The Summer Garden Quotes

I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds. ~ Robert Bridges

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

We spent all of our days afraid it was too good to be true, Tatiana," said Alexander. "We were always afraid all we had was a borrowed five minutes from now."

Her hands went on his face. "That's all any of us ever has, my love," she said. "And it all flies by."

"Yes," he said, looking at her, at the desert, covered coral and yellow with golden eye and globe mallow. "But what a five minutes it's been."
-- The Summer Garden ~ Paulina Simmons

There is no real need for decorations when throwing a barbecue party - let the summer garden, in all its vibrant and luscious splendour, speak for itself. ~ Pippa Middleton

At night in the tent, he leaves the flaps open, to feel the fire outside, to hear Anthony in the trailer, to see her better. She asks him to lie on his stomach, and he does, though he can't see her, while she runs her bare breasts over his disfigured back, her nipples hardening into his scars. You feel that? she whispers. Oh, he does. He still feels it. She kisses him from the top of his head downward, from his buzz-cut scalp, his shoulder blades, his wounds. Inch by inch she cries over him and kisses her own salt away, murmuring into him, why did you have to keep running? Look what they did to you. Why didn't you just stay put? Why couldn't you feel I was coming for you?

You thought I was dead, he says. You thought I had been killed and pushed through the ice in Lake Ladoga. And what really happened was, I was a Soviet man left in a Soviet prison. Wasn't I dead?

He is fairly certain he is alive now, and while Tatiana lies on top of his back and cries, he remembers being caught by the dogs a kilometer from Oranienburg and held in place by the Alsatians until Karolich arived, and being flogged in Sachsenhausen's main square and then chained and tattooed publicly with the 25-point star to remind him of his time for Stalin, and now she lies on his back, kissing the scars he received when he tried to escape to make his way back to her so she could kiss him.

As he drives across Texas, Alexander remembers himself in Germany lying in the bloody straw ~ Paullina Simons

There is one moment, a moment in eternity. Before we find out the truth about one another. That simple moment is the one that propels us through life – what we felt at the very edge of our future, standing over the abyss, before we knew for sure we loved. Before we knew for sure we loved forever. …

Before all that, you and I walked through The Summer Garden, and once in a while my bare arm touched your arm, and once in a while you spoke and that gave me an excuse to look up into your face, into your laughing eyes, to catch a glimpse of your mouth and I, who had never been touched, tried to imagine what it might be like to have your mouth touch me. Falling in love with you in The Summer Garden in the white nights of Leningrad is the moment that propels me though life. ~ Paullina Simons

The Summer Garden, perhaps the most beautiful garden in Petersburg, had the particular advantage of being almost next to the Embassy. Originally laid out by Leblond, in the manner of Versailles, its most remarkable feature was a series of fountains, with statuary depicting scenes from Aesop's Fables. ~ Alan Sheridan

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

I think ya'll should work for me this summer in Gutshot. I'm starting a project, and you'd be perfect for it.
Over the years, people had occasionally sought to employ Colin in a manner beffitting his talents. But (a) summers were for smart-kid camp so that he could further his learning and (b) a real job would distract him from his real work, which was becoming an ever-larger repository of knowledge, and (c) Colin didn't really have any marketable skills. One rarely comes across, for instance, the following want ad: ~ John Green

How do you greet a god? If there's an etiquette guide for that, I haven't read it. I'm never sure if I'm supposed to shake hands, kneel, or bow and shout, "We're not worthy!" I knew Hermes better than most of the Olympians. Over the years, he'd helped me out several times. Unfortunately last summer I'd also fought his demigod son Luke, who'd been corrupted by the Titan Kronos, in a mortal combat smack-down for the fate of the world. Luke's death hadn't been entirely my fault, but it still put a damper on my relationship with Hermes. I decided to start simple. "Hi. ~ Rick Riordan

Just in case you're wondering," Gage says, breaking the silence, "this alliance of ours doesn't mean I like you."
"Feeling's mutual." Julian tosses him a disdainful look. ~ Laura Kreitzer

