Lilac Quotes

The hotel was quaint, and their room had a little balcony over an atrium, which seemingly was home to several stray cats and had the stench of stale urine. Looking down, Lilac felt faint. The hairs on the back of her neck were erect. Sensing a haunting presence in the atrium below her, she quickly stepped back inside and closed the balcony windows to shut out the unwelcoming energy. ~ Lali A. Love

Lilac was desperate to maintain hope by holding onto the love and protection she felt for Violet and Rose. They were so young and innocent; they did not understand the circumstances of their surroundings. They were both under five years of age; Lilac tried to shield them from the poison that had spread throughout their new house. She sensed the growing evil residing in their home and was desperately trying to keep its ugly claws from extinguishing her spirit. ~ Lali A. Love

Lilacs are May in essence. ~ Jean Hersey

The sun was up and I want to say that it was golden, but it wasn't golden, it was the color of treacle. I want to say the grass was green, but it wasn't, it was turquoise, the color of a quarry pool. The rocks were lion-colored and glimmered with quartz, and the sky I wanted to call blue was in reality lilac. And the colors were moist. It was as much as I could do to prevent myself from getting off the horse and putting my hands into these colors, to see if they would come off on my fingers. ~ Graham Joyce

He just seems as cool as ever. I can smell him. Even on the other side, there is smell. Like, when babies are born, there's two smells-one is chicken soup, which is the flesh, and the other is lilacs, which is coming from the spiritual garden. The spirit has a lilac smell. ~ Carlos Santana

Snow is bruised lilac in half-lite: such pure solace. You speak like an aesthete sometimes, Sonmi. Perhaps those deprived of beauty perceive it most instinctively. So ~ David Mitchell

And we have the night ahead of us
to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there
is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours
and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream
did its job and, like a postman, hurried on
to someone else. So we have to be
worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river
that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us. ~ Mahmoud Darwish

And it's always the lilac garden on the other side of the river. If the soul should ask you if that is far from here, you should say, On the other side of the river, not this one, but the one over there. ~ Alejandra Pizarnik

Prince Aenys was the first to marry. In 22 AC, he wed the Lady Alyssa, the maiden daughter of the Lord of the Tides, Aethan Velaryon, King Aegon's lord admiral and master of ships. She was fifteen, the same age as the prince, and shared his silvery hair and purple eyes as well, for the Velaryons were an ancient family descended from Valyrian stock. King Aegon's own mother had been a Velaryon, so the marriage was reckoned one of cousin to cousin. fruitful. The following year, Alyssa gave birth to a daughter. Prince Aenys named her Rhaena, in honor of his mother. Like her father, the girl was small at birth, but unlike him she proved to be a happy, healthy child, with lively lilac eyes and hair that shone like beaten silver. ~ George R.R. Martin

Take me away - to a garden of flowers; a scented reality with lilac showers. ~ Anangsha Alammyan

Aubade Ending with the Death of a Mosquito"

- at Apollo Hospital, Dhaka

Let me break
free of these lace-frail
lilac fingers disrobing
the black sky
from the windows of this
room, I sit helpless, waiting,
silent - sister,
because you drew from me
the coil of red twine: loneliness -
spooled inside -
once, I wanted to say one
true thing, as in, I want more
in this life,
or, the sky is hurt, a blue vessel -
we pass through each other,
like weary
sweepers haunting through glass
doors, arcing across gray floors
faint trails
of dust we leave behind - he
touches my hand, waits for me
to clutch back
while mosquitoes rise like smoke
from this cold marble floor,
from altars,
seeking the blood still humming
in our unsaved bodies - he sighs,
I make a fist,
I kill this one leaving raw
kisses raised on our bare necks -
because I woke
alone in the myth of one life, I will
myself into another - how strange,
to witness
nameless, the tangled shape
our blood makes across us,
my open palm. ~ Tarfia Faizullah

If only
it were possible to juicily belch up the life
one's lived, chew it anew and gulp it down,
and then once more to roll it with a fat,
ox-like tongue, to squeeze from its eternal
dregs the former sweetness of crisp grass,
drunk with the morning dew and the bitterness
of lilac leaves! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

When you're on top and you lead the parade, everyone's there throwing lilies and lilac water on your head. But when those parades have gone by and there's a storm in your heart, there are very few people that are going to sit there and listen to you bemoan life. ~ Sylvester Stallone

