spooky blossom.

“If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or--and the outward semblance is the same--crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory.”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

“Queen of Night is as close to black as a flower gets, though in fact it is a dark and glossy maroonish purple. Its hue is so dark, however, that it appears to draw more light into itself than it reflects, a kind of floral black hole. In the garden, depending on the the angle of the sun, the blossoms of a Queen of Night may read as positive or negative space, as flowers or shadows of a flower.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“How often is it the case that, when impossibilities have come to pass and dreams have condensed their misty substance into tangible realities, we find ourselves calm, and evenly coldly self-possessed, amid circumstances which it would have been a delirium of joy or agony to anticipate!”
― Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccini's Daughter

“And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.”
― Tom Cheetham, Green Man, Earth Angel: The Prophetic Tradition and the Battle for the Soul of the World