38 Quotes by Margot Berwin

The oil smelled floral and musky, like a flowery animal.She kept right on stroking my body."It has lilac, jasmine, and musk from a rutting deer," she said.The words for the ingredients excited me. Lilac, jasmine, and musk, I said to myself. Lilac, jasmine, and musk, I must. Lilac, jasmine, and musk, I must. They sounded like an incantation. They sounded like the sexiest words in the English language.

The room was large and empty except for a four-poster bed and a framed picture of Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans."A free woman of color who owned her own business," said Vivian Weaver. "She made her own money, and rose to fame and power in a segregated South.

I don't know. Chicken bones, frizzly hens, all that voodoo stuff gives me the creeps."He got up and put his arms around me."How do you know about frizzly hens?""I just do.""Strange.""Louise and Fayetteville.""Ah, yes, Louise. Well, do I give you the creeps?""No.""That's right. And besides, there's a lot more to New Orleans than that. There's gumbo and bread pudding and fried chicken. There are old Victorian homes, music everywhere, and the friendliest, nicest people everywhere.

New Orleans has a scent of its own that's strong almost all the time. Magnolia, sweet olive, jasmine, and chicory-flavored coffee. I doubt anyone will notice you there. Let me give you something beautiful and tender and delicate and tasty, like what you give me every day now, with your skin. Let me give you New Orleans.

I took a walk through the rows of tombs and vaults that looked like blocks and blocks of dead people living next door to each other in the quietest neighborhood that ever existed. There were mausoleums as big as some of the houses I'd seen in the Garden District. Some were well taken care of, whitewashed, and covered with small offerings. Others had huge marble statues of angels holding flowers. And a few were moldy and decayed with actual bones sticking up through the cracks.

Is he from New Orleans originally?""Born and raised.""The people here are born below the sea level and they spend their whole lives wanting to go back to where they came from. My own theory is that everyone from here was a mermaid in another lifetime and they are all trying to swim back to the bottom of the ocean. That Michael of yours will drag you down to the depths if you let him. It's not his fault either. That's where he's most comfortable.

The Floribunda RoseAbundant blooms of sweet perfume, silky smooth to the touch, and intoxicating to the senses, floribunda can and will fool you. In reality she is tough, disease-resistant, prickly, and very hardy in colder zones. The proverbial iron fist in the velvet glove of plants.

Plant MoneyMarijuana can go for thousands of dollars an ounce. In fact, as of 2006, it was the number-one cash crop in the United States, averaging thirty billion dollars a year.Saffron from Iran is the next-most-expensive plant, as it takes seventy-five thousand flowers to make one pound of the popular spice. Orchids, on the other hand, tend to elude the laws of supply and demand and are priced much more like paintings or sculpture, their value being in the eye of a particular collector.

I liked The Water Nymph. It was a dark-haired woman sitting in a dimly lit deep green forest on a gray stone slab overlooking a dark blue spring. It was a contemplative, moody piece and the girl looked the way I imagined I would if I were alone and someone was staring at me without my knowing that they were there.