Quotes by Gardeners

Doesn't matter what you do, or how you do it, your neighbors are gonna talk about you ANYWAY.
Felder Rushing
Ambition old as mankind the immemorial weakness of the strong.
Vita Sackville-West
So prodigal was I of youth Forgetting I was young I worshipped dead men for their strength Forgetting I was strong.
Vita Sackville-West
Not seeing is half-believing.
Vita Sackville-West
A daffodil bulb will divide and redivide endlessly. That's why, like the peony, it is one of the few flowers you can find around abandoned farmhouses, still blooming and increasing in numbers fifty years after the farmer and his wife have moved to heaven, or the other place, Boca Raton. If you dig up a clump when no one is nearby and there is no danger of being shot, you'll find that there are scores of little bulbs in each clump, the progeny of a dozen or so planted by the farmer's wife in 1942. If you take these home, separate them, and plant them in your own yard, within a couple of years, you'll have a hundred daffodils for the mere price of a trespassing fine or imprisonment or both. I had this adventure once, and I consider it one of the great cheap thrills of my gardening career. I am not advocating trespassing, especially on my property, but there is no law against having a shovel in the trunk of your car.
Cassandra Danz
One character all messages had in common was vague generality. "Fly away with me," a tussie-mussie might suggest, but never "Meet me at the railway depot at six-thirty.
Geraldine Adamich Laufer
And still the strange meaningless conversations continue, and I wonder more and more at the fabric which nets the world together, so that anything which I do finally incubate out of my system into words will quite certainly be about solitude. Solitude and the desirability of it, if one is to achieve anything like continuity in life, is the one idea I find in the resounding vacancy which is my head.
Vita Sackville-West
Days I enjoy are days when nothing happens,When I have no engagements written on my block,When no one comes to disturb my inward peace,When no one comes to take me away from myselfAnd turn me into a patchwork, a jig-saw puzzle,A broken mirror that once gave a whole reflection,Being so contrived that it takes too long a timeTo get myself back to myself when they have gone.
Vita Sackville-West
I'm not one of those academics that don't do shit but reads about it. The difference is, I do shit. I have a proof of concept and it works.
Ron Finley
I have come to the conclusion, after many years of sometimes sad experience, that you cannot come to any conclusion at all.
Vita Sackville-West
She said that the planting of trees, like the education of children, was a gift to the future.
Cassandra Danz
You cannot simply tap your creative nature once and then expect to be done with it. It is a lifelong process: a continual commitment to being open to possibility, trusting your instincts, experimenting, taking risks, and revising.
Fran Sorin
I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong.
Vita Sackville-West
That hedge provides almost complete privacy from cars and pedestrians, and I would bet he and his wife do it more than the national average.
Cassandra Danz
I think the Big Bang theory must have been invented by a man. A woman would have wanted it to take longer and insisted on a commitment.
Cassandra Danz
Soap wasn't invented until the Romans, who also invented interesting sex. (Since my editor informs me that a gardening book is not a proper venue for discussions of interesting sex, I will go into this topic in more detail when I write my private memoirs, 'A Petunia Named Desire').
Cassandra Danz
There had been no moments when she could differentiate and say: Then, at such a moment, I love him; and again, Then, at such another, I loved him not. The stress had been constant. her love for him had been a straight black line drawn right through her life. It had hurt her, it had damaged her, it had diminished her, but she had been unable to curve away from it.
Vita Sackville-West
My dear Mr FitzGeorge!' cried Lady Slane. 'You really mustn't talk as though my life had been a tragedy. I had everything that most women would covet: position, comfort, children, and a husband I loved. I had nothing to complain of - nothing.''Except that you were defrauded of the one thing that mattered. Nothing matters to an artist except the fulfilment of his gift. You know that as well as I do. Frustrated, he grows crooked like a tree twisted into an unnatural shape. All meaning goes out of life, and life becomes existence - a makeshift. Face it, Lady Slane. Your children, your husband, your splendour, were nothing but obstacles that kept you from yourself. They were what you chose to substitute for your real vocation. You were too young, I suppose, to know any better, but when you chose that life you sinned against the light.
Vita Sackville-West
She found herself suddenly surrounded by a host of assumptions. It was assumed that she trembled for joy in his presence, languished in his absence, existed solely (but humbly) for the furtherance of his ambitions, and thought him the most remarkable man alive, as she herself was the most favoured of women, a belief in which everybody was fondly prepared to indulge her. Such was the unanimity of these assumptions that she was almost persuaded into believing them true.
Vita Sackville-West
There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years, from the small acorn of passion, into a great rooted tree
Vita Sackville-West
Modern life is, for most of us, a kind of serfdom to mortgage, job and the constant assault to consume. Although we have more time and money than ever before, most of us have little sense of control over our own lives. It is all connected to the apathy that means fewer and fewer people vote. Politicians don’t listen to us anyway. Big business has all the power; religious extremism all the fear. But in the garden or allotment we are king or queen. It is our piece of outdoors that lays a real stake to the planet.
Monty Don
I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can't cross; that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. [VW]
Vita Sackville-West
It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.
Vita Sackville-West
ONE WORDOne word— one stonein a cold river.One more stone—I'll need many stonesif I'm going to get over.
Olav H. Hauge
Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this.
Vita Sackville-West