Snow is bruised lilac in half light: such pure solace. ~ David Mitchell

If you had to lose everything, what would you miss most? It wouldn't be anything gross, like the big house, or the fancy car, assuming you had such things. It wouldn't be your impeccable reputation, or fame, or the regard of others. No; if you had to lose everything – I mean EVERYTHING – it would be the things you most take for granted now that you would miss. It would be different for each person, and it would probably surprise you to know what it was: a lilac tree in flower, the sound of a train in the distance, the smell of marmalade or hot buttered toast. Rain on a windowpane. A fruit thingummy. ~ John Burnside

Lilac was compelled to battle and overcome the evil in front of her so that Dahmien could be metamorphosed back to his divine spiritual wholeness. She was determined to combat his demons with pure, unconditional love to save her family from further torment and to end the ancestral bloodline curse once and for all. ~ Lali A. Love

Is there really a lilac bush?"
"Hell yes, there is. I nearly killed it when I fell off the roof and landed in the middle of it, but it was tougher than it looked. Kind of like another Lilac I know. ~ Amie Kaufman

glanced at the van sitting in the driveway before turning her gaze on the mountains in the distance, all lilac and orange in the rising sunlight. How easy would it be to just drive away? Never look back? Do something different. Something new. Something ~ Julie Frayn

…there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall. ~ Michael Pollan

The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramaphones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station. ~ T. S. Eliot

Monet Refuses the Operation"

Doctor, you say that there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weig ~ Lisel Mueller

Lilac won't talk to me again. There's a tremor. Lilac won't kiss me again. I won't hear her laugh. My lungs constrict. Why am I doing this to myself ? ~ Amie Kaufman

A bird hopped onto the foaming lilac outside. Its throat quivered; notes rose and fell out. As long as it kept singing and I kept staring, I told myself, I wouldn't start crying. ~ David Mitchell

Though I feel I should warn you that you that you could be here for a while. My friends aren't really known for their punctuality. ~ Amie Kaufman

Summer was meeting everyone by throwing the rich carpet of blue periwinkles over the little hill under one of the spreading apricot trees, and by sparking off the lights of red and lilac decorative peas which crawled on the lattice boarding the vegetable garden ~ Sahara Sanders

There was one of those sunsets beginning - the kind we've been having for months. Buildings and telephone poles were punched black against a watercolour sky into which fresh colour kept washing and spreading, higher and higher. We've never seen so high before; every day the colours go up and up to a hectic lilac, and from that, at last, comes the night. People carry their drinks outside not so much to look at the light, as to be in it. It's everywhere, surrounding faces and hair as it does the trees. It comes from a volcanic eruption on the other side of the world, from particles of dust that have risen to the upper atmosphere. Some people think it's from atomic tests; but it's said that, in Africa, we are safe from atomic fallout from the Northern Hemisphere because of the doldrums, an area where the elements lie becalmed and can carry no pollution. ~ Nadine Gordimer

Truth be told, my head was spinning so much that the car could have been doing interpretive dance in a lilac tutu and I might not have noticed. ~ Jim Butcher

Maybe it's the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn't buy the product even if I liked it. ~ Raymond Chandler

We are ghosts in Victorian gowns,
lilac apparitions with parasols… ~ Simone Muench

I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost something sooner or later - because I did not belong there, did not come from there - but when you are twenty-two or twenty-three, you figure that later you will have a high emotional balance, and be able to pay whatever it costs. I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. ~ Joan Didion

The problem with playing hide-and-seek with your sister is that sometimes she gets bored and stops looking for you.And there you are - under the couch, in the closet, wedged behind the lilac tree - and you don't want to give up,because maybe she's just biding her time. But maybe she's wandered off. ... Maybe she's downstairs watching TV and eating the rest of the Pringles.You wait. You wait until you forget that you're waiting, until you forget that there's anything to you beyond stillnessand quiet; an ant crawls over your knee, and you don't flinch. And it doesn't matter now whether she's coming for you - the hiding is enough. (You win when no one finds you, even if they're not looking.)When you break from behind the tree, it's because you want to. It's the first breath after a long dive. Branches snapunder your feet, and the world is hotter and brighter.
Ready or not, here I come. Here I come, ready or not. ~ Rainbow Rowell

Hold your finger to the sky with so much force it lengthens like a spine. Look up to the point of it and beyond. There. That tiny patch of the world, no bigger than the tip of your finger. At first glance, it might look like one flat color. Blue, or gray, or maybe even orange.

