboxes, all identical, and opens them one by one. And each time a box is opened, it loses its anonymity and becomes unique: one is filled with paintings, another with a bundle of banknotes, a third with jewels or letters tied in ribbon, engravings, objects of no value at all, silverware, photos, gold sovereigns, dried flowers, files of paper, crystal glasses, or children’s toys--and so on. There is something intoxicating about opening a new one, finding its contents and feeling overjoyed that in a trice one is no longer in front of a set of boxes, but in the presence of the riches and wretched banalities that make up human existence.

What do they think has happened, the old fools, To make them like this ? Do they somehow suppose It's more grown-up when your mouth hangs open and drools And you keep on pissing yourself, and can't remember Who called this morning ? Or that, if they only chose, They could alter things back to when they danced all night, Or went to their wedding, or sloped arms some September ? Or do they fancy there's really been no change, And they've always behaved as if they were crippled or tight, Or sat through days of thin continuous dreaming Watching light move ? If they don't (and they can't), it's strange: Why aren't they screaming ? At death, you break up: the bits that were you Start speeding away from each other for ever With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true: We had it before, but then it was going to end, And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower Of being here. Next time you can't pretend There'll be anything else. And these are the first signs: Not knowing how, not hearing who, the power Of choosing gone. Their looks show that they're for it: Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into lines- How can they ignore it ? Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms Inside your head, and people in them, acting. People you know, yet can't quite name; each looms Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning, Setting down a Iamp, smiling from a stair, extracting A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning, The blown bush at the window, or the sun' s Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live: Not here and now, but where all happened once. This is why they give An air of baffled absence, trying to be there Yet being here. For the rooms grow farther, leaving Incompetent cold, the constant wear and tear Of taken breath, and them crouching below Extinction' s alp, the old fools, never perceiving How near it is. This must be what keeps them quiet. The peak that stays in view wherever we go For them is rising ground. Can they never tell What is dragging them back, and how it will end ? Not at night? Not when the strangers come ? Never, throughout The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well, We shall find out. - The Old Fools

History that is presented only as ink-embalmed data is as a flower pressed in a book. Although the dry petals still hold all the elements of the original flower, they cannot show us how it looked blooming in the field. The color and fragrance - the true reality - or the flowers are gone.

What You Should Know to be a Poet" all you can know about animals as persons. the names of trees and flowers and weeds. the names of stars and the movements of planets and the moon. your own six senses, with a watchful elegant mind. at least one kind of traditional magic: divination, astrology, the book of changes, the tarot; dreams. the illusory demons and the illusory shining gods. kiss the ass of the devil and eat sh*t; fuck his horny barbed cock, fuck the hag, and all the celestial angels and maidens perfum’d and golden- & then love the human: wives husbands and friends children’s games, comic books, bubble-gum, the weirdness of television and advertising. work long, dry hours of dull work swallowed and accepted and lived with and finally lovd. exhaustion, hunger, rest. the wild freedom of the dance, extasy silent solitary illumination, entasy real danger. gambles and the edge of death.

Tom O’ Bedlam among the Sunflowers" To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . . I woke this morning before your dream had shredded And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold, Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones, Petals the color of a wedding band. You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold. Perhaps I made those flowers in my head, For I have counted snowflakes in July Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium, And I have stepped into your dream at night, A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight. I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver. Love, the stars have fallen into the garden And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand. It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets. This morning the garden is littered with dry petals As yellow as the page of an old book. I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.

Then a silence fell between them. She had ceased to lean against him, and he missed the cosy friendliness of it. Now that their voices and the cawings of the rooks had ceased, there was nothing heard but the dry rustle of the leaves, and the plaintive cry of a buzzard hawk hunting over the little tor across the river. There were nearly always two up there, quartering the sky. To the boy it was lovely, that silence—like Nature talking to you—Nature always talked in silences. The beasts, the birds, the insects, only really showed themselves when you were still; you had to be awfully quiet, too, for flowers and plants, otherwise you couldn't see the real jolly separate life there was in them. Even the boulders down there, that old Godden thought had been washed up by the Flood, never showed you what queer shapes they had, and let you feel close to them, unless you were thinking of nothing else.

