A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy. Rumer Godden found in Power of Simple Living by Ellyn Sanna

I suppose the more you have to do, the more you learn to organize and concentrate-or else get fragmented into bits. I have learned to use my 'ten minutes'. I once thought it was not worth sitting down for a time as short as that; now I know differently and, if I have ten minutes, I use them, even if they bring only two lines, and it keeps the book alive.

Every time a child, any child, is born, it is new - and different; that is the wonder.

A writer who has never explored words, who has never searched, seeded, sieved, sifted through his knowledge and memory...dictiona ries, thesaurus, poems, favorite paragraphs, to find the right word, is like someone owning a gold mine who has never mined it.

Every piece of writing starts from what I call a grit a sight or sound, a sentence or happening that does not pass away but quite inexplicably lodges in the mind.

You must remember garden catalogues are as big liars as house-agents.