But it's much more complex than that. Squint. See the daubs of lilac. The streak of sage no wider than a hyphen. That butterscotch smear and the faint wash of carnelian. All of them coming together to swirl at the point just above your finger.

Breathe them in. Let them settle in your lungs. Those are the colors of right now. ~ Emily X.R. Pan

Lilac fiercely battled and fought off the demons that were on a mission to diminish her inner light, to the point of exhaustion, preventing the negative energy from dragging her and her sister into the dark abyss. ~ Lali A. Love

The Princess Saralinda was tall, with freesias in her dark hair, and she wore serenity brightly like the rainbow. It was not easy to tell her mouth from the rose, or her brow from the white lilac. Her voice was faraway music, and her eyes were candles burning on a tranquil night. She moved across the room like wind in violets, and her laughter sparkled on the air, which, from her presence, gained a faint and undreamed fragrance. The Prince was frozen by her beauty, but not cold, and the Duke, who was cold but not frozen, held up the palms of his gloves, as if she were a fire at which to warm his hands. ~ James Thurber

Lilac Wine"

I lost myself on a cool damp night
Gave myself in that misty light
Was hypnotized by a strange delight
Under a lilac tree
I made wine from the lilac tree
Put my heart in its recipe
It makes me see what I want to see...
And be what I want to be
When I think more than I want to think
Do things I never should do
I drink much more that I ought to drink
Because I brings me back you...

Lilac wine is sweet and heady, like my love
Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, like my love
Listen to me... I cannot see clearly
Isn't that she coming to me nearly here?

Lilac wine is sweet and heady where's my love?
Lilac wine, I feel unsteady, where's my love?

Listen to me, why is everything so hazy?
Isn't that she, or am I just going crazy, dear?

Lilac Wine, I feel unready for my love... ~ Nina Simone

Color - that's another thing people don't expect. In her imagination, in her dreams, everything has color. The museum buildings are beige, chestnut, hazel. Its scientists are lilac and lemon yellow and fox brown. Piano chords loll in the speaker of the wireless in the guard station, projecting rich blacks and complicated blues down the hall toward the key pound. Church bells send arcs of bronze careening off the windows. Bees are silver; pigeons are ginger and auburn and occasionally golden. The huge cypress trees she and her father pass on their morning walk are shimmering kaleidoscopes, each needle a polygon of light.
She has no memories of her mother but imagines her as white, a soundless brilliance. Her father radiates a thousand colors, opal, strawberry red, deep russet, wild green; a smell like oil and metal, the feel of a lock tumbler sliding home, the sound of his key rings chiming as he walks. He is an olive green when he talks to a department head, an escalating series of oranges when he speaks to Mademoiselle Fleury from the greenhouses, a bright red when he tries to cook. He glows sapphire when he sits over his workbench in the evenings, humming almost inaudibly as he works, the tip of his cigarette gleaming a prismatic blue. ~ Anthony Doerr

I was too awestruck to speak. Vines of bright pink flowers danced over a wrought-iron arbor. I recognized them immediately as the very same variety, bougainvillea, that grew in Greenhouse No. 4 at the New York Botanical Garden. Just beyond, two potted trees stood at attention- a lemon, its shiny yellow globes glistening in the sunlight, and what looked like an orange, studded with the tiniest fruit I'd ever seen.
"What is this?" I asked, fascinated.
"A kumquat," she said. "Lady Anna used to pick them for the children." She reached out to pluck one of the tiny oranges from the tree. "Here, try for yourself."
I held it in my hand, admiring its smooth, shiny skin.
I sank my teeth into the flesh of the fruit. Its thin skin disintegrated in my mouth, releasing a burst of sweet and sour that made my eyes shoot open and a smile spread across my face. "Oh, my," I said. "I've never had anything like it."
Mrs. Dilloway nodded. "You should try the clementines, then. They're Persian."
I walked a few paces further, admiring the potted orchids- at least a hundred specimens, so exquisite they looked like Southern belles in hoop skirts. On the far wall were variegated ferns, bleeding hearts, and a lilac tree I could smell from the other end of the room. ~ Sarah Jio

