Luxembourg Gardens Quotes

I was born on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, in the early spring of 1960. ~ Andre Brink

Part 2
Etienne: I cheated on her every day. In my mind, I thought of you in ways I shouldn't have, again and again. She was nothing compared to you. I've never felt this way about anybody before…

Anna: But…

Etienne: The first day of school. We weren't physics partners by accident. I saw Professeur Wakefield assigning lab parnters based on where people were sitting, so I leaned forward to borrow a pencil form you at just the right moment so he'dt think we were next to each other. Anna, I wanted to be your partner the first day.

Anna: But …

Etienne: I bought you love poetry! „I love you as certain dark things are loved, secretly, between the shadow and the soul." Neruda. I starred the pasasge. God. Why didn't you open it?

Anna: Because you said it was for school

Etienne: I said you were beautiful. I slept in your bed!

Anna: You never made a move! You had a girlfriend!

Etienne: No matter what a terrible boyfriend I was, I wouldn't actually cheat on her.
But I thought you'd know. With me being there, I thought you'd know.

Anna: How could I know if you never said anything?

Etienne: How could I know if you never said anything?

Anna: You had Ellie!

Etienne: You had Toph! And Dave! Anna. I'm sorry for what happened in Luxembourg Gardens. Not because of the kiss – I've never had a kiss like that in my life – but because I didn't tell you why I ~ Stephanie Perkins

I grew up around the Luxembourg Gardens, so I guess that is my best memory. ~ Emmanuelle Seigner

In the morning I walked down the Boulevard to the rue Soufflot for coffee and brioche. It was a fine morning. The horse-chestnut trees in the Luxembourg gardens were in bloom. There was the pleasant early-morning feeling of a hot day. I read the papers with the coffee and then smoked a cigarette. The flower-women were coming up from the market and arranging their daily stock. Students went by going up to the law school, or down to the Sorbonne. The Boulevard was busy with trams and people going to work. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

I'm speechless.I think at the rooftops of Paris.
he touches my cheek,pulling my gaze back to him.I suck in my breath.
"Anna.I'm sorry for what happened in Luxembourg Gardens.Not because of the kiss-I've never had a kiss like that in my life-but because I didn't tell you why I was running away.I chased after Meredith because of you."
Touch me again. Please,touch me again.
"All I could think about was what that bastard did to you last Christmas. Toph never tried to explain or apologize. How could I do that to Mer? And I ought to have called you before I went to Ellie's,but I was so anxious to just end it,once and for all,that I wasn't thinking straight."
I reach for him. "St. Clair-"
He pulls back. "And that.Why don't you call me Etienne anymore?"
"But...no one else calls you that.It was weird.Right?"
"No.It wasn't." His expression saddens. "And every time you say 'St. Clair,' it's like you're rejecting me again."
"I have never rejected you."
"But you have.And for Dave." His tone is venomous.
"And you rejected me for Ellie on my birthday. I don't understand.If you liked me so much,why didn't you break up with her?"
He gazes at the river. "I've been confused. I've been so stupid."
"Yes.You have."
"I deserve that."
"Yes.You do." I pause. "But I've been stupid,too.You were right.About...the alone thing. ~ Stephanie Perkins

Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can step out of a railway station - the Gare D'Orsay - and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees - nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train? ~ Margaret Anderson

This private estate was far enough away from the explosion so that its bamboos, pines, laurel, and maples were still alive, and the green place invited refugees - partly because they believed that if the Americans came back, they would bomb only buildings; partly because the foliage seemed a center of coolness and life, and the estate's exquisitely precise rock gardens, with their quiet pools and arching bridges, were very Japanese, normal, secure; and also partly (according to some who were there) because of an irresistible, atavistic urge to hide under leaves. ~ John Hersey

Children have such an innocent view of their world and surroundings; every thought is a garden full of wonder. ~ C.J. Heck

Most folks probably think that gardens only get tended when they're blooming. But most folks would be wrong. ~ Shannon Wiersbitzky

