Water Lily Quotes

• The water-lily, in the midst of waters, opens its leaves and expands its petals, at the first pattering of the shower, and rejoices in the rain-drops with a quicker sympathy than the packed shrubs in the sandy desert.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Freedom, Rain, Firsts

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• It took me time to understand my water lilies. I had planted them for the pleasure of it; I grew them without ever thinking of painting them.

  Claude Monet

  Thinking, Lilies, Painting

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• In a marshland amongst the crocodiles, there float beautiful water lilies! Even in the Hell, one can find the good and the beauty.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Beautiful, Lilies, Hell

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• A pure drop of rain may fall on a beautiful water lily or on a dirty mud pond! This is exactly what happens when we are born!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Beautiful, Rain, Dirty

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• Swan flocks of lilies shoreward lying, In sweetness, not in music, dying.

  John Greenleaf Whittier

  Lying, Swans, Dying

  John Greenleaf Whittier (1873). “The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier”, p.306

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• The sky was a midnight-blue, like warm, deep, blue water, and the moon seemed to lie on it like a water-lily, floating forward with an invisible current.

  Willa Cather

  Lying, Moon, Blue

  Willa Cather (2013). “The Best of Willa Cather”, p.782, Simon and Schuster

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• The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.

  Daniel Quinn

  Whales, Spiders, World

  Daniel Quinn (2010). “The Story of B”, p.324, Bantam

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• Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.

  Luther Burbank

  Children, Butterfly, Animal

  Luther Burbank (2000). “The Training of the Human Plant”, p.91, The Minerva Group, Inc.

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• He goes along just as a water lily
  Gentle on the surface of his thoughts his body floats
  Unweighed down by passion or intensity
  Yet unaware of the depth upon which he coasts
  And he finds a home in me
  For what misfortune sows, he knows my touch will reap

  Fiona Apple

  Song, Passion, Home

  Song: Pale September, Album: Tidal, 1996

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• But, for all that, they had a very pleasant walk. The trees were bare of leaves, and the river was bare of water-lilies; but the sky was not bare of its beautiful blue, and the water reflected it, and a delicious wind ran with the stream, touching the surface crisply.

  Charles Dickens

  Beautiful, Nature, Blue

  Charles Dickens (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Dickens (Illustrated)”, p.7979, Delphi Classics

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• The first place that I can well remember was a large pleasant meadow with a pond clear water in it. Some shady trees leaned over it, and rushes and water-lilies grew at the deep end.

  Anna Sewell

  Book, Tree, Firsts

  Anna Sewell (2012). “Black Beauty”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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• Nature seemed to have adorned herself for our departure with a profusion of fringes and curls, mingled with the bright tints of flowers, reflected in the water. But we missed the white water-lily, which is the queen of river flowers, its reign being over for this season.... Many of this species inhabit our Concord water.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Queens, Flower

  Henry David Thoreau (2017). “HENRY DAVID THOREAU – The Man, The Philosopher & The Trailblazer (Illustrated): Biographies, Memoirs, Autobiographical Books & Personal Letters (Including Walden, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, A Yankee in Canada…)”, p.37, e-artnow

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• Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light.

  Jerry Saltz

  Light, Giving, World

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• I have sat here happy in the gardens, Watching the still pool and the reeds And the dark clouds. . . . But though I greatly delight In these and the water lilies, That which sets me nighest to weeping Is the rose and white colour of the smooth flag-stones, And the pale yellow grasses Among them.

  Richard Aldington

  Happiness, Dark, Garden

  Richard Aldington (1928). “Collected poems”

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• She left the web, she left the loom, She made three paces through the room, She saw the water-lily bloom, She saw the helmet and the plume, She look'd down to Camelot. Out flew the web and floated wide; The mirror crack'd from side to side; "The curse is come upon me," cried The Lady of Shalott.

  Alfred Lord Tennyson

  Mirrors, Cracks, Three

  'The Lady of Shalott' (1832, revised 1842) pt. 3

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• And you're too nice," he added, above the lap-lap of the water and the patter of sand on the water-lily leaves. "I was relying on you being too jealous to let that demon near the place.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Nice, Jealous, Lap

  Diana Wynne Jones (2002). “Wizard's Castle”

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• Everyone knows French artist Claude Monet's "Water Lilies," which he painted in his garden. You find the images everywhere from galleries to dorm rooms and dentists' lounges.

  Ari Shapiro

  Artist, Garden, Lilies

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person.

  Maurice Sendak

  Beautiful, Book, Roles

  The Believer interview, www.believermag.com. November/December 2012.

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• In 1879 the Bengali scholar S.M. Tagore compiled a more extensive list of ruby colors from the Purana sacred texts: ‘like the China rose, like blood, like the seeds of the pomegranate, like red lead, like the red lotus, like saffron, like the resin of certain trees, like the eyes of the Greek partridge or the Indian crane…and like the interior of the half-blown water lily.’ With so many gorgeous descriptive possibilities it is curious that in English the two ancient names for rubies have come to sound incredibly ugly.

  Victoria Finlay

  Eye, Blood, Color

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