Plants - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

The soul of a flower is its scent, and splendid as they may look, sea flowers have no soul.

- Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870), translated byWalter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter (1993)

[On an alien:] An intellectual carrot. The mind boggles.

- Charles Lederer, The Thing (from AnotherWorld) (film, 1951)

Tom's words laid bare the hearts of trees and their thoughts, which were often dark and strange, and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth, gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

He laid his hand upon the tree beside the ladder; never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree's skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.

- J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

The silence seemed to carry as much weight as that deep mass of foliage which covered all the land on the day side of the planet. It was a silence built of millions upon millions of years, intensifying as the sun overhead poured forth more and more energy in the first stages of its decline. Not that the silence signified lack of life. Life was everywhere, life on a formidable scale. But the increased solar radiation that had brought the extinction of most of the animal kingdom had spelt the triumph of plant life. Everywhere, in a thousand forms and guises, the plants ruled. And vegetables have no voices.

- BrianW. Aldiss, ''Nomansland'' (1961)

That which submits rules. [. . .] The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows - a wall against the wind. This is the willow's purpose.

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

Earth, terra, tellus mean both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live; the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.

- Ursula K. Le Guin, ''TheWord forWorld Is Forest'' (1972)

He could sense, too, the thrill of being a tree, which was something he hadn't expected. He knew that it felt good to curl your toes in the earth, but he'd never realized it could feel quite as good as that.

- Douglas Adams, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1985)

The power of growing things confounded imagination. Little fresh top soil had formed on this man-made clearing but the roadway had for all practical purposes vanished under weeds, shrubs, trees, native grasses.

- George Turner, Drowning Towers (1987)

Plant breeding is not an enterprise for impatient people. It is a gesture of faith in the (personal) future.

- Judith Moffett, ''Tiny Tango'' (1989)

Wind swept the grass in waves, the golden blades swaying as if to pipe music. No smell on earth is like that one, a sweetness more delicate than any perfumed oil, richer than any scent of flower.

- Jim Grimsley, ''Free in Asveroth'' (1998)