Relaxing In The Garden Quotes

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 North Germany, a troublesome ghost is bagged, and the bag emptied in some lone spot or in the garden of a neighbour against whom a grudge is entertained. ~ Sabine Baring-Gould

Right now, I am in Fallujah. I am in Darfur. I am on Sixty-third and Park having dinner with Ellen Barkin and Ron Perelman ... Right now, I'm on Lafayette and Astor waiting to hit you up for change so I can get high. I'm taking a walk through the Rose Garden with George Bush. I'm helping Donald Rumsfeld get a good night's sleep ... I was in that cave with Osama, and on that plane with Mohamed Atta ... And what I want you to know is that your work has barely begun. And what I want you to trust is the efficacy of divine love if practiced consciously. And what I need you to believe is that if you hate who I love, you do not know me at all. And make no mistake, "Who I Love" is every last one. I am every last one. People ask of me: Where are you? Where are you? ... Verily I ask of you to ask yourself: Where are you? Where are you? ~ Stephen Adly Guirgis

Grace is the first ingredient necessary for growing up in the image of God. Grace is unbroken, uninterrupted, unearned, accepting relationship. It is the kind of relationship humanity had with God in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were loved and provided for. They knew God's truth, and they had perfect freedom to do God's will. In short, they were secure; they had no shame and anxiety. They could be who they truly were. Perhaps you have experienced this kind of love and grace with someone. You can be exactly who you are. You do not need to hide your thoughts or feelings; you do not need to perform; you do not need to do anything to be loved. Someone knows the real you, and loves you anyway. ~ Henry Cloud

In the woods waits the only person with whom I can be myself. Gale. I can feel the muscles in my face relaxing, my pace quickening as I climb the hills ~ Suzanne Collins

Happiness is that butterfly which comes and sit in your garden until you try to grab it, The moment we try to grab it, it flies off, so never try to grab it, just let it go, because it will come back again for search of honey and to give you happiness again. ~ Debolina Bhawal

When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time ~ Svetlana Alexievich

And language for Tolkien was also the soil from which his literary garden grew, as he explains in a 1966 interview, referring again to "cellar door": "Supposing you say some quite ordinary words to me - 'cellar door,' say. From that, I might think of a name, 'Selador,' and from that a character, a situation begins to grow. ~ Philip Zaleski

What won't work - what can't work - is to act like the last years never happened, and that the survival of the [mass media] industry will be found by hiding content behind walled gardens. Instead of sticking their finger in the dike, trying to hold back the flow of innovation, companies need to ride the rapids of progress and seize the opportunities it provides. ~ Arianna Huffington

Miss Manette!'
The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and kept her hand drawn through his arm.
'Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.'
To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd. Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all the staring curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him to remain quite still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts to control and steady his breathing shook the lips from which the colour rushed to his heart. The buzz of the great flies was loud again.
'Miss Manette, have you ever seen the prisoner before?'
'Yes, sir. ~ Charles Dickens

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness. ~ Michael Pollan

Despite all their surface diversity, most jokes and funny incidents have the following logical structure: Typically you lead the listener along a garden path of expectation, slowly building up tension. At the very end, you introduce an unexpected twist that entails a complete reinterpretation of all the preceding data, and moreover, it's critical that the new interpretation, though wholly unexpected, makes as much "sense" of the entire set of facts as did the originally "expected" interpretation.
In this regard, jokes have much in common with scientific creativity, with what Thomas Kuhn calls a "paradigm shift" in response to a single "anomaly." (It's probably not coincidence that many of the most creative scientists have a great sense of humor.) Of course, the anomaly in the joke is the traditional punch line and the joke is "funny" only if the listener gets the punch line by seeing in a flash of insight how a completely new interpretation of the same set of facts can incorporate the anomalous ending.
The longer and more tortuous the garden path of expectation, the "funnier" the punch line when finally delivered. ~ V.S. Ramachandran

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

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike. ~ Evelyn Underhill

From inside, I hear Sister Beatrice's voice: Did Andrew leave already? Such a sweet boy he is. And devoted too, when he sets his heart to a task. Let me tell you about the time he weeded the convent's garden. It's a long story, but we 'ave all afternoon. There was a scuffle in the lunch room, you see ... ~ Emma Chase

For a moment the garden, the noise, the stentch of blood and demon, vanished away, and he was alone in a soundless place with only Tessa. He wanted to run to her, wrap her in his arms. Protect her.
But it was Jem's place to do those things, not his. Not his. ~ Cassandra Clare

He guided her back against a hedge, and kissed her breathless. The wind sang through the garden, tangling in her dress and his cloak, whipping around them both as his hands, more smoke than skin, wrapped around her waist and her hands, flesh and bone, wrapped around his back and–– ~ Victoria Schwab

I hope to have gathered
To repay your kindness
The willow leaves
Scattered in the garden. ~ Matsuo Basho

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

There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals. ~ John Ruskin

I de-stress with my family, just at home pruning roses, cutting, working in the garden. ~ Jaclyn Smith

