Dee > Dee's Quotes

“For some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you. Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship mean; they show us how to live and die.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

“Christmas, children, is not a date. It is a state of mind. ”
― Mary Ellen Chase

“Indeed, learning to write may be part of learning to read. For all I know, writing comes out of a superior devotion to reading.”
― Eudora Welty, On Writing

“The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy.”
― Eudora Welty

“Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried.”
― Eudora Welty, The Wide Net And Other Stories

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
― Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale

“Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it.”
― Sue Grafton

“There's a certain class of people who will do you in and then remain completely mystified by the depth of your pain.”
― Sue Grafton, E is for Evidence

“Eccentricty had flowered into madness.”
― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice

“...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.”
― Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice

“I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow; but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.”
― Agatha Christie

“Remember if people talk behind your back, it only means you are two steps ahead.”
― Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe

“Miles and years become suddenly invisible when you find yourself back where you started from, as if you've learned nothing and you are once again the person you once were.”
― Karen White, The Memory of Water

“Madness is only a variety of mental nonconformity and we are all individualists here.”
― Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek

“Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
― E.L. Doctorow, Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews, 2nd Series

“May I a small house and large garden have;
And a few friends,
And many books, both true.”
― Abraham Cowley

“For you little gardener and lover of trees, I have only a small gift. Here is set G for Galadriel, but it may stand for garden in your tongue. In this box there is earth from my orchard, and such blessing as Galadriel has still to bestow is upon it. It will not keep you on your road, nor defend you against any peril; but if you keep it and see your home again at last, then perhaps it may reward you. Though you should find all barren and laid waste, there will be few gardens in Middle-earth that will bloom like your garden, if you sprinkle this earth there. Then you may remember Galadriel, and catch a glimpse far off of Lórien, that you have seen only in our winter. For our spring and our summer are gone by, and they will never be seen on earth again save in memory.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“It was such a pleasure to sink one's hands into the warm earth, to feel at one's fingertips the possibilities of the new season.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
― Ray Bradbury

“A day without writing was a little death.”
― Ray Bradbury, Death is a Lonely Business

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

“You try as a parent. You love beyond reason. You fight beyond endurance. You hope beyond despair.
You never think, until the very last moment, that it still might not be enough.”
― Lisa Gardner, Live to Tell

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.”
― Maya Angelou

“It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them. ”
― Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie: An Autobiography

“One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.”
― Agatha Christie

“Plants want to grow; they are on your side as long as you are reasonably sensible.”
― Anne Wareham

“Gardening is akin to writing stories. No experience could have taught me more about grief or flowers, about achieving survival by going, your fingers in the ground, the limit of physical exhaustion.”
― Eudora Welty

“But gardening is none of that, really. Strip away the gadgets and the techniques, the books and the magazines and the soil test kits, and what you're left with, at the end of the day, is this: a stretch of freshly turned dirt, a handful of seeds scratched into the surface, and a marker to remember where they went. It is at the same time an incredibly brave and an incredibly simple thing to do, entrusting your seeds to the earth and waiting for them to rise up out of the ground to meet you.”
― Amy Stewart, From the Ground Up: The Story of a First Garden

“I plant daffodil bulbs about eight inches deep. As I mentioned before, I don't use a ruler. As a married woman, I know perfectly well what six or eight inches looks like, so it's easy to make a good estimate. This mental measurement makes planting time much more interesting than it might be otherwise.”
― Cassandra Danz, Mrs. Greenthumbs: How I Turned a Boring Yard into a Glorious Garden and How You Can, Too