It was slow at first, dead things slowly mouldering away. The flies in the corners, the dried flowers in their clay pots. The stuffed bird Alfie bought, only because he was both fascinated and disgusted by it in equal measures, was molting on it's perch. It's feathers falling like leaves then laying, parched and cracking dry. The sea shells I kept on my windowsill turned slowly back into sand and the wind filtering through the curtains blew the pieces into the creases of my bedsheets. When I pulled them over my head at night they felt like waves crashing against my ears. It made my thoughts sodden and heavy like impalpable clay, they dredged through my mind like half-forgotten things. Wave: a face, a feeling, the ghost of a name balancing on my teeth and ready to- crash: and now gone, like a dream I once tried to remember though it was already evaporating quick from my morning-shaking fingers. I started dreaming of crumbling sandcastles and the ocean lapping at my feet. I woke in waves and lay, rocking, until I got up to place my feet in the quiet carpet and watch through my down-turned, dream-filled lashes, as it exhaled dust at every step.

I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in his dreams. And above all I’m calm, like a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top of its pointed cap (a component part of the same head) produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble notice to Fate.

They say the world will end soon. They say that the nuclear weapons made, Due to fearing 'the other', Has become a curse, a plague, a scourge On those who made them Even more than those they were made to scare... And I wonder: Will the nuclear weapons be the cause of world’s end? Or will world’s end be caused by humanity’s fear, complicity, and submission? And if what they say is true, Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to drink one last cup of cardamom-flavored tea Taste one last fig, peach, or apricot, Smell a quince, Dip one last piece of bread In Palestinian thyme and olive oil… Before the world ends, I wish to smell a few pine needles, To breathe the smell of the first rain shower After a long, hot, and dry summer… Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to read one more book Out of the thousands of books that I still want to read… Before the world ends and before I die, I ask for one more spring To smell bunches of Iraqi narcissus flowers. I want to live one more autumn, To enjoy the magical colors Of the dying leaves on the trees As they challenge death with beauty Right before falling on the grounds of indifference… But my biggest wish before I die is For my death not to be the end of the world… [Original poem published in Arabic on October 13 at ahewar.org]

Love is a Deep and a Dark and a Lonely " love is a deep and a dark and a lonely and you take it deep take it dark and take it with a lonely winding and when the winding gets too lonely then may come the windflowers and the breath of wind over many flowers winding its way out of many lonely flowers waiting in rainleaf whispers waiting in dry stalks of noon wanting in a music of windbreaths so you can take love as it comes keening as it comes with a voice and a face and you make a talk of it talking to yourself a talk worth keeping and you put it away for a keen keeping and you find it to be a hoarding and you give it away and yet it stays hoarded like a book read over and over again like one book being a long row of books like leaves of windflowers bending low and bending to be never broken

Pack what you need for the divination,” he said. Relieved that he believed me capable, I walked to his desk. A detailed map of Hereswith was spread over the wood, river rocks pinning down the four corners. It was a map I had memorized with its crooked, winding streets. Above the desk, shelves lined the walls, burdened with leather-bound spell books, stacks of paper, jars brimming with crushed flowers and salt crystals and swan quills, ornate ink pots, cast-iron spoons with jewels embedded in the handles, silver bowls nestled into each other, a potted fern whose wilting leaves dangled like unrequited love. I gathered what I needed: a bowl that shone like a full moon, pink salt, dried gardenias, a spoon with an emerald chip, a pitcher full of water, a swan quill, a silver inkwell that was crafted as an octopus, its tentacles holding a vial of walnut ink. I charmed them all beneath my breath with a shrinking cantrip—a spell my mother had taught me—until the objects could sit cradled in my palm, and I slipped them into my pocket, where the remedies waited. The objects clinked like musical notes when they met, weightless as air.

You go through life thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The watercolor sunset hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

YOU GO THROUGH LIFE thinking there’s so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish Breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don’t want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow—it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The watercolor sunset hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars. The cab was waiting outside the station. The airport, I said, but no sound came out. “The airport,” I said, and we pulled away. You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

