Armstrongs Garden Quotes

It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls. ~ Gilbert K. Chesterton

If I was a flower, I would sell perfume.
If I was a plant, I would sell herbs.
If I was a seed, I would sell wood.
If I was a tree, I would sell forests.
If I was a garden, I would sell beauty.
If I was a plant, I would sell medicine.
If I was a fish, I would sell oceans.

If I was a bee, I would sell honey.
If I was a spider, I would sell silk.
If I was a firebug, I would sell light.
If I was a sheep, I would sell wool.
If I was a rabbit, I would sell carrots.
If I was a cow, I would sell leather.
If I was a hen, I would sell eggs.

If I was a stream, I would sell lakes.
If I was a river, I would sell seas.
If I was a bird, I would sell skies.
If I was a monkey, I would sell trees.
If I was a dog, I would sell plains.
If I was a bear, I would sell caves.
If I was a goat, I would sell mountains.

If I was a fox, I would sell wit.
If I was a dove, I would sell peace.
If I was a bear, I would sell valor.
If I was a camel, I would sell grit.
If I was an owl, I would sell wisdom.
If I was a lion, I would sell strength.
If I was an elephant, I would sell might. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

My garden does not whet the appetite; it satisfies it. It does not provoke thirst through heedless indulgence, but slakes it by proffering its natural remedy. Amid such pleasures as these have I grown old. ~ Epicurus

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes. ~ Thomas Moore

Here, in the garden at night, it is another world, strange and yet friendly and familiar, never frightening. There is such quietness, such sweetness, such refreshment.

Close your eyes. Breathe in again, smell everything mingled together, flowers and earth and leaves and grass. Smell the night.

Listen. Nothing at all. Silence, rushing like the sea in your ears.

However small and sparse the garden, and wherever it is, even inside a great city, if something grows there, it is a magic place by night.

Leave it, walk quietly back towards the lights that shine out of the house. You will take its magic with you.

Now, you will sleep. ~ Susan Hill

If she had to choose which aspect of the suite she despised most, it would have been a hard call between the lock and the garden, though these days she nursed a particular grudge against the curtains. ~ Marie Rutkoski

Surely there was some divine trick to make the hours go faster. To let them slip past unseen, to sleep for years, so that when I woke again the world would be new. I closed my eyes. Through the window I heard the bees singing in the garden. My lion's tail beat against the stones. An eternity later, when I opened my eyes, the shadows had not even moved. ~ Madeline Miller

Okay, but would you say between us we have the combined IQ of at least a garden slug? ~ Norah Wilson

They were full of mysteries and secrets, like ... like poems turned into landscapes."
"'Poems turned into landscapes.'" he murmured with a slight smile. "And what of Vestenveld's gardens? Do you see poems in them?"
"Your gardens are like your country's poetry. Very frilly and organized. ~ Jaclyn Dolamore

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066
and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000. ~ Robert Lacey

Letter 90


When I used to sit up late at night writing in our bed, I was calmed by the sound of your breathing. I would hold my breath and watch your chest rise and fall. I felt like a blind man soothed by the scents and sounds of a garden.

As I lie here in bed writing this letter, there is only the sound of my own breathing.

When I hold my breath, there is only silence.

Tonight I feel like a miner being lowered farther and farther into a dark mine shaft, longing for the scents and the sounds of a garden. ~ Gregory Colbert

That dude scored 8 points in the last 19 seconds, pulled out a miracle win at the Garden. He made me choke on a chicken bone that day. I'm serious. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

For more than thirty years, Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd have been gardening with extraordinary, indeed legendary, results. Part memoir, part omnium-gatherum of horticultural wisdom and practical advice, Our Life in Gardens is at once literate, learned, sensible, and, often, sheer luscious poetry. There are delights to be sampled on every page. From a cultivated life, they have brought forth, once again, a cultivated book. ~ Philip Gambone

The true definition of a perennial: Any plant which, had it lived, would have bloomed year after year. ~ Henry Beard

