how poor and disheartening a thing is experience compared with hope!

Is it better to be extremely ambitious, or rather modest? Probably the latter is safer; but I hate safety, and would rather fail gloriously than dingily succeed.

Autumn in felted slipper shuffles on, Muted yet fiery.--Vita Sackville-West

The more one gardens, the more one learns; And the more one learns, the more one realizes how little one knows.

The farmer and the gardener are both busy, the gardener perhaps the more excitable of the two, for he is more of the amateur, concerned with the creation of beauty rather than with the providing of food. Gardening is a luxury occupation; an ornament, not a necessity, of life.

I do not like January very much. It is too stationary. Not enough happens. I like the evidences of life, and in January there are too few of them.

I like owls. I admire their intransigent spirit. I have respected them deeply ever since I met a baby owl in a wood, when it fell over dead, apparently from sheer temper, because I dared to approach it. It defied me first, and then died. I have never forgotten the horror and shame I experienced when that soft fluffy thing (towards which I had nothing but the most humanitarian motives) fell dead from rage at my feet.