“
The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
If you had really loved something, wouldn't a little bit of it always linger?
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I suppose I do have one embarrassing passion- I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I don't like hiking with convicts carrying machetes.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I would argue that it might be easier to endure loneliness than to endure the idea that you might disappear.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
There is nothing more melancholy than empty festive places.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration - that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
It's not really about collecting the thing itself," Laroche went on. "It's about getting immersed in something, and learning about it, and having it become part of your life. It's a kind of direction." He stopped on the word "direction" and chortled. "If anybody had a plant I didn't have, I made sure to get it. It was like a heroin addiction. If I ever had money I would spend it on plants.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
The old orchid hunter lay back on his pillow, his body limp... 'You'll curse the insects,' he said at least, 'and you'll curse the natives... The sun will burn you by day and the cold will shrivel you by night. You'll be racked by fever and tormented by a hundred discomforts, but you'll go on. For when a man falls in love with orchids, he'll do anything to possess the one he wants. It's like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine... it's a sort of madness...
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn't have seen this space as sad-making and vacant - I think I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Now I was also trying to understand how someone could end such intense desire without leaving a trace. If you had really loved something, wouldn't a little bit of it always linger? A couple of houseplants? A dinky Home Depot Phalaenopsis in a coffee can? I personally have always found giving up on something a thousand times harder than getting it started, but evidently Laroche's finishes were downright and absolute, and what's more, he also shut off any chance of amends.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are too lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too much aware that there is no one else like you in the world. If you submerge yourself completely in something - your town or your profession or your hobby - then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are a part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind. It is the fundamental contradictoriness of the United States of America - the illogical but optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals in which every man is king.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I don't want to collect anything for myself right now. I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something - I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it. " He shook his head and scuffed up some gravel. "You know, I'll see something, just anything, and I can't help but thinking to myself, Well, Jesus Christ, now that's interesting! Jesus, I'll bet you could find a lot of those.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn't at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time - the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism - because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
In the universe there are only a few absolutes of value; something is valuable because it can be eaten for nourishment or used as a weapon or made into clothes or it is valuable if you want it and you believe it will make you happy. Then it is worth anything as well as nothing, worth as much as you will give to have something you think you want.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody’s always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Okay, fuck the sundial. We'll just go straight and eventually we'll get there. What I mean is that we'll get somewhere. Out of here. I mean, logically, we have to get out as long as we walk straight. I've done this millions of times. Whenever everything's killing me, I just say to myself, screw it, and go straight ahead.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Orchids are considered the most highly evolved flowering plants on earth. They are unusual in form, uncommonly beautiful in color, often powerfully fragrant, intricate in structure, and different from any other family of plants. The reason for their unusualness has always been puzzled over. One guess is that orchids might have evolved in soil that was naturally irradiated by a meteor or mineral deposit, and that the radiation is what mutated them into thousands of amazing forms... In 1678 the botanist Jakob Breyne wrote: "The manifold shape of these flowers arouses our highest admiration. They take on the form of little birds, of lizards, of insects. They look like a man, like a woman, sometimes like an austere, sinister figure, sometimes like a clown who excites our laughter. They represent the image of a lazy tortoise, a melancholy toad, an agile, ever-chattering monkey." Orchids have always been thought of as beautiful but strange. A wildflower guide published in 1917 called them "our queer freaks.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
There were orchids for sale, for one and two and three and five hundred dollars, a madhouse of orchids in every color, in every shape, with wide leaves and skinny leaves and no leaves at all, with fat jutting lips and lips cupped like thimbles, and with blackish-red hoods and freckles, with ruffles, with pleats, with corkscrew curls, big as fists, small as fingernails, smelling of honey, grass, citrus, cinnamon, or of nothing, not a smell at all but just the heavy warm quality that air has after it has been sitting in a flower.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid, in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I read lots of local newspapers and particularly the shortest articles in them, and most particularly any articles that are full of words in combinations that are arresting. In the case of the orchid story I was interested to see the words 'swamp' and 'orchids' and 'Seminoles' and 'cloning' and 'criminal' together in one short piece. Sometimes this kind of story turns out to be something more, some glimpse of life that expands like those Japanese paper balls you drop in water and then after a moment they bloom into flowers, and the flower is so marvelous that you can't believe there was a time when all you saw in front of you was a paper ball and a glass of water.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Името "орхидея" произхожда от гръцката дума όρχις, която означава "тестис". Това название се дължи не само на формата на грудките им, но и на едновремешното вярване, че орхидеите са се породили от разпръснатата семенна течност на съвкупяващи се животни. Британският наръчник на билките от 1653 г. препоръчва орхидеите да се употребяват благоразумно: "Те са горещи и влажни при експлоатация и попадат под влиянието на Венера, предизвикват прекомерна похот". Във викторианска Англия отглеждането на орхидеи като хоби било толкова всепоглъщащо, че понякога го наричали "орхиделириум". Под неговото влияние обладаните от орхидеите, напълно нормални на вид хора, ставали все по-малко нормални...