We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square. ~ Erin Lawless

Carmen glanced up and saw the room's open window, its balcony reflecting the sun's beams and the blue sky outside. She stood and walked over before sticking her head out and observing her surroundings. There was a huge drop from the window to the gardens below. There were no other balconies nearby either, only a slight ledge lining along from her window to the one next door. ~ Robin Lane

The line of the horizon was clear and hard against the sky,and in one particular quarter it showed black against a silvery climbing phosphorescence that grew and grew. At last, over the rim of the waiting earth the moon lifted with slow majesty till it swung clear of the horizon and rode off, free of moorings; and once more they began to see surfaces - meadows widespread, and quiet gardens; and the river itself from bank to bank, all softy disclosed, all washed clean of mystery and terror, all radiant again as by day, but with a difference that was tremendous. ~ Kenneth Grahame

I should like to enflame the whole world with my taste for gardening. There is no virtue that I would not attribute to the man who lives to project and execute gardens. ~ Michel, 14th Prince Of Ligne

Great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again. ~ Seth Godin

One cannot analyse the character of European gardens without looking beyond the Mediterranean. This is because horticulture, palace life and city-building developed in the Fertile Crescent before spreading, via Crete, Greece, Egypt and Italy to the forests of Europe ~ Tom Turner

The gardens of my youth were fragrant gardens and it is their sweetness rather than their patterns of their furnishings that I now most clearly recall. ~ Louise Wilder

A creative person has to create. It doesn't really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on. ~ Katherine Dunham

By tradition, Beijing is a city of walls, sheltering its intrigues and ambitions behind a series of concentric barriers from the Great Wall down to courtyard homes that draw sunlight only from the gardens at their core. ~ Evan Osnos

People who spend a great deal of time in their gardens attest to the natural mindfulness that gardening requires. What could be more naturally mindful than weeding? It requires a great deal of sustained attention. Weeds need to be taken up with care: Pull too hard, and the weed breaks in your fingers, leaving the root to grow and spread. Different weeds need different techniques and, sometimes, tools. When we weed our gardens, we have to pay attention to where and how we walk and bend. Move too far in one direction or another, and we'll squash growing things. ~ Surya Das

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

One of Picton's officers fell asleep the instant the halt was sounded and did not think of food until later in the night, when he woke to eat some chops cooked in the breastplate of a dead cuirassier (meat fried in a breastplate was very much à la mode in the Waterloo campaign, rather as rats spitted on a bayonet were to be in 1871 or champagne exhumed from chateau gardens in 1914). ~ John Keegan

The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair on the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants ... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes. ~ Bronislaw Malinowski

I do not wish to die- There is such contingent beauty in life: The open window on summer mornings Looking out on gardens and green things growing, The shadowy cups of roses flowering to themselves- Images of time and eternity- Silence in the garden and felt along the walls. ~ A. L. Rowse

Love In Autumn

I sought among the drifting leaves,
The golden leaves that once were green,
To see if Love were hiding there
And peeping out between.

For thro' the silver showers of May
And thro' the summer's heavy heat,
In vain I sought his golden head
And light, fast-flying feet.

Perhaps when all the world is bare
And cruel winter holds the land,
The Love that finds no place to hide
Will run and catch my hand.

I shall not care to have him then,
I shall be bitter and a-cold --
It grows too late for frolicking
When all the world is old.

Then little hiding Love, come forth,
Come forth before the autumn goes,
And let us seek thro' ruined paths
The garden's last red rose. ~ Sara Teasdale

XXVI
There was set before me a mighty hill,
And long days I climbed
Through regions of snow.
When I had before me the summit-view,
It seemed my labor
Had been to see gardens
Lying at impossible distances. ~ Stephen Crane

In the closed world of the gynaeceum, despite the gardens and parkland extending beyong the horizon, despite the insurmountable walls separating pavillions and palaces, the tangled web of our fate was inescapable. Why did these women love each other to the point of madness? Why did they loathe one another so vehemently, and why did sworn enemies feel such horror and fascination for one another? Why should furious hate become obsession, then intoxication and the very reason to live?
Because love and hate were the two heads of the demon. ~ Shan Sa

