I Love My Garden Quotes

I love that I live a creative life. It is in the work that I do - acting, writing, and directing. It's also in the mindfulness of every part of my life, from a meal that I prepare for family and friends to putting my imagination to work in a garden. ~ Regina Taylor

The queen gazes into the garden. There, near the trees, is a fountain; it is white in the darkness and tall, tall as a ghost. The queen hears, through the talk and the music, the soft splashing of its waters. She looks and thinks. You, Sirs, you are all noble, clever, rich, you throng round me, every one of my words is precious to you, you are all ready to die at my feet, you are my slaves.. But there, by the fountain, by the plashing water, he whose slave I am awaits me. He wears neither gorgeous raiment nor precious stones, no one knows him, but he await me, sure that I come – and I shall come –and there is no power in the world that can stop me when I want to go to him, to be with him, to lose myself with him there in the darkness of the garden, with the rustling of the trees and the murmur of the fountain …' Zinaida was silent. ~ Ivan Turgenev

My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laugher, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry ... Where could my heart find refuge from itself? Where could I go, yet leave myself behind? ~ Wally Lamb

Come out, come out, little Harry!" she called in her mock-baby voice, which echoed off the polished wooden floors. "What did you come after me for, then? I thought you were here to avenge my dear cousin!"

"I am!" shouted Harry, and a score of ghostly Harrys seemed to chorus I am! I am! I am! all around the room.

"Aaaaaah... did you love him, little baby Potter?"

Hatred rose in Harry such as he had never known before. He flung himself out from behind the fountain and bellowed "Crucio!"

Bellatrix screamed. The spell had knocked her off her feet, but she did not writhe and shriek with the pain as Neville had -- she was already on her feet again, breathless, no longer laughing. Harry dodged behind the garden fountain again -- her counterspell hit the head of the handsome wizard, which was blown off and landed twenty feet away, gouging long scratches into the wooden floor.

"Never used an Unforgivable Curse before, have you, boy?" she yelled. She had abandoned her baby voice now. "You need to mean them, Potter! You need to really want to cause pain -- to enjoy it -- righteous anger won't hurt me for long -- I'll show you how it is done, shall I? I'll give you a lesson--! ~ J.K. Rowling

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

As I stood in contemplation of the garden of the wonders of space," Milosz writes, "I had the feeling that I was looking into the ultimate depths, the most secret regions of my own being; and I smiled, because it had never occurred to me that I could be so pure, so great, so fair! My heart burst into singing with the song of grace of the universe. All these constellations are yours, they exist in you; outside your love they have no reality! How terrible the world seems to those who do not know themselves! When you felt so alone and abandoned in the presence of the sea, imagine what solitude the waters must have felt in the night, or the night's own solitude in a universe without end!" And the poet continues this love duet between dreamer and world, making man and the world into two wedded creatures that are paradoxically united in the dialogue of their solitude. ~ Gaston Bachelard

I like the posture, but not the yoga.
I like the inebriated morning, but not the opium. I like the flower but not the garden, the moment but not the dream. Quiet, my love. Be still. I am sleeping. ~ Roman Payne

Do you know my best quality?" she asks.
"Of your many, I could not say, my darling."
"I see the best in people. I fall in love with people when I see a window into their beings, their shining moments. I've fallen in love with so many people but the trouble is I fall out of love so quickly too. I see the worst in them just as easily.
"Do you know I fell in love with you right away? That day at the Trotters' I had noted you because you were new, of course, and then you sat down at the piano, and you played a few notes, but you played them so well, with no self consciousness, and no idea that anyone might be listening. It was in that room off the garden and you were the only one there. I was passing through on the way to the ladies' room and saw you there. I fell in love with you right then, and so I slipped my drink all over myself so I could meet you." ~ Janice Y.K. Lee

Don't you see? Everything's different now. I'm different now. I'm not that dashing, immortal youth who kissed you in the garden all those years ago."
She stroked his cheek. "I'm not the giddy, moonstruck girl you kissed. I'm a woman now, with my own fears and desires. And a heart that's grown stronger than you'd credit. Strong enough to contain four years' worth of love."
He cleared his throat and studied the wood paneling. The whorls of grain twisted and churned as he blinked. "You should have saved it for someone else."
"I've never wanted anyone else." She tugged on his chin until he met her gaze. "Luke. Fight for me. ~ Tessa Dare

When the Deep Purple falls,
Over sleepy garden walls,
And the stars begin to flicker in the sky,
Thru the mist of a memory
You wander back to me,
Breathing my name with a sigh.
In the still of the night,
Once again I hold you tight,
Tho' you're gone, your love lives on
When moonlight beams.
And as long as my heart will beat
Lover, we'll always meet
Here in my Deep Purple dreams. ~ Rebecca Wells

I'd never been in love, never felt that surge of feeling or that fall from its graces. I'd only watched as others weathered it: my mother in her garden, Sumner on the front lawn all those years ago, Ashley sobbing from the other side of a wall. I sat kerbside with my best friend and held her, trying to shoulder some of the hurt. There's only so much you can do, in these situations. ~ Sarah Dessen

As for rosemary, I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language. ~ Thomas More

As it is my practice here to conceal nothing, I shall relate on this page the episode of the wall. Virigilia and Lobo Neves were soon to sail. Entering Dona Placida's house, I saw on the table a folded piece of paper. It was a note from Virgilia. It said that she would be waiting for me in the garden at sundown, without fail. It concluded, "The wall is low on the side toward the little path."
I made a gesture of displeasure. The letter seemed to me extraordinary audacious, ill-considered, and even ridiculous. It not only invited scandal, it invited it together with laughter and sneers. I pictured myself leaping over the wall and caught in the act by an officer of the law, who led me off to jail. "The wall is low…" And what if it was low? Obviously Virgilia did not know what she was doing; perhaps by now she wished she had not sent the note. I looked at it, a small piece of paper, wrinkled by inflexible. I felt an urge to tear it in thirty thousand pieces and to throw it to the wind as the last vestige of my adventure; but I did not do so. Self-love, shame at the thought of fleeing from danger…There was no way out; I would have to go.
"Tell her I'll go."
"Where?" asked Dona Placida.
"Where she said she would wait for me."
"She said nothing to me."
"In this note."
Dona Placida stared. "But this paper, I found it this morning in your drawer, and I thought that…"
I felt a queer sensation. I reread the paper and looked at it a long t ~ Machado De Assis

