My experience, with both my parents, is that grief has a lot of down, sad things, but I was also really emotionally raw, in the first year after each of them passed. Flowers smelled more intensely, my relationships were hotter, and I was more willing to risk. I was going for it a lot more. I was 'unsober' and I wasn't playing by my rules.

Everybody has a right to like or dislike anything or anyone. From a flower to a flavor to a book or a composition but it is very sad that in our country we actually fight over such things in an unseemly manner.

One day, I was at my grandmother's house, and I found diaries that she kept as a young girl. I opened one to a page that had flowers glued inside. In her childish handwriting, my grandmother wrote, 'Pap died today. I am very sad.' The fact that this was true and that I could see the withered flowers made a huge impression on me.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers.

I'm more likely to give you a cuddle than a punch in the face. I have a soft side, especially with my girlfriend. I send her flowers and use my culinary skills to pull off romantic meals. I do great Thai dishes.

I think there are certain tenets set in place for all different types on genres. For thrillers, women usually die first. I can't say exactly why, and it's kind of a bummer... But I also can't explain why the wallflower girl in the romantic comedy always gets the guy in the end. That's just the way those movies go.

I'm a romantic, and I like guys to bring flowers and buy some gifts - not expensive things, just romantic things.

I hope that I would be considered romantic. I don't know... one of my favorite movies is 'The Notebook' so I guess that would be considered romantic. But I think being romantic is more than the flowers and the gifts. It's about connecting with the person and being able to talk and share things with her.

I once took the key off my girlfriend's key ring so that I could surprise her when she got home. So I did this whole romantic setup in our bedroom with flowers and rose petals. She was so mad when she got home, but then when she walked in, she was so surprised.

I don't find these technical things like flowers and chocolates romantic at all. I think Valentine's Day makes no sense.

I'm a hopeless romantic, and very much the person in a relationship to go: If things are going well, I'll buy the flowers, remember the dates of things, plan fun nights out.

Now I believe that lovers should be draped in flowers and laid entwined together on a bed of clover and left there to sleep, left there to dream of their happiness.

I'm very romantic. I've emptied flower shops.

Every garden scheme should have a backbone, a central idea beautifully phrased. Every wall, path, stone and flower should have its relationship to the central idea.

Give fools their gold, and knaves their power; let fortune's bubbles rise and fall; who sows a field, or trains a flower, or plants a tree, is more than all.

All things by immortal power. Near of far, to each other linked are, that thou canst not stir a flower without troubling of a star.

That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are smallthings but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

No, what I should really like to do right now, in the full blaze of lights, before this illustrious assembly, is to shower every one of you with gifts, with flowers, with offerings of poetry - to be young once more, to ride on the crest of the wave.

The Victorian language of flowers began with the publication of 'Le Language des Fleurs,' written by Charlotte de Latour and printed in Paris in 1819. To create the book - which was a list of flowers and their meanings - de Latour gathered references to flower symbolism throughout poetry, ancient mythology, and even medicine.

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

Patience doesn't mean making a pact with the devil of denial, ignoring our emotions and aspirations. It means being wholeheartedly engaged in the process that's unfolding, rather than ripping open a budding flower or demanding a caterpillar hurry up and get that chrysalis stage over with.

I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer's body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.