And even if fairies built a nest in the bottom of my garden and it should turn out that I have to live for a thousand years, there's not one of them when I'll be of a mind to trust you. ~ Michael Dobbs

If you're John Muir you want trees to
live among. If you're Emily, a garden
will do.
Try to find the right place for yourself.
If you can't find it, at least dream of it.
When one is alone and lonely, the body
gladly lingers in the wind or the rain,
or splashes into the cold river, or
pushes through the ice-crusted snow.
Anything that touches.
God, or the gods, are invisible, quite
understandable. But holiness is visible,
entirely.
Some words will never leave God's mouth,
no matter how hard you listen. ~ Mary Oliver

(Hadley and Mary in the Garden at Blanchard House)
He laughed, a harsh sound, all sign of humor leaving his eyes. "Don't let any of it fool you, my dear, for even the most tarnished silver can acquire a fine and gleaming polish. And believe me, there is far more tarnish here than an innocent and unschooled eye such as yours can discern."
"Why would you speak so of yourself?" Mary protested.
He reached for a red-gold curl that had escaped her lace cap and coiled it around his !nger. "I would forewarn you, Miss Edwardes that I am a man, and men in general are not to be trusted ... " He held her gaze as he slowly released the ringlet, allowing his fingers to skim her cheek. " ... especially not by pretty young virgins. ~ Victoria Vane

The Death of Allegory

I am wondering what became of all those tall abstractions
that used to pose, robed and statuesque, in paintings
and parade about on the pages of the Renaissance
displaying their capital letters like license plates.


Truth cantering on a powerful horse,
Chastity, eyes downcast, fluttering with veils.
Each one was marble come to life, a thought in a coat,
Courtesy bowing with one hand always extended,


Villainy sharpening an instrument behind a wall,
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.


Valor lies in bed listening to the rain.
Even Death has nothing to do but mend his cloak and hood,
and all their props are locked away in a warehouse,
hourglasses, globes, blindfolds and shackles.


Even if you called them back, there are no places left
for them to go, no Garden of Mirth or Bower of Bliss.
The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums
and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.


Here on the table near the window is a vase of peonies
and next to it black binoculars and a money clip,
exactly the kind of thing we now prefer,
objects that sit quietly on a line in lower case,


themselves and nothing ~ Billy Collins

Until the eighteenth century, people believed that biblical paradise, the Garden of Eden, was a real place. It appeared on maps
located, ironically, at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in what is now modern-day Iraq. ~ Eric Weiner

Lying in bed and daydreaming was the best thing I did all day. ~ Marty Rubin

Too many American authors have a servile streak where their backbone should be. Where's our latest Nobel laureate? More than likely you'll find him in the Rose Garden kissing the First Lady's foot. ~ Edward Abbey

GARDENS OR FIELDS? Craig Blomberg points out that in Matthew's parable of the mustard seed, the sower sows his seed in a "field" (agros, Matt 13:31), while in Luke the sowing is in a "garden" (kepos, Luke 13:19). Jews never grew mustard plants in gardens, but always out on farms, while Greeks in the Mediterranean basin did the opposite. It appears that each gospel writer was changing the word that Jesus used in Mark - the word for "earth" or "ground" (ge, Mark 4:31) - for the sake of his hearers. There is a technical contradiction between the Matthean and Lukan terms, states Blomberg, "but not a material one. Luke changes the wording precisely so that his audience is not distracted from ... the lesson by puzzling over an ... improbable practice." The result is that Luke's audience "receives his teaching with the same impact as the original audience."22 ~ Timothy Keller

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

We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest. ~ Lewis Thomas

Nationalism cannot flower if it does not grow in the garden of internationalism. ~ Sukarno

To Paula in Late Spring"

Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment ~ W.S. Merwin

Are you Mr. Baker? If you are, we've been expecting you. If not, you're trespassing. And you should leave before I bury you here in my garden. No one would ever know because the roots would eat your entrails and bones. I think. I've never buried anyone before. It would be a learning experience for the both of us! ~ T.J. Klune

But here we call it Spring, when a young man's fancy turns,
fitfully, lightly, to idling in the sun,
to touching in the dark. And the old man's?
To worms in their garden box; stepping aside
a moment in a poem that will remember,
fitfully, who made it and the discord
and stammer, and change of heart and catch of breath
it sprang from. A bending down
lightly to touch the earth. ~ David Malouf

More grows in the garden, than the gardener knows he has planted ~ Spanish Proverb

Val smiled evilly at the child and reached into his pocket.
"Do you," he asked, "like kittens?"
And he held out a black, fluffy kitten with a white chest.
Annalise blinked at the kitten's green eyes.
The kitten blinked back.
"Oh, yes!" said Annalise.
Val deposited the kitten into the plump little arms and strolled to the kitchens, where Hecate and her kittens were in residence, swinging his gold walking stick.
There were seven more kittens remaining and a garden full of his enemies' children ... ~ Elizabeth Hoyt