I'll emerge, with wings, from the banner I am, bird
that never alights on trees in the garden
I will shed my skin and my language.
Some of my words of love will fall into
Lorca's poems; he'll live in my bedroom
and see what I have seen of the Bedouin moon. I'll emerge
from almond trees like cotton on sea foam ~ Mahmoud Darwish

I dedicate my work today to the furtherance of all things good. Whether I am paid or not, whether I am working out in the world or planting my own garden, I dedicate whatever I am doing today to the uplifting of all things. May the activity of my mind and work of my hands be of service to the healing of the world. Today I remember that there is only one work: to be who I am capable of being, to do what I am capable of doing to make the world a better place. May my life be of use to something greater than myself, that I might feel the joy of being used. Dear God, Today I dedicate all I am and all that I have, That love might use me as a conduit of its power. Illumine my mind and increase my understanding, Hone my personality and deepen my skills, That all I do might glorify Your presence in the world. And so it is. Amen. ~ Marianne Williamson

Mother I had a beautiful house in Shingdi a vegetable garden Vines of bitter gourd lettuce English spinach and tousled coconut trees Coconuts fell on my darling husbands head One day we made love under the tree Now I was pregnant just like my orchard full of fruits with the love child Oh I ran as hard as I could from the shadow These were shadows of time shadows of the past ... ~ Mehreen Ahmed

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

One does not find solitude, one creates it. Solitude is created alone. I have created it. Because I decided that here was where I should be alone, that I would be alone to write books. It happened this way. I was alone in this house. I shut myself in - of course, I was afraid. And then I began to love it. This house became the house of writing. My books come from this house. From this light as well, and from the garden. From the light reflecting off the pond. It has taken me twenty years to write what I just said. ~ Marguerite Duras

Ethan's gaze returned to the swell of her breast above the top of her gown. "Cord once mentioned a room here at Sheffield House on the second floor, rather out of the way,I understand, and rarely used.I don't think anyone would miss us if we disappeared for a while, do you?"
Her pulse quickened. She couldn't look away from the smoky heat in his eyes or the sensual curve of his lips. They were equally matched, she thought, and perfectly mated,her mind slipping ahead to what would happen in that room. "No,I don't believe they would miss us in the least."
His look burned hotter. He glanced at the crush of people surrounding them, spoke just loudly enough for them to hear. "Come,my love.It's a bit warm in here.Why don't we take a stroll in the garden?"
Grace bit back a smile. "That is a very good notion,my lord.I believe the night is clear enough for us to see the stars.The Great Bear and the Little Lion should be visible tonight and I am ever so eager to see them."
Ethan's smile held a trace of amusement that disappeared beneath a look of sensual heat. ~ Kat Martin

I do love Oregon." My gaze wanders over the quiet, natural beauty surrounding us, which isn't limited to just this garden. "Being near the river, and the ocean, and the rocky mountains, and all this nature ... the weather."
He chuckles. "I've never met anyone who actually loves rain. It's kind of weird. But cool, too," he adds quickly, as if afraid to offend me. "I just don't get it."
I shrug. "It's not so much that I love rain. I just have a healthy respect for what if does. People hate it, but the world needs rain. It washes away dirt, dilutes the toxins in the air, feeds drought. It keeps everything around us alive."
"Well, I have a healthy respect for what the sun does," he counters with a smile."
"I'd rather have the sun after a good, hard rainfall."
He just shakes his head at me but he's smiling. "The good with the bad?"
"Isn't that life?"
He frowns. "Why do I sense a metaphor behind that?"
"Maybe there is a metaphor behind that." One I can't very well explain to him without describing the kinds of things I see every day in my life. The underbelly of society - where twisted morals reign and predators lurk, preying on the lost, the broken, the weak, the innocent. Where a thirteen-year-old sells her body rather than live under the same roof as her abusive parents, where punks gang-rape a drunk girl and then post pictures of it all over the internet so the world can relive it with her. Where a junkie mom's drug addiction is readily f ~ K.A. Tucker

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turn'd to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be:
And Priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars, my joys & desires.

- The Garden of Love ~ William Blake

All France, it has often been said, is a garden, and if you love France, as I do, it can be a very beautiful garden. For myself I found it healing and soothing to the spirit; I recovered from the shocks and bruises which I had received in my own country. But there comes a day, when you are well again and strong, when this atmosphere ceases to be nourishing. You long to break out and test your powers. Then the French spirit seems inadequate. You long to make friends, to create enemies, to look beyond walls and cultivated patches of earth. You want to cease thinking in terms of life insurance, sick benefits, old age pensions and so on. ~ Henry Miller

How many years have passed since that far-off June afternoon? More than thirty. And yet, if I close my eyes, Micòl Finzi-Contini is still there, leaning over her garden wall, looking at me and talking to me. In 1929 Micòl was little more than a child, a thin, blond thirteen-year old with large, clear, magnetic eyes. And I was a boy in short trousers, very bourgeois and very vain, whom a small academic setback was sufficient to cast down into the most childish desperation. We both fixed our eyes on each other. Above her head the sky was a compact blue, a warm already summer sky without the slightest cloud. Nothing, it seemed, would be able to alter it, and nothing indeed has altered it, at least in memory. ~ Giorgio Bassani

