Garden Quotes - page 14
Dotty: Archie says the Church is a monument to irrationality.
George: ... The National Gallery is a monument to irrationality! Every concert hall is a monument to irrationality! - and so is a nicely kept garden, or a lover's favour, or a home for stray dogs! You stupid woman, if rationality were the criterion for things being allowed to exist, the world would be one gigantic field of soya beans!
Tom Stoppard
I was thinking of preparing my palette and my brushes to resume work, but relapses and further bouts of pain prevented it. I'm not giving up that hope and am occupying myself with some major alterations in my studios and plans to perfect the garden [in Giverny ]. All this to show you that, with courage, I'm getting the upper hand. [three months before Monet died].
Claude Monet
The speeches by the Minister and the former Minister were an absolute disgrace in complacency, especially the assumption that market forces will solve the housing problem. If that is so, why is it that there are record numbers of homeless people? Why is it that tonight, as on every night of the year, people will be sleeping under the national theatre, in Covent Garden, around the tube stations in London and alongside the main roads? The Government, in their obsession with market forces and the triumph of the rich over the poor, are creating a hobo society. That is all they are trying to do with their housing policies...They are proposing a return to Rachmanism. They are proposing all the horrors of the Rent Act 1957: nothing but homelessness and exploitation for the unemployed, the poor and the homeless.
Jeremy Corbyn
As citizens of Cheon Il Guk, please have the wisdom to protect and love nature. Return to nature and enjoy a life of liberation and complete freedom. To love nature is to love God and humanity. When human life resonates with nature, human character can blossom in perfection. The flowers of a true culture of heart, a true artistic world, will bloom. It will be the Garden of Eden, the original ideal where human beings and all creation live in complete harmony and express their original nature.
Sun Myung Moon
Here life is, moves; faintly. A wrist. The faint throb of blood, precise, miraculous . . . And they talk of dying! The blood delicately descending and ascending: making an arm. Being an arm. The warm flesh, the dim slender flesh filled with life, slenderer than a miracle, frailer . . . These are the shoulders through which fell the world. The dangerous shoulders of Eve, in god's entire garden newly strolling.
E. E. Cummings
The young artists of to-day understand nothing; they copy to satiety the classic ornaments and designs, and reproduce them in so cold a manner that they lose all meaning. The ancients obtained their designs from nature. They found their models in the garden, even in the vegetable garden. They drew their inspiration from its source. The cabbage-leaf, the oak-leaf, the clover, the thistle, and the brier are the motives of the Gothic capital. It is not photographic truth, but living truth, that we must seek in art.
Auguste Rodin
We have inherited an incredibly beautiful and complex garden, but the trouble is that we have been appallingly bad gardeners. We have not bothered to acquaint ourselves with the simplest principles of gardening. By neglecting our garden, we are storing up for ourselves, in the not very distant future, a world catastrophe as bad as any atomic war, and we are doing it with all the bland complacency of an idiot child chopping up a Rembrandt with a pair of scissors. We go on, year after year, all over the world, creating dust bowls and erosion, cutting down forests and overgrazing our grasslands, polluting one of our most vital commodities - water - with industrial filth and all the time we are breeding with the ferocity of the Brown Rat, and wondering why there is not enough food to go round. We now stand so aloof from nature that we think we are God. This has always been a dangerous supposition.
Gerald Durrell
My wife says I had a nervous breakdown during the writing of Mefisto. Maybe I did, but what's a nervous breakdown for a writer? For a writer every day is a nervous breakdown. [...] The book came out in the spring, and I remember I spent that following summer digging my garden - Voltaire would have been proud. I made a wonderful garden. Grew beans, lettuces. I was healing myself from some kind of traumatic process that I don't pretend to understand. All right, let's agree with my wife and call it a nervous breakdown.
John Banville
The Dell,(Bodnant Garden) is the most extensive, most varied and most tasteful piece of planting I have ever seen. I have no doubt at all that this is the richest garden I have ever seen. Knowledge and taste are combined with enormous expenditure to render it one of the wonders of the world.
Harold Nicolson
While yesteryear I tarried
In a garden in the south,
I met a youth who carried
A rose-bud in his mouth.I gave him chase and caught him,
And would not set him free,
But held him and besought him
To give the flower to me.He smiled, and broke a petal
And laid it in my hand-
It seared like molten metal,
And here is yet the brand.
Enoch Powell
