If something anticipated arrives too late it finds us numb, wrung out from waiting, and we feel - nothing at all. The best things arrive on time.
Dorothy GilmanWhat continues to astonish me about a garden is that you can walk past it in a hurry, see something wrong, stop to set it right, and emerge an hour or two later breathless, contented, and wondering what on earth happened.
Dorothy GilmanPerhaps we clutch at life only when we have never lived or trusted it. Then death seems the last and greatest defeat, the end of something never felt.
Dorothy Gilmanmy rebelliousness went so deep that, faced with a can of asparagus that instructed me to open at this end, I always, stubbornly, opened it at the other.
Dorothy GilmanWhen we live with a memory we live with a corpse; the impact of the experience has changed us once but can never change us again.
Dorothy Gilman... people misunderstood death, they died not of too little life but of too much life, that as the skin withered and the future grew short it was the past that took on flesh, until ultimately the sheer accumulation of experience and memory became too heavy to carry.
Dorothy Gilmanwhen a gourd is hollowed out it becomes empty and is of great use to the world because of its emptiness.
Dorothy Gilman