Planting Garden Quotes

The sun was shining, but Christ had hidden Himself, and all the world was black to you; or it was night, and since the bright and morning star was gone, no other star could yield you so much as a ray of light. What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hideth Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

A truth is not something that is constructed in a garden of roses. ~ Alain Badiou

Adam and Eve were placed in the garden with a mission. God said, "Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it" (Gen. 1:28). It was God's intention that as they bore more children, who also lived under God's rule, they would be extending the boundaries of His garden (His government) through the simplicity of their devotion to Him. ~ Bill Johnson

For me planting a tree is a very doable thing. It's not complicated, it doesn't require technology, it doesn't require much knowledge, but it can be a very important entry point into communities understanding how they destroy their own resources, but how they can also restore those resources, and not wait for their government or international agencies to come and help them. ~ Wangari Maathai

A single rose can be my garden; a single friend, my world. ~ Leo Buscaglia

These examinations and certificates and so on--what did they matter? And all this efficiency and up-to-dateness--what did that matter, either? Ralston was trying to run Brookfield like a factory--a factory for turning out a snob culture based on money and machines. The old gentlemanly traditions of family and broad acres were changing, as doubtless they were bound to; but instead of widening them to form a genuine inclusive democracy of duke and dustman, Ralston was narrowing them upon the single issue of a fat banking account. There never had been so many rich men's sons at Brookfield. The Speech Day Garden Party was like Ascot. Ralston met these wealthy fellows in London clubs and persuaded them that Brookfield was the coming school, and, since they couldn't buy their way into Eton or Harrow, they greedily swallowed the bait. Awful fellows, some of them--though others were decent enough. Financiers, company promoters, pill manufacturers. One of them gave his son five pounds a week pocket money. Vulgar . . . ostentatious . . . all the hectic rotten-ripeness of the age. . . . And once Chips had got into trouble because of some joke he had made about the name and ancestry of a boy named Isaacstein. The boy wrote home about it, and Isaacstein père sent an angry letter to Ralston. Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense of proportion--that was the matter with them, these new fellows. . . . No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of proportion, above all things, that Brookfield ou ~ James Hilton

Take me away - to a garden of flowers; a scented reality with lilac showers. ~ Anangsha Alammyan

Dad leapt over the garden wall instead of going through the gate. Sadly he didn't do himself a severe injury, and so he lives to embarrass me to death another day. ~ Louise Rennison

Had God pulled me from Adam's rib and placed me naked in the garden, the story would be no different. Let's not blame Eve anymore. If she hadn't eaten the fruit, it would most certainly have been me. I would have eaten it again and again, and then I would have given you a bite. ~ Amber C. Haines

Now, instead of asking if God is good for women, I'm asking a new question. I stole it from Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novel, "The Secret Garden." When the orphaned heroine, Mary Lennox, stumbled over a piece of untended, overgrown land needing to be ruled and subdued, she asked her uncle, "Might I have a bit of earth?"
[ ... ] May God bless every woman's life with men like Boaz. But even if there is no Boaz, God is a mighty advocate. God is good for women, and women who know this are strong for his kingdom. God wants to hear his daughters ask, "Might I have a bit of earth?" This is the Gospel of Ruth. ~ Carolyn Custis James

The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land. ~ Abraham Lincoln

The picnic table in the photo was an old door set up on sawhorses, and the seats were old tree stumps, or maybe thick pieces of firewood, topped with square cushions. Six men were sitting there, not looking at the camera, but at the beautiful woman with long, dark hair, almost to her waist, standing at the head of the table. She was smiling, her arms outstretched, as if welcoming everyone to her world. The apple tree in the background, just barely visible, was stretching a single limb out to her, as if wanting to be in the photo with her.
Even it looked a little in love with her. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

He repeated the story he liked to tell us. The one with the small boy who was trying to lift a rock in his garden, and the boy's dad was watching him heave and sweat and struggle, but get nowhere. Eventually the dad asks, 'Why don't you use all of your strength?' And the boy says, 'I am, Daddy. I am using all of my strength.' And his dad says, 'No you're not. You haven't asked me for help. ~ Nathan Filer

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 never had any other desire so strong, and so like covetousness, as that ... I might be master at last of a small house and a large garden, with very moderate conveniences joined to them, and there dedicate the remainder of my life to the culture of them and the study of nature. ~ Abraham Cowley

Religion acts as a moral gardener, to weed out, or suppress, evil tendencies, which, like weeds and nettles, would shoot up spontaneously in the wonderful compost of the garden, if unwatched. ~ Henry Morton Stanley

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

It was like a miracle. I'm just feeling fabulous. What's incredible is someone has given your life back. I'm out in the garden today. This time last year I was looking out a window at a hospital. ~ Mary Travers

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

My dad got me a chemistry book one Christmas and I burnt the garden shed down. I remember there was the most beautiful smell forever after in the remains. ~ Beth Orton

The over-weight and out of shape guy who owned the house had apparently decided that having a half-million dollar house meant that he couldn't afford to hire someone to clean out his gutters. Now he was dead with what looked to me like a broken neck after the ladder had slipped. He'd taken the plunge into his fancy landscaping - complete with rock garden. But hey, his fucking gutters were clean. ~ Diana Rowland