What madness, to love a man as something more than human! I lived in a fever, convulsed with tears and sighs that allowed me neither rest nor peace of mind. My soul was a burden, bruised and bleeding. It was tired of the man who carried it, but I found no place to set it down to rest. Neither the charm of the countryside nor the sweet scents of a garden could soothe it. It found no peace in song or laughter, none in the company of friends at table or in the pleasures of love, none even in books or poetry. Everything that was not what my friend had been was dull and distasteful. I had heart only for sighs and tears, for in them alone I found some shred of consolation. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

I think that places, like people, ought to have boundaries. Who ever said that gardening was a public activity, anyway? Gardening, like making love, feels a lot better than it looks. Nobody buys tickets to gardening competitions. There's no such thing as the Gardening Olympics. There is no gold medal in Speed Weeding or Double Digging. Maybe there should be, but I wouldn't compete in a gardening Olympiad for all the compost in China. I go through ungainly contortions when I garden. I squat. I crawl around on my hands and knees. Most of the time I bend over, upended. That angle may be flattering to a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader, but it is not flattering to me. ~ Cassandra Danz

A young man and woman walked past - a handsome young man and pretty young woman, the man in a seersucker suit and the woman in an old-fashioned summer dress - and they were walking a bit apart from one another with a space between them, and the man was looking straight ahead and the woman had her arms crossed against her chest, hugging herself, looking down at her feet, at her toes that peeked out the open fronts of her shoes, and they both had the same gleefully suppressed smile on their faces, and I knew that they were freshly in love, perhaps they had fallen in love having dinner in some restaurant with a garden or tables on the sidewalk, perhaps they had not even kissed yet, and they walked apart because they thought they had their whole lives to walk close together, touching, and wanted to anticipate the moment they touched for as long as possible, and they passed my without noticing me and Miro. Something about watching them made me sad. I think it was too lovely: the summer night, the open-toed shoes, their faces rapt with momentarily ramped-down joy. I felt I had witnessed their happiest moment, the pinnacle, and they were already walking away from it, but they did not know it. ~ Peter Cameron

I am a gardener of life, the heart is my garden, love is my flower, and joy is the fragrance. ~ Debasish Mridha

The first time I got a chance to meet Michael was onstage at Madison Square Garden. There were tons of people on the stage, and I just remember losing my mind. Like, Oh my God, that's Michael Jackson right there. I was just over his right shoulder. And then when I finally got a chance to get on the stage with him, I was just shut down. He had the type of magic that you just bowed to. I just said, I love you, and I know you've heard it a million and one times from fans all over the world, but you've meant so much to me as an entertainer, and I love you, and I've admired you all these years. ~ Usher

In a room as big as loneliness
my heart which is as big as love
looks at the simple pretexts of its happiness
at the beautiful decay of flowers in the vase
at the saplings you planted in our garden
and the song of canaries
which sing to the size of a window.

Ah…this is my lot
this is my lot
my lot is a sky that is taken away
at the drop of a curtain
my lot is going down a flight of disused stairs
to regain something amid putrefaction and nostalgia
my lot is a sad promenade in the garden of memories
and dying in the grief of a voice which tells me I love your hands. ~ Forugh Farrokhzad

My sympathies and my love went out to her, even as my hand had in the garden. I felt that years of the conventionalities of life could not teach me to know her sweet, brave nature as had this one day of strange experiences. Yet there were two thoughts which sealed the words of affection upon my lips. She was weak and helpless, shaken in mind and nerve. It was to take her at a disadvantage to obtrude love upon her at such a time. Worst still, she was rich. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

Men of dreams, the lovers and the poets, are better in most things than the men of my sort; the men of intellect. You take your being from your mothers. You live to the full: it is given you to love with your whole strength, to know and taste the whole of life. We thinkers, though often we seem to rule you, cannot live with half your joy and full reality. Ours is a thin and arid life, but the fullness of being is yours; yours the sap of the fruit, the garden of lovers, the joyous pleasaunces of beauty. Your home is the earth, ours the idea of it. Your danger is to be drowned in the world of sense, ours to gasp for breath in airless space. You are a poet, I a thinker. You sleep on your mother's breast, I watch in the wilderness. On me there shines the sun; on you the moon with all the stars. Your dreams are all of girls, mine of boys - ~ Hermann Hesse

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden. ~ Claudia Adrienne Grandi

I cannot love evergreens - they are the misanthropes of nature. To them the spring brings no promise, the autumn no decline; they are cut off from the sweetest of all ties with their kind - sympathy ... I will have no evergreens in my garden; when the inevitable winter comes, every beloved plant and favorite tree shall drop together - no solitary fir left to triumph over the companionship of decay. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I love the quietude of misty dawn before the sober sun is up... The morning songs of birds awakening in blooming garden sets my soul gently... Aroma flowers with glistering of the dew... Deep full chest breath... Shy sunbeams flickering over the tops of wisdom whispering choir of waving trees... Serenity of mind... The crystal still lagoon reflecting soft lavender sailing clouds...I step in breeze realm, close eyes and fly with them over the miles, time and space... The serenading music fills my heart... Above the skies the joy of the refreshing winds, as our summer, recalls my being by your side and makes me feel the touch of you and gladness of your tranquil vibes. I smile... ~ Oksana Rus

Indeed, so deep is my pleasure in the work of the garden that, if there be a dimension after death in which grieving for the loss of the world of senses is possible, I shall grieve for no person however once agonisingly desired and passionately beloved, for no emotional adventure however uplifting, for no success however warming, no infamy however exhilarating, for nothing half so much as I shall grieve to the loss of the earth itself, the soil, the seeds, the plants, the very weeds ... It is a love almost overriding my love the words that could express that love. ~ Hal Porter