God wants nothing from you but the gift of a peaceful heart. ~ Meister Eckhart

Two things cannot be in one place. Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow. ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Sarah put the man and the other dead children out of her head. Later, perhaps, she would watch Lockie out in the garden and cry for all the mothers who would not see their children again. Later she would weep for the sadness of their loss and the joy of her own luck, but now she only had eyes for her boy, her little man, her Lockie. She ran her hands over his body, lifted his shirt a little and caught sight of a yellowing bruise. The air caught in her throat.
'Oh Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,' she whispered.
Someone had hit him. She wanted to undress him right then to see the damage but Lockie was so fast asleep. She knew he wasn't just sleeping because he was tired. He had gone to the same place she had been in for months. She and Lockie looked alike now. The angles on his face matched hers and in a way she was glad.
She had suffered along with him.
And now here he was. ~ Nicole Trope

Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant. ~ Mark Twain

When light returns to its source,
it takes nothing
of what it has illuminated.

It may have shone on a garbage dump, or a garden,
or in the center of a human eye. No matter.

It goes, and when it does,
the open plain becomes passionately desolate,
wanting it back. ~ Rumi

If gardens are created to tell stories, which I believe they are, then garden gates are the crucial opening lines that can make or break a tale. ~ Vivian Swift

Because a garden is the heart of a house, where love is the seed and the dark earth like a mother who nurtures her saplings until they bloom, and then waits for them with furrowed arms to return. It is the story told again and again from my garden: from dust we begin, and to dust we will return again. ~ Karen White

Her father had taught her about hands. About a dog's paws. Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel! She would pretend disgust, but the dog's paw was a wonder: the smell of it never suggested dirt. It's a cathedral! her father had said, so-and-so's garden, that field of grasses, a walk through cyclamen
a concentration of hints of all the paths the animal had taken during the day. ~ Michael Ondaatje

"Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it ... have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth; that numberless cities are raised from the foundation, and only their name remaining; that many countries, which were once as the garden of God, are now a desolate wilderness; and that so many once numerous and powerful nations are vanished from the earth! Such was, and is at this day, the rage, the fury, the revenge, of these destroyers of human kind". ~ John Wesley

The "whole good" cannot be had, it would seem, without mustering all the strength of our inner life. Even in the sphere of external possessions there are goods which inherently demand, if they are to be truly ours, far more of us than mere acquisition. "'My garden,' the rich man said; his gardener smiled. ~ Josef Pieper

What Tarquin the Proud said in his garden with the poppy blooms was understood by the son but not by the messenger. ~ Johann Georg Hamann

When those who have the title of shepherd play the part of wolves," said Lothar of Saxony, "heresy grows in the garden of the Church. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds. ~ Plutarch

Let us create an opportunity for every child to grow up with their own unique beauty in this wonderful garden of humanity. ~ ApolloM

Don't go into Mr. McGregor's garden: your Father had an accident there; he was put in a pie by Mrs. McGregor. ~ Beatrix Potter

Walk down any sidewalk in any city and eventually you'll find a flower growing out of a crack in the concrete, tenaciously grasping for life, barely enough earth for it to clench hold of. This little flower has seeded, sprouted, and blossomed, despite thousands of feet walking over and around it every day. This flower is a survivor, thriving better than if it were in my Aunt Tilda's fucking backyard garden with her fussing over it day and night and giving it all the goddamned care she thought it needed. Yeah, eventually, some careless asshole's gonna trample and kill that flower, but another one's gonna replace it. [...] I'll always believe in you, Raeburn. You just have to find another crack in the sidewalk and blossom. Don't be another Kurt Cobain. Don't give up. People need you. ~ Pete Conrad

We're neither pure, nor wise, nor good
We'll do the best we know.
We'll build our house and chop our wood
And make our garden grow.
And make our garden grow! ~ Leonard Bernstein

When the moon comes up, I go down For the first time There's a garden deep, deep in my heart But it's blossomed for the last time ~ Happy Rhodes

At places like Chelsea, often the garden displays are so big and grand that you'd never be able to have them at home. ~ Anton Du Beke