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

... 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.

The sorrows of children are profound and unsuspected.

the urgent crowds out the essential.

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

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.

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