English Garden Quotes

British garden history is best understood as a small incident in the histories of ideas, design and technology. ~ Tom Turner

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom and then berries, blackthorn, hawthorn, dog-roses, the odd ash tree with its sooty buds. ~ A.S. Byatt

old-fashioned flowers, it looked like an English garden. ~ Melanie Benjamin

In Flemish bond, headers alternate with stretchers from brick to brick. Flemish bond is much more popular than English, not because it is stronger, but because it is more economical since every facade has more long faces than short ones, and thus requires fewer bricks. But there were many other patterns - Chinese bond, Dearne's bond, English garden-wall bond, cross bond, rat-trap bond, monk bond, flying bond, and so on - each signifying a different configuration of headers and stretchers. ~ Bill Bryson

Myself
a prince by fortune of my birth,
Near to the king in blood, and near in love
Till you did make him misinterpret me
Have stooped my neck under your injuries
And sighed my English breath in foreign clouds,
Eating the bitter bread of banishment,
Whilst you have fed upon my signories,
Disparked my parks and felled my forest woods,
From my own windows torn my household coat,
Rased out my imprese, leaving me no sign,
Save men's opinions and my living blood,
To show the world I am a gentleman. ~ William Shakespeare

There is a subset of Democrats who tend to mis-fill out ballots. The way you mark the ballot is like an S.A.T. - you fill in the circle. And the subset of people who tend to, like, put a check there instead, or an X, or fill it out wrong, tend to be people who didn't take S.A.T.s, or first-time voters, or people with English as a second language. ~ Al Franken

Her laptop. That's where the good stuff would be anyway. It always was. Even at my old school, kids had always been frantic when they'd lost their laptops, thinking about all the incriminating stuff that someone might find on them. Like e-mails about how drunk the kids had gotten with their friends the weekend their parents thought they went to band camp. Papers they'd downloaded and plagiarized for AP English. Porn. ~ Jennifer Estep

Alba, it's okay,' Clare says softly. She looks at me. 'Say the poem about lovers on the carpet.'
I blank, and then I remember. I feel self-conscious reciting Rilke in front of all these people, and so I begin: 'Engel!: Es wäre ein Platz, den wir nicht wissen-'
'Say it in English,' Clare interrupts.
'Sorry. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I have a rock garden. Last week three of them died. ~ Richard K. Diran

English is like a poetic extension of myself. It holds my creativity and imagination in blissful and inspiring captivity. Though I consider myself not a prisoner, but rather a valued guest of honor. ~ Storm Princeholm

I used to sit in the garden and think. Now I just sit in the garden. ~ Marty Rubin

The associations get only richer and more intense when you realise that the very concept of truth - the cornerstone of philosophy and religion alike, let alone law - also rests heavily on the meaning of waking up. And you don't need a philosopher to appreciate it, because there are clues to its dependency in everyday phrases such as 'waking up to the truth', 'my eyes were opened' and even 'wake up and smell the coffee'. If such phrases hint that waking up and truth are bedfellows of some sort, you need only go back to the ancient Greek for corroboration. There you'll find that the word truth is 'aletheia', from which in English we get the word for 'lethargy'. But see how the Greek word is 'a-letheia' rather than letheia - that is truth is the opposite of lethargy. And what is opposite of lethargy, if not waking up? ~ Robert Rowland Smith

One great distinction, I appeared to myself to see plainly between even the characteristic faults of our elder poets, and the false beauty of the moderns. In the former, from Donne to Cowley, we find the most fantastic out-of-the-way thoughts, but in the most pure and genuine mother English, in the latter the most obvious thoughts, in language the most fantastic and arbitrary. Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The two girls grew up at the edge of the ocean and knew it was paradise, and better than Eden, which was only a garden. ~ Eve Babitz

Everything in this world is the fruit of the imagination. If there is no imaginary garden in our head, we can't plant a real one. ~ Bakhtiyar Ali

She remembers standing at her locker, hearing the whispers. Whispers about her. And about Luke. She remembers turning and seeing Dani and Lynn with a group of girls they knew from Yearbook. She remembers not understanding right away. And then Dani stared her down, eyes narrowed to slits. When Hallelujah dropped her gaze, she heard Lynn's peal of laughter. "So anyway," Lynn went on, "Luke said . . ."
She remembers the note, in English class. "You knew I liked him." Dani's clean cursive. Hallelujah stared at her friend's back. Dani didn't turn around. And she didn't respond to calls or emails in the weeks that followed.
By winter break, Dani was dating Luke. The rumors about Hallelujah had circulated and changed and circulated again. Still, on the first day of the new semester, she mustered up the courage to say something. To warn her former friend about who Luke really was. Dani laughed in her face. Called her jealous. Luke dumped Dani in February. Dani and Lynn still refused to speak to Hallelujah. It was like they'd never been friends at all. ~ Kathryn Holmes

