Patrick > Patrick's Quotes

“I cannot exist without you - I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again - my Life seems to stop there - I see no further. You have absorb'd me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I were dissolving... I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion - I have shudder'd at it - I shudder no more - I could be martyr'd for my Religion - Love is my religion - I could die for that - I could die for you. My creed is Love and you are its only tenet - You have ravish'd me away by a Power I cannot resist.”
― John Keats

“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke

“It’s possible that they were coming over to offer me homemade bread or a hand-drawn map to all the local breweries or perhaps even their friendship, but I will never know, because I’m from Chicago and I don’t believe in answering an unsolicited door knock.”
― Samantha Irby, Wow, No Thank You.

“still find it hard to realize that I am an alcoholic, though even strangers know this right away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“She had never seen Rosewater County, had no idea what a night-crawler was, did not know that land anywhere could be so deathly flat, that people anywhere could be so deathly dull.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“I look at these people, these Americans," Eliot went on, "and I realize that they can't even care about themselves any more—because they have no use. The factory, the farms, the mines across the river—they're almost completely automatic now. And America doesn't even need these people for war—not any more.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“All else was shithouses, shacks, alcoholism, ignorance, idiocy and perversion, for all that was healthy and busy and intelligent in Rosewater County shunned the county seat.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“The difference between pornography and art is bodily hair!”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Those who write on Heaven's walls Should mold their shit in little balls. And those who read these lines of wit Should eat these little balls of shit.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—: " 'God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Earlier O’Brien and Pottinger had aggressively argued against allowing the Chinese firm Huawei, the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, into U.S. markets. O’Brien was convinced that Huawei wanted to use its fifth generation (5G) wireless network eventually to monitor every citizen in the world. It was another major national security threat to the United States. O’Brien said, “Backdoor your medical records, your social media posts, your emails, your financial records. Personal, private data on every American. Micro-target you based on your deepest fears.”
― Bob Woodward, Rage

“It occurred to him, not for the first time, that London was more than one city. There was the one he was taxied comfortably about in, whose views were spacious and spoke in agreeable accents of wealth and plenty, while the other was cramped, soiled and barbarous, peopled by a feral race who’d strip you bare and chew the bones.”
― Mick Herron, Real Tigers

“Magenta, the discount pigment with which nature has brushed a thousand weeds, has always been a mark of bad breeding in the garden world.”
― Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

“Lavender stoechas, which is all over these Spanish hills, should not damp off as it is apt to do in an ordinary border. This lavender would form agreeable clumps between the bulbs; fairly dwarf, it makes a change from the usual lavenders, such as the deep purple nana atropurpurea. Clip them close, when the flower-spike is going over, to keep them neat and rounded.”
― Vita Sackville-West, Sissinghurst: Vita Sackville-West and the Creation of a Garden

“They make extravagant use of gardens, do artists, they individualize them—a Monet garden is a world away from a Van Gogh garden—the garden may shape their work, but their gardens also shape our perception of the garden, of plants and flowers, so that, once seen, a particular painting will forever influence our own vision: reality is affected by metaphor.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“The garden—any garden—is in a state of unstoppable change. Each day, each week, each leaf, each bud, each flower—moving inexorably on to its next incarnation, the spring sparkle forgotten by the time of the summer show, that too fallen away before smoldering autumn. Then dead of winter, but one determined rose with a flower at Christmas.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“It does seem odd now, this early-twentieth-century view that social status made one kind of physical activity—work, you could call it—acceptable and another very much not. Gardening, you get a lot hotter and dirtier than you do dusting a room or washing a floor. But gardening was a genteel occupation, housework a demeaning task that you paid someone else to do.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“I suppose the fascination of gardening lies a lot in the way one can plan for the future. Especially in such an insecure world. I open my morning paper and read of some fresh new horror the scientists have devised and then I plan some change in the garden that won’t be fully realized for at least five or six years. It’s illogical, of course, but it’s some comfort.”
― Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

“Social mobility I suppose but now the upper classes drink cheap bourbon with tap water and a sprig of ragweed.”
― Jim Harrison, Wolf

“Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one.”
― Henry Mitchell

“Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.... I never see a great garden, (even in my mind's eye, which is the best place to see great gardens around here), but I think of the calamities that have visited it, unsuspected by the delighted gardener who supposes, "It must be nice to garden there."
It is not nice to garden anywhere. Everywhere there are startling winds, once in every five centuries floods....
Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that, even as his pain increases with each loss, he comprehends, truly knows, that where there was a garden once there can be again.”
― Henry Mitchell, The Writer in the Garden