She was wearing a gown of lilac pink threaded with silver and stitched with tiny pearls. It was gorgeous in itself, and of course had the perfect new skirt, but it did not flatter her as a cooler shade would have done. ~ Anne Perry

Lilac Rose LaRoux. Untouchable. Toxic. I should've been named Ivy, or Foxglove, or Belladonna. ~ Amie Kaufman

Tarver," she whispers, her eyes on my face. "There'll be cameras all the time. More questions. Everyone will want to hear your story. Your life will be different, no matter how far from Corinth we go." A flashlight flickers through the trees, broken and jagged as it shines past the trunks. The light glances off her face, illuminating her eyes for a brief, brilliant moment. I step closer.
"I don't care."
"My father will try to - " She swallows, then lifts her chin, mouth firming to a straight, determined line. "No. I'll figure out a way to handle him." I can't help but grin down at her, this steely assurance, my Lilac through and through.
"I'd pay to see that showdown. ~ Amie Kaufman

Just now the lilac is in bloom
All before my little room. ~ Rupert Brooke

Victoria spent most of the morning in the town house's private garden. It was a cool, humid day, the sky liberally laced with clouds, the air stirring with mild breezes. She sat at the stone table and read for a while, then wandered along graveled paths bordered with boxes of lilac, jessamine, and Russian honeysuckle. The carefully tended garden was bordered by poplar hedges and ivy-covered walls. Well-stocked beds of flowering and fruit-bearing paths and filled the air with perfume.
In this small, secluded world, it seemed as if the city were a hundred miles away. It was difficult not to be contented in such beautiful surroundings. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The room held her scent, fresh lilac, pathetic. ~ Stephen King

The Garden by Moonlight"

A black cat among roses,
Phlox, lilac-misted under a first-quarter moon,
The sweet smells of heliotrope and night-scented stock.
The garden is very still,
It is dazed with moonlight,
Contented with perfume,
Dreaming the opium dreams of its folded poppies.
Firefly lights open and vanish
High as the tip buds of the golden glow
Low as the sweet alyssum flowers at my feet.
Moon-shimmer on leaves and trellises,
Moon-spikes shafting through the snow ball bush.
Only the little faces of the ladies' delight are alert and staring,
Only the cat, padding between the roses,
Shakes a branch and breaks the chequered pattern
As water is broken by the falling of a leaf.
Then you come,
And you are quiet like the garden,
And white like the alyssum flowers,
And beautiful as the silent sparks of the fireflies.
Ah, Beloved, do you see those orange lilies?
They knew my mother,
But who belonging to me will they know
When I am gone. ~ Amy Lowell

Even though her family had left the old country of Georgia long ago, Lilac still felt the dark presence of her ancestral bloodline around them, ready to expose its vicious bitterness and destruction. ~ Lali A. Love

The stranger slowly pulled off the gargoyle mask to reveal himself, and Lilac was horrified when she saw his face. His wicked black eyes pierced her soul in a manner so familiar to her that, in the past, it would have caused her heart to be seized by sheer terror. ~ Lali A. Love

There is an infinity of landscape here, caused by the purity of the atmosphere. It has been said that there is a lack of colour. It is not so obvious as the greenness of England, but it is infinitely more varied and more delicate in tone. The landscape is a pinky mauve, a lilac, and the reflection of the sun of the particles of the atmosphere is a warm amber. So I should say our colour scheme is amber and lilac. ~ Hans Heysen

The newspapers kept stroking my fear. New surveys provided awful statistics on just about everything. Evidence suggested that we were not doing well. Researchers gloomily agreed. Environment psychologists were interviewed. Damage had 'unwittingly' been done. There were 'feared lapses'. There were 'misconceptions' about potential. Situations had 'deteriorated'. Cruelty was on the rise and there was nothing anyone could do about it. The populace was confounded, yet didn't care. Unpublished studies hinted that we were all paying a price. Scientists peered into data and concluded that we should all be very worried. No one knew what normal behavior was anymore, and some argued that this was a form of virtue. And no one argued back. No one challenged anything. Anxiety was soaking up most people's days. Everyone had become preoccupied with horror. Madness was fluttering everywhere. There was fifty years of research supporting this data. There were diagrams illustrating all of these problems – circles and hexagons and squares, different sections colored in lime or lilac or gray. Most troubling were the fleeting signs that nothing could transform any of this into something positive. You couldn't help being both afraid and fascinated. Reading these articles made you feel that the survival of mankind didn't seem very important in the long run. We were doomed. We deserved it. I was so tired. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