I have the same pet peeve as Anderson Cooper, which is bare feet in public. I hate it. It so grosses me out, especially in New York. Oh my God, New York in the summer with people and their feet in their sandals and their flip-flops, like get it away! ~ Busy Philipps

For too long we've been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching - a market response to inefficient distribution. ~ Chris Anderson

Nobody wants you to stop, obviously because you're a moneymaking machine. But you have to make the decision and you have to move forward. So I took time off to have babies and do all that. ~ Donna Summer

Well I've been locking myself up in my house for some time now Reading and writing and reading and thinking and searching for reasons and missing the seasons The Autumn, the Spring, the Summer, the snow ~ Colleen Hoover

An aphrodisiac will disappear,
delusional, like permanence or wealth -
a shimmering, as if love were a ghost -
and yet my passion for you seethes and sears
without an end. Late April leaves can't crave
caress of dew, sunlight's sweet splash, more than
I pine for your embrace, us turned to one;
when harsh reversals scar, the thought of you will salve
like summer wind in autumn; deep red blood
surging along with mine, staid genes worked hot
from your electric charms, as all my moods
succumb to your sweet fire, and perfect wit.
Now you are all I live for - loving you -
in fleeting world of lies, you are the truth. ~ Lauren Lipton

You start seeing all of the athlete profiles on NBC, and whenever the Summer Olympics come up, I feel like I share the same experience with the Summer Olympians. ~ Lindsey Vonn

My route, Sior Francis - and don't be surprised when you hear it - my route when I set out to find God... was... laziness. Yes, laziness. If I wasn't lazy I would have gone the way of respectable, upstanding people. Like everyone else I would have studied a trade - cabinet-maker, weaver, mason - and opened a shop; I would have worked all day long, and where then would I have found time to search for God? I might as well be looking for a needle in a haystack: that's what I would have said to myself. All my mind and thoughts would have been occupied with how to earn my living, feed my children, how to keep the upper hand over my wife. With such worries, curse them, how could I have the time, or inclination, or the pure heart needed to think about the Almighty?

But by the grace of God I was born lazy. To work, get married, have children, and make problems for myself were all too much trouble. I simply sat in the sun during winter and in the shade during summer, while at night, stretched out on my back on the roof of my house, I watched the moon and the stars. And when you watch the moon and the stars how can you expect your mind not to dwell on God? I couldn't sleep any more. Who made all that? I asked myself. And why? Who made me, and why? Where can I find God so that I may ask Him? Piety requires laziness, you know. It requires leisure - and don't listen to what others say. The laborer who lives from hand to mouth returns home each night exhausted and famished. He a ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

I have heard several people justify working long hours and getting home from work late it night by saying things like, "I have to put in all this time to make up for the vacation we're going to take this summer." I bet if I asked your kids, they'd say that they'd rather have you home every night to play with them than the weeklong summer trip to the lake where you're stressed out the whole time anyways. ~ Daniel Willey

I have a Bird in spring
Which for myself doth sing -
The spring decoys.
And as the summer nears -
And as the Rose appears,
Robin is gone.
Yet do I not repine
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown -
Learneth beyond the sea
Melody new for me
And will return. ~ Emily Dickinson

With the Wit, one is aware of all the life that surrounds one. It was not just the warmth of the mare nearby that I sensed. I knew the scintillant forms of the myriad insects that populated the grasses, and felt even the shadowy life force of the great oak that lifted its limbs between the moon and me. Just up the hillside, a rabbit crouched motionless in the summer grasses. I felt its indistinct presence, not as a piece of life located in a certain place, but as one sometimes hears a single voice's note within a market's roar. But above all, I felt a physical kinship with all that lived in the world. I had a right to be here. I was as much a part of this summer night as the insects or the water purling past my feet. I think that old magic draws much of its strength from that acknowledgment: that we are a part of that world, no more, but certainly no less than the rabbit."
p. 129 ~ Robin Hobb

