Gardeners

We both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace.
Beverley Nichols

I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
Jane Austen

Dawns and sunsets in books.

A good book is never exhausted. It goes on whispering to you from the wall. Books perfume and give weight to a room. A bookcase is as good as a view, as the sight of a city or a river. There are dawns and sunsets in books--storms, fogs, zephyrs.
Anatole Broyard

I was absent

I pretended to work like others from morning to evening, but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries.
Czeslaw Milosz

To love is to be vulnerable.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
C.S. Lewis

Tears

Do tears not yet spilled wait in small lakes?
Pablo Neruda

There's a bluebird

There's a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going to let anybody see you.
Charles Bukowski

A bus came.

A bus came. I climbed aboard and sat on the plastic seat while the things of our city turned in the windows like the images in a slot machine.
Denis Johnson

Edge

Here I came to the very edge where nothing at all needs saying...and every day on the balcony of the sea wings open fire is born and everything is blue again like morning.
Pablo Neruda

Shadows

The eye is always caught by light, but shadows have more to say.
Gregory Maguire

Insect view

Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau

The journey

The journey is my home.
Muriel Rukeyser

I love sleep

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?
Ernest Hemingway

A tree

Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
Czeslaw Milosz

Love quote

To take possession of a city of which you are not a native you must first fall in love there.
John Banville

understanding someone

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.
Harper Lee

fatal to prejudice

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain

The things that really matter

The only thing you'll find on the summit of Mount Everest is a divine view. The things that really matter lie far below.
Roland Smith

There is simply the rose.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives nature in the present, above time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

even without looking, she knows.

A woman knows the face of the man she loves as a sailor knows the open sea.
Honoré de Balzac

The bar …

The bar … is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable — and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn’t like to talk.
Luis Buñuel

Idle details

I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does.
Jorge Luis Borges

Red

Red is the ultimate cure for sadness.
Bill Blass

At home

Don’t you stay at home of evenings? Don’t you love a cushioned seat in a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love match

I believe a strong woman may be stronger than a man, particularly if she happens to have love in her heart. I guess a loving woman is indestructible.
John Steinbeck

Boredom remains

Jump out the window if you are the object of passion. Flee it if you feel it. Passion goes, boredom remains.
Coco Chanel

The ornament

The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

The present

The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
Frank Lloyd Wright

Sometimes

Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.
A.A. Milne

holding a piece of the city

She stood at the window, her arms spread wide, holding on to each side of the frame, it was as if she held a piece of the city.
Ayn Rand