Margot Berwin · 288 pages
Rating: (1.6K votes)
“Plants need roots because they can't move on their own. Their roots serve them well, stopping them from getting blown all over the place by the wind. But we humans can move around at will, and our roots hold us in place unnecessarily. Usually in a place we don't want to be. Then, when we try to move, we rip our roots, and it hurts, so we end up staying right where we are.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“What a strange place, I thought. If I look up everything is so clear and beautiful, and if I look down, everything is so dangerous and ugly. I wished I could keep my head in the sky, but the scorpions brought me back to reality. Or was the sky the reality?”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“I liked the sound of that. A true plant person. It sounded so much more alive, and warmer than a true advertising person.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“The model stripped down naked and stood with her arms out to her sides while genderless cohorts sprayed her body with large silver canisters of foundation. They wore masks over there faces and sprayed her from head to toe like they were putting out a fire. They airbrushed her into a mono-toned six-foot-two column of a human being with no visible veins, nipples, nails, lips, or eyelashes. When every single thing that was real about the model was gone, the make up artist fug through a suite case of brushes and plowed through hundreds of tubes of flesh colored colors and began to draw human features onto her face. At the same time, the hair stylist meticulously sewed with a needle and thread strand after strand of long blond hairs onto her thin light brown locks, creating a thick full mane of shimmering gold. The model had brought her own chef, who cooked her spinach soup from scratch. The soup was fed to her by one of her lackeys, who existed solely for this purpose. The blond boy stood in front of her, blowing on the soup and then feeding it to her from a small silver child's spoon, just big enough to fit between her lips. the model's mouth was barely open, maybe a quarter of an inch wide, so that she would not crack the flesh colored paint.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“I opened the door and stepped down onto something squishy. It was moss, velvety smooth, creating uneven hills of emerald green across the floor of the laundry. I slipped off my silver ballet flats, and my feet sank into the floor
”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“If you can hear the quiet while being woken up by the garbage trucks, you have power. When you can feel the stars when all you can see are the skyscrapers, that's power. When you can smell the forest in front of the dumpster, then you have power. Never let the events in front of you or the people around you, tell you what to see, feel, taste, smell or hear.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“They think they are, but the person they were born to be was covered up by years of living with parents and going to school and fitting in. Every year that passes, a person gets covered up a little bit more, like a sleeping bag slowly zipping up around a body. It's a subtle process until the day a person is totally gone. The sleeping bag is closed, and they never see the sun again”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“It was a color I didn't realize the earth could make without the help of human beings. I knew the water would be blue, but I had in mind a tamer, more pastel blue: a light color through which all the sand and fish underneath would be clearly visible. This water was like super-wavy, lit up turquoise, and so beautiful I could hardly take my eyes off it. The moment I was spellbound by the color of the water was the moment I knew I had been in New York for to long and my decision to leave was a good one.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“I twirled it around in front of my eyes, going momentarily cross-eyed as I looked for any sign of roots. Of course it was much too soon, and I knew that there wouldn't be any, but I checked anyway, because I'm a checker by nature: lights, stoves, occasionally underneath beds, and, apparently, now plant stems. Life was getting complicated.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“After the death of my marriage, I was hell-bent on keeping the bird-of-paradise alive. I would take it slowly. Plants first. And if everything went well, then I'd move on to people.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“Поварвай ми, когато опознаеш себе си, никога да поискаш да се преструваш, че си някой друг.Защото да си себе си е по-прекрасно от всичко, на което можеш да се престориш, за което си мечтал, което можеи да си представиш или в което да се превърнеш.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“In just one moment I had emerged from a world of dark green, almost black, to a world of bright blue and light sunshine. It was what I imagined birth to be like.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
“I went back to the ocean for a wash. The salt stung my face. I didn't know my skin was so raw. I slung my backpack over my shoulders, and with the white mosquito netting wrapped around me like a wedding dress, I went back into the jungle.”
― Margot Berwin, quote from Hothouse Flower and the Nine Plants of Desire
Margot Berwin
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“Instead of asking yourself how you can change that aspect of you, maybe you should be asking yourself why you were created that way. For what purpose do you exist the way that you are?”
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“There's something fairy-tale-like about it, which is perfect, because fairy tales are all about innocence and ill will and the inevitability of terrible things. They're all about the moment when a girl is no longer who she once was”
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“She raised a sharp eyebrow at him. "Vlad, no offense, but look at you. If you're not a vampire, you're clearly the most anemic goth I've ever seen."... "We believed you. Because that's what friends do."
pg267 October to Vlad”
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“A real tank now costs about a million dollars, while a hallucinated one amounts to less than one-hundredth of a cent per person, or centispecter per spectator. A destroyer costs a dime. Today you could fit the whole arsenal of the United States inside a single truck.”
― Stanisław Lem, quote from The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy
“The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye; the good economist also looks beyond. The bad economist sees only the direct consequences of a proposed course; the good economist looks also at the longer and indirect consequences. The bad economist sees only what the effect of a given policy has been or will be on one particular group; the good economist inquires also what the effect of the policy will be on all groups.”
― Henry Hazlitt, quote from Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics
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