Florence Quotes

1. "I was born in Riverside and spent my whole growing-up years in Florence, a little township on the Delaware River. I tell people that I'm from the West Coast of New Jersey."
Author: Adam Hughes

2. "Page 134 Florence Nightengale is speaking to William MonkOf course. If you know the truth, it takes a gentler and perhaps a wiser woman than Purdence Barrymore not to speak it aloud. She did not understand the arts of diplomacy. I fear that perhaps I do not either. The sick cannot wait for flattery and coercion to do their work."
Author: Anne Perry

3. "She was shocked by how dirty Florence was."
Author: Christobel Kent

4. "Mother Florence had once told her that jealousy was the worst of all faults because it prevented a person from being who they were born to be."
Author: Christopher Pike

5. "Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone's blueprint? It's not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called "capitalism," figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin."
Author: David Graeber

6. "…"The Emersons who were at Florence, do you mean? No, I don't suppose it will prove to be them. It is probably a long cry from them to friends of Mr. Vyse's. Oh, Mrs. Honeychurch, the oddest people! The queerest people! For our part we liked them, didn't we?" He appealed to Lucy. "There was a great scene over some violets. They picked violets and filled all the vases in the room of these very Miss Alans who have failed to come to Cissie Villa. Poor little ladies! So shocked and so pleased. It used to be one of Miss Catharine's great stories. ‘My dear sister loves flowers,' it began. They found the whole room a mass of blue — vases and jugs — and the story ends with ‘So ungentlemanly and yet so beautiful.' It is all very difficult. Yes, I always connect those Florentine Emersons with violets."…"
Author: E.M. Forster

7. "As her time in Florence drew to a close she was only at ease amongst those to whom she felt indifferent."
Author: E.M. Forster

8. "To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown."
Author: Elizabeth Blackwell

9. "When you celebrate, there is sure to be cake."Florence Ditlow, in "The Bakery Girls."
Author: Florence Ditlow

10. "Everything I pick up seems to lure me away. Everything I do in my daily life begins to feel like striking wet matches. The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to 'go' runs through me equally with an intense desire to 'stay' at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of Old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport."
Author: Frances Mayes

11. "How many bones did he set?" I cared about it much less than they did. It's my Florence Nightingale calm, I suppose.There was a pause."Twenty-seven," said Father.There was a question mark in that pause. "How many bones are in the hand?"Another pause."Twenty-seven," said Eldric."
Author: Franny Billingsley

12. "Speak up,' says Myrna who has a fuzzy white caterpillar of a moustache. 'My hearing's not so good.' 'I WAS SHOT IN THE HEAD.' Liz turns to Thandi. 'I thought you said you didn't remember how you got the hole in your head.' Thandi apologizes. 'I just remembered.' 'Shot in the head!' Florence-scratchy-voice says. 'Oy, that's rough.' 'Aw, it's nothing special. Happens pretty regularly where I'm from,' Thandi says. 'WHAT?' asks Myrna with the moustache. 'Say it toward my left ear, that's the good one.' 'I SAID, "IT'S NOTHING SPECIAL,"' Thandi yells/"
Author: Gabrielle Zevin

13. "I can see how I could write a bold account of myself as a passionate man who rose from humble beginnings to cut a wide swath in the world, whose crimes along the way might be written off to extravagance and love and art, and could even almost believe some of it myself on certain days after the sun went down if I'd had a snort or two and was in Los Angeles and it was February and I was twenty-four, but I find a truer account in the Herald-Star, where it says: "Mr. Gary Keillor visited at the home of Al and Florence Crandall on Monday and after lunch returned to St. Paul, where he is currently employed in the radio show business… Lunch was fried chicken with gravy and creamed peas"."
Author: Garrison Keillor

14. "The key to the city of Florence was about two feet long, and painted a garish gold.Hamilton was fascinated by it. "Wow! How big is the lock?"Jonah laughed. "There is no lock, cuz. It's an honorary gig. Back in my crib in LA, I've got a whole shed full of keys from different cities. Want to know the kicker? I can't get at them. The gardener lost the key to the shed."
Author: Gordon Korman

15. "Hamilton dabbed a tissue at the cut under his eye. "Except for the time I met the Great Khali, that was the coolest thing I've ever done!"The foursome, only slightly the worse for wear, stood on the tarmac of the small airfield outside Milan, transferring their luggage from the limo to Jonah's jet for the flight back to Florence. "You didn't do anything, yo," Jonah seethed. "It was done to all of us by the freak show with the nerve to complain that the family branches are too violent!"
Author: Gordon Korman

16. "I'm starving. When we check into our hotel, let's ask the desk clerk where we can find one of those vast pizzas.""What are you talking about?""Your guidebook says Florence is a city of vast pizzas. Look it up yourself.""Those are vast piazzas, not pizzas! It means public squares!"Dan's face fell. "Oh."Amy sighed. "I honestly thought the clue hunt took the dweeb out of you. No such luck."
Author: Gordon Korman

17. "Florence and Milan had given him ideas more flexible than hose of people who'd stayed at home."
Author: Hilary Mantel

18. "Let's say I will rip your life apart. Me and my banker friends. How can he explain that to him? The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined; from Lisbon, from where the ships with sails of silk drift west and are burned up in the sun. Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses, not be the call of the bugle, but by the click of the abacus, not by the grate and click of the mechanism of the gun but by the scrape of the pen on the page of the promissory note that pays for the gun and the gunsmith and the powder and shot."
Author: Hilary Mantel