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

The moment I formulated this thought, everything aroud me seemed to droop heavily toward the earth. Outside in the garden, the eaves of the roof dripped rain like beads of weighted glass. Even the mats themselves seemed to press down upon the floor. I remember thinking that I was dacing to express not the pain of a young woman who has lost her supernatural lover, but the pain I myself would feel when my life was finally robbed of the one thing I cared most deeply about. I found myself thinking,too,of satsu; I danced the bitterness of our eternal separation.By the end I felt almost overcome with grief; but I certainly wasn't prepared for what I saw when I turned to look at the Chairman.He was sitting at the near corner of the table so that, as it happened, no one but me could see him. I thought he wore an expression of astonishment at first, because his eyes were so wide. But just as his mouth sometimes twitched when he tried not to smile, now I could see it twitching under the strain of a different emotion. I couldn't be sure, but I had to impression his eyes were heavy with tears. He looked toward the door, pretending to scratch the side of his nose so he cold wipe a finger in the corner of his eye; and he smoothed his eyebrows as if the were the source of his trouble. I was so shocked to see the Chairman in pain I felt almost disoriented for a moment. ~ Arthur Golden

Certainly if I were to think in terms of a field that would have required a different mode of education, I think I would have leaned in the direction of being a therapist. And without the education, or a different kind of education, I think my first choice would be a landscape architect. I love to garden. ~ Jill McCorkle

I've got a telescope in my garden and one of the things I love to do is go out and let the sky, the night sky, the galaxies, the Orion nebula, have an impact on my mind. I find that awe inspiring. And just to contemplate on what the astronomers have revealed to us about the immense size and so on of the universe. I find that very healthy. And it's a good thing to do. ~ John Lennox

'The Secret Garden' was the first musical that I fell in love with when I was a kid. My mom took me to see it, and it was the first one that I owned the soundtrack to and listened to over and over again. ~ Allison Tolman

Water makes me feel at peace. In Corsica, I spend most of my time on the beaches or in the rivers. That's one reason I love it there so much. The water is so clean and fresh - you can drink it straight out of the rivers! This island is my secret garden. ~ Laetitia Casta

A Halt

Lie still, my soul, the Sun of Grace
Is warm within this garden space
Beneath tall kindly trees.
The quiet light is green and fair;
A fragrance fills the swooning air;
Lie still, and take thine ease.

This silent noon of Jesu's love
Is warm about thee and above-
A tender Lord is He.
Lie still an hour- this place is His
He has a thousand pleasaunces,
And each all fair and fragrant is,
And each is all for thee.

Then, Jesu, for a little space
I rest me in this garden place,
All sweet to scent and sight.
Here, from this high-road scarce withdrawn,
I thrust my hot hands in the lawn
Cool yet with dew of far-off dawn
And saturate with light.

But ah, dear Saviour, human-wise,
I yearn to pierce all mysteries,
To catch Thine Hands and see Thine Eyes
When evening sounds begin.
There, in Thy white Robe, Thou wilt wait
At dusk beside some orchard gate,
And smile to see me come so late,
And, smiling, call me in. ~ Robert Hugh Benson

I love you, Tess McGee. I don't do big funny or heartfelt speeches in front of people at birthday parties, but I'm excellent in private alcoves in beer gardens." He paused. "Okay, that sounded really bad, what I mean is ... "
I kissed him into silence. I pressed my forehead against his with a sigh. "I love you, too, Toby. In fact, that's what I was going to tell you before we walked into the beer garden. Right before the really bad singing started."
Toby chuckled. He let out a sigh of relief. "Ready to reminisce?"
I whispered my final word before he closed the distance.
"Always. ~ C.J. Duggan

As June walked toward me from the darkness of the garden into the light of the door, I saw for the first time the most beautiful woman on earth. Astartling white face, burning dark eyes, a face so alive I felt it would consume itself before my eyes. Years ago I tried to imagine a true beauty; I created in my mind an image of just such a woman. I had never seen her until last night. Yet I knew long ago the phosphorescent color of her skin, her huntress profile, the evenness of her teeth. She is bizarre, fantastic, nervous, like someone in a high fever. Her beauty drowned me...

By the end of the evening I had extricated myself from her power. She killed my admiration by her talk. Her talk. The enormous ego, false, weak, posturing. She lacks the courage of her personality, which is sensual, heavy with experience. Her role alone preoccupies her. She invents drama in which she always stars. I am sure she creates genuine dramas, genuine chaos and whirlpools of feelings, but I feel that her share in it is a pose. That night, in spite of my response to her, she sought to be whatever she felt I wanted her to be. She is an actress every moment. I cannot grasp the core of June. ~ Anais Nin

I knew I loved you before I met you
I think I dreamed you into life
I knew I loved you before I met you
I have been waiting all my life ~ Savage Garden

I have always wanted to be a gardener, and I love the time I spend in my garden. ~ Pawan Kalyan

I have seen myself lose intolerance, narrowness, bigotry, complacence, pride and a whole bushel-basket of other intellectual vices through my contact with Nature and with men. And when you take weeds out of a garden it gives you room to grow flowers. So, every time I lost a little self-satisfaction, or arrogance, I could plant some broadness or love of my own in its place, and after a while the garden of my mind began to bloom and be fragrant and I found myself better equipped for my work and more useful to others as a consequence. ~ Luther Burbank

It was a feeling that I could be a little different from everyone else of my age, and that, if pushed, I could battle against the forces of nature and prevail. Adventure felt the most natural thing in the world, and it was where I came alive. It is what made me feel, for the first time, really myself.
As I got older and the rest of my world got more complicated and unnatural, I sought more and more the identity and wholeness that adventure gave me.
In short, when I was wet, muddy, and cold, I felt like a million dollars, and when I was with the lads, with everyone desperately trying to be "cool," I felt more awkward and unsure of myself. I could do mud, but trying to be cool was never a success.
So I learned to love the former and shy away from the latter.
(Although I gave "cool" a brief, good go as a young teenager, buying winklepicker boots and listening to heavy metal records all through one long winter, both of which were wholly unsatisfying, and subsequently dropped as "boring.")
Instead, I would often dress up in my "worst" (aka my best) and dirtiest clothes, stand under the hosepipe in the garden, get soaking wet--in December--and then go off for a run on my own in the hills.
The locals thought me a bit bonkers, but my dog loved it, and I loved it. It felt wild, and it was a feeling that captured me more and more.
Once, I returned from one such run caked in mud and ran past a girl I quite fancied. I wondered if she might like the mudd ~ Bear Grylls

