Garden Quotes

I can't stand to see a living thing in pain, least of all Evander. The nuns who raised me said I'd been that way since birth. Trying to put the wings back on a trampled butterfly. Tending the weakest plants in their garden. That's what made me so well suited for walking in the Deadlands, they said. My love of life. ~ Sarah Glenn Marsh

He made two or three peculiar observations; as when shewn the botanical garden, 'Is not EVERY garden a botanical garden? ~ James Boswell

If there were no tribulation, there would be no rest; if there were no winter, there would be no summer. ~ Saint John Chrysostom

I do that which I do in every place. Here also, at the gateway of that garden into which time has not entered, I fight with time my ever-losing battle, because to do that diverts me. ~ James Branch Cabell

The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.
To dwell is to garden. ~ Martin Heidegger

Better not to walk upon a garden made of quicksand. ~ Robert McCammon

Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got $260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it
lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding
sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money.
And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream.
Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that. ~ Jenny Downham

Life is given to you like a flat piece of land and everything has to be done. I hope that when I am finished, my piece of land will be a beautiful garden, so there is a lot of work. ~ Jeanne Moreau

The trouble with gardening is that is does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession. ~ Phyllis McGinley

Our little kinsmen after rain
In plenty may be seen,
a pink and pulpy multitude
The tepid ground upon;
A needless life if seemed to me
Until a little bird
As to a hospitality
Advanced and breakfasted. ~ Emily Dickinson

The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet. ~ Jandy Nelson

The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alivewith chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

I'm never happy with what I've written. You imagine, before you start, there's a cathedral, and the moment it starts on the page, it's a garden shed. And then you just try to make it the best shed you can. ~ Sadie Jones

Prohibition didn't work in the Garden of Eden. Adam ate the apple. ~ Vicente Fox

With your permission and cooperation, God will work the soil of your heart, and your life will become a lovely garden for him. ~ Linda Evans Shepherd

Glaring at the doctor, Kev spoke in Romany. "Ka xlia ma pe tute" (I'm going to shit on you.)

"Which means," Rohan said hastily, "'Please forgive the misunderstanding; let's part as friends.'"

"Te malavel les i menkiva," Kev added for good measure. (May you die of a malignant wasting disease.)

"Roughly translated," Rohan said, "that means, 'May your garden be filled with fine, fat hedgehogs.' Which, I may add, is considered quite a blessing among the Rom. ~ Lisa Kleypas

The Chinese, you know, believe that deep within each of us, no larger than the ball of your thumb, is the garden of the immortals, the great valley where we are all king forever. ~ John Crowley

What I've always found interesting in gardens is looking at what people choose to plant there. What they put in. What they leave out. One small choice and then another, and soon there is a mood, an atmosphere, a series of limitations, a world. ~ Helen Humphreys

I read, go for walks and I love to garden. My hands are such a mess. People think I should have movie star hands, but they're just gardening ones. Always slightly grubby and with a bit of dirt under the fingernails. ~ Amanda Donohoe

I feel really bad for everyone who died on 9/11. Not just the people in the World Trade Center, Pentagon, or Flight 93, but all of the terrorists, too. 'Garden State' came out in 2004. That means none of them got a chance to see it. Let that sink in for a second. No wonder they're building a memorial. ~ Zach Braff

In search of my mother's garden, I found my own. ~ Alice Walker

They talk too much for me. They have worries, aims, desires, that I cannot understand. I often sit with one of them in the little beer garden and try to explain to him that this is really the only thing: just to sit quietly, like this. They understand of course, they agree, they may even feel it so too, but only with words, only with words, yes, that is it--they feel it, but always with only half of themselves, the rest of their being is taken up with other things, they are so divided in themselves that none feels it with his whole; I cannot even say myself exactly what I mean. ~ Erich Maria Remarque

You mustn't rely on your flowers to make your garden attractive. A good bone structure must come first, with an intelligent use of evergreen plants so that the garden is always clothed, no matter what time of year. Flowers are an added delight, but a good garden is the garden you enjoy looking at even in the depths of winter. ~ Margery Fish

Plants are like people: they're all different and a little bit strange. ~ John Kehoe