19. "On Chesil Beach he could have called out to Florence, he could have gone after her. He did not know, or would not have cared to know, that as she ran away from him, certain in her distress that she was about to lose him, she had never loved him more, or more hopelessly, and that the sound of his voice, would have been a deliverance, and she would have turned back."
Author: Ian McEwan

20. "But her role had changed; she was now available for marriage and her primary task was to find a mate. As Florence and Hugh Bell's daughter, she was expected to make an excellent match. And if there wasn't one here, at least she would learn how to conduct herself for the chase."
Author: Janet Wallach

21. "I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool."
Author: John Updike

22. "I was hedging. I had no idea about what would happen if I told him something about the future.Like that Siena would face a plague within a few years. And that Florence would eventually rule them.What would happen if I let such things slip? All sorts of time/space continuum stuff might come crashing down. Or maybe it wouldn't.I should've watched more Star Trek as a kid."
Author: Lisa Tawn Bergren

23. "After a sleepless night the body gets weaker,It becomes dear and not yours - and nobody's.Just like a seraph you smile to peopleAnd arrows moan in the slow arteries.After a sleepless night the arms get weakerAnd deeply equal to you are the friend and foe.Smells like Florence in the frost, and in eachSudden sound is the whole rainbow.Tenderly light the lips, and the shadow's goldenNear the sunken eyes. Here the night has sparkedThis brilliant likeness - and from the dark nightOnly just one thing - the eyes - are growing dark."
Author: Marina Tsvetaeva

24. "At Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts. Imprisoned"
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

25. "Florence which included diplomatic missions to various European courts."
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli

26. "Florence had noticed one or two eccentricities in herself lately, which might be the result of hard work, or of age, or of living alone. When the letters came, for example, she often found herself wasting time in looking at the postmarks and wondering whoever they could be from, instead of opening them in a sensible manner and finding out at once."
Author: Penelope Fitzgerald

27. "When rivers flooded, when fire fell from the sky, what a fine place the library was, the many rooms, the books. With luck, no one found you. How could they!--when you were off to Tanganyika in '98, Cairo in 1812, Florence in 1492!?"
Author: Ray Bradbury

28. "You see?" Damien leaned over his desk and spread out half a dozen charcoal sketches. "These are only quick studies of course. But my agent in Florence tells me this artist, Leonardo, is a master and also quite an inventor of mechanical devices--which, as you know, are my passion. Leonardo just completed a portrait of Lisa de Giocondo. He calls it the Mona Lisa. I thought I might commission him to do a portrait of me, and while he's here, I can pick his mind for mechanical secrets. How does that sound?""Expensive," Gideon murmured."
Author: Rick Riordan

29. "Florence and art is something that is part of my life and is part of myself."
Author: Roberto Cavalli

30. "The Black Death was a faithful visitor to Florence. It arrived, on average, once every ten years, always in the summer."
Author: Ross King

31. "Florence Nightingale was an amazing figure. She created the American Red Cross. She saw the suffering from bad health conditions on the battlefield and in the military hospitals, and she fought like crazy to change the conditions; to make sure that the doctors washed their hands and practiced sanitary measures. She put herself at great risks."
Author: Sharon Lawrence

32. "By the time Florence Nightingale got her neurotic hands on Cleopatra, she had been mangled beyond recognition by both history and literature."
Author: Stacy Schiff

33. "You have the most revolting Florence Nightingale complex,' said Mrs. Smiling.It is not that at all, and well you know it. On the whole, I dislike my fellow beings; I find them so difficult to understand. But I have a tidy mind and untidy lives irritate me. Also, they are uncivilized."
Author: Stella Gibbons

34. "I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway.."
Author: Sylvia Plath

35. "It's a wonderful body," he'd whispered the next morning while she was still asleep. Not even the blue silk Loretta Caponi pajamas he'd brought back for her from Florence could disguise its lumpiness. But it was so gorgeously strong. She almost never got sick. She could outswim riptides and ski double diamonds. And even when a wave scraped her into the sand or a patch of ice threw her to the ground, she rarely bruised. He loved that body for taking care of her, for sheltering the one thing he couldn't live without."
Author: Tanya Egan Gibson

36. "To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity."
Author: Timothy Garton Ash

37. "I've been diagnosed as being bi-polar but so have Florence Nightingale and King David...which kinda leaves me in pretty dam good company...if I must say so."
Author: Timothy Pina

38. "She suddenly realizes that Bob, the probable cancer patient, is standing in the hallway looking lost. She stops and tries to look concerned.'Will you be okay?' As if I give a fuck.'Yeah,' he replies forlornly. 'I'll be fine.'She gives him a quick kiss on the forehead – as sexual as Florence Nightingale on a TB ward – and rushes from the house."
Author: Tom Winter

39. "Gather up your loins, daughter. You named Lillian Florence Jones after my mother. A toughter lady never lived. Find your talent and drive it."
Author: Toni Morrison

40. "In Paris, you learn wit, in London you learn to crush your social rivals, and in Florence you learn poise."
Author: Virgil Thomson

41. "Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wishful hunch now seems confirmed by the way she's reading her Time magazine article next to me."
Author: Zack Love

Florence Quotes Pictures