Victoria spent most of the morning in the town house's private garden. It was a cool, humid day, the sky liberally laced with clouds, the air stirring with mild breezes. She sat at the stone table and read for a while, then wandered along graveled paths bordered with boxes of lilac, jessamine, and Russian honeysuckle. The carefully tended garden was bordered by poplar hedges and ivy-covered walls. Well-stocked beds of flowering and fruit-bearing paths and filled the air with perfume.
In this small, secluded world, it seemed as if the city were a hundred miles away. It was difficult not to be contented in such beautiful surroundings. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Within the black community, roughly 60 percent of children are born to single moms. Moms don't have the emotional wherewithal to deal with their children. Their English is atrocious. Their speaking is atrocious. The dropout rate is horrendous. ~ Walter Dean Myers

Coffee and humanity both sprang from the same area in eastern Africa. What if some of those early ape-men nibbled on the bright red berries? What if the resulting mental stimulation opened them up to a new way of looking at old problems, much as it did Europeans? Could this group of berry nibblers be the Missing Link, and that memory of the bright but bitter-tasting fruit be the archetype for the story of the Garden of Eden? ~ Stewart Lee Allen

In Dzokchen, compassion is much more than the virtue of loving kindness. Nor does the word compassion in the Dzokchen context denote its English etymological meaning, "suffering together" or "empathy," although both these meanings may be inferred. Essentially, compassion indicates an open and receptive mind responding spontaneously to the exigencies of an ever-changing field of vibration to sustain the optimal awareness that serves self-and-others' ultimate desire for liberation and well-being. The conventional meaning of compassion denotes the latter, active part of this definition, and, due to the accretions of Christian connotation, response is limited to specifically virtuous activity. "Responsiveness" defines the origin and cause of selfless activity that can encompass all manner of response. On this nondual Dzokchen path virtue is the effect, not the cause; the ultimate compassionate response is whatever action maximizes Knowledge - loving kindness is the automatic function of Awareness. ~ Keith Dowman

What are you? German? American? English? Greek? Japanese? Turkish? French? Indian? Chinese? These are not real, these are virtual! You are human! This is what is real! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Gardening has a magical quality when you are a child. ~ Barbara Damrosch

The rain keeps up throughout the next day. "Lovely English summer we're having," everyone jokes. ~ Gayle Forman

Dogs can't speak English. Nor any human language - save, in one notable exception, Luxembourgish, which is only comprehensible to bankers and Luxembourgers, and therefore hardly of any use at all. No, you've eaten something disagreeable and are having a nightmare, that's all. ~ Ransom Riggs

I came to New York when I was 21, 22. I couldn't speak English. I knew I wanted to go to fashion school. ~ Francisco Costa

I got to a state where phrases like "the Good, the True, and the Beautiful" filled me with a kind of suppressed indignation, because they stood for the big sin of Platonism: the reduction of all reality to the level of pure abstraction, as if concrete, individual substances had no essential reality of their own, but were only shadows of some remote, universal, ideal essence filed away in a big card-index somewhere in heaven, while the demi-urges milled around the Logos piping their excitement in high, fluted, English intellectual tones. ~ Thomas Merton

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Velutha looked down at Ambassador Insect in his arms He put her down. Shaking too.
"And look at you!" he said, looking at her ridiculous frothy frock "So beautiful! Getting married?"
Rahel lunged at his armpits and tickled him mercilessly. Ickilee ickilee ickilee!
"I saw you yesterday," she said.
"Where?" Velutha made his voice high and surprised.
"Liar" Rahel said. "Liar and pretender. I did see you. You were a Communist and had a shirt and a flag. And you ignored me."
"Aiyyo kashtam," Velutha said. "Would I do that? You tell me, would Velutha ever do that? It must've been my Long-lost Twin brother."
"Which Long-lost Twin brother?"
"Urumban, silly... The one who lives in Kochi."
"Who Urumban?" Then she saw the twinkle. "Liar! You haven't got a Twin brother! It wasn't Urumban! It was you!"
Velutha laughed. He had a lovely laugh that he really meant
"Wasn't me," he said. "I was sick in bed."
"See, you're smiling!" Rahel said. "That means it was you
Smiling means 'It was you.'"
"That's only in English' Velutha said. "In Malayalam my
teacher always said that 'Smiling means it wasn't me.'"
It took Rahel a moment to sort that one out. She lunged at him once again. Ickilee ickilee ickilee! (169( ~ Arundhati Roy