You rave about the Holy Place (Masjid al-Haram) and say you've visited God's garden but where is your bunch of flowers? There is some merit in the suffering you have endured but what a pity you have not discovered the Makkah thats inside ~ Rumi

Daddy had a farm - cows, pigs, OK, a big garden, OK? We did live off the land, and then we would supplement all that with whatever we could kill or catch. Whether we'd kill squirrels, deer, duck, or caught catfish or brim, that was what went on the table. ~ Si Robertson

I rode horseback three miles each way to get to high school, and in bad weather it was a problem sometimes to make my eight o'clock class on time. Like others, I often missed school to help on the farm, especially in the fall, until after harvest, and in the spring, during planting season. ~ Ezra Taft Benson

Where do any of us come from in this cold country? Oh Canada, whether you admitted it or not, we come from you we come from you. From the same soil, the slugs and slime and bogs and twigs and roots. We come from the country that plucks its people out like weeds and flings them into the roadside. We grow in ditches and sloughs, untended and spindly. We erupt in the valleys and mountainsides, in small towns and back alleys, sprouting upside-down on the prairies, our hair wild as spiders' legs, our feet rooted nowhere. We grow where we are not seen, we flourish where we are not heard, the thick undergrowth of an unlikely planting. Where do we come from Obasan? We come from cemetaries full of skeletons with wild roses in their grinning teeth. We come from our untold tales that wait for their telling. We come from Canada, this land that is like every land, filled with the wise, the fearful, the compassionate, the corrupt. ~ Joy Kogawa

But God has the most fun with artists and writers: he inflames them with the desire to rival his own creations, then douses their overheated ambitions with a cold spray from the garden hose of reality. If they persist, he slams them to the ground and tweaks them on the proboscis for good measure. A fortunate few break free and prosper; the others lament the day they didn't become bank clerks. ~ Rick Bayan

Ali stares dreamily at the shadows of the garden. I wonder why he's the one who seems to be pining for something. I look intently at the dark sky as I consider his questions and finally I realise what 'home' means to me. Even with a roof over my head I'm still homeless in my heart. Bricks and mortar don't mean anything. I'm not sure if I want a real home right now, somewhere I belong. Not that one is on offer or available to someone like me. Some days, I long for the freedom of the streets, strange as it may sound to anyone who has never been homeless. My bedsit and the job are like a hamster's cage, giving me temporary shelter but making me go round and round in circles ~ A. Zukowski

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

Where have I
been while this person is leading my life
with her patience, will and order? In the garden;
on the bee and under the bee; in the
crown gathering cumulus and
flensing it from the boughs ~ Sharon Olds

Memories are like that, like mustard seeds, tiny at first, but eventually the largest tree in all of the garden. ~ Sarah Domet

You know why they call it the Garden State, don't you? It's like the Garden of Eden-- everyone is from there originally, but no one you meet actually lives there anymore. ~ Irina Reyn

She wondered if her father had awakened yet, if he had missed her, if Jeweltongue would tell him she was only out in the garden, if Tea-cosy's wretchedness would give them all away immediately. She wondered if she had been right to guess that her father would not mend till she left--and that he would mend when she did. Had the Beast sent his illness? Did he watch them from his palace? What a sorcerer could and could not do could never quite be relied on--not even always by the sorcerer. She could hate him--easily she could hate him--for the misery of it if he had sent it. If he kept his promises like a man, did he suppose that they mere humans as they were, would keep theirs any less? The price was high for one stolen rose, but they would pay it. If he had sent her father's illness to beat them into acquiescence, she would hate him for it.

The bitterness of her thoughts weighted her down till she had to stop walking. She looked again at the beech trees and, not waiting for a gap this time, fought her way through to the nearest and leant against it, turning her head so that her cheek was against the bark. The Beast is a Beast, even if he keeps his promises; how could she guess how a Beast thinkds, especially one who is so great a sorcere? It was foolish to talk of hating him--foolish and wasteful. What had happened had happened, like anything else might happen, like a bit of paper giving you a new home when you had none finding its way into your hand, like a company ~ Robin McKinley

The glory of the farmer is that, in the division of labors, it is his part to create. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. He stands close to Nature; he obtains from the earth the bread and the meat. The food which was not, he causes to be. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

In this jangle of causes and effects, what had become of their true selves? Here Leonard lay dead in the garden, from natural causes; yet life was a deep, deep river, death a blue sky, life was a house, death a wisp of hay, a flower, a tower, life and death were anything and everything, except this ordered insanity, where the king takes the queen, and the ace the king. Ah, no; there was beauty and adventure behind, such as the man at her feet had yearned for; there was hope this side of the grave; there were truer relationships beyond the limits that fetter us now. As a prisoner looks up and sees stars beckoning, so she, from the turmoil and horror of those days, caught glimpses of the diviner wheels. ~ E.M. Forster

Trade increases the wealth and glory of a country; but its real strength and stamina are to be looked for among the cultivators of the land. ~ William Pitt