It hadn't occurred to me that my mother would die. Until she was dying, the thought had never entered my mind. She was monolithic and insurmountable, the keeper of my life. She would grow old and still work in the garden. This image was fixed in my mind, like one of the memories from her childhood that I made her explain so intricately that I remembered it as if it were mine. She would be old and beautiful like the black-and-white photo of Georgia O'Keeffe I'd once sent her. I held fast to this image for the first couple of weeks after we left the Mayo Clinic, and then, once she was admitted to the hospice wing of the hospital in Duluth, that image unfurled, gave way to the others, more modest and true. I imagined my mother in October; I wrote the scene in my mind. And then the one of my mother in August and another in May. Each day that passed, another month peeled away. ~ Cheryl Strayed

Tom O' Bedlam among the Sunflowers"

To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . .
I woke this morning before your dream had shredded
And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold,

Six-sided - more than that - broken on flagstones,
Petals the color of a wedding band.
You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold.

Perhaps I made those flowers in my head,
For I have counted snowflakes in July
Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium,

And I have stepped into your dream at night,
A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight.
I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver.

Love, the stars have fallen into the garden
And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand.
It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets.

This morning the garden is littered with dry petals
As yellow as the page of an old book.
I step among them. They are brittle as bone china. ~ Thomas James

I dreamed I spoke in another's language,
I dreamed I lived in another's skin,
I dreamed I was my own beloved,
I dreamed I was a tiger's kin.
I dreamed that Eden lived inside me,
And when I breathed a garden came,
I dreamed I knew all of Creation,
I dreamed I knew the Creator's name.
I dreamed
and this dream was the finest
That all I dreamed was real and true,
And we would live in joy forever,
You in me, and me in you. ~ Clive Barker

Plants Fed On by Fawns"

All the flowers: the pleated leaves of the hellebore;
And the false blossom of the calla, a leaf like a petal -
The white flesh of a woman bathing - a leaf over-
Shadowing the small flowers hidden in the spadix;
And fly poison, tender little flower, whose cursed root
Pounded into a fine white powder will destroy flies.
But why kill flies? They do not trouble me. They
Are like the fruit the birds feed on. They are like
The wind in the trees, or the sap that threads all things,
The blue blood moving through branch and vine,
Through the wings of dead things and living things....
If I lift my hand? If I write to you? The letters
Can be stored in a box. Can they constitute the shape
Of a love? Can the paper be ground? Can the box
Be altar and garden plot and bed? Can there rise
From the bed the form of a two-headed creature,
A figure that looks both forward and back, keeping
Watch always, one head sleeping while the other wakes,
The bird head sleeping while the lion head wakes,
And then the changing of the guard?.... No,
The flies do not trouble me. They are like the stars
At night. Common and beautiful. They are like
My thoughts. I stood at midnight in the orchard.
There were so many stars, and yet the stars,
The very blackness of the night, though perfectly
Cold and clear, seemed to me to be insub ~ Brigit Pegeen Kelly

She cried, "Laura," up the garden,
"Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men. ~ Christina Rossetti

Sometimes you don't die
when you're supposed to
& now I have a choice
repair a world or build
a new one inside my body
a white door opens
into a place queerly brimming
gold light so velvet-gold
it is like the world
hasn't happened
when I call out
all my friends are there
everyone we love
is still alive gathered
at the lakeside
like constellations
my honeyed kin
honeyed light
beneath the sky
a garden blue stalks
white buds the moon's
marble glow the fire
distant & flickering
the body whole bright-
winged brimming
with the hours
of the day beautiful
nameless planet. Oh
friends, my friends -
bloom how you must, wild
until we are free. ~ Cameron Awkward-Rich

And so to my fool's bed. What was that? No, no, not a girl crying in the garden. No one, cold, hungry, and banished, was shivering there, longing and not daring to come in. It was the chains swinging at the well. It would be folly to get up and go out and call again: Psyche, Psyche, my only love. I am a great queen. I have killed a man. I am drunk like a man. All warriors drink deep after the battle. Bardia's lips on my hand were like the touch of lightning. All great princes have mistresses and lovers. There's the crying again. No, it's only the buckets at the well. "Shut the window, Poobi. To your bed, child. Do you love me, Poobi? Kiss me good night. Good night." The king's dead. He'll never pull my hair again. A straight thrust and then a cut in the leg. That would have killed him. I am the Queen; I'll kill Orual too. ~ C.S. Lewis

My Dearest Theresa,

I have read this book in your garden, my love, you were absent, or else I could not have read it. It is a favourite book of mine. You will not understand these English words, and others will not understand them, which is the reason I have not scrawled them in Italian. But you will recognize the handwriting of him who passionately loved you, and you will divine that, over a book that was yours, he could only think of love.
In that word, beautiful in all languages, but most so in yours, Amor mio, is comprised my existence here and thereafter. I feel I exist here, and I feel that I shall exist hereafter – to what purpose you will decide; my destiny rests with you, and you are a woman, eighteen years of age, and two out of a convent, I wish you had stayed there, with all my heart, or at least, that I had never met you in your married state.
But all this is too late. I love you, and you love me, at least, you say so, and act as if you did so, which last is a great consolation in all events. But I more than love you, and cannot cease to love you. Think of me, sometimes, when the Alps and ocean divide us, but they never will, unless you wish it. ~ Lord Byron

I'm -- earthy. I don't look at a figure on a cross, I look at the things round me. Those are what I love; my husband, my child, my dog, my garden, my spinet, my bedroom, my home. Earthy. You see. But I have love overflowing for all those. Those are more important to me than a Man sitting on a throne in Heaven. I hope if I explain it to Him when I see Him, He'll come round to see it my way . . . ~ Winston Graham