You know, Mr. Lupin," Harry said, "it really takes a baroque interpretation to think that somebody would be walking around, pondering how death is just something we all have to accept, and communicate their state of mind by saying, 'The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.' Maybe someone else thought it sounded poetic and picked up the phrase and tried to interpret it differently, but whoever said it first didn't like death much." Sometimes it puzzled Harry how most people didn't seem to even notice when they were twisting something around to the 180-degree opposite of its first obvious reading. It couldn't be a raw brainpower thing, people could see the obvious reading of most other English sentences. "Also 'shall be destroyed' refers to a change of future state, so it can't be about the way things are now. ~ Eliezer Yudkowsky

I made a choice between you and the King, and I chose you," Loki said. "In the garden, we were alone. I could've knocked you out and thrown you over my shoulder, then taken you back to the King. He would've spared me if I had.
"But I didn't." He stepped closer to me, and I could feel the heat radiating from his body. "He told me what he'd do to me if I didn't return you to him, but I couldn't do it."
He lifted his other hand, so he held my face in his hands. His skin was warm against mine, and even if he wasn't holding me, I wouldn't have looked away. There was something in his eyes, a longing and warmth, that took my breath away.
"Do you understand now?" Loki asked, his voice husky. "I would do it again for you, Wendy. I would go through hell and back for you. Even knowing how much you hate me right now."
I was so caught up in the moment I didn't even notice how close the passing SUV had gotten until it squealed to a stop next to us, nearly hitting our Cadillac. Loki moved toward me, and Tove jumped out of the driver's seat. Finn ran around the car and charged at Loki. ~ Amanda Hocking

And listen
tell your friend to try English Breakfast net time. It's a little more robust. Earl Grey is really more of a 'Sense and Sensibility' kind of tea.
Cab driver to J.D. Jameson ~ Julie James

I feel blessed to even be able to put out an English album. Not too many Latin artists get the opportunity to come out and record another genre that's so different to Bachata. ~ Prince Royce

And now you ask in your heart, 'How shall we distinguish that which is good in pleasure from that which is not good?'
Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
*

People of Orphalese, be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees. ~ Kahlil Gibran

[L]iberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents' life or that of the "English," they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do what would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, in other words, to effectively render them "English." This also clearly demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil: it is deemed acceptable if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice, the meaning of her act changes completely: it is no longer a sign of her direct substantial belongingness to the Muslim community, but an expression of her idiosyncratic individuality, of her spiritual quest and her protest against the vulgarity of the commodification of sexuality, or else a political gesture of protest against the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of choice itself: it is one thing to wear a veil because of one's immediate immersion in a tradition; it is quite another to refuse to wear a veil; and yet another to wear one not out of a sense of belonging, but as an ethico-political choice. This is why, ~ Slavoj Zizek

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures. ~ Charles Darwin

Jesus Christ was the only one capable of performing the magnificent Atonement because He was the only perfect man and the Only Begotten Son of God the Father. He received His commission for this essential work from His Father before the world was established. His perfect mortal life devoid of sin, the shedding of His blood, His suffering in the garden and upon the cross, His voluntary death, and the Resurrection of His body from the tomb made possible a full Atonement for people of every generation and time. ~ Cecil O. Samuelson

There is no royal path to good writing; and such paths as exist do not lead through neat critical gardens, various as they are, but through the jungles of self, the world, and of craft. ~ Jessamyn West

I worry these days that Latinos in California speak neither Spanish nor English very well. They are in a kind of linguistic limbo between the two. They don't really have a language, and are, in some deep sense, homeless. ~ Richard Rodriguez

The likelihood is that any English-speaking skier has more words for different types of snow than any inhabitant of Alaska or Greenland. ~ Larry Trask

THE MOTH AND THE BUTTERFLY

When the sun rises over the horizon,
the butterfly emerges to dance in its brilliant light.
It flickers its colorful wings with euphoria,
To celebrate all the beauty found
in the majestic garden of life.

When the moon arrives in the darkness,
The moth appears at the disappearance of sunlight.
It flickers its pale wings as it shakes from its deep slumber,
To go search for food
To carry it through the night.

The moth prefers the moon and detests the sun,
while the butterfly loves the sun and hides from the moon.
Every living creature responds to light,
But depending on the amount of light you have inside,
Determines which lamp in the sky
Your heart will swoon.

Poetry by Suzy Kassem ~ Suzy Kassem