In gardens it's not just plants and insects and microbes that grow. People grow too, and the best bit is that they don't realise it's happening. It just happens. ~ Costa Georgiadis

I thought I was long done with the Firsts. First Easter since his death, First Birthday, First Trip to IHOP, First Phillies Game. But everything we ever did together, that we'd never share again
like Longwood Gardens at Christmas
still waited before me. In that moment, I dreaded the rest of my life. ~ Jeri Smith-Ready

The witch approached it and pared its edges with a sword that she drew from her thigh. Then she sat down beside it on the earth and sang to it while it cooled. Not like the runes that enraged the flames was the song she sang to the sword: she whose curses had blasted the fire till it shrivelled big logs of oak crooned now a melody like a wind in summer blowing from wild wood gardens that no man tended, down valleys loved once by children, now lost to them but for dreams, a song of such memories as lurk and hide along the edges of oblivion, now flashing from beautiful years of glimpse of some golden moment, now passing swiftly out of remembrance again, to go back to the shades of oblivion, and leaving on the mind those faintest traces of little shining feet which when dimly perceived by us are called regrets. She sang of old Summer noons in the time of harebells: she sang on that high dark heath a song that seemed so full of mornings and evenings preserved with all their dews by her magical craft from days that had else been lost, that Alveric wondered of each small wandering wing, that her fire had lured from the dusk, if this were the ghost of some day lost to man, called up by the force of her song from times that were fairer. ~ Lord Dunsany

In this way I have sat in many rooms and walked in many gardens, and it has been as though I were a stick of furniture or a branch of a tree. I seem to have caused no sense of restraint or embarrassment. People have been able to talk freely in front of me, almost as freely as though I weren't there. I suppose some might think this a great compliment; it has given me a curious feeling of nonexistence. Now ~ Madeleine L'Engle

They set great store by their gardens ... Their studie and deligence herein commeth not only of pleasure, but also of a certain strife and contention ... concerning the trimming, husbanding, and furnishing of their gardens; everye man or his owne parte. ~ Thomas More

My favorite thing is landscaping. I love landscaping. And so what I'll do is, mostly I put language into search engines, and if I want to look, like, at tulip gardens, or, like, Georgian gardens, i love English gardens, how they're laid out. Japanese gardens, Asian gardens. So, I'm kind of a frustrated landscaper. ~ Michele Bachmann

She opens the door to her grandfather's bedroom and stops. Below her, the man pauses again. Has he heard her? Is he climbing more quietly? Out in the world waits a multitude of sanctuaries - gardens full of bright green wind; kingdoms of hedges; deep pools of forest shade through which butterflies float thinking only of nectar. She can get to none of them. ~ Anthony Doerr

In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

A thrumming of piano-strings beyond the gardens and through the elms. At length the melody steals into my being. I know not when it began to occupy me. By some fortunate coincidence of thought or circumstance I am attuned to the universe, I am fitted to hear, my being moves in a sphere of melody, my fancy and imagination are excited to an inconceivable degree. This is no longer the dull earth on which I stood. ~ Henry David Thoreau

That we looked out for one another- that we watched out for each other's kids and shared the harvest of our gardens and took care of our old people, and when we did the little things, like bake a cake, we'd bake two, one for our home and one for the neighbor. ~ Adriana Trigiani

People are like cities: We all have alleys and gardens and secret rooftops and places where daisies sprout between the sidewalk cracks, but most of the time all we let each other see is is a postcard glimpse of a skyline or a polished square. Love lets you find those hidden places in another person, even the ones they didn't know were there, even the ones they wouldn't have thought to call beautiful themselves. ~ Hilary T. Smith

We must plant our dreams in real earth. We must dirty our hands. It's the only way. Whether we dream of planting flower gardens or churches, ever dream needs a place in which to take root and grow. Every dream needs a home. ~ Christie Purifoy