They say the world will end soon. They say that the nuclear weapons made, Due to fearing ‘the other’, Have become a curse, a plague, a scourge On those who made them Even more than those they were made to scare... And I wonder: Will the nuclear weapons be the cause of the world’s end? Or will the world’s end be caused by humanity’s fear, complicity, and submission? And if what they say is true, Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to drink one last cup of cardamom-flavored tea Taste one last fig, peach, or apricot, Smell a quince, Dip one last piece of bread In Palestinian thyme and olive oil… Before the world ends, I wish to smell a few pine needles, To breathe the smell of the first rain shower After a long, hot, and dry summer… Before the world ends and before I die, I wish to read one more book Out of the thousands of books that I still want to read… Before the world ends and before I die, I ask for one more spring To smell bunches of Iraqi narcissus flowers. I want to live one more autumn, To enjoy the magical colors Of the dying leaves on the trees As they challenge death with beauty Right before falling on the grounds of indifference… But my biggest wish before I die is For my death not to be the end of the world… [Original poem published in Arabic by ahewar.org on October 13, 2022]

The mainland of Greece was dark; and somewhere off Euboea a cloud must have touched the waves and spattered them—the dolphins circling deeper and deeper into the sea. Violent was the wind now rushing down the Sea of Marmara between Greece and the plains of Troy. In Greece and the uplands of Albania and Turkey, the wind scours the sand and the dust, and sows itself thick with dry particles. And then it pelts the smooth domes of the mosques, and makes the cypresses, standing stiff by the turbaned tombstones of Mohammedans, creak and bristle. Sandra’s veils were swirled about her. “I will give you my copy,” said Jacob. “Here. Will you keep it?” (The book was the poems of Donne.) Now the agitation of the air uncovered a racing star. Now it was dark. Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns—Paris—Constantinople—London—were black as strewn rocks. Waterways might be distinguished. In England the trees were heavy in leaf. Here perhaps in some southern wood an old man lit dry ferns and the birds were startled. The sheep coughed; one flower bent slightly towards another. The English sky is softer, milkier than the Eastern. Something gentle has passed into it from the grass–rounded hills, something damp. The salt gale blew in at Betty Flanders’s bedroom window, and the widow lady, raising herself slightly on her elbow, sighed like one who realizes, but would fain ward off a little longer—oh, a little longer!—the oppression of eternity. But to return to Jacob and Sandra. They had vanished. There was the Acropolis; but had they reached it? The columns and the Temple remain; the emotion of the living breaks fresh on them year after year; and of that what remains?

I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

There are some people who throw down a book after having read it, as one leaves a bottle after having drank the wine from it. There are others who read books with a pencil in their hands, and they mark the most striking passages. Afterward, in the hours of rest, in the moments when one needs a stimulant from within and one searches for harmony, sympathy of a thing apparently so dead and strange as a book is, they come back to the marked passages, to their own thoughts, more comprehensible since an author expressed them; to their own sentiments, stronger and more natural since they found them in somebody else's words. Because ofttimes it seems to us—the common readers—that there is no difference between our interior world and the horizon of great authors, and we flatter ourselves by believing that we are 'only less daring, less brave than are thinkers and poets, that some interior lack of courage stopped us from having formulated our impressions. And in this sentiment there is a great deal of truth. But while this expression of our thoughts seems to us to be a daring, to the others it is a need; they even do not suspect how much they are daring and new. They must, according to the words of a poet, "Spin out the love, as the silkworm spins its web." That is their capital distinction from common mortals; we recognize them by it at once; and that is the reason we put them above the common level. On the pages of their books we find not the traces of the accidental, deeper penetrating into the life or more refined feelings, but the whole harvest of thoughts, impressions, dispositions, written skilfully, because studied deeply. We also leave something on these pages. Some people dry flowers on them, the others preserve reminiscences. In every one of Sienkiewicz's volumes people will deposit a great many personal impressions, part of their souls; in every one they will find them again after many years.

pring is a great time to introduce your children to the wonders of God's creation. Take them to a garden center and let them pick out a tree to be planted in your yard. Let them help dig the hole, add soil amendments, and place the tree. As they fill the hole around the tree, talk about how amazing God was when creating the world. Your children will love watching the tree grow through the years... as they grow with it. And remember when you used to press flowers in a scrapbook? Why not do it again? Use the pages of your phone book or apply heavy weight as you press and dry the flowers. When they're completely dry, use a tiny bit of glue to arrange them on colorful or white poster board. Add lace and ribbon, and you've got a perfect pressed flower arrangement. Or make it more masculine by adding graphics of sports, animals, cars, or trucks. ere's a tip that'll help in the dilemma of what to do with your various collections. Always arrange them in odd-numbered groupings. Three is a magic number. Cluster things that have differing shapes, but keep a theme going. ho is your best friend? Who is your second best friend? Now think about it. Is there really such a thing as a "bad" friend? Not all friendships are alike, to be sure. Some are casual and relaxing. Others are intense and stimulating. And some surprise us by seeming to come out of nowhere. Some friendships will fade ...a truth we have to accept. I have several "friends of the heart." These people aren't necessarily "best friends" because

It was too long ago; she couldn’t recall the feelings of love, only remember that she’d had them. A dried-out memory, like a flower pressed between the pages of a book.