That's my kind of girl! ~ Amie Kaufman

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden, there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the more delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. ~ Oscar Wilde

Lord Henry went out to the garden and found Dorian Gray burying his face in the great cool lilac-blossoms, feverishly drinking in their perfume as if it had been wine. ~ Oscar Wilde

Holding up an oil-paper umbrella,
I loiter aimlessly in the long, long
And lonely rainy alley,
I hope to encounter
A lilac-like girl
Nursing her resentment
A lilac-like color she has
A lilac-like fragrance,
A lilac-like sadness,
Melancholy in the rain,
Sorrowful and uncertain;
She loiters aimlessly in this lonely rainy alley
Holding up an oil-paper umbrella
Just like me
And just like me
Walks silently,
Apathetic, sad and disconsolate
Silently she moves closer
Moves closer and casts
A sigh-like glance
She glides by
Like a dream
Hazy and confused like a dream
As in a dream she glides past
Like a lilac spray,
This girl glides past beside me;
She silently moves away, moves away
Up to the broken-down bamboo fence,
To the end of the rainy alley.
In the rains sad song,
Her color vanishes
Her fragrance diffuses,
Even her
Sigh-like glance,
Lilac-like discontent
Vanish.
Holding up an oil-paper umbrella, alone
Aimlessly walking in the long, long
And lonely rainy alley,
I wish for
A lilac-like girl
Nursing her resentment glide by. ~ Dai Wangshu

The desert. No seasons of bloom and decay. Just the endless turn of night and day. Out of time: and she is gazing- not over it, taken into it, for it has no measure of space, features that mark distance from here to there. In a film of haze there is no horizon, the pallor of sand, pink-traced, lilac-luminous with its own colour of faint light, has no demarcation from land to air. Sky-haze is indistinguishable from sand-haze. All drifts together, and there is no onlooker; the desert is eternity. ~ Nadine Gordimer

I miss the floral scent of her hair, the perfume that barely masked the underlying truth of what she was. She was lost time. She smelled of dusty libraries and unwound clocks, salted sand and rain riding on the first rays of dawn. And lilac. When she held me to her, lilac was what I smelled first. ~ Courtney M. Privett

Through the window of my mask I see a wall of coral, its surface a living kaleidoscope of lilac flecks, splashes of gold, reddish streaks and yellows, all tinged by the familiar transparent blue of the sea. ~ Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Hmm, What did I love? I think all the scents. Mama's lilac trees, and the wild iris in the fields, and rain on the breeze on a hot day. Apple and pear blossoms. The hay just cut. The mix of odors in the barn when the sunlight was shafting through the cracks in the boards, heating everything up. ~ Jane Smiley

Then, there on the screen I saw Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. An American Tragedy, a film I'd seen at least twice, not that it was all that great, but still it was very good, especially the final scene, which was unreeling at this particular moment: Clift and Taylor standing together, separated by the bars of a prison cell, a death cell, for Clift is only hours away from execution. Clift, already a poetic ghost inside his grey death-clothes, and Taylor, nineteen and ravishing, sublimely fresh as lilac after rain. ~ Truman Capote

They'd eaten every meal outdoors, hard-boiled eggs and cheese from a picnic basket, and drunk wine under the lilac tree in the walled garden. They'd disappeared inside the woods, and stolen apples from the farm next door, and floated down the stream in her little boat as one silken hour spun itself into the next. On a clear, still night, they'd dug the old bicycles out of the shed and cycled together along the dusty lane, racing, laughing, breathing in salt from the warm air as moonlight made the stones, still hot from the day, shine lustrous white. ~ Kate Morton

The fading dawn colors revive momentarily, and the sky shines with lilac and daffodil, layering colors in clouds like quilts stacked on a bed. More birds chime into the morning air: a nuthatch's nasal onk joins the crow's croak and a black-throated green warbler's murmur from the branches above the mandala. As the colors finally fade under the fierce gaze of their mother, the sun, a wood thrush caps the dawn chorus with his astounding song. The song seems to pierce through from another world, carrying with it clarity and ease, purifying me for a few moments with its grace. Then the song is gone, the veil closes, and I am left with embers of memory. ~ David George Haskell

