"Flowerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... daffodil comes, not only before the swallow comes— which is a matter of indifference, as nobody thinks any the worse of the swallow in consequence—but before all the many flowers of summer; it comes on the heels of a flowerless winter. Whereby it is as superior to the rose as an oasis in the Sahara is to champagne at ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... She knew that Mrs. Overtheway had flowers somewhere, it is true, for certain pots of forced hyacinths had passed through the little green gate to the Christmas church decorations; but one's winter garden is too precious to be cropped as recklessly as summer rose-bushes, and the old lady went flowerless to church and enjoyed her bulbs at home. But the change ...
— Mrs. Overtheway's Remembrances • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... much better the graceful wrought-iron balconies of the town would look if enlivened with blossoms, with pendent carnations or pelargonium; but there is no great display of these things; the deficiency of water is a characteristic of the place; it is a flowerless and songless city. The only good drinking-water is that which is bottled at the mineral springs of Monte Vulture and sold cheaply enough all over the country. And the mass of the country people have small charm of feature. Their faces seem to have ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... space they must divine it as a presence behind the actual, faintly gleaming and flashing through the serried ranks of the forest. There were heaths and mosses under the pines; but otherwise for a while the path was flowerless; and Elizabeth discontentedly remarked ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of time, Neither the noisy city's mingled Babel, Nor the most tranquil soul of the great plain, Nor the gold cloud of dust on the wide road, Nor the brook's course that sings like nightingales, Nothing of these is either shown to thee Or speaks before thy bare and flowerless window, O humble hut of ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... pride and joy, had become loosened during the various unaccustomed motions of its parent hat, and now lay, lonely and lovely, a golden spot on the bright green grass. Peggy fished again, but this time in vain; and finally she was obliged to give it up, and go off flowerless in search ...
— Three Margarets • Laura E. Richards
... Smiling no more, but with illumined eyes, Transfigured brow, grave lips, and faltering limbs, So came into the room where Raschi lay Stretched 'twixt tall tapers lit at head and foot. She held in both hands leafy, flowerless plants, Some she had fastened in her twisted hair, Stuck others in her girdle, and from all Issued a racy odor, pungent-sweet, The living soul of Spring. Death's chamber seemed As though clear sunshine and a ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... eyes, And sees and hears not: smiles and sighs As flowers ephemeral fall and rise About its birth, about its way, And pass as love and sorrow pass, As shadows flashing down a glass, As dew-flowers blowing in flowerless grass, ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... fain would taste. The very fowl that haunt the mere Stand doubtful on the bank, and fear To dip them in the wintry wave As cowards dread to meet the brave. The frost of night, the rime of dawn Bind flowerless trees and glades of lawn: Benumbed in apathetic chill Of icy chains they slumber still. You hear the hidden saras cry From floods that wrapped in vapour lie, And frosty-shining sands reveal Where the unnoticed rivers steal. ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... ease to toil, as dew To flowerless fields, as sleep to slackening pain, As hope to souls long weaned from hope again Returning, or as blood revived anew To dry-drawn limbs and every pulseless vein, Even so toward us should no man be ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... order the party proceeded down the avenue as far as the first gate; then they returned by a side-walk leading through the laurels, and stood in a line facing the wind-worn tennis-ground, with its black, flowerless beds, and bleak vases of alabaster and stone. From time to time remarks anent the Land League were made; but all knew that a drama even as important as that of rent was being enacted. Olive had joined ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... of the months and stars Now folded in the flowerless fields of heaven, Goddess whom all gods love with threefold heart, Being treble in thy divided deity, A light for dead men and dark hours, a foot Swift on the hills as morning, and a hand To all things fierce ...
