The worst of gardening is that it's so full of metaphors one hardly knows where to begin.

librarianship is one of the few callings in the world for which is it still possible to feel unqualified admiration and respect.

Physical weather certainly is beyond our control. ... But human weather - the psychological climate of the world - is not beyond our control. The human race is its own rain and its own sun. It creates its own cyclones and anti-cyclones. The ridges of high pressure which we sometimes enjoy, the troughs of low pressure which we so often endure, are of our own making and nobody else's.

[Gardening] is a means by which you can attain many valuable hours of solitude without being thought unsociable.

swans ... always look as though they'd just been reading their own fan-mail.

However long the horror continued, one must not get to the stage of refusing to think about it. To shrink from direct pain was bad enough, but to shrink from vicarious pain was the ultimate cowardice. And whereas to conceal direct pain was a virtue, to conceal vicarious pain was a sin. Only by feeling it to the utmost, and by expressing it, could the rest of the world help to heal the injury which had caused it. Money, food, clothing, shelter - people could give all these and still it would not be enough; it would not absolve them from paying also, in full, the imponderable tribute of grief.

One is what one remembers: no more, no less.