The Garden Party Quotes

“They do that in Japan, you know. Rather a lot."
"Poems to foxes?"
"Perhaps, but I mean they're always tying white paper on strings around trees- it looks as though the trees have necklaces or garter belts. Are you sure your witch friend wasn't Japanese? Their spirit world is full of foxes. They are called kitsune, and some are divine and some are mischievous or wicked.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“What would you like, black or green?"
"Green, please. It has an earthier taste."
"What is you name?"
"Leila. It means 'evening,' but I would rather have a morning name. I was at the other party, but I like your party better."
"I see. Cup or mug?"
"Cup, please. The best china. Gold-rimmed, no flowers. No cracks or chips. It's okay. I don't break things.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“It was one of those yearning and gentle days of late spring, suddenly warm, when the air turns greenish yellow, so thick is it with pollen and bloom.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“As he went along the path he stopped to look at the plants. He paused by the kitchen plot to pick leaves from the aromatic herbs and rub them in his hands. He lingered among the flower beds, bending to smell or to touch the petals. When he got to the statue hidden by the yew bushes he laughed, then backed off to see it from a bit farther away. He shifted his head from side to side, then, imitating the figure, he lifted his hands to play an imaginary flute and raised one knee in a Bacchic dance.
When Celia heard Dennis laughing near the statue she came to greet him and introduce himself.
"Oh, you caught me dancing with this faun fellow! I am so glad to finally meet you," he said. "Your plume poppies are glorious," he said. "The whole garden is. I hope you will walk me through it when there's time."
"Of course I will." Celia almost hugged him for his appreciation. "I'm glad you like the poppies. I can give you some if you like, but they are complete thugs. Hooligans! They escape wherever you put them, they multiply and take over. You really have to keep an eye on them.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Will your friend allow curry powder on her raw foods?"
"Not allowed, my dear," said Nat Morrill. "Curry powder is already a mixture, thus impure. In any case, she does not allow one to sprinkle something on top of something else."
"This is worse than kashruth," Leah said. "What about sushi?"
"Not allowed. It's raw, but still, it's a combination, because of the rice, the seaweed."
"Sashimi?"
"Fine. But no joining, no marriage of the fish with soy sauce or pickled ginger, no green shiso leaf.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Earth, air, fire, and water," he began. "The ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles says that these four elements are the roots of everything."
Here was the garden he inherited from Leah. Celia, who mostly tended it, called it her sculpture in four dimensions, the fourth being time. Perhaps all sculpture changed over time, with decay and dissolution setting in, rust and chipping and breakage. But marble or bronze evolved so slowly, and their changes were unintended, while the garden was always in visible flux, each morning a new unfolding. Celia always said that the flower beds were a progression of looping actions: each plant opening, blooming, fading, setting seed, drooping, falling; and each seed rooting, sprouting, budding, blooming. And the seasons, the moons and days, the pendulum of darkness and light, the beat of the cardinal's song. Was the earth, then, our real timepiece? Stop, Pindar. Pay attention.
"But Empedocles also said that our spirits have successive lives, born sometimes as the fair-tressed laurel trees, sometimes as lions who live in the golden grass...."
A shifting of the light through the trees made Pindar notice the Queen Anne's lace in its brass vase. Constellations of tiny white stars swirled in a galactic umbrella the size of his hand- who was above? Who below? Beside their lacy flaring explosives symmetry, the black-eyed Susans gazed at him with their fierce yellow. Wide-open, with none of the hidden turns and caverns of the lilies whose trumpets would be deep enough to incubate in, or at least hide one's thoughts in, though their scent would be too strong for the dinner table.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“He thought of the smoked glass one was supposed to use to look at the sun during an eclipse. Surely this much beauty must be an evolutionary mistake: To steal the breath of onlookers cannot lead to increase of the human species. Perhaps such beauty didn't have anything to do with humans. Perhaps he was merely standing in the path of something else, caught in the crossfire of the gods as they signal with their sacred mirrors.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“I will take you and keep you and give you light and dark wine and perhaps children. In spring, after we have planted, I will sit and watch the warm rains with you on the covered porch. In summer and in fall I will walk with you in the gardens. And when the snows of winter come, I will wrap us both in a quilt of starry darkness.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Pindar turned his thoughts back to time. What exactly was a moment? Was it the shortest span of time that could be represented by art? Perhaps moments were like sheets of gold leaf, hammered ever so thin, each leaf the locus for new thoughts. Time would then be a matter of layering, so that each second had a stack of moments on top, a baklava of time. Was this why his new Babylonian fragment had the word layers, then a gap where a piece was chipped out, then time? Or was that word branches rather than layers? Perhaps time wasn't flat after all. In that case, no sheaves like baklava, but filaments like kataifi, those nests made of shredded pastry drenched with syrup or honey. He saw the pastry threads as silver, now, each strand branching into new trees of silvery time growing out from each second, all of them inhabited by breath. For breathing had become necessary to his conception of time, inspiration and expiration. He needed the gods to breathe into him, breathe through him like a flute.