The Garden Against Time Quotes

“What I loved, aside from the work of making, was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“This was the more sinister legacy of Eden: the fantasy of perpetual abundance. I was beginning to see what a poisoned fruit it truly was. So many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay, insisting on summer all the time. Permanent growth, constant fertility, perpetual yield, instant pleasure, maximum profit, outsource the labour, keep evidence of pollution out of sight.”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“I'm talking about how we - and I mean here the "we" of people who have experienced some kind of trauma, which I think is a very large category indeed - how we manage the serious burden that we carry, how we contain it, what spent fuel pool or dry cask storage we improvise for material that is even now still leaking its lethal isotopes.”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“A partridge settled at the base of a holm oak. It was garden out of time, a garden against time, continually occupying the present tense, insinuating itself into the future by way of each new visitor, I understood how it worked now, how gardens self-seed.”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“One of the operations by which capitalism
perpetuates itself is displacement, the determined and absolute separation of the product from the site of production, so that when we buy petrol or peat from a garden centre or even a
chocolate bar, when we turn on a light switch or a tap, when we flush a toilet or purchase a sofa from Ikea, we are persuaded believe that these things have arisen spontaneously, naturally...”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“Shame had entered the garden, making him more painfully estranged from his own body”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“It’s somehow wounding to the consumer to have to connect the can of Coke, a sleek and gleaming apparition, with water shortages and pollution in Uttar Pradesh, Kerala and Rajasthan.”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“Despite its title, Paradise Lost is not exactly nostalgic. The garden serves as a kind of lodestar, an experience of nurture and richness that cannot be dismantled and might in future be reinstated. Adam and Eve mourn their losses, grieve what won’t continue, but when eviction comes, when the cherubim gather like mist rising from a river, when they are taken by the hand and led to Eden’s gate, they look back, drop a tear, and then turn resolutely round. The final line swells with possibility. ‘The World was all before them.’ Whatever they have suffered, whatever damage has been done, the future lies open ahead.”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

“I wanted a home, absolutely, but it was a garden that I needed.”
― Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise