What I really do is take real plums and put them in an imaginary cake.

... in America ... children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

The fact is that gardening, more than most of our other activities except sometimes love-making, confronts us with the inexplicable.

There are no new truths, but only truths that have not been recognized by those who have perceived them without noticing.

For me, in fact, the mark of the historic is the nonchalance with which it picks up an individual and deposits him in a trend, like a house playfully moved by a tornado.

The consumer today is the victim of the manufacturer who launches on him a regiment of products for which he must make room in his soul.

Every age has a keyhole to which its eye is pasted. Spicy court-memoirs, the lives of gallant ladies, recollections of an ex-nun, a monk's confession, an atheist's repentance, true-to-life accounts of prostitution and bastardy gave our ancestors a penny peep into the forbidden room.