quotations about blushing
You haven't seen a bald man in his sixties blush? Oh, it happens, just as it does to a hairy, spotty fifteen-year-old. And because it's rarer, it sends the blusher tumbling back to that time when life felt like nothing more than one long sequence of embarrassments.
JULIAN BARNES
The Sense of an Ending
The man that blushes is not quite a brute.
EDWARD YOUNG
Night Thoughts
Now the red wins upon her cheek;
Now white with crimson closes
In desperate struggle--so to speak,
A War of Roses.
THOMAS BAILEY ALDRICH
On Her Blushing
I would rather see a young man blush than turn pale.
MARCUS CATO
Plutarch's Lives
Sometimes a woman has experienced too much life to have any blush left in her cheeks, but the man who puts it there is someone not easily forgotten.
DANNIKA DARK
Five Weeks
While, mantling on the maiden's cheek,
Young roses kindled into thought.
THOMAS MOORE
Evenings in Greece
Blushing is the color of virtue.
MATHEW HENRY
Commentaries
If you'd blush saying something in person, don't write it.
JONATHAN PRICE
Put That in Writing
And bid the cheek be ready with a blush
Modest as morning when she coldly eyes
The youthful Phoebus.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Troilus and Cressida
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
MARK TWAIN
Following the Equator
There's a blush for won't, and a blush for shan't,
And a blush for having done it.
JOHN KEATS
Sharing Eve's Apple
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
PAUL HOFFMAN
The Last Four Things
Forgot the blush that virgin fears impart
To modest cheeks, and borrow'd one from art.
WILLIAM COWPER
Expostulation
On her cheek blushes the richness of an autumn sky,
With ever-shifting beauty.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
"The Spirit of Poetry"
Red as a rose is she.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Blushing is literally waving a red flag at a bull, a come on, a variation on the fight-or-flee response. Blushers want to hide, yet the blush draws attention to themselves.
MURRAY BILMES
attributed, The Odd Body
Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all.
ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING
Aurora Leigh
Give me the eloquent cheek, where blushes burn and die.
FRANCES SARGENT OSGOOD
A Wreath of Wild Flowers from New England
Thou know'st the mask of night is on my face;
Else would a maiden blush bepaint my cheek.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Romeo and Juliet
And ever and anon, with rosy red
The bashful blood her snowy cheeks did dye.
EDMUND SPENSER
Faerie Queene