TWENTY SMALL GRAVES

There was a woman who bore a child almost every year, but the children never lived longer

than six months. Usually after three or four months they would die. She grieved long and

publicly. "I take on the work of pregnancy for nine months, but the joy vanishes quicker

than a rainbow." Twenty children went like that, in fevers to their small graves. One night

she had a revelation. She saw the place of unconditional love, call it the garden or source

of gardens. The physical eye cannot see its unseeable light. Lamp, green flower, these

are just comparisons, so that some of the love-bewildered may catch a fragrance. The woman

saw pure grace and, drunk with the seeing, fell to the ground. Those who have the vision said

then, "This morning meal is for those who rise with sincere devotion. The tragedies you've

had came from other times when you did not take refuge." "Lord, give me more grief.

Tear me to pieces, if it leads here." She said this and walked into the presence

she had seen. Her children were all there, "Lost to me," she cried, "but not to you."

Without this great grieving no one can enter the spirit. ~ Rumi

11 And the LORD will guide you continually and satisfy your desire in scorched places and make your bones strong; and you shall be u like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters do not fail. ~ Anonymous

The oldest, easiest to swallow idea was that the earth was man's personal property, a combination of garden, zoo, bank vault, and energy source, placed at our disposal to be consumed, ornamented, or pulled apart as we wished. ~ Lewis Thomas

Will gritted his teeth as Will Junior and Nellie continued their debate. He loved his son, but he found him
and many members of hisgeneration
ruthless in their pursuit of money and standing and harsh toward the less fortunate. He had reminded him on many occasions that both the McClanes and their mother's family
the Van der leydens
had at one time been immigrants. As had members of all the city's wealthy families. But Will's lectures made no difference to his son. He was an American. And those getting off the boat at Castle Garden were not. Italian, Irish, Chinese, Polish
nationality made no difference. They were lazy, stupid, and dirty. Their numbers spelled ruin for the country. p. 264 ~ Jennifer Donnelly

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

Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things.
I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's "Open Sesame":
Once upon a time ... ~ Jean Cocteau

I associate the garden with the whole experience of being alive, and so, there is nothing in the range of human experience that is separate from what the garden can signify in its eagerness and its insistence, and in its driving energy to live
to grow, to bear fruit. ~ Stanley Kunitz

I am a close friend of Robert Loggia. And I just love how, with actors, there's the screen persona. Here is Robert, known for his portrayal of many characters, including gangsters. But in real life, he is elegant and erudite. He sits in the garden reading the sonnets of William Shakespeare. ~ Luanne Rice

She had come into the garden expecting summer roses and had instead been caught in a bank of twisted, thorny, frostbitten vines. ~ Nenia Campbell

That chair -shall I ever forget it? Where the shadows fell on the canvas upholstery, stripes of a deep but glowing indigo alternated with stripes of an incandescence so intensely bright that it was hard to believe that they could be made of anything but blue fire. For what seemed an immensely long time I gazed without knowing, even without wishing to know, what it was that confronted me. At any other time I would have seen a chair barred with alternate light and shade. Today the percept had swallowed up the concept. I was so completely absorbed in looking, so thunderstruck by what I actually saw, that I could not be aware of anything else. Garden furniture, laths, sunlight, shadow - these were no more than names and notions, mere verbalizations, for utilitarian or scientific purposes, after the event. The event was this succession of azure furnace doors separated by gulfs of unfathomable gentian. It was inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying. ~ Aldous Huxley

If you treat what you value most in life more like a garden and less like a vending machine, you'll probably be happier. (from You Oughta Know By Now) ~ Brian P. Cleary

All the shall stand about the God of glory, the fountain of love, as it were opening their bosoms to be filled with those effusions of love which are poured forth from thence, as the flowers on the earth in a pleasant spring day open their bosoms to the sun to be filled with his warmth and light, and to flourish in beauty and fragrancy by his rays. Every saint is as a flower in the garden of God, and holy love is the fragrancy and sweet odor which they all send forth, with which they fill that paradise. ~ Jonathan Edwards

Some men think that the globe is a sponge that God puts into their hands to squeeze for their own garden or flower-pot. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

