As every real estate agent knows, a poor house in good surroundings will sell for a higher price than a better house in poor surroundings, and in a town they confidently ask 25 percent more rent for a flat with a view of a park that for an identical flat with no view.

... 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.

children are not undeveloped versions of adult people: they are a different race of beings: they are children.

Enthusiasm is a plant which grows variously in the varying soils of different natures.

We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.

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

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.