Rebecca uttered a low dry laugh, not facetiously, but more like a stitch coming apart at the seam. A wound opened. Her eyes were opening to a world she had denied for so long. She looked up at Frank and knew, just like in the books, hatred, real hatred is a Gollum that hides under the mountain of our hearts. It buries itself deep underground where no light can touch. And it waits. Rebecca thought of Tolkien and Bilbo and Frodo and that old grey wizard, she thought that maybe they were right. Perhaps “there are older and fouler things in the deep places of the world —in the deep places of our hearts.” And as she sat on the floor with Tom Johnson’s Glock aimed at her husband’s head, Rebecca looked into the space where his eyes should have been. She looked at what was now only darkness and felt something on the other side, something not her husband, looking back.

A Lover's Call XXVII Where are you, my beloved? Are you in that little Paradise, watering the flowers who look upon you As infants look upon the breast of their mothers? Or are you in your chamber where the shrine of Virtue has been placed in your honor, and upon Which you offer my heart and soul as sacrifice? Or amongst the books, seeking human knowledge, While you are replete with heavenly wisdom? Oh companion of my soul, where are you? Are you Praying in the temple? Or calling Nature in the Field, haven of your dreams? Are you in the huts of the poor, consoling the Broken-hearted with the sweetness of your soul, and Filling their hands with your bounty? You are God's spirit everywhere; You are stronger than the ages. Do you have memory of the day we met, when the halo of You spirit surrounded us, and the Angels of Love Floated about, singing the praise of the soul's deed? Do you recollect our sitting in the shade of the Branches, sheltering ourselves from Humanity, as the ribs Protect the divine secret of the heart from injury? Remember you the trails and forest we walked, with hands Joined, and our heads leaning against each other, as if We were hiding ourselves within ourselves? Recall you the hour I bade you farewell, And the Maritime kiss you placed on my lips? That kiss taught me that joining of lips in Love Reveals heavenly secrets which the tongue cannot utter! That kiss was introduction to a great sigh, Like the Almighty's breath that turned earth into man. That sigh led my way into the spiritual world, Announcing the glory of my soul; and there It shall perpetuate until again we meet. I remember when you kissed me and kissed me, With tears coursing your cheeks, and you said, "Earthly bodies must often separate for earthly purpose, And must live apart impelled by worldly intent. "But the spirit remains joined safely in the hands of Love, until death arrives and takes joined souls to God. "Go, my beloved; Love has chosen you her delegate; Over her, for she is Beauty who offers to her follower The cup of the sweetness of life. As for my own empty arms, your love shall remain my Comforting groom; your memory, my Eternal wedding." Where are you now, my other self? Are you awake in The silence of the night? Let the clean breeze convey To you my heart's every beat and affection. Are you fondling my face in your memory? That image Is no longer my own, for Sorrow has dropped his Shadow on my happy countenance of the past. Sobs have withered my eyes which reflected your beauty And dried my lips which you sweetened with kisses. Where are you, my beloved? Do you hear my weeping From beyond the ocean? Do you understand my need? Do you know the greatness of my patience? Is there any spirit in the air capable of conveying To you the breath of this dying youth? Is there any Secret communication between angels that will carry to You my complaint? Where are you, my beautiful star? The obscurity of life Has cast me upon its bosom; sorrow has conquered me. Sail your smile into the air; it will reach and enliven me! Breathe your fragrance into the air; it will sustain me! Where are you, me beloved? Oh, how great is Love! And how little am I!

