The Garden Intrigue Quotes

About, not to. Prepositions had been invented for a reason. ~ Lauren Willig

He's back!" said George. "Dad's home!" They hurried through the garden and back into the house. ~ J.K. Rowling

The Kiss of the Sun for Pardon, The Song of the Birds for Mirth, One is Nearer God's Heart in a Garden, Than Anywhere Else on Earth. ~ Nicola Furlong

In the name of Him Who created and
sustains the world, the Sage Who
endowed tongue with speech.
He attains no honor who turns the face from the doer of His mercy.
The kings of the earth prostate themselves before Him in supplication.
He seizes not in haste the disobedient, nor drives away the penitent with
violence. The two worlds are as a drop of water in the ocean of His knowledge.
He withholds not His bounty though His
servants sin; upon
the surface of the earth has He spread a feast, in which both friend and foe may share.
Peerless He is, and His kingdom is eternal. Upon the head of one He placed a crown another he hurled from the throne to the ground.
The fire of His friend He turned into a
flower garden; through the water of the
Nile He sended His foes to perdition.
Behind the veil He sees all, and conceal
ed our faults with His own goodness.

He is near to them that are downcast,
and accepts the prayers of them that
lament.
He knows of the things that exist not, of secrets that are untold.
He causes the moon and the sun to revolve, and spreads water upon the
earth.
In the heart of a stone hath He placed
a jewel; from nothing had He created all that is.
Who can reveal the secret of His qualities; what eye can see the limits of His
beauty?
The bird of thought cannot soar to the height of His presence, nor the hand ~ Saadi

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

The coming together of a man and woman was a holy thing, after all. God had chosen this way of replenishing the earth. God did everything so elegantly, with such an exquisite attention to detail. She knew this from studying the flowers in the garden and watching the morning sky, all mauve and pink and orange. So beautiful. But God had looked at all this, His ideas, His wonderful sense of color and design put into action, and had said merely that it was good. Not great. Not fantastic. Just good. But when He had looked at man and woman together, He had said it was "very good". ~ Naomi Ragen

I don't want this life to end," said Alexander. "The good, the bad, the everything, the very old, to ever end. ~ Paullina Simons

The heart is like a garden. It can grow compassion or fear, resentment or love. What seeds will you plant there? ~ Jack Kornfield

A great challenge: stop ruining the garden which God has entrusted to us so that all may enjoy it. ~ Pope Francis

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

Life can unmoor so many feelings; it is a relief we sleep through it.
Night unravels the day and reinvents it for the first time.
We may mean nothing to time, but to each other we are kings and queens, and the world is a wild benevolent garden filled with chance meetings and unexplained departures. ~ Simon Van Booy

Sadly, one of the few places where bumblebees generally won't settle is in the bumblebee nest boxes widely sold in garden centres. Whatever ~ Dave Goulson

Eugen Bleuler (who in 1911 coined the word 'schizophrenia') once said that in the end his patients were stranger to him than the birds in his garden. But if they're strangers to us, what are we to them? (26) ~ Michael Greenberg

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds and binding with briars my joys and desires. (from 'The Garden of Love') ~ William Blake

Asparagus, tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades, that precious quality which I should recognise again when, all night long after a dinner at which I had partaken of them, they played (lyrical and coarse in their jesting as the fairies in Shakespeare's Dream) at transforming my humble chamberpot into a bower of aromatic perfume. ~ Marcel Proust

I only do His will, replied Death. I am his gardener. I take all His flowers and trees, and transplant them into the gardens of Paradise in an unknown land. How they flourish there, and what that garden resembles, I may not tell you. ~ Hans Christian Andersen

your hips will try to burst through your skin.

your thighs will try to grow together like a mermaid's tail.

a soft garden will try to sprout on your legs.

(& between your legs, on your upper lip, on your armpits, etc.)

no, you are not just here to be sexy for him.

the world begins & ends when you say so.

