leisure is an attitude of mind, not simply remission of work.

the large black slugs ... come out at dusk. Enormous slugs. As big as crocodiles. So huge we need a gun to shoot them. And by the end of the summer, if they go on growing, we shall have to go out in pairs together for protection.

Most of us are experts at solving other people's problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.

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

when people go away, or when we leave the places we love, or something we treasure goes out of our life - I have always noticed that before it happens - this leaving, this parting - when we think about it beforehand we are overwhelmed with sadness at the loss to come. ... the most unbearable sense of loss, the worst homesickness of all, so I have found, is this loss and sickness we feel beforehand, before we ever leave home.

... 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.

We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.