A garden without its statue is like a sentence without its verb. ~ Joseph Beach

My body is like a single nerve ending from head to toe. Everything feels alive and more. My heart is opening, like the heart of Rappaccini's daughter, Beatrice, when she meets young Giovanni after he wanders into her garden. As I stand there, I can almost feel it unfold, petal by petal, beat by beat. ~ Jennifer Niven

I was the youngest of four kids, and Dad, who had a garden centre before he retired, came from a large Lancashire family. Every one of my uncles had their own business, including a post office, two fish and chip shops and a painting and decorating business. ~ Rick Astley

Wildland firefighters do not enjoy the cultural prestige that structural firefighters do. They do not wax their fire engines and cruise down the local parade route, lights flashing; they are not the subject of countless popular books and movies; major politicians do not honor their sacrifices on the Senate floor or from the Rose Garden; they do not have bagpipe bands, fancy equipment, enduring icons, or other signifiers of honor verifying the importance of their activity. ~ Matthew Desmond

As soon as he stood in front of her, she folded her arms and looked cross.
"You don't have any gardening skills. You turned down a prestigious job to weed the garden?
"I will be rewarded richly in treasures untold."
She raised a brow.
"I've heard dragon-shifters pay a lot of money to merchants and the like.
"Aaagh, but you are also a dragon-shifter of a sort.
Yes, but I am a gardener, which means I don't go on high-risk missions to earn my gold. ~ Terry Spear

The terrace and the whole place, the lawn and the garden beyond it, all I could see of the park, were empty with a great emptiness. ~ Henry James

A student asked to his master: "You teach me fighting but you talk about peace. How do you reconcile the two?"

The master replied: " It's better to be warrior in garden than to be a gardener in war. ~ Zen Master

Nick stands up and offers his hand to me. I have no idea what he wants, but what the hell, I take his hand anyway, and he pulls me up on my feet then presses against me for a slow dance and it's like we're in a dream where he's Christopher Plummer and I'm Julie Andrews and we're dancing on the marble floor of an Austrian terrace garden. Somehow my head presses Nick's t-shirt and in this moment I am forgetting about time and Tal because maybe my life isn't over. Maybe it's only beginning. ~ Rachel Cohn

One does not lash hat lies at a distance. The foibles that we ridicule must at least be a little bit our own. Only then will the work be a part of our own flesh. The garden must be weeded. ~ Paul Klee

How cunningly nature hides every wrinkle of her inconceivable antiquity under roses and violets and monring dew ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Coppersmith is a bird who makes a noise exactly like the beating of a little hammer on a copper pot; and the reason he is always making it is because he is the town crier to every Indian garden, and tells all the news to everybody who cares to listen. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The neighborhood doesn't feel nearly as safe. Not that the Garden was ever a utopia, hell no, but before I only worried about GDs and Crowns. Now I gotta worry about the cops too? Yeah, people get killed around here, and nah, it's not always by the police, but Jay says this was like having a stranger come in your house, steal one of your kids, and blame you for it because your family was dysfunctional, while the whole world judges you for being upset. ~ Angie Thomas

To exist as a nation, to prosper as a state, and to live as a people, we must have trees. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

We gathered up the kids and sat up on the hill. We had no time to get our chickens and no time to get our horses out of the corral. The water came in and smacked against the corral and broke the horses' legs. The drowned, and the chickens drowned. We sat on the hill and we cried. These are the stories we tell about the river," said [Ladona] Brave Bull Allard. The granddaughter of Chief Brave Bull, she told her story at a Missouri River symposium in Bismark, North Dakota, in the fall of 2003.

