I am the very model of a modern Major-General, I've information vegetable, animal and mineral, I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical, From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical.

-Gilbert, Sir W(illiam) S(chwenck)
   The Major-General's song, The Pirates of Penzance, act1.

Its clones have hung on so many suburban walls over the decades that it has become the Mona Lisa of the vegetable world.

-Hughes, Robert Studley Forrest
  On VincentVan Gogh's Sunflowers. In Time,13  Apr.

My vegetable love should grow Vaster than empires, and more slow, An hundred years should go to praise Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze. Two hundred to adore each breast: But thirty thousand to the rest. An age at least to every part, And the last age should show your heart. For Lady you deserve this state; Nor would I love at lower rate. But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near: And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity.

-Marvell, Andrew
c.1650^1652  'To His Coy Mistress' (published1681).

Out of the fertile ground he caused to grow All trees of noblest kind for sight, smell, taste; And all amid them stood theTree of Life, High eminent, blooming ambrosial fruit Of vegetable gold; and next to life Our death theTree of Knowledge grew fast by, Knowledge of good bought dear by knowing ill.

-Milton,John
  Paradise Lost (published1667), bk.4, l.218^24.

Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.

-Pagels, Heinz R(udolf)
  'The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine Mackinnon and Andrea Dworkin', in Playboy, Oct. Collected inVamps andTramps (1994).

There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried.

-Shelley, Percy Bysshe
  'AVindication of Natural Diet'.