I have wished you dead and myself dead. How could it be otherwise. I have broken into you like a burglar. And you've set your dogs on me. And a pile of broken sticks. A child could kick. I have climbed you like a monument, gasoing, For the exercise and the view, And leaned over the railing at the top ... Strong and warm, the summer wind. ~ Alicia Ostriker

I fill my lungs with the scent of lightning-born ozone, and cool air pushing out the heat, and the earth, opening up, releasing everything that's been baked into it by the searing sun. Dirt. Life. Country. Summer. ~ Tudor Robins

I hadn't thought you such a faithless coward. You are a princess of the Summer Throne, wedded Queen of the Craig, and my wife. You swore an oath, before a priest and your father's court, to accept my counsel and my care. You swore to offer me all the fruits of your life. And now, you would deny me that which you swore to offer? Do you have so little honor?"
The accusation stole the silver from her eyes, leaving them pure, plain gray filled with shock and dismay. "I ... No! Of course not! I'm no oathbreaker."
"Then come to your bath. Accept my care, as you swore you would. Offer me the fruits of your life, that I may dine once more on peace instead of war. ~ C.L. Wilson

I once thought that The Bridges Ablaze would be that masterpiece. I'm not so sure it matters much anymore. You must learn this while you are still young. Live in the crux of the present. And write to explain the world to yourself and to others. Look forward only to the summer of your first convertible. Look forward only if what's in front of you is a mirror. Because one day you'll be so busy looking backward, and everything will feel like winter. If you still don't get it, pare, let me make it abundantly clear. Just write and write justly. Ezra Pound be damned. Poets lie though beautifully. Don't make things new, make them whole. ~ Miguel Syjuco

And thus it happens that the reader, the closer he comes to the novel's end, the more he wishes he were back in the summer with which it begins, and finally, instead of following the hero onto the cliffs of suicide, joyfully turns back to that summer, content to stay there forever. ~ Franz Kafka

There is a spider called Amaurobius, which lives in a burrow and has its young in the late summer, and then it dies when the frosts begin, and the young spiders live through the cold by eating their mother's dead body. One can't believe that's an accident. I don't know that I imagined God as having thought it all out, but somehow He was connected with the pattern, He was the pattern ... ~ Iris Murdoch

Ere, in the northern gale,
The summer tresses of the trees are gone,
The woods of Autumn, all around our vale,
Have put their glory on. ~ William C. Bryant

On the lawn one late summer day, her pale hair tangled because she'd cry if anyone tried to brush it, spinning around and around until she got so dizzy she fell in a pile of bare feet and dandelions and sundress. ~ Holly Black

Gibran says: Once I asked such a scarecrow, "I can understand the farmer who made you - he needs you. I can understand the poor animals - they don't have great intelligence to see that you are bogus. But in the rain, in the sun, in the hot summer, in the cold winter, you remain standing here: for what?" And the scarecrow said, "You don't know my joy. Just to make those animals afraid is such a joy that it is worth suffering rain, suffering sun, suffering heat, winter, everything. I am making thousands of animals afraid! I know I am bogus, there is nothing inside me, but I don't care about that. My joy is in making others afraid." I want to ask you: Would you like to be just like this bogus man - nothing inside, making somebody afraid, making somebody happy, making somebody humiliated, making somebody respectful? Is your life only for others? Will you ever look inside? ~ Osho

There are two times in a person's life when there is the possibility of pure happiness: in youth and in summer. ~ Brielle A. Marino

She was right: school was lonely. The eighteen and nineteen year olds didn't socialize with the younger kids, and though there were plenty of students my age and younger [ ... ] their lives were so cloistered and their concerns so foolish and foreign-seeming that it was as if they spoke some lost middle-school tongue I'd forgotten. They lived at home with their parents; they worried about things like grade curves and Italian Abroad and summer internships at the UN; they freaked out if you lit a cigarette in front of them; they were earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless. For all I had in common with any of them, I might as well have tried to go down and hang out with the eight year olds at PS 41. ~ Donna Tartt

He watched her emerald eyes darken with need until they were the color of the Highland hills warmed by the summer sun. ~ Shelly Thacker