A smell of old incense permeated the fabrics of the covers and cushions of an immense divan such as might have been used by court-musicians. One fancied that dust rose from it, gently enveloping us in a dry benevolent mist in which hung minute particles of the leaves and petals of garlands of flowers: jasmine, roses, frangipani and marigold, and all the names of Allah. One observer: a mouse. Are you afraid? I asked. No,

No, this was the kind of moment that made everything stop. You separated it from every other one, pressing the feeling to your heart, like a dried flower slipped between the pages of a beloved book. The moment was made of something fragile and delicate, yet it possessed the power to last forever.

Guilt is the poisonous flower that springs up after a selfish act. In order to grow, there has to be soil present to begin with. The most impressive blooms get pressed into your book of recollections, and every time you go back and reread a chapter, their dry, skeletal remains drop out and fall into your lap. Decomposition marks the pages, and when you've interred too many bad memories, the book itself begins to smell.

When other people’s lives are flourishing but yours is not, do not give up. Not all flowers bloom at the same time. Like a flower that blooms in summer, you will flourish if you persevere during the dry seasons of life.

Or we might draw dried flowers—still wrong-handed and quick—if we have them. Which makes us all commonly flustered and silly (and usually really gets us laughing). We might then exchange those drawings with a partner who will add captions, making a kind of lyric comic book, which makes us now collaborating (though listening to each other’s dreams and talking about what we love is collaboration as well, maybe even radical collaboration). This seems like something I probably got from Lynda Barry. There is a lot, so so much, to get from Lynda Barry.

The flesh of her face was dried like a flower that is pressed between the pages of a book, the water dried out so that, if there is ink on the pages - if it is a book that has been used in extremis, a book of psalms used where no proper pressing book was present - that ink is blurred, and the words are only just comprehensible: 'so my redeemer liveth', or some such nonsense.

The intensity of my sensations has always been less than the intensity of my awareness of them. I've always suffered more from my consciousness that I was suffering than from the suffering of which I was conscious. The life of my emotions moved early on to the chambers of thought, and that's where I've most fully lived my emotional experience of life. And since thought, when it shelters emotion, is more demanding than emotion by itself, the regime of consciousness in which I began to live what I felt made how I felt more down-to earth, more physical, more titillating. By thinking so much, I became echo and abyss. By delving within, I made myself into many. The slightest incident — a change in the light, the tumbling of a dry leaf, the faded petal that falls from a flower, the voice speaking on the other side of the stone wall, the steps of the speaker next to those of the listener, the half-open gate of the old country estate, the courtyard with an arch and houses clustered around it in the moonlight — all these things, although not mine, grab hold of my sensory attention with the chains of longing and emotional resonance. In each of these sensations I am someone else, painfully renewed in each indefinite impression. I live off impressions that aren't mine. I'm a squanderer of renunciations, someone else in the way I'm I.

Near a stone house, bleached and weathered from salt and the sun, stood an old abandoned school. At its foot, before the house and the school, a rolling vineyard spread out. The boy walked through the vineyard every day on his way back from the school. That day, when Antonio ran to his father, not suspecting the upheaval in his young life, he’d learned from the village teacher about the crusades, religion, ethnicity, and some wicked people, as his classmate had called them. The little boy ran, full of questions, and shouted from a distance: − Father, I’m happy that we live in Sicily! − Why, my son? − We have no wars, no fighting, and if someone attacks us, we have many dangerous people who will protect us from all evils! Aldo took a long stick with a cloth on top, which he used to cool the fruits in the vineyard, turned it on end and drew two circles in the dry soil. He drew a flower in one circle and a sword in the other. Looking at the boy, he asked: − These are the heads of two rivals. Which adversary is good and which is evil? − I don’t know ‒ the little boy replied, knowing that his father was presenting him with a new riddle. − Both opponents are good. One knows his power and the other doesn’t. − But how can a good adversary wield a sword? − One day you’ll understand.

Personal pleasures were like drying flowers, best kept away from the light to preserve their vibrance.

I feel like a flower hungry for nourishment of the sun. A flower withering in a closet. Soon I will be dried and dead, and you can press me into the pages of a book.

She was not beautiful. She could be called attractive, for she was attractive to him, and attractiveness lies in the eyes of the beholder. That early love, that first love (that he had sworn would be the last) was only a shadowy memory now, a half-remembered name from the past. Marguerite; he could say it and it had no meaning now. As dry and flat as a flower pressed for years between the pages of a book. A name from someone else’s past, not even his. For every seven years we change completely, they say, and there is nothing left of what we were.