Poppies Quotes

“People wonder why so many writers come to live in Paris. I’ve been living ten years in Paris and the answer seems simple to me: because it’s the best place to pick ideas. Just like Italy, Spain.. or Iran are the best places to pick saffron. If you want to pick opium poppies you go to Burma or South-East Asia. And if you want to pick novel ideas, you go to Paris.”
― Roman Payne, Crepuscule

“We need not be afraid of second-guessing our firm convictions or our holy truths because they often look like dazzling poppies or scented daffodils wilting after a while as if they had never existed. (“Measuring space”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Every November of my boyhood, we put on red poppies and attended highly patriotic services in remembrance of those who had 'given' their lives. But on what assurance did we know that these gifts had really been made? Only the survivors—the living—could attest to it. In order to know that a person had truly laid down his life for his friends, or comrades, one would have to hear it from his own lips, or at least have heard it promised in advance. And that presented another difficulty. Many brave and now dead soldiers had nonetheless been conscripts. The known martyrs—those who actually, voluntarily sought death and rejoiced in the fact—had been the kamikaze pilots, immolating themselves to propitiate a 'divine' emperor who looked (as Orwell once phrased it) like a monkey on a stick. Their Christian predecessors had endured torture and death (as well as inflicted it) in order to set up a theocracy. Their modern equivalents would be the suicide murderers, who mostly have the same aim in mind. About people who set out to lose their lives, then, there seems to hang an air of fanaticism: a gigantic sense of self-importance unattractively fused with a masochistic tendency to self-abnegation. Not wholesome.

The better and more realistic test would therefore seem to be: In what cause, or on what principle, would you risk your life?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.”
― Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist

“Opium: that terrible truth serum. Dark secrets guarded for a lifetime can be divulged with carefree folly after a sip of the black smoke.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“Only with kisses and red poppies can I love you,
with rain-soaked wreaths,
contemplating ashen horses and yellow dogs.
Only with waves at my back can I love you,
between dull explosions of brimstone and reflective waters,
swimming against cemeteries that circulate in certain rivers,
drowned pasture flooding the sad, chalky tombstones,
swimming across submerged hearts
and faded lists of unburied children.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“In general I strive for greatness and rational achievement, but I admit to you I’ve a terrible fondness for women, a tendency towards drunkenness, and a weakness for the fumes of the poppy—opium and other miserable beauties.”
― Roman Payne

“In November, when our nation remembers her fallen soldiers and honours the lost youth of my generation, the Prime Minister, government leaders and the hollow men of business affix paper poppies to their lapels and afford the dead of war two minutes' silence. Afterwards, they speak golden platitudes about the struggle and the heroism of that time. Yet the words they speak are meaningless because they have surrendered the values my generation built after the horrors of the Second World War.”
― Harry Leslie Smith, Harry's Last Stand: How the world my generation built is falling down, and what we can do to save it

“And the heart sounds like a sour conch,
calls, oh sea, oh lament, oh molten panic,
scattered in the unlucky and disheveled waves:
the sea reports sonorously
on its languid shadows, its green poppies.”
― Pablo Neruda, The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems

“Mrs Darley, I noticed, always had her corn dolly amidst an arrangement of cornflowers and poppies (albeit they were artificial!). The corn, I was to later understand, represented the God, the red poppies his sacrificial blood and the blue cornflowers his death and this is something I still adhere to today.”
― Carole Carlton, Mrs Darley's Pagan Whispers: A Celebration of Pagan Festivals, Sacred Days, Spirituality and Traditions of the Year

“My chest drummed, and at the top of a sweetgrass hill speckled with orange-gold California poppies, I danced like a little kid, adrenaline rushing. A sense of great possibility charmed me. A wicked white jolt, wonderful and wrong.”
― Aspen Matis, Your Blue Is Not My Blue: A Missing Person Memoir

“The death of quality foreshadows the death of humanity. What is the point of humanity if it does not produce the highest quality and excellence? A humanity that is not ascending is descending. As it is, the crushing weight of averageness and mediocrity presses down on everything and makes all high things flat, drab and dull. All the tall poppies have to die. The only tall poppies the mediocre like are those associated with wealth, beauty and fame. They despise the intelligent, the artistic and the technical.”
― Joe Dixon, The Irresistible Rise of Mediocre Man: The War On Excellence

“As he went along the path he stopped to look at the plants. He paused by the kitchen plot to pick leaves from the aromatic herbs and rub them in his hands. He lingered among the flower beds, bending to smell or to touch the petals. When he got to the statue hidden by the yew bushes he laughed, then backed off to see it from a bit farther away. He shifted his head from side to side, then, imitating the figure, he lifted his hands to play an imaginary flute and raised one knee in a Bacchic dance.
When Celia heard Dennis laughing near the statue she came to greet him and introduce himself.
"Oh, you caught me dancing with this faun fellow! I am so glad to finally meet you," he said. "Your plume poppies are glorious," he said. "The whole garden is. I hope you will walk me through it when there's time."
"Of course I will." Celia almost hugged him for his appreciation. "I'm glad you like the poppies. I can give you some if you like, but they are complete thugs. Hooligans! They escape wherever you put them, they multiply and take over. You really have to keep an eye on them.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Little bloody skirts!

--from "Poppies in July", written 20 July 1962”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel

“I was in search
but could not find the missing
until I saw the field of poppies”
― Nanette L. Avery

“Maggie got straight to the point. What about calling themselves Bloomers? It was the poppies on her leggings that had grabbed her heart. Blooming is aspirational. If we’re going with branding, let’s get blooming!”
― Anne Schlebusch, Bloomer

“It is a field as big as a football stadium carpeted every inch with bright-red poppies. The red is like the kind of color that you see only in oversaturated photos, the kind that doesn't seem to truly exist in real life. Thousands and thousands of poppies stretch out in front of us, one right after the other, as though if you squinted, it would look like a giant red blanket had been laid on top of thousands of gangly green weeds. Dense olive trees line the edges of the field, and behind them, sloping green hills take over the skyline against a cloudless blue sky.
I bend down and pick up a poppy, its inky-black center surrounded by delicate red petals clustered and fanning out. It is all so dreamy.”
― Ali Rosen, Recipe for Second Chances