My sister lived in the moment. She said she would love the summer only when it came and warmed her. But I lived and still live in the future. Where it's warm when it's cold. Where dreams are not yet reality. Where the sad people are happy. The only problem with living in the future is that everyone has died, including yourself. So your plans are fiction and your predictions are fantasy. Living in the future is pure fantasy. I think that's why I love it so dearly. ~ F.K. Preston

The men stood back, chanting a song of one who would not be forgotten, of loved ones lost and returned to the earth, and of the land itself which does not die but is always born anew with each fall of the long rains. They chanted of life, which is short as a spear of summer grass or long as the heart of the Rift itself, and of the silent land that waits beyond. ~ Deanna Raybourn

All that spring and summer, there were times when she felt as if she had no joints or muscles, no physical means with which to move about the world. ~ Julia Glass

The glittering light of eight chandeliers was reflected in her upturned eyes, filling them with tiny sparks that made the blue irises look like a starry summer midnight. She was staring at him with an intensity that she had never shown before, as if she yearned for something she might never have. The look disquieted him, eliciting a powerful need to satisfy her in any way possible. Whatever she might have asked him for in that moment, he would have given without a qualm. ~ Lisa Kleypas

No," he said, "look, it's very, very simple ... all I want ... is a cup of tea. You are going to make one for me. Keep quiet and listen." And he sat. He told the Nutri-Matic about India, he told it about China, he told it about Ceylon. He told it about broad leaves drying in the sun. He told it about silver teapots. He told it about summer afternoons on the lawn. He told it about putting in the milk before the tea so it wouldn't get scalded. He even told it (briefly) about the history of the East India Company.
"So that's it, is it?" said the Nutri-Matic when he had finished.
"Yes," said Arthur, "that is what I want."
"You want the taste of dried leaves in boiled water?"
"Er, yes. With milk."
"Squirted out of a cow?"
"Well, in a manner of speaking I suppose ... ~ Douglas Adams

The Buried Melancholy of the Poet"

One summer when he was still young he stood at the window and wondered where they had gone, those women who sat by the ocean, watching, waiting for something that would never arrive, the wind light against their skin, sending loose strands of hair across their lips. From what season had they fallen, from what idea of grace had they strayed? It was long since he had seen them in their lonely splendor, heavy in their idleness, enacting the sad story of hope abandoned. This was the summer he wandered out into the miraculous night, into the sea of dark, as if for the first time, to shed his own light, but what he shed was the dark, what he found was the night. ~ Mark Strand

I remember when I was twenty-five," he said. "No client comes to you when you're twenty-five. It's like when you are looking for a doctor. You don't want the new one that just graduated. You don't want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys. ~ Daniel Amory

All Carolina folk are crazy for mayonnaise, mayonnaise is as ambrosia to them, the food of their tarheeled gods. Mayonnaise comforts them, causes the vowels to slide more musically along their slow tongues, appeasing their grease-conditioned taste buds while transporting those buds to a place higher than lard could ever hope to fly. Yellow as summer sunlight, soft as young thighs, smooth as a Baptist preacher's rant, falsely innocent as a magician's handkerchief, mayonnaise will cloak a lettuce leaf, some shreds of cabbage, a few hunks of cold potato in the simplest splendor, restyling their dull character, making them lively and attractive again, granting them the capacity to delight the gullet if not the heart. Fried oysters, leftover roast, peanut butter: rare are the rations that fail to become instantly more scintillating from contact with this inanimate seductress, this goopy glory-monger, this alchemist in a jar.
The mystery of mayonnaise-and others besides Dickie Goldwire have surely puzzled over this_is how egg yolks, vegetable oil, vinegar (wine's angry brother), salt, sugar (earth's primal grain-energy), lemon juice, water, and, naturally, a pinch of the ol' calcium disodium EDTA could be combined in such a way as to produce a condiment so versatile, satisfying, and outright majestic that mustard, ketchup, and their ilk must bow down before it (though, a at two bucks a jar, mayonnaise certainly doesn't put on airs)or else slink away in disgrace. Who but the ~ Tom Robbins