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
There is a deep stillness in the Fakahatchee, but there is not a moment of physical peace. Something is always brushing against you or lapping at you or snagging at you or tangling in your legs, and the sun is always pummeling your skin, and the wetness in the air makes your hair coil like a phone cord. You never smell plain air in a swamp - you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant’s roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and leaves slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hurry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if someone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving about at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
world. I had vowed that I would acquire not even a single orchid on any of my trips down here, but I thought I might die if I couldn’t have this one. The background of the petals was the beigey yellow of a legal pad, and over the yellow background was a spray of hot-pink pinpoint dots, and the flower was attached to the plant by a stem that was twisted like a stick of licorice. The petals were plump and supple and pleasant to touch. The center of the flower looked like the face of a piglet. I felt as if the plant was looking at me as much as I was looking at it.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
award-winning, other growers will probably start working on hybrids with
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
It was said of Dante that he always had time for lechery.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
It was a dazed, shambling kind of afternoon, a day seen through a scrim, the time gliding by. When I first met a lot of orchid people, they also said that time spent in a greenhouse had a rare, shapeless quality - a day could go by and they wouldn't even notice it had passed if they had spent it among their orchids. That afternoon at Dewey's the light shifted and still we roved around the shadehouse picking up plants, smelling things, rubbing fingers on slick leaves, poking thumbs into dirt, and every couple of minutes Dewey and Laroche would pause and both would light cigarettes and stand in front of some delicate green sprig of something, smoking hard and wordlessly admiring it. I wasn't in any hurry to leave, even though I should have been. Being int he shadehouse was restful in a way that being around people can never be, and it was vivid the way being around lifeless objects can never be, and in the veil of evening air it was as fantastic as a dream.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
When we stopped to rest and Tony tried to figure out what was wrong with his compass, I asked him what he thought it was about orchids that seduced humans so completely that they were compelled to steal them and worship them and try to breed new and specific kinds of them and then be willing to wait for nearly a decade for one of them to flower.
"Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose," he said, shrugging. "Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help them pass the time.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Nothing in science can account for the way people feel about orchids. Orchids seem to drive people crazy. Those who love them love them madly. Orchids arouse passion more than romance. They are the sexiest flowers on earth. The name "orchid" derives from the Latin orchis, which means testicle. This refers not only to the testicle-shaped tubers of the plant but to the fact that it was long believed that orchids sprang from the spilled semen of mating animals. The British Herbal Guide of 1653 advised that orchids be used with discretion. "They are hot and moist in operation, under the dominion of Venus, and provoke lust exceedingly." In Victorian England the orchid hobby grew so consuming that it was sometimes called "orchidelirium"; under its influence many seemingly normal people, once smitten with orchids, became less like normal people and more like John Laroche. Even now, there is something delirious in orchid collecting. Every orchid lover I met told me the same story - how one plant in the kitchen had led to a dozen, and then to a backyard greenhouse, and then, in some cases, to multiple greenhouses and collecting trips to Asia and Africa and an ever-expanding orchid budget and a desire for oddities so stingy in their rewards that only a serious collector could appreciate them - orchids like the Stanhopea, which blooms only once a year for at most one day. "The bug hits you," a collector from Guatemala explained to me. "You can join A.A. to quit drinking, but once you get into orchids you can't do anything to kick the habit.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation. That has always been part of its charm. Laroche loved orchids, but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as the flowers themselves. The worse a time he had in the swamp the more enthusiastic he would be about the plants he'd come out with.
