“She understood. They were plastic flowers of words—but they looked nice on the surface.”

“To be unpopular, you must look the part. Remember four words: plastic flowered swim cap.”

“A woman doesn't want to be told she looks nice,' Jude nuttered as she sat down beside maud's grave. "She wants to be told she's beautiful, sexy. That she looks outrageous. It dosen't matter if its not true.' She sighed and laid the flowers against the headstone. 'Because for the moment, when the words are said and the words are heard, it's perfect truth.”

“Jack hesitated still, and Hazel wanted to say something comforting, give him some bright plastic flowers of words, but Jack would see them for what they were. Jack knew how to see things.”

“There was nothing to be done. From then on, there were flowers waiting for me every time we met, and in the end I gave in, because I was disarmed by the spontaneity of giving and understood tha Lucie cared for it; perhaps her tongue-tied state, her lack of verbal eloquence, made her think of flowers as a form of speech; not in the sense of heavy-handed conventional flower symbolism, but in a sense still more archaic, more nebulous, more instinctive, prelinguistic; perhaps, having always been sparing of words, she longed for that mute stage of evolution when there were no words and people communicated by simple gestures”

“Nancy taught two hens to help her sort flowers to make leis. She set them down by a basket of three colors of plastic flowers. One hen quickly pulled out all the red flowers, and another the white ones, leaving the pink flowers in the basket.”