Only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.

The unmulched garden looks to me like some naked thing which for one reason or another would be better off with a few clothes on.

It’s a fair-sized job to write a book that people can be bothered just to read; when they begin to steal copies, you are really getting some place.

To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.

There is peace in the garden. Peace and results.

The central paradox and challenge of marriage is that we have to make family out of someone we're not related to.

Working in the garden gives me something beyond the enjoyment of the senses. It gives me a profound feeling of inner peace.