There was no word for what I was - unable to rent a car but able to stand in front of a room of thirteen-year-olds, sweating under industrial-grade fluorescent lights in the lilac-colored button-down my mom had picked and paid for a few months earlier. I could knock back black coffee and tell them how to ask questions, how to sit down, how to look me in the pupils. Throw away your gum. Don't text at school, at work. Clean your desk, your apartment, your life. Lessons. ~ Harris Sockel

On Sunday, a lambent crevice opened up in the street outside my house,
By Tuesday birds were flying into it.
"I probably won't miss you," my mother said,
"I'm only interested in the end of the world," I replied.

Many find it difficult to breath
without the atmosphere
but we knew how. We just stopped breathing.

We're at the Moonlite All-Nite Dinner and they're serving up fruit from the plants growing out of the waitress.
The CLOSED sign whispers, "Please, don't touch me."
We watch bodies fall to the ground outside like deep-sea creatures surfacing.

You turn to me and ask, "Do you ever think about suicide?"
I look away from you and close my eyes,
eat the raspberries to confuse the blood in my mouth.

Now you're in the only car in the parking lot at midnight and you're watching me throw stones at the moon,
which hangs low in the sky so he can look into your house.
Your sister tried to touch him from her bedroom window once, and he flinched; now he and the oceans watch her with a quiet concern.
The lilac sky is trying to rest her head on his shoulder, all trees gradually growing through her.

A hummingbird whispers to you, "Be careful, under her dress is her skin," and then builds his nest in the middle of the highway,
I look back at you, and you close your eyes. ~ Katherine Ciel

How many were the aquarelles she painted for me; what a revelation it was when she showed me the lilac tree that grows out of mixed blue and red! Sometimes, in our St Petersburg house, from a secret compartment in the wall of her dressing room (and my birth room), she would produce a mass of jewelry for my bedtime amusement. I was very small then, and those flashing tiaras and chokers and rings seemed to me hardly inferior in mystery and enchantment to the illumination in the city during imperial fêtes, when, in the padded stillness of a frosty night, giant monograms, crowns, and other armorial designs, made of coloured electric bulbs - sapphire, emerald, ruby - glowed with a kind of charmed constraint above snow-lined cornices on housefronts along residential streets. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The warm bittersweet smell of clean Negro welcomed us as we entered the churchyard-Hearts of Love hairdressing mingled with asafoetida, snuff, Hoyt's Cologne, Brown's Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum. ~ Harper Lee

Tarver lifts one hand to touch my face, tracing the curve of my cheek. "Lilac, if something happened to you," he murmurs, "I would be anything but fine. ~ Amie Kaufman

The forbidden cabinet. The forbidden fruit. That fruit is - a volume, a huge blue-lilac volume with a gold inscription slantwise: Collected Works of A.S. Pushkin. I read the fat Pushkin in the cabinet with my nose in the book and on the shelf, almost in darkness and almost right up against it and even a little bit suffocated by his weight that came right into the throat, and almost blinded by the nearness of the tiny letters. I read Pushkin right into the chest and right into the brain. ~ Marina Tsvetaeva

In the country, spring is a time of small happenings happening quietly, hyacinth shoots thrusting in a garden, willows burning with a sudden frosty fire of green, lengthening afternoons of long flowing dusk, and midnight rain opening lilac; but in the city there is the fanfare of organ-grinders, and odors, undiluted by winter wind, clog the air; windows long closed go up, and conversation, drifting beyond a room, collides with the jangle of a peddler's bell. ~ Truman Capote

I grabbed it and held it to my face and there,God,yes.Her smell.The lilac shampoo and the almond in her skin lotion and benneath all of that the faint sweetness of the skin itself. ~ John Green

I reached the privy and emptied the slop pail, and so forth.
And so forth, Grace? asks Dr.Jordan.
I look at him. Really if he does not know what you do in a privy there is no hope for him.
What I did was, I hoisted my skirts and sat down above the buzzing flies, on the same seat everyone in the house sat on, lady or lady's maid, they both piss and it smells the same, and not like lilac neither, as Mary Whitney used to say. What was in there for wiping was an old copy of the Godey's Ladies' Book; I always looked at the pictures before using them. Most were of the latest fashions, but some were of duchesses from England and high-society ladies in New York and the like. You should never let your picture be in a magazine or newspaper if you can help it, as you never know what ends your face may be made to serve, by others, once it has got out of your control.
But I do not say any of this to Dr. Jordan. And so forth, I say firmly, because And so forth is all he is entitled to. Just because he pesters me to know everything is no reason for me to tell him. ~ Margaret Atwood

She died."
I had to prompt him.
"Soon after?"
"In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital."
"Poor girl."
"All past. All under the sea."
"You make it seem present."
"I do not wish to make you sad."
"The scent of lilac."
"Old man's sentiment. Forgive me."
There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.
"Is this why you never married?"
"The dead live."
The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.
"How do they live?"
And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.
"By love. ~ John Fowles

Bastian had climbed a dune of purplish-red sand and all around him he saw nothing but hill after hill of every imaginable color. Each hill revealed a shade or tint that occured in no other. The nearest was cobalt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve, turquoise blue, lilac, moss green, ruby red, burnt umber, Indian yellow, vermillion, lapis lazuli, and so on from horizon to horizon. And between the hill, separating color from color, flowed streams of gold and silver sand. ~ Michael Ende

The thought of hovering above the earth, weightless in a lilac sky, appealed to her, in the same way imaginary friends appealed to her, or talking alligators. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

She came upon a bankside of lavender crocuses. The sun was on them for the moment, and they were opened flat, great five-pointed, seven-pointed lilac stars, with burning centres, burning with a strange lavender flame, as she had seen some metal burn lilac-flamed in the laboratory of the hospital at Islington. All down and oak-dry bankside they burned their great exposed stars. And she felt like going down on her knees and bending her forehead to the earth in an oriental submission, they were so royal, so lovely, so supreme. She came again to them in the morning, when the sky was grey, and they were closed, sharp clubs, wonderfully fragile on their stems of sap, among leaves and old grass and wild periwinkle. They had wonderful dark stripes running up their cheeks, the crocuses, like the clear proud stripes on a badger's face, or on some proud cat. She took a handful of the sappy, shut, striped flames. In her room they opened into a grand bowl of lilac fire. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Lilacs, False Blue, White, Purple,
Colour of lilac,
Your great puffs of flowers
Are everywhere in this my New England ...
Lilacs in dooryards
Holding quiet conversation with an early moon;
Lilacs watching a deserted house; ...
Lilacs, wind-beaten, staggering under a lopsided shock of bloom,
You are everywhere. ~ Amy Lowell

A cloud, hitherto unseen, came upon the moon, and hovered an instant like a dark hand before a face.The illusion went with it, and the lights in the windows were extinguished. I looked upon a desolate shell, soulless at last, unhaunted, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls.
The house was a sepulchre, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection. When I thought of Manderley in my waking hours I would not be bitter. I should think of it as it might have been, could I have lived there without fear. I should remember the rose-garden in summer, and the birds that sang at dawn.Tea under the chestnut tree, and the murmur of the sea coming up to us from the lawns below.
I would think of the blown lilac, and the Happy Valley. These things were permanent, they could not be dissolved.They were memories that cannot hurt. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices in the lost lilac and the lost sea voices and the weak spirit quickens to rebel for the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell quickens to recover. ~ T. S. Eliot

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night ... I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a "white man" disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions; that was why I'd abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes. ~ Jack Kerouac

Of course to one so modern as I am, `Enfant de mon siècle,' merely to look at the world will be always lovely. I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer. Like Gautier, I have always been one of those 'pour qui le monde visible existe. ~ Oscar Wilde

Lilac intrinsically knew that she was about to be catapulted into an unknown event; however, she could not rationalize this instinct with her analytical mind. She was feeling discombobulated and confused, stuck between levels of consciousness and her perceived dimensional reality. ~ Lali A. Love

The lilac moon came high an altitude from mine to clasp its beauty,yet next to my bosom hide, lies she,like ten thousand silver moons illumine;and her soul's music showered words as she spoke wide. ~ Nithin Purple

When you chopped logs with the ax and they split open they smelled beautiful, like Christmas. But when you split someone's head open it smelled like abattoir and quite overpowered the scent of the wild lilacs you'd cut and brought into the house only this morning, which was already another life. ~ Kate Atkinson

I've not much interest in the important things of life. Only in the beautiful things. Just this lilac here makes me happy. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair; ~ T. S. Eliot

Lilac curled her upper lip in a dead-eyed sneer, and it made my skin crawl. The girl looked like she might fillet me and have me for a snack later. She made the Dale R. Fielding High School Cheer Squad look like Barney and Friends, and I vowed to give her a wide berth. ~ Veronica Wolff

Lilac fell in love with the village of Positano. It had such incredible healing energy and positive vibes. The ambiance there moved her, and she understood why she had been receiving messages from the universe to come to this magical place. She sensed an imminent divine intervention but didn't realize its magnitude at the time. ~ Lali A. Love

Promise me that no matter what you hear, you won't go off on your own to investigate. I want your word. There's a command in his voice, soft as it is. ~ Amie Kaufman

Like some winter animal the moon licks the salt of your hand,
Yet still your hair foams violet as a lilac tree
From which a small wood-owl calls. ~ Johannes Bobrowski

Or else I'm dead, and I've ended up in hell after all, and it's an escape pod with Lilac LaRoux. ~ Amie Kaufman

I mean, when a man reaches ... a certain age," he tried again, "he knows the world is never going to be perfect. He's got used to it being a bit, a bit ... " "Manky?" Nobby suggested. Tucked behind his ear, in the place usually reserved for his cigarette, was another wilting lilac flower. "Exactly," said Colon. "Like, it's never going to be perfect, so you just do the best you can, right? But when there's a kid on the way, well, suddenly a man sees it different. He thinks: my kid's going to have to grow up in this mess. Time to clean it up. Time to make it a Better World. He gets a bit ... keen. Full of ginger. ~ Terry Pratchett

I wonder if I don't give too much of myself to writing: I am always half where I am; the other half is feeding the furnace, kick-starting the heat of creativity. I am making love with someone but at the same time I'm noticing how this graceful hand across my belly might just fit in with the memory of lilacs in Albuquerque in 1974. ~ Natalie Goldberg

I recall a battle once,' said Dickens, looking up at a tree. 'In history, it was. And there was this company, see, and they was a ragtag of different squads and covered in mud in any case, and they found themselves hiding in a field of carrots. So as a badge they all pulled up carrots and stuck them on their helmets so's they'd know who their friends were and incidentally have a nourishing snack for later, which is never to be sneezed at on a battlefield.'
'Well? So what?" said Dibbler.
'So what's wrong with a lilac flower?' said Dickens, reaching up and pulling down a laden branch. 'Makes a spanking plume, even if you can't eat it…'
And now, Vimes thought, it ends. ~ Terry Pratchett

I tremble with pleasure when I
think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and
the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss
the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. ~ Oscar Wilde

Cinderella
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock. ~ Sylvia Plath

I saw that the garden had obeyed the jungle law, even as the woods had done. The rhododendrons stood fifty feet high, twisted and entwined with bracken, and they had entered into alien marriage with a host of nameless shrubs, poor, bastard thing that clung about their roots as though conscious of their spurious origin. A lilac had mated with a copper beech, and to bind them yet more closely to one another the malevolent ivy, always an enemy to grace, had thrown her tendrils about the pair and made them prisoners. ~ Daphne Du Maurier

Beautiful? I've always been reasonably pretty - but enough money would turn even a cow into a catch. ~ Amie Kaufman

As Lilac found herself in the circle of love with her mother, Jasmine, Violet, Rose, Liz, and Jo, she could not help but feel the power of her divine feminine love for her soul tribe. It was so electrifying; she felt her heart was going to burst out of her chest into a million little lightning bolts. ~ Lali A. Love

The scent of flowers grew stronger and came from all sides; the grass was drenched with dew; a nightingale struck up in a lilac bush close by and then stopped on hearing our voices; the starry sky seemed to come down lower over our heads. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame, and all that was seen was she - simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay and eager. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Winter is not here yet. There's a little flower, up yonder, the last bud from the multitude of bluebells that clouded those turf steps in July with a lilac mist. Will you clamber up and pluck it to show papa? ~ Emily Bronte

We were in the woods, and not a parent or a friend on earth knew where. At this moment, we were untraceable, this notion an odd pleasure. A patch of fallen leaves glowed in a pool of golden sun, and the dim forest air smelled sweet, of young lilac, invisible sage. ~ Aspen Matis

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac. ~ Laura Miller