-what they don't want you to know ~ Amanda Lovelace

--Your headache--


I am trying to imagine it
Your head is in your hands
The nurse is pouring pills onto a plate
November again
Too late

Your headache
It is a bird
Wounded, in leaves

Its sweet bird's nest is full of pain in a distant place

November
There are daisies
In the ruined garden, still blooming strangely

And in a manic yellow hat, the old lady

And the old man, dead in his bed

And their daughter, the saint:

Her dark, religious hair gets tangled in the branches
She is screaming, grabbing

While the nurses play Mozart in another room
While the bats fly over the roof
Snatch the black notes from the blackness
Laughing

You cry
I am going to die

I can see them through this window

Their little black capes

The touching ugliness of their little faces ~ Laura Kasischke

Anyone who would be a disciple of Christ kneels sometime at [our own] Gethsemane.
But . . . we need not stay. We can find the courage to surrender, to accept the gift of the
Savior, who already suffered there; we can stand and move on to another garden. Grace [and the Atonement] offer[s] the quiet promise of that safe passage. ~ Elaine Sorensen Marshall

Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit, and, I would add, impeccably clean toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture. The parlor may have its charms, but the Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, basking in the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, 'a physiological delight' he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and green leaves. ~ Junichiro Tanizaki

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

He feels a second pang now for the existence of perfection, the stubborn existence of perfection in the most vulnerable of things and in the face of his refusal-logical-admirable refusal-to engage with this existence in his heart, in his mind. For the comfortless logic, the curse of clear sight, no matter which string he pulls on the same wretched knot: (a) the futility of seeing given the fatality in a place such as this where a mother still bloody must bury her newborn, hose off, and go home to pound yam into paste; (b) the persistence of beauty, in fragility of all places!, in a dewdrop at daybreak, a thing that will end, and in moments, and in a garden, and in Ghana, lush Ghana, soft Ghana, verdant Ghana, where fragile things die. ~ Taiye Selasi

"We may talk what we please," he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, "of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles, in fields d'or or d'argent; but, if heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms." ~ Abraham Cowley

Shall we walk through the woods;
dance through the meadows;
and celebrate the miracle
of this garden world? ~ Leland Lewis

Each of us is always blessed with third options, with choices. If there is one thing the scientific approach to living our life points to is – there is no end to our abilities to discover and make meaning. There are no "absolutes," or end point in our explorations and possibilities. The blessing comes in participating in our surroundings and consciously making meaning through our perceptions and choices. Everything is taken in as filled with blessing because no experience is exempt. We are always making meaning through our choices, but now, we do so consciously, deliberately and creatively while tapping into the universes power to manifest. We are like gardeners (always) in the garden of Eden – with the most basic choices sometimes awakening us to our true nature – do I eat the apple? Every decision as Joseph Campbell says, "is a destiny decision. ~ Julie Tallard Johnson

Between the roof of the shed and the big plant that hangs over the fence from the house next door I could see the constellation Orion. People say that Orion is called Orion because Orion was a hunter and the constellation looks like a hunter with a club and a bow and arrow, like this:

But this is really silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted, and you could make it look like a lady with an umbrella who is waving, or the coffeemaker which Mrs. Shears has, which is from Italy, with a handle and steam coming out, or like a dinosaur.

And there aren't any lines in space, so you could join bits of Orion to bits of Lepus or Taurus or Gemini and say that they were a constellation called the Bunch of Grapes or Jesus or the Bicycle (except that they didn't have bicycles in Roman and Greek times, which was when they called Orion Orion). And anyway, Orion is not a hunter or a coffeemaker or a dinosaur. It is just Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and Alnilam and Rigel and 17 other stars I don't know the names of. And they are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. And that is the truth.

I stayed awake until 5:47. That was the last time I looked at my watch before I fell asleep. It has a luminous face and lights up if you press a button, so I could read it in the dark. I was cold and I was frightened Father might come out and find me. But I felt safer in the garden because I was hidden. I looked at the sky a lot. I ~ Mark Haddon

Get away from me, you sick fuck!"
"I'm not the one who kidnapped you, so save it. Either you want the water and aspirin or you can eat shit and die, your choice."
Lyonette groaned. "Maya. ~ Dot Hutchison

No Surprises

A heart that's full up like a landfill,
a job that slowly kills you,
bruises that won't heal.
You look so tired-unhappy,
bring down the government,
they don't, they don't speak for us.
I'll take a quiet life,
a handshake of carbon monoxide,

with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
Silent silence.

This is my final fit,
my final bellyache,

with no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please.

Such a pretty house
and such a pretty garden.

No alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises,
no alarms and no surprises please. ~ Radiohead

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

No one lives on the top of the mountain. It's fine to go there occasionally -for inspiration, for new perspectives. But you have to come down. Life is lived in the valleys. That's where the farms and gardens and orchards are, and where the plowing and the work is done. That's where you apply the visions you may have glimpsed from the peaks. ~ Arthur Gordon Webster

Tom and I sit on a bench in the garden to watch the moon melt in an arc below the horizon as fast as ice on a warm hand before we can call the others to witness its exit. ~ Marion Coutts