Cherry Blossoms Quotes

“What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.”
― Kobayashi Issa, Poems

“Let us find inner freedom in each lucky moment that we encounter, like a sun-basking butterfly that finds peace on a cherry blossom petal. (“I seek you”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Come see the cherry trees of a water constellation
and the round key of the rapid universe,
come touch the fire of instantaneous blue,
come before its petals are consumed.”
― Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets

“Light as feathers, as fleeting as Zephyr, one moment they breathed pink, the next they faded. Cherry blossoms were as much an inspiration for beautiful verse as they were a reminder of life's fickleness, she thought.”
― Alice Poon, The Green Phoenix: A Novel of Empress Xiaozhuang, the Woman Who Re-Made Asia

“Due to their short bloom time, Sakura blossoms are a metaphor for life itself: beautiful yet fleeting. You’ll realize when you’re as old as me to hang on to the good times because they won’t last forever.”
― Shannon M Mullen, See What Flowers

“Suddenly she was seeing the buds on the cherry trees around her; she could feel the energy packed within them, a bouquet of fireworks whose fuse had already been lit. She could smell them, too, a subtle essence of pink and lollipops, the sweetness deepened by the scent of the slowly warming earth below them.”
― Erica Bauermeister, The Lost Art of Mixing

“A cherry tree was coming into bloom, shooting out a froth of sugar-pink blossoms. She could see from its size and the gnarled branches that it was a mature tree, yet still capable of putting on such a wonderful show.
A new beginning every spring, even from an old tree.”
― Maggie Alderson, The Scent of You

“Like any great and good country, Japan has a culture of gathering- weddings, holidays, seasonal celebrations- with food at the core. In the fall, harvest celebrations mark the changing of the guard with roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, and skewers of grilled gingko nuts. As the cherry blossoms bloom, festive picnics called hanami usher in the spring with elaborate spreads of miso salmon, mountain vegetables, colorful bento, and fresh mochi turned pink with sakura petals.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Watanabe-san and Sadie exchanged gifts. She brought him a pair of carved wooden Ichigo chopsticks that their Japanese distributor had had made to celebrate the release of the second Ichigo in Japan.
In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process---its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman's slate appears to be blank. "I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you," Watanabe-san said. "This is by Hokusai's daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survived, but I think she is even better than the father.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“They hung in huge clusters from the black austerity of the branches like a mass of white seashells spread over a reef. The evening wind made the curtains billow along the path, and when it caught the tips of the branches, they bent gracefully in a rustle of blossoms. Then the great, widespread branches themselves began to sway with an easy grandeur under their weight of white. The pallor of the flowers was tinged here and there by pink clusters of buds. And with almost invisible subtlety, the star-shaped centre of each blossom was marked with pink in tiny, sharp strokes, like the stitches holding a button in place.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

“I went outside. The rain had stopped.
The air, washed by the rain, was serene, and the waves sounded closer than usual.
The full moon shone like a pearl in the night sky.
The moonlight made it look as if all the houses had sunk to the bottom of a lake.
The road stretched ahead, white.
It was the road that led to Migitahama.
A gust of wind and the petals from a wild cherry tree went dancing, white against the darkness, and I remembered then that the cherry trees here blossomed two or three weeks later than in Tokyo.
The waves roared.
I stood alone in the darkness.
Light does not illuminate.
It only looks for things to illuminate.
And I had never been found by the light.
I would always be in darkness—”
― Yū Miri, Tokyo Ueno Station