— Atalanta in Calydon • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the echo of a silvery horn blown clear on the wintry silence startled him out of his semi-abstraction. Rising, he went instinctively to the window, though from that he could see nothing but his own garden, looking blank enough in its flowerless condition, the only bright speck in it being a robin sitting on a twig hard by, that ruffled its red breast prettily and blinked its trustful eye at him with a friendly air of sympathy and recognition. He listened attentively for a moment and heard the approaching trot and gallop of horses,—then ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... perdition would be with the fires out. It is better to dig wheat and corn from the soil than gold. Only a few days ago I was where they wrench the precious metals from the miserly clutch of the rocks. When I saw the mountains, treeless, shrub-less, flowerless, without even a spire of grass, it seemed to me that gold had the same effect upon the country that holds it, as upon the man who lives and labors only for that. It affects the land as it does the man. It leaves the heart barren without a flower of ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll
... to the cube, where they found that Smith, happening to look out a window, had spied a pond not far off. The three visited it and found, on its banks, the first green stuff they had seen; a tiny, flowerless salt grass, very scarce. It bordered a slimy, bluish pool of absolutely still fluid. Nobody would call it water. They took a few samples of it ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... is, that our grim old Puritan fathers set their feet down resolutely on all forms of amusement; they would have stopped the lambs from wagging their tails, and shot the birds for singing, if they could have had their way; and in consequence of it, what a barren, cold, flowerless life is our New England existence! Life is all, as Mantalini said, one 'demd horrid grind.' 'Nothing here but working and going to church,' said the German emigrants,—and they were about right. A French traveller, in the year 1837, says that attending the Thursday-evening lectures and church prayer-meetings ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... candytuft, red flax, tassel flowers, blue Anchusa, Gaillardia, and a multitude besides of seasonable annuals, which can all be raised quite easily without a frame or green-house, and what excuse has any farmer for having a flowerless garden in ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... pamphlet with a grim Indictment which is as eloquent in its flowerless straightforward English as is the hand-painted rhapsody ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... at all paper periodicals with pleasure, for sake of the Flowers and the Stars. Suppose them all extinct, and life would be like a flowerless earth, a starless heaven. We should soon forget the Seasons. The periodicals of the External would soon all lose their meaning, were there no longer any periodicals of the Internal. These are the lights and shadows of life, merrily dancing or gravely stealing ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... with dancing feet, was now obliged to walk with crutches. The roses and lilies of spring were faded now, and instead of the music of his youth he heard only the sound of harsh, ungrateful voices, in the flowerless days of poverty ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... roof where it had burned its way into the home that even then enshrined my dearest treasures. I saw the window at which Emily Warren had directed the glance that had sustained my hope for months. I looked wistfully at the leafless, flowerless garden, where I had first recognized my Eve. "Will her manner be like the present aspect of that garden?" I groaned. I saw the arbor in which I had made my wretched blunder. I had about broken myself of profanity, but an ugly expression slipped out (I hope the good ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... not for the pretty notice of Moss in the last passage (6), we should be inclined to say that Shakespeare had as little regard for "idle Moss" as for the "baleful Mistletoe." In his day Moss included all the low-growing and apparently flowerless carpet plants which are now divided into the many families of Mosses, Lichens, Club Mosses, Hepaticae, Jungermanniae, &c., &c. And these plants, though holding no rank in the eyes of a florist, are yet deeply interesting, perhaps no family of plants ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... sun, shining in a cloudless sky—it was a still October day—beat hot against the western side of the hedge as I noiselessly walked beside it. In the aftermath, green but flowerless, a small flock of sheep were feeding—one with a long briar clinging to his wool. They moved slowly before me; a thing I wanted; for behind sheep almost ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... forms no moral need, And beauty is its own excuse; But for the dull and flowerless weed Some healing virtue still must plead, And the rough ore must find its ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... whom the girl's spirit stirred in sympathy. All about her beauty flamed luxuriant. At her feet the secrets of the world were written in wild flowers, the wild flowers of Sicily, which redeem the honor of the wellnigh flowerless land of Greece. All about her the ground flushed with such color as never yet was woven on a Persian loom or blended in a wizard's diadem. The gold and silver of great daisies gleamed in the grass; pimpernel blue and red, mallow red and white, yellow spurge and green mignonette, blue borage and ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Beneath the flowerless trees, where May, Proud of her orchards' fine array, Abates her claim and holds no sway, Past iron tombs, the useless shields Of cousins slain in Elsass fields, The girl, with ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... sweet Phillis, for thine absence causeth A flowerless prime-tide in these drooping meadows; To push his beauties forth each primrose pauseth, Our lilies and our roses like coy widows Shut in their buds, their beauties, and bemoan them, Because my Phillis doth not ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... (1) Cryptogams, or Flowerless, such as mosses, ferns, equisetums, and (2) Phanerogams, or Flowering. Flowering plants are again divided into those with naked seeds, as the conifers and cycads (gymnosperms), and those whose seeds are enclosed in ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... has never before flourished when transplanted by me, is sending up fresh fronds, already fruiting. A few fronds each of the Buck Fern and Cystoptiris or Bladder Fern, with at least three kinds of moss complete the list of "Flowerless Plants." Three little clumps of Violets are sending out new leaves. There are a few leaves of Partridge-berry vine, a yellow Oxalis, an Orchid called Rattlesnake-Plantain, having lovely velvety leaves veined with white, a few sprigs ...
— The Mayflower, January, 1905 • Various
... And lust bore lust, And the world was heavy with flowerless rods, And pride outran The strength of a man Who had set himself in the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... air of the study was stifling. He opened the window and went out into the cool, dark garden. He paced up and down, heedless of where he trod, trampling the flowerless plants down into their black beds. At the end of the path a little circle of white stones glimmered in the dark. That ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... loves beyond the shallow word; A heart well loved beyond its flowerless worth: One who asks God to answer the prayer heard; One from the dust returning to ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... lonelier than ruin; A sea that is stranger than death: Far fields that a rose never blew in, Wan waste where the winds lack breath; Waste endless and boundless and flowerless But of marsh-blossoms fruitless as free: Where earth lies exhausted, as powerless To strive with ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... and wintry spring Between the tortive serpent-shapen roots Wherethrough their dim growth hardly strikes and shoots And shews one gracious thing Hardly, to speak for summer one sweet word Of summer's self scarce heard. But higher the steep green sterile fields, thick-set With flowerless hawthorn even to the upward verge Whence the woods gathering watch new cliffs emerge Higher than their highest of crowns that sea-winds fret, Hold fast, for all that night or wind can say, Some pale pure colour yet, Too dim for green and luminous for grey. ...