Before The Flood, her Standing Rock Sioux Tribe lived in a Garden of Eden, where nature provided all their needs. "In the summer, we would plant huge gardens because the land was fertile," she recalled. We had all our potatoes and squash. We canned all the berries that grew along the river. Now we don't have the plants and the medicine they used to make. ~ Bill Lambrecht

Our two first parents, yet the only two Of mankind, in the happy garden placed, Reaping immortal fruits of joy and love, Uninterrupted joy, unrivalled love In blissful solitude. ~ John Milton

There is no elegance or character of any sort in [the forsythia's] structure. Its crude expose of colour is undiluted by foliage. And in its most popular cultivars the flowers are packed into such congested lumps that it is like being asked to swallow a helping of cornflour pudding. ~ Christopher Lloyd

It's a comfort to always find pasta in the cupboard and garlic and parsley in the garden. ~ Alice Waters

But let me be a lover in the Savage Garden with you, and the light that went out of life would come back in a great burst of glory. Out of mortal flesh I would pass into eternity. I would be one of you. - Daniel ~ Anne Rice

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation's braggart lords. ~ John Muir

All I really want is enough to live on, a little house in the country ... and a tree in the garden with seven of my enemies hanging in it. ~ Heinrich Heine

THE DAY

The day was a year at first
When children played in the garden;

The day shrank down to a month
When the boys played ball;

The day was a week thereafter
When young men walked in the garden;

the day was itself a day
when love grew tall

the day shrank down to an hour
when old man limped in the garden

The day will last forever
When it is nothing at all. ~ Theodore Spencer

And all of this leaves me wondering if this dream of mine-that out there, somewhere, hiding, there exists a guy who is cultured and calm, and smiley and faithful, who want´s to escape the rat-race with me and, apparently like the French, wear wellies and make cheese...Well, I wonder if it can possibly exist. I don´t want much...just someone who would flat on his stomach next to me in the garden watching ants carrying crumbs through the jungle of blades of grass. I wonder if that can ever exist, anywhere, for anyone. ~ Nick Alexander

Smartass Disciple: Master, why there was no second chance in garden of eden?
Master of Stupidity: Of course. Perhaps, human can only enjoy one-time virginity. ~ Toba Beta

They'd fallen into an easy routine, the three of them. Breakfast together in the morning, then Hughie would leave for work and she and Nell would get started in the house. Lil found she liked having a second shadow, enjoyed showing Nell things, explaining how they worked and why. Nell was a big one for asking why-why did the sun hide at night, why didn't the fire flames leap out of the gate, why didn't the river get bored and run the other way?-and Lil loved supplying answers, watching as understanding dawned on Nell's little face. For the first time in her life, Lil felt useful, needed, whole. ~ Kate Morton

. . .in your light, had I learned to love, here
in your beauty, could I speak
knowing of this space close within
as the breath held inside a garden rose, there -
there is no time. ~ John Daniel Thieme

One must first seek to love plants and nature, and then to cultivate that happy peace of mind which is satisfied with little. He will be happier if he has no rigid and arbitrary ideals, for gardens are coquettish, particularly with the novice. ~ Liberty Hyde Bailey

Looking at a first assembly is kind of like looking at an overgrown garden. You can't just wade in with a weed whacker; you don't yet know where the stems of the flowers are. ~ Walter Murch

We are battered and torn from the day we are born, in a world that has blinded and bound us.
Is it any surprise we don't open our eyes to the truth that's disguised all around us?
Like the secrets we keep, and don't know we're keeping, from before there was time, before there were lies.
Can we find You again, this far from the garden? Do we dare even try?
Do we dare pay attention - dare even mention - the mystery we find ourselves caught in?
And do we dare to remember all that we have forgotten?
--"Do We Dare" from Feel Free (1997) ~ Carolyn Arends

My 'act' was schoolwork. I was your basic, garden-variety, ambitious, upwardly mobile, hard-working Jewish boy from Brooklyn. I was bound to go beyond my parents. It was simply the way things were. ~ Clive Davis

There was an old, crazy dude who used to live a long time ago. His name was Lord Buckley. And he said, a long time ago, he said, 'People
they'r e kinda like flowers, and it's been a privilege walking in your garden.' My love goes with you. ~ Robin Williams

I hammered and sawed, the sawdust sprinkled about, and soon, very soon, I would have my garden, thanks to Joseph, a man who saw three lost, lonely, mentally tangled kids and put out a hand to hold so we wouldn't drown in misery. ~ Cathy Lamb

If you ever reach that stage in life where you really couldn't give a toss about what others think of you, then you have achieved freedom. ~ Daniel Kemp

For how tiny the world,
This ant's egg-and the sky! ~ Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib

Elron: These were happy woods. The entire place was happy from the house to the gardens to the woods. But this one little garden had something extra. It was excited. Something odd for plants and trees. They were prone to joy, happiness, sorrow and tranquility but not something as active as excitement. Someone had spent a lot of time here and a bit of their personality had seeped into the place. That someone was excited about life and probably young. Strange. Few youth of any race knew enough to transmit their feelings. The trees whispered about a person, moving and bending with change. The plants gossiped about tenderness shown them but the air breathed words of rage and despair in my ear. The plants didn't know gender but I got the impression of a woman, a young woman. The altar indicated she was a witch. A good witch. ~ N.E. Conneely

Old gardeners never die. They just spade away and then throw in the trowel. ~ Herbert V. Prochnow

In the garden where the lilacs were so tall it was impossible to see the road. The leaves were dusty, the way they always were in August when the weather turned hot. ~ Alice Hoffman

Suddenly I realized that I wanted everything to be as it was when I was younger. When you're young enough, you don't know that you live in a cheap lousy apartment. A cracked chair is nothing other than a chair. A dandelion growing out of a crack in the sidewalk outside your front door is a garden. You could believe that a song your parent was singing in the evening was the most tragic opera in the world. It never occurs to you when you are very young to need something other than what your parents have to offer you. ~ Heather O'Neill

[The Christian story] amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the wold. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist the has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.... I don't know of it [the idea of woman as sinner...in other mythologies] elsewhere. The closest thing to it would be perhaps Pandora with Pandora's box, but that's not sin, that's just trouble. The idea in the biblical tradition of the all is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter. Why was the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to Adam and Eve? Without that knowledge, we'd all be a bunch of babies still Eden, without any participation in life. Woman brings life into the world. Eve is the mother o this temporal wold. Formerly you had a dreamtime paradise there in the Garden of Eden – no time, no birth, no death – no life. The serpent, who dies and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the evening, is just a visit ~ Joseph Campbell

Ram fell in love after he saw Sita in a garden immediately before the swamber. The love's visibility was so obvious that even Lakshman could gauge it and felt that Sita would be his Bhabi/Mata. Now ~ Kulbhushan Singhal

Perhaps it is the key to the garden! ~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

Simply by changing our thoughts, we can sow the seeds of happiness in the garden of our minds. ~ Debasish Mridha

You have to trust me, my love. There has only been you. I know who you are. You are my queen. You always have been."
I couldn't look at him, but I could feel his gaze on me. So pained and tender that I fought the need to run to him, to comfort him. But I couldn't push out the image of the woman in the glass garden. I couldn't forget Gauri's necklace encrusted with blood. I couldn't forget how he had hinted at some latent power within me, and yet I couldn't move a single thread on the tapestry.
I couldn't forget his lies.
"Go near that tree and I will lose you forever," he said fiercely. "Your memories won't keep. Your powers will be gone." Amar staggered toward me, and this time, I couldn't help but look at him. His eyes held mine in a firm, unyielding gaze. "Jaani, I put too much of myself and my own memories into the tree. ~ Roshani Chokshi

Love is wild; its whole beauty is in its wildness. It comes like a breeze with great fragrance, fills your heart, and suddenly where there was a desert there is a garden full of flowers. ~ Osho

My garden is a slow work, pursued with love and I do not deny that I am proud of it. Forty years ago, when I established myself here, there was nothing but a farmhouse and a poor orchard ... I bought the house and little by little I enlarged and organized it ... I dug, planted weeded, myself; in the evenings the children watered. ~ Claude Monet

I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to persuade ourselves that this was life and that we were really living it? ~ Diane Setterfield

In Proverbs, a wisdom book of the Hebrew Scriptures, a cat would find a few "wisdom" passages as noxious as the Garden of Eden passages. Again the symbology of fruit being eaten ~ Leviak B. Kelly

When you have gone beyond thinking, and if you can still remain alert, aware, as if one is fast asleep but still alert - deep down at the very core of one's being a lamp goes on burning, a small candle of light - then you will see your original face. And to see your original face is to be back in the Garden of Eden. ~ Osho

