Garden Quotes - Page 36

• I travel in gardens and bedrooms, basements and attics, around corners, through doorways and windows, along sidewalks, over carpets, down drainpipes, in the sky, with friends, lovers, children and heros; perceived, remembered, imagined, distorted and clarified.

  Tom Robbins

  Children, Hero, Sky

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Another Roadside Attraction”, p.30, Bantam

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• This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Moving, Men, Clouds

  F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book House (2016). “F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Complete Novels (Book House)”, p.393, Book House

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• It means much to have loved, to have been happy, to have laid my hand on the living Garden, even for a day.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Mean, Hands, Has Beens

  Jorge Luis Borges (2000). “Selected Poems”, Penguin Group USA

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• THE POISON TREE I was angry with my friend: I told my wrath, my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I water'd it in fears, Night & morning with my tears; And I sunned it with my smiles And with soft deceitful wiles. And it grew both day and night, Till it bore an apple bright; And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine, And into my garden stole When the night had veil'd the pole: In the morning glad I see My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.

  William Blake

  Morning, Night, Apples

  'Songs of Experience' (1794) 'A Poison Tree'

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• When the souls rise up in glory, yours shall not be shunned nor sunderered, but shall be the prize of the gods' gardens. Even your darkness shall be treasured then, and all your pain made holy.

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Pain, Soul, Darkness

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• We can be hindered in our development and our personal growth by political conditions. Outer circumstances can constrain us. Only when we are free to develop our innate abilities can we live as free beings. But we are just as much determined by inner potential and outer opportunities as the Stone Age boy on the Rhine, the lion in Africa, or the apple tree in the garden.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Boys, Opportunity, Apples

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• ...the moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being.

  Anita Desai

  Moon, Risk, Pearls

  Anita Desai (1980). “Clear Light of Day”, p.159, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• There's a black rose growing in your garden.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Rose, Black, Growing

  Hilda Doolittle (1981). “HERmione”, p.82, New Directions Publishing

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• And I walk out of space Into an overgrown garden of values, And tear up seeming stability And self-comprehension of causes. And your, infinity, textbook I read by myself, without people - Leafless, savage medical book, A problem book of gigantic radicals.

  Osip Mandelstam

  Book, Space, Self

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• I am officially Jewish, but I’m Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is an Italian restaurant.

  A. J. Jacobs

  Italian, Way, Olives

  A. J. Jacobs (2008). “The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible”, p.4, Simon and Schuster

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• at last you, will say (maybe without speaking) (there are mountains inside your skull garden and chaos, ocean and hurricane; certain corners of rooms, portraits of great-grandmothers, curtains of a particular shade; your deserts; your private dinosaurs; the first woman) all i need to know: tell me everything just as it was from the beginning.

  Margaret Atwood

  Ocean, Grandmother, Skulls

  Margaret Atwood (1987). “Selected Poems: 1965-1975”, p.39, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• If you listen, you can hear it. The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of the street, on the roof of a house. It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you. It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

  Jon McGregor

  Song, Cutting, Night

  Jon McGregor (2014). “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things”, p.8, HMH

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• Muggles have garden gnomes, too, you know," Harry told Ron as they crossed the lawn. "Yeah, I've seen those things they think are gnomes," said Ron, bent double with his head in a peony bush, "like fat little Santa Clauses with fishing rods.

  J. K. Rowling

  Thinking, Fishing, Muggles

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• Good heavens, I suppose a man may eat his own muffins in his own garden." "But you have just said it was perfectly heartless to eat muffins!" "I said it was perfectly heartless of YOU under the circumstances. That is a very different thing." "That may be, but the muffins are the same!

  Oscar Wilde

  Men, Heaven, Heartless

  Oscar Wilde (1956). “Annotated The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People with English Grammar Exercises: by Oscar Wilde (Author), Robert Powell (Editor)”, p.72, Powell Publications, LLC

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• You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy does not reserve a plot for weeds

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Weed, Truth, Animal

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• ...with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Book, Feelings, Literature

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• They had nothing to say to each other. A five-year age gap between siblings is like a garden that needs constant attention. Even three months apart allows the weeds to grow up between you.

  Zadie Smith

  Weed, Growing Up, Sibling

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• Other people have shrubbery in their gardens. You have a bottomless pit.

  Cassandra Clare

  People, Pits

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• How many Zen masters does it take to screw in a light bulb? The plum tree in the garden!

  Brad Warner

  Light, Tree, Doe

  Brad Warner (2015). “Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality”, p.206, Simon and Schuster

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• The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in the path or the breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.

  John Steinbeck

  Girl, Sight, Degrees

  John Steinbeck (2002). “East of Eden”, p.33, Penguin

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• That's exactly why nature always trumps gardens. Gardens are just reality pruned of chaos. What doesn't work you rip out.

  Justina Chen

  Rip, Reality, Chaos

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• A garden should be natural-seeming, with wild sections, including a large area of bluebells.

  Diana Wynne Jones

  Natural, Should, Bluebells

  Diana Wynne Jones (2002). “Wizard's Castle”

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• In the sort of screen dappled with different states of mind which my consciousness would simultaneously unfold while I read, and which ranged from the aspirations hidden deepest within me to the completely exterior vision of the horizon which I had, at the bottom of the garden, before my eyes, what was first in me, innermost, the constantly moving handle that controlled the rest, was my belief in the philosophical richness and beauty of the book I was reading, and my desire to appropriate them for myself, whatever that book might be.

  Marcel Proust

  Moving, Book, Philosophical

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• The Garden En robe de parade. - Samain Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, And she is dying piece-meal of a sort of emotional anaemia. And round about there is a rabble Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. They shall inherit the earth. In her is the end of breeding. Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. She would like some one to speak to her, And is almost afraid that I will commit that indiscretion.

  Ezra Pound

  Wall, Emotional, Boredom

  'The Garden' (1916)

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• I am very fond of the oyster shell. It is humble and awkward and ugly. It is slate-colored and unsymmetrical. Its form is not primarily beautiful but functional. I make fun of its knobbiness. Sometimes I resent its burdens and excrescences. But its tireless adaptability and tenacity draw my astonished admiration and sometimes even my tears. And it is comfortable in its familiarity, its homeliness, like old garden gloves when have molded themselves perfectly to the shape of the hand. I do not like to put it down. I will not want to leave it.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh

  Beautiful, Fun, Humble

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh (1975). “GIFT FROM THE SEA”

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