Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward.

Of the seven deadly sins, surely it is pride that most commonly afflicts the gardener.

Corn is a greedy crop, as farmers will tell you.

Cooking for yourself is the only sure way to take back control of your diet from the food scientists and food processors, and to guarantee you're eating real food rather than edible foodlike substances, with their unhealthy oils, high-fructose corn syrup, and surfeit of salt.

The two things are synergistic, the health care crisis and the food crisis. Right now, to a large extent, the food industry's biggest product is patients for the health care industry and we have to break that.

We're spending, on average, 27 minutes a day cooking and about four minutes cleaning up, so basically about a half hour. Any one of TV shows takes twice as long to watch as that, which I think is very interesting because the main excuse people give for not cooking is they don't have time to cook, but somehow they're finding time to watch other people cook or eat on TV.

The green thumb is equable in the face of nature's uncertainties; he moves among her mysteries without feeling the need for control or explanations or once-and-for-all solutions. To garden well is to be happy amid the babble of the objective world, untroubled by its refusal to be reduced by our ideas of it, its indomitable rankness.