Love all the seasons, because every season has its own treasures! Winter does not own the treasures of the spring; the spring does not own the treasures of the winter! If you know only the autumn, you are poor; if you know only the summer, you are poor! To be rich, love all the seasons and live all the seasons! Wise and rich man is the one who knows all the treasures of all the seasons! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

Summer was on the way; Jem and I awaited it with impatience. Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape; but most of all, summer was Dill. ~ Harper Lee

Bercelak frowned. "Do we know you?"
"I'm Bram," the dragon said, appearing confused. "I stayed with your parents last summer."
"Oh." Ghleanna glanced at them. "Right. Uh ... Brogue."
"Bram."
"Right. Bram. Bram the ... Friendly?"
"Merciful."
"Of course!" Ghleanna smiled, patted his shoulder. "Bram the Merciful. My father speaks quite highly of you."
"Really? What did he say?"
"Uh ... ~ G.A. Aiken

When did your name
change from a proper noun
to a charm?

Its three vowels
like jewels
on the thread of my breath.

Its consonants
brushing my mouth
like a kiss.

I love your name.
I say it again and again
in this summer rain.

I see it,
discreet in the alphabet,
like a wish.

I pray it
into the night
till its letters are light.

I hear your name
rhyming, rhyming,
rhyming with everything.


"Name ~ Carol Ann Duffy

Eighth grade's a distant rumor, a tabled issue, and Dylan knows from experience that the summer between might change anything, everything. He and Mingus Rude too and even Arthur Lomb for that matter are released from the paint-by-numbers page of their schooldays, from their preformatted roles as truant or victim, freed to an unspoiled summer, that inviting medium for doodling in self-transformation. ~ Jonathan Lethem

The final and best means of strengthening demand among consumers and business is to reduce the burden on private income and the deterrence to private initiative which are imposed by our present tax system, and this administration pledged itself last summer to an across-the-board, top-to-bottom cut in personal and corporate income taxes to be enacted and become effective in 1963. ~ John F. Kennedy

Before that summer, I had many times heard long-winded Baptist preachers take ten minutes to pray over card tables of potato salad and fried chicken at church picnics, but the way those sweating, red-faced men sat around on stacked pallets of lumber gulping oysters taught me most of what I knew about simple gladness. ~ Mary Karr

An Ashinabe "spring poem" translated by Gerald Vizenor:

as my eyes
look across the prairie
i feel the summer
in the spring ~ Howard Zinn

For when the grace of God cometh to a man, then he becometh able to do all things, and when it departeth then he will be poor and weak and given up unto troubles. In these thou art not to be cast down nor to despair, but to rest with calm mind on the will of God, and to bear all things which come upon thee unto the praise of Jesus Christ; for after winter cometh summer, after night returneth day, after the tempest a great calm. ~ Thomas A Kempis

In Luth poetry, there was a formula used to indicate a very beautiful woman: you would fall off your horse trying to keep looking at her, as you rode past. That was what the Phemian Adares was like. He had a face like one of the gods painted on the Kossian urns that stood in the summer hall of the kahar- except that unlike them he was always breaking into a smile. And such a smile. You would fall off your horse. ~ A.J. Demas

The winter is made and you have to bear it,
The winter web, the winter woven, wind and wind,
For all the thoughts of summer that go with it
In the mind, pupa of straw, moppet of rags ... ~ Wallace Stevens

For him in vain the envious seasons roll
Who bears eternal summer in his soul. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

When cool-climate relatives and friends are astonished to hear such temperatures, Pico Mundians put a chamber-of-commerce spin on our meteorology, noting that the humidity is a mere fifteen or twenty percent. Our average summer day, they insist, isn't like a sweltering steam bath but like a refreshing sauna. ~ Dean Koontz

The first of many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man's hands after hours spent in a wood shop. ~ Leslye Walton

What bloody man is that, sir?" I tossed the paper in the grate, though there was no fire on this warm summer day. "Bartholomew, you are quoting from Macbeth, did you know? King Duncan in the first scene, which is ominous. He died rather horribly soon after. ~ Ashley Gardner