— Songs of the Springtides and Birthday Ode - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... pede in uno, pretty, nearly), and the Little Parlor, and the Study, and the old books in uniforms as varied as those of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company used to be, if my memory serves me right, and the front yard with the Star-of-Bethlehems growing, flowerless, among the grass, and the dear faces to be seen no more there or anywhere on this earthly ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... early spring; the winter fogs of London had disappeared, the squares were turning green, the hedgerows blooming, the birds were singing on the thorns. Such a sunny, blue morning might have called him into the country, but he turned instead into the flowerless ways of the book stalls. He wandered about for a time and found nothing. Then he thought of old Humphrey, of whom he had bought books perhaps out of pity. There was something about this man that held him; he seemed somehow like a link of the unknown past. He compelled him ...
— True to His Home - A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin • Hezekiah Butterworth
... years in various parts of England, so that its hardihood may be taken for granted. The pretty olive-green of the bark, and the greyish-green of the leathery leaves, render the shrub one of interest even in a flowerless state. In July and August the dense spikes of white, or rather yellowish-white flowers are produced freely, and that, too, even before the shrub has attained to a height of 2 feet. It is well ...
— Hardy Ornamental Flowering Trees and Shrubs • A. D. Webster
... Leinster," where Finn and the Fianna lived, according to the stories, although there are no earthen mounds there like those that mark the sites of old buildings on so many hills. A hot sun beat down upon flowering gorse and flowerless heather; and on every side except the east, where there were green trees and distant hills, one saw a level horizon and brown boglands with a few green places and here and there the glitter of water. ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... know he is sobbing for children that are not. One lonely, distraught, mystified, sorely-beleagured, and still surely-trusting man,—this is the audience. The scene is a tawny desert, once sown to oases of flowers, and billowing grain, and stately palm-tree, and olive-groves, now harvestless, flowerless, palmless. Once a stately palace rose beside a fountain here, and from its open doors ran genial hospitality, to greet the coming guest and the wayfarer overtaken by the night and weariness; and from the windows singing and laughter rose, like a chorus of youthful voices; and now—where ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... side of the lane which conducted to it seemed to give it something of the appearance and feeling of seclusion. It was a small, whitewashed place, with a green porch over the door; scanty brown stalks showed in the garden soil near this porch, and likewise beneath the windows—stalks budless and flowerless now, but giving dim prediction of trained and blooming creepers for summer days. A grass plat and borders fronted the cottage. The borders presented only black mould yet, except where, in sheltered nooks, the first shoots of snowdrop or ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... my friend, in flowerless song, So feebly paint, what yet I feel so strong, The ills, the vices of the land, where first Those rebel fiends, that rack the world, were nurst, Where treason's arm by royalty was nerved, And Frenchmen learned to crush the throne they served— Thou, calmly lulled in dreams of ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... fortnight of grave quiet had followed after the joyous month that went before, with little enlivening, few interruptions. Without, the season had bloomed into greater luxuriance,—within, the flowers now rarely came; and Faith's flowerless dress and belt and hair, said of themselves that Mr. Linden was away. Roses indeed peeped through the windows, and thrust their heads between the blinds, but no one ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... thou art the memory, My genius, in its wildest fancy, bound And petrified to immortality! A holy presence seems to hover round The deep, perpetual loveliness, as crowned With angel radiance, and plumed for flight, Thy pinioned sandals spurn the flowerless ground, Striving to gain that far Olympian height Towards which in rapturous ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... to be considered the seed of the lentil, or some other plant of the bean tribe, whereas it belongs to one of those cryptogamic or flowerless plants, which, like ferns and mosses, do not produce perfect seeds, but are increased by cellular bodies named spores. It belongs to the genus MARSILLEA, order MARSILLEACEAE, and that class of sexual or flowerless plants called ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... willows from the frozen earth; but, although they lived, they were as the dead. They spake not, neither did they hunt, nor eat, nor did they die. Then the Great Spirit, whose name is not known, placed upon earth a man, in his arms the strength to kill, in his heart the primal urge of love. And in that flowerless arctic Eden, out of its bounteous compassion, the Great Spirit placed also a maiden, her face beautiful with the young virginity of the world, in her bosom implanted a yearning, not unmixed with fear, for love. Gazing upon her, the youth's heart stirred, with desire, ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre |
