Lost Roses Summary Quotes

After the winter of thorns came spring. The roses would bloom again. But if she lost Mr. Morland, she'd be chopping down the whole bush. Killing the thorns, to be sure, but killing the beautiful roses too. Just because she couldn't always see the flowers didn't mean they were not still there. ~ Julie Daines

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....

Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows'
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....

Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora.... ~ Russell Edson

It is easy to lose hope when all is lost. We do not realise that is just the beginning. That is just the catalyst. That is when we have to spread our wings like a butterfly. The rainy days will come but so will 'the botanical drawings' of life. Of kitchen tables, our mother's apron strings, cabbage roses and toys if we want to become the women our mother's were. There are so many careers for women to choose from today. Wherever they find themselves women will always find an abundance. ~ Abigail George

Beauty is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight,or springtime, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly, and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you...Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed...Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar...Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing...The world belongs to you for a season...how tragic it would be if you were wasted. For there is such a little time that your youth will last. The common hillflowers wither, but they blossom again. The laburnum will be as yellow next June as it is now. In a month there will be purple stars on the clematis, and year after year the green night of its leaves will hold its purple stars. But we never get back our youth. The pulse of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets, haunted by the memory of the passions of which we were too much afraid, and the exquisite temptations that we had not the co ~ Oscar Wilde

The idea of love walked along the water and her gaze was full of absence and her eyes spat lighting. The impressionable evening received by turns the imprints of grasses, clouds, bodies, and wore crazy astronomical designs. The idea of love walked straight ahead without seeing anything; she was wearing tiny isosceles mirrors whose perfect assemblage was amazing. They were so many images of fish tails, when, by their angelic nature, they answer the promise one might make of always finding each other again. Finding each other again even in the depths of a forest, where the thread of a star is an articulation more silent than life, the dawn a liquor stronger than blood. Who is lost, who truly wanders off when a cup of coffee is steaming in the fog and waiters dressed in snow circulate patiently on the surface of floors whose desired height can be indicated with one's hands? Who? A solitary man whom the idea of love has just left and who tucks in his spirit like an imaginary bed. The man falls all the same and in the next room, under the moon-white verandah, a woman rises whom the idea of love has abandoned. The gravel weeps outside, a rain of glass is falling in which we recognize small chains, tears in which we have time to see ourselves, mirror tears, shards of windows, singular crystals like the ones we witness in our hand on awakening, leaves and the faded petals of those roses that once embelished certain distillery bottles. It's just that the idea of love, it seems angry w ~ Andre Breton

Aubade with a Broken Neck The first night you don't come home summer rains shake the clematis. I bury the dead moth I found in our bed, scratch up a rutabaga and eat it rough with dirt. The dog finds me and presents between his gentle teeth a twitching nightjar. In her panic, she sings in his mouth. He gives me her pain like a gift, and I take it. I hear the cries of her young, greedy with need, expecting her return, but I don't let her go until I get into the house. I read the auspices - the way she flutters against the wallpaper's moldy roses means all can be lost. How she skims the ceiling means a storm approaches. You should see her in the beginnings of her fear, rushing at the starless window, her body a dart, her body the arrow of longing, aimed, as all desperate things are, to crash not into the object of desire, but into the darkness behind it. ~ Traci Brimhall

I reviewed in thought the modern era of raps and apparitions, beginning with the knockings of 1848, at the hamlet of Hydesville, N.Y., and ending with grotesque phenomena at Cambridge, Mass.; I evoked the anklebones and other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters (as described by the sages of the University of Buffalo ); the mysteriously uniform type of delicate adolescent in bleak Epworth or Tedworth, radiating the same disturbances as in old Peru; solemn Victorian orgies with roses falling and accordions floating to the strains of sacred music; professional imposters regurgitating moist cheesecloth; Mr. Duncan, a lady medium's dignified husband, who, when asked if he would submit to a search, excused himself on the ground of soiled underwear; old Alfred Russel Wallace, the naive naturalist, refusing to believe that the white form with bare feet and unperforated earlobes before him, at a private pandemonium in Boston, could be prim Miss Cook whom he had just seen asleep, in her curtained corner, all dressed in black, wearing laced-up boots and earrings; two other investigators, small, puny, but reasonably intelligent and active men, closely clinging with arms and legs about Eusapia, a large, plump elderly female reeking of garlic, who still managed to fool them; and the skeptical and embarrassed magician, instructed by charming young Margery's "control" not to get lost in the bathrobe's lining but to follow up the left stocking until he reached the bare thigh - upon the wa ~ Vladimir Nabokov

How are you giving it magic?" he said, through his teeth.

"I already found the path!" I said. "I'm just staying on it. Can't you - feel it?" I asked abruptly, and held my hand cupping the flower out towards him; he frowned and put his hands around it, and then he said, "Vadiya rusha ilikad tuhi," and a second illusion laid itself over mine, two roses in the same space - his, predictably, had three rings of perfect petals, and a delicate fragrance.

"Try and match it," he said absently, his fingers moving slightly, and by lurching steps we brought our illusions closer together until it was nearly impossible to tell them one from another, and then he said, "Ah," suddenly, just as I began to glimpse his spell: almost exactly like that strange clockwork on the middle of his table, all shining moving parts. On an impulse I tried to align our workings: I envisioned his like the water-wheel of a mill, and mine the rushing stream driving it around. "What are you - " he began, and then abruptly we had only a single rose, and it began to grow.

And not only the rose: vines were climbing up the bookshelves in every direction, twining themselves around ancient tomes and reaching out the window; the tall slender columns that made the arch of the doorway were lost among rising birches, spreading out long finger-branches; moss and violets were springing up across the floor, delicate ferns unfurling. Flowers were blooming everywhere: flowers I had never seen, s ~ Naomi Novik

Some kisses pronounced themselvesthe judgment of conviction love,Some kisses are given with an eyeSome kisses are given with the memory.There are silent kisses, kisses noblesThere enigmatic kisses, sincereSome kisses are given only soulsThere forbidden kisses, true.Some kisses calcined and hurt,Some kisses captivate sensesThere mysterious kisses that have leftthousand wandering and lost dreams.There problematic kisses enclosinga key that no one has decipheredSome kisses engender tragedyfew have defoliated roses brooch.There perfumed kisses, warm kissesthrobbing in intimate longings,Some kisses on the lips leave tracesas a field of sun between two ice.Some kisses seem liliesby sublime, naive and pure,There treacherous and cowardly kisses,There cursed and perjured kisses.Judas kisses Jesus and leaves printin the face of God, felony,while Magdalena with kissesfortifies pious agony.From then kisses throbslove, betrayal and pain,in human weddings they seemthe breeze playing with flowers.There are kisses that produce ravingsloving hot and mad passion,you know them well are my kissesinvented by me, for your mouth.Flame kisses printed on trailThey take the grooves of a forbidden love,kisses storm, wild kissesour lips only been tested.Do you remember the first ...? Indefinable;Your face covered with blushes luridand in the throes of terrible emotion,Your eyes were filled with tears.Do you remember that one evening in excess crazyI saw you jealous imagining grievances,He flunked you in ~ Gabriela Mistral

I am totally lost in the folds of Love,
totally free of worry and care.

I have passed beyond the four qualities.
My heart has torn away the veil of pretense.

There was a time I circled with the nine spheres, rolling with the stars across the sky.
There was a time I stayed by his side -
I lived in his world
and he gave me everything.

With the best of intentions
I became a prisoner in this form.
How else did I get here?
What crime did I commit?
But I'd rather be in a prison with my Friend
than in a rosegarden all alone.

I came to this world
To have a sight of Joseph's purity.
Like a baby born of its mother's womb,
I was brought here with blood and tears.

People think they are born only once
But they have been here so many times.

In the cloak of this ragged body
I have walked countless paths.
How many times I have worn out this cloak!

With ascetics in the desert
I watched night turn into day.
With pagans in the temple
I slept at the foot of idols.

I've been a charlatan and a king;
I've been a healer, and fraught with disease.

I've been on my death-bed so many times. . . . Floating up like the clouds
Pouring down like the rain.

As a darvish I sought the dust of annihilation
but it never touched my robe.
So I gathered armfuls of roses
in this faded ga ~ Rumi

He opened his mouth to say that she looked extremely beautiful and deserved armfuls of roses, but the words were lost in committee somewhere, shuffled aside by the parts of his head that worked full-time at avoiding ridicule. ~ Helen Simonson

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you. ~ Anton Chekhov

The Sun by Czeslaw Milosz

All colors come from the sun. And it does not have
Any particular color, for it contains them all.
And the whole Earth is like a poem
While the sun above represents the artist.

Whoever wants to paint the variegated world
Let him never look straight up at the sun
Or he will lose the memory of things he has seen.
Only burning tears will stay in his eyes.

Let him kneel down, lower his face to the grass,
And look at the light reflected by the ground.
There he will find everything we have lost:
The stars and the roses, the dusks and the dawns.

Warsaw, 1943 ~ Czeslaw Milosz

I CANNOT tell you now;
When the wind's drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind's a whisper at last
Maybe I'll tell you then
some other time.
When the rose's flash to the sunset
Reels to the rack and the twist,
And the rose is a red bygone,
When the face I love is going
And the gate to the end shall clang,
And it's no use to beckon or say, "So long"
Maybe I'll tell you then
some other time.
I never knew any more beautiful than you:
I have hunted you under my thoughts,
I have broken down under the wind
And into the roses looking for you.
I shall never find any
greater than you. ~ Carl Sandburg

She forced herself to stroll casually and appraise her plants. The wisteria was shedding its final leaves, the jasmine had long lost its flowers, but the autumn had been mild and the pink roses were still in bloom. Eliza went closer, took a half-opened bud between her fingers and smiled at the perfect raindrop caught within its inner petals.
The thought was sudden and complete. She must make a bouquet, a welcome-home gift for Rose. Her cousin was fond of flowers, but more than that, Eliza would select plants that were a symbol of their bond. There must be ivy for friendship, pink rose for happiness, and some of the exotic oak-leaved geranium for memories... ~ Kate Morton

He grasped the knob. It was engraved with a wild rose
wound around a revolver, one of those great old guns from his
father and now lost forever.
Yet it will be yours again, whispered the voice of the Tower
and the voice of the roses - these voices were now one.
What do you mean ?
To this there was no answer, but the knob turned beneath
his hand, and perhaps that was an answer. Roland opened the
door at the top of the Dark Tower.
He saw and understood at once, the knowledge falling
upon him in a hammerblow, hot as the sun of the desert that
was the apotheosis of all deserts. How many times had he
climbed these stairs only to find himself peeled back, curved
back, turned back? Not to the beginning (when things might
have been changed and time's curse lifted), but to that moment
in the Mohaine Desert when he had finally understood that his
thoughtless, questionless quest would ultimately succeed? How
many times had he traveled a loop like the one in the clip
that had once pinched off his navel, his own tet-ka can Gan?
How many times would he travel it?
"Oh, no!" he screamed. "Please, not again! Have pity! Have
mercy!"
The hands pulled him forward regardless. The hands of the
Tower knew no mercy.
They were the hands of Gan, the hands of ka, and they
knew no mercy. ~ Stephen King

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly -
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his ~ Elizabeth Bishop

And
Unto thine eyes my heart
Sendeth old dreams of the spring-time,
Yea of wood-ways my rime
Found thee and flowers in and of all streams
That sang low burthen, and of roses,
That lost their dew-bowed petals for the dreams
We scattered o'er them passing by. ~ Ezra Pound

In the green escape of my palace, over a bridge, under a canopy of opalescent light, through there, between dark branches and their shivering leaves, I'm lost in the scent of yellow roses, arrested by the range's filtering light. ~ Etel Adnan

In Memory of M. B.

Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain. ~ Anna Akhmatova

A little way down the road I turned, and saw how his wife and daughter took him up. And I thought to myself: no, 'tis not all roses when one goes a-wandering. At the next place I came to I learned that he had been with the army, as quartermaster-sergeant; then he went mad over a lawsuit he lost, and was shut up in an asylum for some time. Now in the spring his trouble broke out again; perhaps it was my coming that had given the final touch. But the lightning insight in his eyes at the moment when the madness came upon him! I think of him now and again; he was a lesson to me. 'Tis none so easy to judge of men, who are wise or mad. And God preserve us all from being known for what we are! ~ Knut Hamsun

In the spring of 1988, I returned to New Orleans, and as soon as I smelled the air, I knew I was home.
It was rich, almost sweet, like the scent of jasmine and roses around our old courtyard.
I walked the streets, savoring that long lost perfume. ~ Anne Rice

The roses of pleasure seldom last long enough to adorn the brow of him who plucks them; for they are the only roses which do not retain their sweetness after they have lost their beauty. ~ Hannah More

Some day, when you are old and wrinkled and ugly, when thought has seared your forehead with its lines, and passion branded your lips with its hideous fires, you will feel it, you will feel it terribly. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow, and hollow–cheeked, and dull–eyed. You will suffer horribly… Ah! realise your youth while you have it. Don't squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure, or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common, and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals, of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing… A new Hedonism - that is what our century wants. ~ Oscar Wilde

whoever sees you with the eyes of the heart
goes ecstatic
but the blind person stays lost in thought
hundreds of branches from the secret worlds are
dropping roses at your feet
why do you cut down the tree of contentment? ~ Rumi

I have often perplexed myself over what I saw in Nelle Snyder's aged face at that moment. It was no look of paranoia. It was a look of waiting. Perpetual waiting. That look was to come back to me sixteen years later when I heard Rose's narration at the end of James Cameron's Titanic, with its line about survivors "waiting for an absolution that never came." Yet the waiting I saw in Nelle Snyder's face seemed larger even than a waiting for absolution. It seemed vaster even than Titanic herself. Call it the waiting of the Mother of all Perished Vessels. Or of a Ship of Honeymoon Dreams perchance, with a passenger list spanning all humanity, that once proudly sailed but was lost, aeons ago, and sank to a dark, unreachable abode where nothing whatsoever can be grasped about her except her perplexing power still to haunt us. ~ James Glaeg

What kind of woman was she? What kind of woman was it who called to me from that calamity on the Seventh Avenue line? What kind of woman do I love now, with a fealty that will not cease, not till my occluded arteries send their clots up to the spongy interiors in my skull and I go mute and slack? I love the kind of woman whose hair has gone gray in a not terribly flattering way, the kind who doesn't even notice how she has to keeps having to buy larger jeans, the kind who likes big cars because she doesn't like to be uncomfortable. I love this woman because she is gifted with astounding premonitory skills: no matter how uncertain, how despondent, how lost her mate feels, no matter how dire the circumstances, she nonetheless predicts that Everything will be roses. ~ Rick Moody

It is the qualities of the heart, not those of the face, that should attract us in women, because the former are durable, the latter transitory. So lovable women, like roses, retain their sweetness long after they have lost their beauty. ~ Alphonse De Lamartine

I only saw glimpses of the real world around me. Reality dissolved beneath the press of his lips against mine. I lost myself. In that moment there was We...
He enveloped me. I felt his strength. He seemed gigantic to me. And yet gentle. His breath was inside me. I tasted what he tasted like. All the scents of that instant cascaded upon me. His sweet. The roses. The nectar of the feeders. The wood that hat hammered into with nails. The sweet raspberries on his mouth. ~ Dan Skinner

I beg your pardon, but don't cry for me, Argentina. A little rain's bound to fall on those roses of yours - a dribble, a drizzle, a deluge. Think you're the only one with wet flowers?
A tear rolls down my cheek and some of the heaviness I've been carrying trickles out with it.
Why me?
Why pain? Why suffering? Why heartache?
Because we're a forgetful bunch, always busy with the daily grind. We overlook the good things until we're confronted with the bad. There but for the grace of God...and all that jazz.
Life is how we measure it. And people have different currencies. Some are tangible. Others are carried in your heart. Like the woman beside me, I've been dwelling on what I've lost, not what I have. Her riches vanished in a moment. Mine, thankfully, remain - wonderful childhood memories, a caring husband, a baby on the way.
Wet roses? They'll dry. Meanwhile, I'll enjoy the rest of my garden. ~ Roxy Boroughs

I was still walking behind Mrs. Haze through the dining room when, beyond it, there came a sudden burst of greenery – "the piazza," sang out my leader, and then, without the least warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.

It was the same child-the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day. And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side. With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts – that last mad immortal day behind the "Roches Roses." The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Riding horseback along a country lane I saw wild roses in bloom, against an old stone wall. The expensive, improved varieties in my garden have lost something. Sophistication always does. ~ James Webb Young

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: ~ Ernest Dowson

The city had changed beyond recognition. Wrecking balls and bulldozers had leveled the old buildings to rubble. The dust of construction hung permanently over the streets. Gated mansions reached up to the northern foothills, while slums fanned out from the city's southern limits.
I feared an aged that had lost its heart, and I was terrified at the thought of so many useless hands. Our traditions were our pacifiers and we put ourselves to sleep with the lullaby of a once-great civilation and culture. Ours was the land of poetry flowers, and nightingales - and poets searching for rhymes in history's junkyards. The lottery was our faith and greed our fortune. Our intellectuals were sniffing cocaine and delivering lectures in the back rooms of dark cafés. We bought plastic roses and decorated our lawns and courtyards with plaster swans. We saw the future in neon lights. We had pizza shops, supermarkets, and bowling alleys. We had trafric jams, skyscrapers, and air thick with noise and pollution. We had illiterate villagers who came to the capital with scraps of paper in their hands, begging for someone to show them the way to this medical clinic or that government officee. the streets of Tehran were full of Mustangs and Chevys bought at three times the price they sold for back in America, and still our oil wasn't our own. Still our country wasn't our own. ~ Jasmin Darznik

Precision is easier to master than artful vagueness, especially now when, thanks to Google, novels are fact-heavy. We no longer refer to "flowers" but to particular varieties of roses. The whole valuable distinction between foreground (precise) and background (blurred) has been lost, and now everything is crowding toward the viewer, clamoring for attention. ~ Edmund White

Noah doesn't hold hands often. In fact, it was one of the few rules I understood, and it's not lost on me how special this moment is. It's like the roses. Noah's showing me his love. ~ Katie McGarry

Lupe was upset that the Japanese honeymooners were wearing surgical masks over their mouths and noses; she imagined the young Japanese couples were dying of some dread disease - she thought they'd come to Of the Roses to beg Our Lady of Guadalupe to save them. "But aren't they contagious?" Lupe asked. "How many people have they infected between here and Japan?" How much of Juan Diego's translation and Edward Bonshaw's explanation to Lupe was lost in the crowd noise? The proclivity of the Japanese to be "precautionary," to wear surgical masks to protect themselves from bad air or disease - well, it was unclear if Lupe ever understood what that was about. ~ John Irving

I believe in roses. And I believe in putting roses into a vase and sitting the vase on the table. I believe in getting lost and being found, I believe in going barefoot, and in laughter! My religion is to laugh at myself, whenever I can! I believe in the sunlight and in grey skies with big, beautiful clouds! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Rush-hour on the A rain. A blind man
staggers forth, his cane tapping lightly
own the aisle. He leans against the door,

raises a violin to chin, and says I'm sorry
to bother you, folks. But please. Just listen.
And it kills me, the word sorry. As if something like music

should be forgiven. He nuzzles into the wood like a lover,
inhales, and at the first slow stroke, the crescendo
seeps through our skin like warm water, we

who have nothing but destinations, who dream of light
but descend into the mouths of tunnels, searching.
Beads of sweat fall from his brow, making dark roses

on the instrument. His head swooning to each chord
exhaled through the hollow torso. The woman beside me
has put down her book, closed her eyes, the baby

has stopped crying, the cop has sat down, and I know
this train is too fast for dreaming, that these iron jaws
will always open to swallow a smile already lost.

How insufficient the memory, to fail before death.
how will hear these notes when the train slides
into the yard, the lights turned out, and the song

lingers with breaths rising from empty seats?
I know I am too human to praise what is fading.
But for now, I just want to listen as the train fills

completely with warm water, and we are all
swimming slowly toward the man with Mozart
flowing from his hands ~ Ocean Vuong

She hadn't planned on having another beer, but then ... when did she ever plan to drink another one? They usually just followed one after the other like stepping stones set into a stream, and she hopped along them one at a time until she lost her balance and fell into the drink. ~ Megan Hart

Without a plan, even the most brilliant business can get lost. You need to have goals, create milestones and have a strategy in place to set yourself up for success. ~ Yogi Berra

Heat is lost at the surface, so the more surface area you have relative to volume, the harder you must work to stay warm. That means that little creatures have to produce heat more rapidly than large creatures. They must therefore lead completely different lifestyles. An elephant's heart beats just thirty times a minute, a human's sixty, a cow's between fifty and eighty, but a mouse's beats six hundred times a minute - ten times a second. Every day, just to survive, the mouse must eat about 50 percent of its own body weight. We humans, by contrast, need to consume only about 2 percent of our body weight to supply our energy requirements. One area where animals are curiously - almost eerily - uniform is with the number of heartbeats they have in a lifetime. Despite the vast differences in heart rates, nearly all animals have about 800 million heartbeats in them if they live an average life. The exception is humans. We pass 800 million heartbeats after twenty-five years, and just keep on going for another fifty years and 1.6 billion heartbeats or so. It is tempting to attribute this exceptional vigor to some innate superiority on our part, but in fact it is only over the last ten or twelve generations that we have deviated from the standard mammalian pattern thanks to improvements in our life expectancy. For most of our history, 800 million beats per lifetime was about the human average, too. ~ Bill Bryson

I never slept when I lost. I'd see the sun come up without ever having closed my eyes. I'd see those base hits over and over and they would drive me crazy. ~ Robin Roberts

The music surged down the stairs like a flashing stream - it gathered in the corridor and burst like a waterfall through the wide entry doors. It splashed over a small, lonely figure crouching on the lowest step, dark and colorless like an un-moving lump of black, a little hillock with mad, unresting eyes. It was the old man who had freed himself with such difficulty from the unrelenting window. He crouched in the corner, lost and done for, with bowed shoulders and knees drawn high, as though he would never rise again - and over him, and away in gay and flashing cascades, the music splashed and danced, strong, pitiless, unceasing as life itself. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

That was fantastic," Alvarez said. "I want to do it again. Next year, maybe, when my legs grow back." "Stop being such a baby," Laila said. "Ignore her," Alvarez said to Neil. "She's just sour because she lost nine goals in forty-five minutes. Don't know why, not like it's a new personal record or - ohhh, it is. Ouch, that's gotta sting a bit. So much for being first-draft. ~ Nora Sakavic

Why do you want so much this new beginning? Do you think the new beginning will postpone the end? Are you afraid of the end? Are you afraid of death Michael?" (Ch.35) ~ Stevan V. Nikolic

The pure, the bright, the beautiful, That stirred our hearts in youth, The impulse to a wordless prayer, The dreams of love and truth; The longings after something lost, The spirit's yearning cry, The striving after better hopes ... These things can never die. ~ Ruskin Bond

I am very grateful for the opportunities provided to me through appearing on 'American Idol.' The value that the fans and the show have given to my career is not lost on me. However, I have not felt that I have been free to conduct my career in a way that I am comfortable with. ~ Phillip Phillips

A big desire is not enough to meet the expectations of lost dreams. ~ Dejan Stojanovic