Laroche's perverse pleasure in misery was traditional among orchid hunters. An article published in a 1906 magazine explained: "Most of the romance in connection with the cult of the orchid is in the collecting of specimens from the localities in which they grow, perhaps in a fever swamp or possibly in a country full of hostile natives ready and eager to kill and very likely eat the enterprising collector." In 1901 eight orchid hunters went on an expedition to the Philippines. Within a month one of them had been eaten by a tiger; another had been drenched with oil and burned alive; five had vanished into thin air; and one had managed to stay alive and walk out of the woods carrying forty-seven thousand Phalaenopsis plants. A young man commissioned in 1889 to find cattleyas for the English collector Sir Trevor Lawrence walked of fourteen days through jungle mud and never was seen again. Dozens of hunters were killed by fever or accidents or malaria or foul play. Others became trophies for headhunters or prey for horrible creatures such as flying yellow lizards and diamondback snakes and jaguars and ticks and stinging marabuntas. Some orchid hunters were killed by other orchid hunters. All of them traveled ready for violence. Albert Millican, who went on an expedition in the northern Andes in 1891, wrote in his diary that the most important supplies he was carrying were his knives, cutlasses, revolvers, daggers, rifles, pistols, and a year's worth of tobacco. Being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places. From the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, when orchid hunting was at its prime, terrible places were really terrible places, and any man advertising himself as a hunter needed to be hardy, sharp, and willing to die far from home.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Once we started with the orchids, we've never looked back," he said. "I grew to be quite in love with them, you know. I like them because they're slightly evil and slightly mysterious, don't you think? In the early days I found it hard to make them flower, and when I did, it was a great, great triumph. They are a great, great challenge. They sulk, they pout, they ignore you. But it's onward with the orchids!
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Once we started with the orchids we've never looked back," he said. "I grew to be quite in love with them, you know. I like them because they're slightly evil and slightly mysterious, don't you think? In the early days I found it hard to make them flower, and when I did, it was a great, great triumph. They are a great, great challenge. They sulk, they pout, they ignore you. But it's been onward with the orchids!"...
"Do any of your kids have orchids?"
He laughed and said, "I have a son who is thirty-nine and I'm sure he wants to get his hands on my orchids. I think he's quite eagerly waiting for me to die.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
If all of this makes orchids seem smart—well, they do seem smart. There is something clever and un-plantlike about their determination to survive and their knack for useful deception and their genius for seducing human beings for hundreds and hundreds of years.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Orchids are one of the few things in the world that can live forever.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Many people who collect orchids designate an orchid heir in their wills, because they know the plants will outlast them.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
In a sense, then, the number of orchid species on the planet is uncountable because it is constantly changing.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
To desire orchids is to have a desire that will never be, can never be, fully requited. A collector who wants one of every orchid species on earth will certainly die before even coming close.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
One magazine recently reported that a customer of one orchid kennel in San Francisco had so many plants that he was paying two thousand dollars in monthly rent.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Lady’s slipper orchids have a special hinged lip that traps bees and forces them to pass through sticky threads of pollen as they struggle to escape through the back of the plant.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Sometimes I think I've figured out some order in the universe, but then I find myself in Florida, swamped by incongruity and paradox, and I have to start all over again.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Orchid hunting is a mortal occupation. That has always been part of its charm, Laroche loved orchids, but I came to believe he loved the difficulty and fatality of getting them almost as much as the flowers themselves.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Being an orchid hunter has always meant pursuing beautiful things in terrible places.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
when a man falls in love with orchids, he’ll do anything to possess the one he wants. It’s like chasing a green-eyed woman or taking cocaine.… it’s a sort of madness.…
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Victorian women were forbidden from owning orchids because the shapes of the flowers were considered too sexually suggestive for their shy constitutions, and anyway the expense and danger and independence of collecting in the tropics were beyond any Victorian woman’s ken.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
On the other hand, my single most unfavorable thing in life so far has been to touch the mushy bottom of the lake during swimming lessons at summer camp and feel the weedy slime squeeze between my clenched toes, so the idea of walking through the swamp was a little bit extra-horrible to me.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Chinese Edition))
“
The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Carl Fisher, a Detroit automobile mogul who came to Florida right after World War I and poured three million cubic yards of sand onto an expanse of mangrove swamp and created Miami Beach.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
Melaleucas grow to be fifty feet tall and have spongy white bark and look a little like a eucalyptus tree with long hair. They drink so much water that they can dry out an acre of wetlands a day, so they were also used to help drain what was then considered Florida’s useless swampland.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
The most valued tulips were those with brilliant streaks and stripes of colors, then thought to be the mark of distinction, and now known by botanists to be the evidence of a devastating flower virus spread by aphids.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession)
“
If you had really loved something, wouldn’t a little bit of it always linger?
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
Do you wake up one day and say "hey honey, let's have a baby goat and guava jam business"?
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
I hate hiking with convicts carrying machetes.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)
“
At this point I realized it was just as well that I never saw a ghost orchid, so that it could never disappoint me, and so it would remain forever something I wanted to see.
”
”
Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief)