Jane Borodale Quotes

When I am out in my garden or in the fields ... , I think if anything, we are just earth ... We are earth, walking about, eating it. We are composed of the soil, but free to wander. When we dig, we dig at ourselves.

The only certain way to forge new understanding it to carry out investigations for oneself.

Clarity! Accuracy! Think of your words as a key to fit into the lock of your meaning. Cast them with precision. That key should then be swift and perfect in achieving its aim. Well shaped talk is a release from the indefinite. It is explanation. Preparation. Nothing more.

While he digs he is free to let his mind wander, and he dreams his kingdom of pear trees in the orchard across to his left, growing skywards, gnarling, putting forth fat green soft fruits with ease each year. The trees that already grow in the orchards he loves almost as women in his life; the Catherine pear, the Chesil or pear Nouglas, the great Kentish pear, the Ruddick, the Red Garnet, the Norwich, the Windsor, the little green pear ripe at Kingsdon Feast; all thriving where they were planted in his father's ground at Lytes Cary before the management of the estate became his own responsibility as the eldest son. So much has happened these last six years since his father handed over and left for his house in Sherborne: there have been births and deaths - Anys herself was taken from him only last year. But the pear trees live on, reliably flowering and yielding variable quantities as an annual crop that defines the estate, and he has plans to add more.

What a waste of beauty, what a waste of knowledge a sudden death can inflict, like spilling something vital away into dry soil.

I do not need the debris of your mind to furnish mine.

So much of what we do in life stays unexplained