“Because this tea kaiseki would be served so soon after breakfast, it would be considerably smaller than a traditional one. As a result, Stephen had decided to serve each mini tea kaiseki in a round stacking bento box, which looked like two miso soup bowls whose rims had been glued together. After lifting off the top dome-shaped cover the women would behold a little round tray sporting a tangle of raw squid strips and blanched scallions bound in a tahini-miso sauce pepped up with mustard. Underneath this seafood "salad" they would find a slightly deeper "tray" packed with pearly white rice garnished with a pink salted cherry blossom. Finally, under the rice would be their soup bowl containing the wanmori, the apex of the tea kaiseki. Inside the dashi base we had placed a large ball of fu (wheat gluten) shaped and colored to resemble a peach. Spongy and soft, it had a savory center of ground duck and sweet lily bulb. A cluster of fresh spinach leaves, to symbolize the budding of spring, accented the "peach," along with a shiitake mushroom cap simmered in mirin, sake, and soy.
When the women had finished their meals, we served them tiny pink azuki bean paste sweets. David whipped them a bowl of thick green tea. For the dry sweets eaten before his thin tea, we served them flower-shaped refined sugar candies tinted pink.
After all the women had left, Stephen, his helper, Mark, and I sat down to enjoy our own "Girl's Day" meal. And even though I was sitting in the corner of Stephen's dish-strewn kitchen in my T-shirt and rumpled khakis, that soft peach dumpling really did taste feminine and delicate.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“Finally, we would have been offered either a spring takiawase, meaning "foods boiled or stewed together," or a wanmori (the apex of a tea kaiseki meal) featuring seasonal ingredients, such as a cherry blossom-pink dumpling of shrimp and egg white served in a dashi base accented with udo, a plant with a white stalk and leaves that tastes like asparagus and celery, and a sprig of fresh sansho, the aromatic young leaves from the same plant that bears the seedpods the Japanese grind into the tongue-numbing spice always served with fatty eel.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“God took His time to carve out the perfect place, Sam remembered her grandma always saying.
Indeed, the hilltop was akin to a real cherry on top of a stunningly picturesque sundae. Bayview Point was home to two of northern Michigan's most popular orchards and tourist stops: Very Cherry Orchards and her family's Orchard and Pie Pantry. The first half of the hill was dense with rows of tart cherry trees, and the limbs of the small, bushy trees were bursting with cherries, red arms waving at Sam as if to greet her home.
In the spring, these trees were filled with white blossoms that slowly turned as pink as a perfect rosé, their beauty so tender that it used to make Sam's heart ache when she would run through the orchards as part of her high school cross-country training.
Often, when Sam ran, the spring winds would tear at the tender flowers and make it look as though it were snowing in the midst of a beautiful warm day.
Like every good native, Sam knew cherries had a long history in northern Michigan. French settlers had cherry trees in their gardens, and a missionary planted the very first cherry trees on Old Mission Peninsula.
Very Cherry Orchards grew nearly 100 acres of Montmorency tart cherries in addition to Balaton cherries, black sweet cherries, plums, and nectarines. They sold their fruit to U-Pickers as well as large companies that made pies, but they had also become famous for their tart cherry juice concentrate, now sold at grocery and health food stores across the United States. People loved it for its natural health benefits, rich in antioxidants.”
― Viola Shipman, The Recipe Box

“One day we strolled down the Philosopher's Path, which proved as enchanting as I had hoped in the fragrant pink bloom of spring. Since ancient times, the Japanese have heralded the arrival of the cherry blossoms because they symbolize the ephemeral beauty of life.
But it isn't just the three or four days of open flowers that stirs the senses. It is their arrival and departure. Looking at a bud about to burst open offers the pleasurable anticipation of rebirth, while the soft scattering of petals on the ground is often considered the most beautiful stage of all because it represents the death of the flowers.
Another day I took John to one of my tea kaiseki classes to watch the making of a traditional picnic to celebrate the arrival of the cherry blossoms. While he sat on a stool near my cooking station, Stephen and I cooked rice in water flavored with kelp, sake, and light soy, then packed it into a wooden mold shaped like a chrysanthemum. After tapping out the compact white flower, we decorated it with two salted cherry blossoms.
We wrapped chunks of salted Spanish mackerel in brined cherry leaves and steamed the packets until the fatty fish turned milky in parts. We also made cold seafood salad, pea custard, and chewy millet dumplings, which we grilled over a charcoal burner until brown and sticky enough to hold a coating of ivory Japanese poppy seeds.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“She holds the acceptance letter in her hand; the sweet smell of the bird cherry tree wafts in through the open kitchen window. Her mother's apron is covered in black and purple flowers. Maya shuts her eyes, breathes in the spicy aroma of bird cherry blossoms.”
― Anne Østby, Pieces of Happiness

“Four years to the day after Fairchild's 1908 gift of the trees to Washington's schools, on March 27, 1912, Mrs. Taft broke dirt during the private ceremony in West Potomac Park near the banks of the Potomac River. The wife of the Japanese ambassador was invited to plant the second tree. Eliza Scidmore and David Fairchild took shovels not long after. The 3,020 trees were more than could fit around the tidal basin. Gardeners planted extras on the White House grounds, in Rock Creek Park, and near the corner of Seventeenth and B streets close to the new headquarters of the American Red Cross. It took only two springs for the trees to become universally adored, at least enough for the American government to feel the itch to reciprocate. No American tree could rival the delicate glamour of the sakura, but officials decided to offer Japan the next best thing, a shipment of flowering dogwoods, native to the United States, with bright white blooms.
Meanwhile, the cherry blossoms in Washington would endure over one hundred years, each tree replaced by clones and cuttings every quarter century to keep them spry. As the trees grew, so did a cottage industry around them: an elite group of gardeners, a team to manage their public relations, and weather-monitoring officials to forecast "peak bloom"---an occasion around which tourists would be encouraged to plan their visits. Eventually, cuttings from the original Washington, D.C, trees would also make their way to other American cities with hospitable climates. Denver, Colorado; Birmingham, Alabama; Saint Paul, Minnesota.”
― Daniel Stone, The Food Explorer: The True Adventures of the Globe-Trotting Botanist Who Transformed What America Eats

“The crest of Cherry Hill was a wonderful vantage point. To the west the lake gleamed sapphire blue in the May sunshine. To the east and south cherry blossoms blazed white against the green landscape.”
― Louisa Morgan, The Age of Witches

“Make a fist,
Hold your breath—
Let it go.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“Autumn in kimono,
Poet's cue to write haiku—
Sense over rhyme.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“We are visitors,
Busy in claiming it ours—
In museum of art.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“Clear blue sky,
Mirroring the calm sea—
I'm a fish, got hooked.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“How are you?
The reason you need to ask—
Is the answer.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“What shed, earth’s clay—
Transaction held in the air,
Flower became honey.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“Every house is haunted
With the ghost that says—
You're safe within the wall.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“Cocoon's cry to first fly,
Travels thousands of miles—
So much in so little life.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“Air breathes Fire,
Fell for Flames—
Phoenix born in Flickers.”
― Ritu Negi, Cherry Blossoms: A Haiku Poetry Book

“They are lovely in the way that all cherry blossom is lovely--- pink and frilly and slightly cloying to the eye--- but a few steps away from the crowds is a hut selling ice cream. I queue for a cornet, which comes with a perfect soft-serve swirl that id then showered with gold leaf. Tiny snowflakes of gold on a wave of vanilla ice cream that I eat under the cherry trees. Silly, decadent and breathtakingly beautiful.


A gnarled, grey tree whose branches are covered in creamy-white bubbles of opening blossom. It is like a tree festooned with popcorn.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“In the food hall of a department store in Osaka, flat plastic packets of rose-pink cherry blossom on twigs. Just as we would sell herbs.”
― Nigel Slater, A Thousand Feasts: Small Moments of Joy… A Memoir of Sorts

“Do you remember? Every spring, we wanted to see the cherry blossoms. We even dreamed of going to Japan one day.”
― Sevinc Abbasova, Moments Unframed