We'll meet again in Lvov, my love and I ... Tatiana hums, eating her ice cream, in our Leningrad, in jasmine June, near Fontanka, the Neva, the Summer Garden, where we are forever young. ~ Paullina Simons

Dear old Jane is a jewel," agreed Anne, "but," she added, leaning forward to bestow a tender pat on the plump, dimpled little hand hanging over her pillow, "there's nobody like my own Diana after all. Do you remember that evening we first met, Diana, and 'swore' eternal friendship in your garden? We've kept that 'oath,' I think…we've never had a quarrel nor even a coolness. I shall never forget the thrill that went over me the day you told me you loved me. I had had such a lonely, starved heart all through my childhood. I'm just beginning to realize how starved and lonely it really was. Nobody cared anything for me or wanted to be bothered with me. I should have been miserable if it hadn't been for that strange little dreamlife of mine, wherein I imagined all the friends and love I craved. But when I came to Green Gables everything was changed. And then I met you. You don't know what your friendship meant to me. I want to thank you here and now, dear, for the warm and true affection you've always given me. ~ L.M. Montgomery

I would love this place to be my garden.
(on Arsenal's old stadium) ~ Thierry Henry

Yes, I'd love to have a garden of my own
spacious, and full of everything that is fragrant and flowering. But if I don't succeed, never mind
I've still got the dream. ~ Ruskin Bond

I am a gardener of thoughts, and my garden only grows flowers of love. ~ Debasish Mridha

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

"I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961 ~ Sylvia Plath

I loved you, I did. I believe I even sold myself a bit: on your love, my lust, your hair and just the way we stood there. How the air smelled of you, the way your shirt was cursed with blues. The way we danced by the ocean in front your mini-garden. The white fence, your loveliness and the heavenly kisses. It'll always be the sheets, lying beside, holding your arm and kissing your hair in a loving stride. ~ Dominic Riccitello

I love decorating my home. I'm a gardener too, so that's usually something I have to play catch up with. ~ Suzy Bogguss

Ah, then, upon my bedroom I do draw
The blind to hide the garden, where the moon
Enjoys the open blossoms as they straw
Their beauty for his taking, boon for boon.
And I do lift my aching arms to you,
And I do lift my anguished, avid breast,
And I do weep for very pain of you,
And fling myself at the doors of sleep, for rest. ~ D.H. Lawrence

Do you have a leather jacket? One for a ten-year-old boy?" I asked the man selling leather jackets and gloves in Covent Garden, London. "Yes, I have one right here!" And the man dug out a fine leather jacket that looked styled and tailored for a young boy. "I'm buying this for my son" I said to him. "I love this jacket, it's perfect, I think I will just come back for it tomorrow, though! I'll be back tomorrow, okay?" And the man reached his arms above his head, and said with a big smile upon his face "You only have one life to live! What is the difference if you do something today, or if you do it tomorrow?" I thought about the man's words. And I bought the jacket. He was right, there is no difference, really, between doing something today and doing something tomorrow, when you only have one life to live! Afterall, tomorrow may never come! All you really have is today! ~ C. JoyBell C.

Mrs. Flanigan made this for you and dropped it off earlier. So pretty, wouldn't you agree?"...
"White roses - the bride's flower," Mrs. Norton said with a lilt in her voice. "For unity, purity, and a love stronger than death." She touched the edge of a blossom. "And, in addition, you have chrysanthemums for fidelity, optimism, joy, and long life, with the color white standing for truth and loyal love."
As if caught in a spell, Grace stared at the flowers, a lump forming in her throat, the words echoing in her mind... Joy, truth, fidelity, a love stronger than death.
Mrs. Flanigan chuckled. "Mrs. Norton, you make the bouquet sound so poetic. I'm afraid I can't take credit for such a romantic arrangement. I chose the only white flowers still blooming in my garden. ~ Debra Holland

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

Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet;
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet.
She bid me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree;
But I, being young and foolish, with her did not agree.
In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears. ~ W.B.Yeats

Evie is our beautiful, dark-haired, green-eyed child,' I say. I can hear the tremor in my voice. 'Like many seven-year-old girls, she's obsessed with princesses. We think she looks more like a fairy. She loves Lego and painting. She laughs easily. She has pretend tea parties in a tree in our garden and invites all her dolls. She wants to be an artist when she grows up. Please find her. Please bring her back to us. We miss her beyond measure. She is the love of our life. ~ Sanjida Kay

I literally melted. Seriously, how was I going to not go for this guy?
"May I?" he asked. Somehow I went from puddle on the floor to freaking out school girl. My insides were fluttering like a butterfly garden. ~ Jessica Florence

My idea of absolute happiness is to sit in a hot garden all, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.'
'You are a romantic, Edith,' repeated Mr Neville, with a smile.
'It is you who are wrong,' she replied. 'I have been listening to that particular accusation for most of my life. I am not a romantic. I am a domestic animal. I do not sigh and yearn for extravagant displays of passion, for the grand affair, the world well lost for love. I know all that, and know that it leaves you lonely. No, what I crave is the simplicity of routine. An evening walk, arm in arm, in fine weather. A game of cards. Time for idle talk. Preparing a meal together. ~ Anita Brookner

As a boy, in my own backyard I could catch a basket of blue crabs, a string of flounder, a dozen redfish, or a net full of white shrimp. All this I could do in a city enchanting enough to charm cobras out of baskets, one so corniced and filigreed and elaborate that it leaves strangers awed and natives self-satisfied. In its shadows you can find metal work as delicate as lace and spiral staircases as elaborate as yachts. In the secrecy of its gardens you can discover jasmine and camellias and hundreds of other plants that look embroidered and stolen from the Garden of Eden for the sheer love of richness and the joy of stealing from the gods. In its kitchens, the stoves are lit up in happiness as the lamb is marinating in red wine sauce, vinaigrette is prepared for the salad, crabmeat is anointed with sherry, custards are baked in the oven, and buttermilk biscuits cool on the counter. ~ Pat Conroy

