Orwell's Roses

At thirteen, he won a scholarship to the most elite of all, Eton, where he spent another four years, acquiring an accent that marked him as an outsider among the poor without making him an insider among the rich.

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about a hundred years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish C

There might be evolutionary reasons why we too find flowers so attractive, since our lives are so bound up with theirs,

“Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

The lives he invented are miseries studded with epiphanies. Orwell did not believe in permanent happiness or the politics that tried to realize it, but he did believe devoutly in moments of delight, even rapture,

As a writer, you withdraw and disconnect yourself from the world in order to connect to it in the far-reaching way that is other people elsewhere reading the words that came together in this contemplative state. What is vivid in the writing is not in how it hits the senses but what it does in the imagination;

“One way of looking at trees is that they are captured light. Photosynthesis, after all, captures a photon, takes a little energy from it before re-emitting it at a lower wavelength, and uses that captured energy to turn air into sugars, and then sugars into the stuff that makes leaves, wood, and roots. Even the most solid of beings, the giant sequ

Though flowers as the sexual organs of plants often have both male and female reproductive parts, they are routinely represented as feminine, and phenomena that have been feminized are often dismissed as ornamental and inconsequential.

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.

Many individual trees that I knew as a child are still recognizable when I return, so little changed when I have changed so much.