The best-trained part of us, though, is the mouth, it �is always obediently and devoutly shut. And it's only too true: an open mouth is a yawning fact, the fact that its owner is dwelling with his few thoughts in some other place than the domain and pleasure-garden of attentiveness. ~ Robert Walser

If there ever were one moment where everything worked for us, where we lived in harmony and at ease with our natures, then we would still be there. There is no garden to return to, no idyllic perfect childhood, no enwombed state. The Garden of Eden was boring, childhood is a nightmare we should all be grateful to be done with, and your mother smoked while she was pregnant and poisoned you in the womb with artificial sugar substitutes. The best thing any of us can do is just to keep fucking up in a forward motion, and see what comes out of it. ~ Jessa Crispin

I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story," said Ford.
"Eh?"
"Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?"
"Yes of course I do."
"Your God person puts an apple tree in the middle of a garden and says do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting 'Gotcha'. It wouldn't have any difference if they hadn't eaten it."
"Why not?"
"Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end."
"What are you talking about?"
"Never mind, eat the fruit. ~ Douglas Adams

It may well be on such a night of clouds and cruel colors that there is brought forth upon the earth such a portent as a respectable poet. You say you are a poet of law; I say you are a contradiction in terms. I only wonder there were not comets and earthquakes on the night you appeared in this garden. ~ G.K. Chesterton

People compared Garden State to the Graduate, but when was the last time you saw Dustin Hoffman doing what I do? ~ Zach Braff

Do not plant a weed and pretend surprise when it grows to strangle your garden. For, I tell you that to hate is to kill for from hatred grows death as surely as life grows from love. ~ Michael Grant

Look, Charlie," said Vince leaning back in his chair. "It's real simple. We will be four people
two men and two women
I figure it's better to have two women instead of three men and one woman so she'll have someone she can confide in and all. Women need that kind of thing. Anyway, we'll be four people
friends
housemates
equal partners. We'll be an alliance. We'll be just like family. And we'll help take care of one another. We'll have a nice home, each with our own private bedroom and bathroom, and a nice yard with flowers."
"And maybe a vegetable garden," added Charlie.
"That's it," grinned Vince. ~ Barbara Casey

God also puts His people in the middle of things for the same reason that He put the tree of temptation in the middle of the garden
so that our choice to follow Him would be a conscious, daily one. Every time we publicly choose to live for Christ, He is glorified. ~ Lynn Austin

The wave of pure outrage blindsided me. I shouldn't be here, I thought. This is utterly fucked up. I should have been sitting in a garden down the road, barefoot with a drink in my hand, swapping the day's work stories with Peter and Jamie. I had never thought about this before, and it almost knocked me over: all the things we should have had. We should have stayed up all night together studying and stressing out before exams, Peter and I should have argued over who got to bring Jamie to our first dance and slagged her about how she looked in her dress. We should have come weaving home together, singing and laughing and inconsiderate, after drunken college nights. We could have shared a flat, taken off Interrailing around Europe, gone arm-in-arm through dodgy fashion phases and low-rent gigs and high-drama love affairs. Two of us might have been married by now, given the other one a godchild. I had been robbed blind. ~ Tana French

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

People always say The God Father is the #1 movie of all time. But ask yourself, did you see Zach Braff in it ... No you didn't. So then by default it goes to Garden State..and if youwatch two episodes of scrubs back to back that counts as the #2. ~ Zach Braff

If, in our world, there is any chance of becoming the person you haven't yet become ... will I know how to seize that chance, turn my life into a garden that will be completely different from my forebears'? ~ Muriel Barbery

Living the focused life is not about trying to feel happy all the time ... rather, it's about treating your mind as you would a private garden and being as careful as possible about what you introduce and allow to grow there. ~ Winifred Gallagher

The unattended garden will soon be overrun with weeds; the heart that fails to cultivate truth and root out error will shortly be a theological wilderness. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

Shun artificial rocks like the plague. ~ Henry Sherman Adams

Their voices rose and fell, like the murmuring of two fountains answering each other across a garden full of flowers. At length, with a certain tender impatience, he turned to her and said: 'Love, why should we linger here? All eternity lies before us. Let us go down into that beautiful country together and make a home for ourselves on some blue hill above the shining river'. ~ Edith Wharton