A DESCRIPTION OF HAPPINESS IN KOBENHAVN
All this windless day snow fell
into the King's Garden
where I walked, perfecting and growing old,
abandoning one by one everybody:
randomly in love with the paradise
furnace of my mind. Now I sit in the dark,
dreaming of a marble sun
and its strictness. This
is to tell you I am not coming back.
To tell you instead of my private life
among people who must wrestle their hearts
in order to feel anything, as though it were
unnatural. What I master by day
still lapses in the night. But I go on
with the cargo cult, blindly feeling the snow
come down, learning to flower by tightening. ~ Jack Gilbert

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

There's a calm in my mind in the morning. A peacefulness that feels nice. A two mile walk and prayer, then watering the garden is relaxing. I don't know if we all feel this way, but throughout the day our minds are filled with interaction, most of it unimportant to our natural well being. In the last few years I've tried to be a calmer person in my mind, and found it much easier with my love for Jesus Christ. Rolling with God's grace. Happy day my friends. Blessings. ~ Ron Baratono

I know my heart, Matthew. I know what I feel won't change." She took a shuddering breath and extended one unsteady hand in his direction. Her voice shook with intensity. "When I tell you I love you, that means I'll love you forever."
What does a man do when his dearest dreams come true?
Matthew stared at her outstretched hand. He'd never imagined this time would come. He wasn't prepared. Her words soaked into his soul, slowly turning the parched desert there into a verdant garden.
"You love me," he said slowly, wonderingly. Then with greater certainty, "By God, you love me." His astonished laugh ended on a choked note as he snatched her hand.
"So much," she said huskily. Her fingers curled hard around his. "So very, very much."
He dragged her back into his arms. "I can't believe it."
"Believe it," she whispered. She raised her hands to frame his face so she could look into his eyes. The blue was so pure that he saw right to her gallant, steadfast soul. "I love you, Matthew. I will always love you."
"And I love you, Grace."
Such simple words to change his life. Yet after tonight, he'd never be the same man again. ~ Anna Campbell

Love, time doth change."

The rose was red,
The color of love,
Its petals vibrant,
A sign of your love.
Its stem did twine,
Around my heart,
But it couldn't keep it pumping,
One day it failed to start.
As clouds parted,
Oceans apart,
We only had our memories,
To remember,
Our love would last.
But time went on,
Your love did change,
And so the rose,
Began to change.
Thorns grew wild,
Petals did fade,
My rose was wilting,
Showing its age.
Red was no more,
Black was the hue,
Without your love,
What was I to do?
I tended my garden,
The thoughts in my mind,
For you were still my love,
For me in my mind. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

To be content, horse people need only a horse, or, lacking that, someone else who loves horses with whom they can talk. It was always that way with my grandfather. He took me places just so we could see horses, be near them. We went to the circus and the rodeo at Madison Square Garden. We watched parades down Fifth Avenue. Finding a horse, real or imagined, was like finding a dab of magic potion that enlivened us both. Sometimes I'd tell my grandfather about all the horses in my eleborate dreams. He'd lean over, smile, and assure me that, one day, I'd have one for real. And if my grandfather, my Opa, told me something was going to come true, it always did. ~ Allan J. Hamilton

I have an organic garden and love being able to say, 'I'm going to see what I can pick to throw in my salad.' ~ Christie Brinkley

I saw an astonishing spectacle down there: the roots of centuries-old trees, seen from the inside, so to speak, gigantic, twisting things, like giant, naked, suspended flowers. Go and visit that garden. I love the place, but sometimes when I'm there I detect the sent of a woman's sex, a giant, worn-out one. Which goes a little way toward confirming my obscene vision: This city faces the sea with its legs apart, its thighs spread, from the bay to the high ground where that luxurious, fragrant garden is. It was conceived - or should I say inseminated, ha, ha! - by a general, Gneral Letang, in 1847. You absolutely must go and see it - then you'll understand why people here are dying to have famous ancestors. To escape from the evidence. ~ Kamel Daoud

There is a little plant called reverence in the corner of my soul's garden, which I love to have watered once a week. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

I play with my grandchildren. I tend to my garden, which I love. Of course, I love to read, and family is really what it's all about. ~ Julie Andrews

When Sterling's eyesight did finally fail him completely, we were
up in years, content to sit in our garden and reflect on what a
wondrous and exciting life we'd led. He did not see my hair fade into
silver. For him it was always a vibrant red. I watched him age
gracefully and with dignity. He leaned on me much more than he
did his walking stick, which was how it should be, because when I
needed him most, he was always there for me. Each day I thought I
could love him no more than I already did - and the following
morning I was always proven wrong, for I awoke loving him just a
little bit more. ~ Lorraine Heath

My mom used to make everything. She had a great garden and composted and made everything from scratch - peanut butter, bread, jelly, everything. I don't know how she did it because all those things take time and love and labour. I only do half the stuff she does - but there's still time. ~ Julia Roberts

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

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. 'I shall be yours,' she told him, 'when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.' But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away. ~ Roland Barthes

Janie ran to my side, where she tugged at the book eagerly as though she'd seen it before. "Flower book," she said, pointing to the cover.
"Where did you find Mummy's book?" Katherine asked, hovering near me.
Cautiously, I revealed the book as I sat on the sofa. "Would you like to look at it with me?" I said, avoiding the question.
Katherine nodded and the boys gathered round as I cracked the spine and thumbed through page after page of beautiful camellias, pressed and glued onto each page, with handwritten notes next to each. On the page that featured the 'Camellia reticulata,' a large, salmon-colored flower, she had written: 'Edward had this one brought in from China. It's fragile. I've given it the garden's best shade.' On the next page, near the 'Camellia sasanqua,' she wrote: 'A christmas gift from Edward and the children. This one will need extra love. It hardly survived the passage from Japan. I will spend the spring nursing it back to health.'
On each page, there were meticulous notes about the care and feeding of the camellias- when she planted them, how often they were watered, fertilized, and pruned. In the right-hand corner of some pages, I noticed an unusual series of numbers.
"What does that mean?" I asked the children.
Nicholas shrugged. "This one was Mummy's favorite," he said, flipping to the last page in the book. I marveled at the pink-tipped white blossoms as my heart began to beat faster. The Middlebury Pink. ~ Sarah Jio

I love my garden, and I love working in it. To potter with green growing things, watching each day to see the dear, new sprouts come up, is like taking a hand in creation, I think. Just now my garden is like faith - the substance of things hoped for. ~ L.M. Montgomery

I never knew what Mother knowed,
Like how a thread and needle sewed,
And how a kiss healed boo-boos fast.
Why family knots were made to last.

