happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.

The sorrows we imagine are more profound and inconsolable than real life leaves us time for.

A collection of plants is not a landscape, any more than a list of choice words is a poem. The merit is in the design, not the material it is expressed in, and the best designs, like the best poems, make ordinary material significant by its arrangement.

There is a stage with people we love when we are no longer separate from them, but so close in sympathy that we live through them as directly as through ourselves. ... we push back our hair because theirs is in their eyes.

Every search has its own momentum. It is why a search makes such an excellent plot for a film or story.

We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.

... garden books are quite unconscious that besides telling us how to turn our patch of earth into a garden, they are also expressing the way their age looks at the world, the state of their society.