I never knew how Mother saw
A caring man in angry pa,
A smile beneath the teary gloom,
A game inside a messy room.

I never knowed what Mother knew,
Like how to smile when days were blue,
And how to laugh for laughter's sake,
While giving up her slice of cake.

I never saw what Mother see'd
Like honor pulling garden weeds,
Or deep confessions in a look,
And hope alive in storybooks.

I never knew how Mother knowed
To hand out carrots when it snowed,
And why hot cocoa liked the rain,
While naptime kept a person sane.

For mother knowed and see'd it all.
A winner in a strike-out ball.
A 'yes, please' in a shoulder shrug.
A 'love you mostest' in a hug.

Perhaps, someday, I'll come to know
What Mother saw and knowed as so.
Like how 'I'm right' can be all wrong,
And why the night requires a song.

But of the things I learned and knew
I never doubted one thing true.
My mother made it crystal clear,
she knowed and loved me ever dear. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I do
sincerely trust that the benediction that is always
awaiting me in my garden may by degrees be more
deserved, and that I may grow in grace, and
patience, and cheerfulness, just like the happy
flowers I so much love. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

There aren't a lot of hobbies you can eat. Like, let's say you love to cook. That's a bad example. Let's say you love to travel, and everywhere you go, you try the food at the best local - My point is, I love gardening as a hobby. Right now in our garden, Portia and I are growing tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, beets, eggplant, ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Ahead, a house sits close to the road: a small, single-story place painted mint green. Ivy grows up one corner and onto the roof, the green tendrils swaying like a girl's hair let loose from a braid. In front there's a full and busy vegetable garden, with plants jostling for real estate and bees making a steady, low, collective hum. It reminds me of the aunties' gardens, and my nonna's when I was a kid. Tomato plants twist gently skywards, their lazy stems tied to stakes. Leafy heads of herbs- dark parsley, fine-fuzzed purple sage, bright basil that the caterpillars love to punch holes in. Rows and rows of asparagus. Whoever lives here must work in the garden a lot. It's wild but abundant, and I know it takes a special vigilance to maintain a garden of this size.
The light wind lifts the hair from my neck and brings the smell of tomato stalks. The scent, green and full of promise, brings to mind a childhood memory- playing in Aunty Rosa's yard as Papa speaks with a cousin, someone from Italy. I am imagining families of fairies living in the berry bushes: making their clothes from spiderweb silk, flitting with wings that glimmer pink and green like dragonflies'. ~ Hannah Tunnicliffe

EMBRACE Will you walk in my garden Our hands to hold? Will we never be parting If we ever grow old? Will you stay with me As bad arises? Life writes its own rules Some with nasty surprises. When the sun no longer Smiles on my face Will your love be stronger As I dream in your Embrace? A poem by Karen Lyons Kalmenson ~ David Mezzapelle

She had a hundred reasons: because Bear had carved a statue of her in the center of the topiary garden, because she could always make him laugh, because he'd let her return to the station, because he won at chess and lost at hockey, because he ran as fast as he could to polar bear births, because he had seal breath even as a human, because his hands were soft, because he was her Bear. "Because i want my husband back," Cassie said. ~ Sarah Beth Durst

You don't notice the dead leaving when they really choose to leave you. You're not meant to. At most you feel them as a whisper or the wave of a whisper undulating down. I would compare it to a woman in the back of a lecture hall or theater whom no one notices until she slips out.Then only those near the door themselves, like Grandma Lynn, notice; to the rest it is like an unexplained breeze in a closed room.
Grandma Lynn died several years later, but I have yet to see her here. I imagine her tying it on in her heaven, drinking mint juleps with Tennessee Williams and Dean Martin. She'll be here in her own sweet time, I'm sure.
If I'm to be honest with you, I still sneak away to watch my family sometimes. I can't help it, and sometimes they still think of me. They can't help it....
It was a suprise to everyone when Lindsey found out she was pregnant...My father dreamed that one day he might teach another child to love ships in bottles. He knew there would be both sadness and joy in it; that it would always hold an echo of me.
I would like to tell you that it is beautiful here, that I am, and you will one day be, forever safe. But this heaven is not about safety just as, in its graciousness, it isn't about gritty reality. We have fun.
We do things that leave humans stumped and grateful, like Buckley's garden coming up one year, all of its crazy jumble of plants blooming all at once. I did that for my mother who, having stayed, found herself facing the ~ Alice Sebold

My brain is divided into two butterflies, and both are in love with your rose-shaped heart. If you've got the garden, I've got my whole life. ~ Jarod Kintz

My grandmother taught me to read before I went to school. I was reading the newspaper when I was five. And Grandpa taught me to do math and figure. They believed in living simply. Grandpa grew a garden, and Grandma canned food for the winter. They taught me to work and to love to learn new things. I wasn't really afraid or shy. ~ Carolyn Brown

PAVILIONS OF SUN
Swans do fly
High above you
All the time
Prince of Sun
From his pavilion
Makes you shine
Come, come, come into my garden, lady love
Maybe I can hold your gold hand
Glide within my gold grove, lady love
Know the earth and you'll understand ~ Marc Bolan