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Haloes of heat shimmer from the guests and their hosts. The candles burn brighter. The plump flies of dusk now congregate around the plates of cheese and crackers on the wooden table. From the cut glass bowl of children's punch, sweet rosy fumes spiral up into the air.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“In the undergrowth robins sang of water; in the rushes bullfrogs croaked of love. The cardinal whistled to his mate. As Harry rushed through the ritual words, Leah wondered what he would look like clothed only in leaves. His hair was so dark it was almost blue. Could he dance? she wondered. She would follow if he started any dance at all. She could see him wreathed with grapes, standing on a boat with curving prow, thee mast encircled with vines, all the sailors already transformed into dolphins.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Seen from above, the canopy of oak and make and pine is pierced by the pond, which looks back at you like some green eye, knowing and ancient. The air above the pond dives into clefts of coolness, then rises up at the warmth of the margins. Down the path, filigrees of blackflies and mosquitos dance in the heat waves given off by men and women and their domestic fires. Joyous bats dart about.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Philippa knew that Eliza was unusual: Animals worshipped her. She attracted them even though she dressed like a heretic. Even that dog of the Cohens had followed her out of the woods. The girl must give off some smell or vibration that attracted the beasts to her. But that she should then turn around and follow them, taking care of distemper or peering into hooves and mouths and reaching into unthinkable places for difficult births?”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“An almost invisible bird, a small piece of hopping dirt, purposed along the edge of the flower bed, eyeing for beauty or looking for worms. Olivia watched it as she walked with her husband toward the yew and puzzling statue. We count those birds as nothing, she thought, the small dun-colored ones, and prefer to keep our wonder for the spectral glory of cardinals, or the ungainly grace of cranes. Goldfinches and even jays delight us, but are they so different from these common little brown birds which we think of as vermin? Astonishing accidents of pigment, size, plumage: Why do they elicit or wonder?”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Yesterday she had been wondering about deer and their antlers: Somebody must understand, but she did not, how the antlers knew, each successive year, that they must grow more points or branches than the previous year, the old pair having been shed after the rutting season. Was it some sort of hormone, which didn't get broken down but just accumulated season after season in the maturing stag? All she knew about antlers was that the blood supply was in the velvet. It was said that squirrels ate fallen antlers for the calcium and other minerals. That was why you didn't find them all over the place in these Brookline woods. Probably tasted a little salty, crunchy like the bones of quail. Perhaps she should get her mother to serve platters of thin-sliced antlers at the wedding lunch tomorrow, as hors d'oeuvres. If antlers were nutritious, perhaps horn was beneficial after all, rhinoceros horn, for example. Except that horn was keratin- like toenails, not bone- like skull.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“The dome of coolness above the pond throbs with croaking. Dragonflies and damselflies pierce the slanting light that burnishes the surface of the water with fire. At the edges frogs wait to spring.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Whenever she could take the time from the English department, Celia would garden. At first she would resist, but then once she was down and dirty, perhaps because of the oxygen coming from the plants themselves, perhaps because she was dealing with the fecundity of the underworld and all its roots and thus the etymology of bloom, perhaps because it made her look forward with such radiant hope- she didn't know what it was, but once she started digging and planting she could not get herself to go back to the house until the light was gone. Most of the time she saw her garden as shaggy with wanting, weeds overgrown with their own delight. Occasionally, though, small corners of terrain or even single plants seemed to approach some ethereal ideal, as when one day a friend had left on her front porch an immense dahlia of impossible color, a sort of smoky rose gold, aureate.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“In the produce section she stopped to inhale the smell of so many oranges- Valencia, blood, juice, navel- net bags of limes, stacks of pineapples. The hygienic overtones of bleach were also in the air and she sniffed at the scent of chlorine as though it were a delicacy. She picked up a watermelon as big as a child, lifting it with difficulty into her cart. A sheaf of plantains. Peaches thick with fuzz.
She chose bottled waters from Maine and Italy, from Germany and France, then proud-colored squeeze bottles of Joy and Cheer, Dove and Palmolive. She reached for high-protein cereals and protein bars, granola with cranberries, Cap'n Crunch. She explored the store, lapping up the light, listening to the music with its brave half-heard songs of love lost and found.
Naomi passed by the stacks of mammalian flesh cut into portions wrapped in tight plastic. She lingered at the fish counter to contemplate the blackness of the mussels, the glistening dislocated stripes of the mackerel, the rosy pinkness of the salmon fillets arrayed on the ice. Here were animals still with their eyes on, red snapper and Mediterranean black bass. In a tank of greenish water, lobsters swam with halting deliberation; she pursed her lips and gave a furtive salute, her fingers held like claws.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“After lunch, Pindar would go in to the university and meet with his students. When his colleagues asked him how his book was going, he tried to seem jolly. "Oh, you know. It's just dreams of eating. Like any other cookbook, only older," he would laugh. "Dabbling in Babylonian stewpots." But he loved his old recipes. In fact, he loved all cookbooks, old or new, perhaps because so few other things in life were such unabashed invitations to delight. When, as a young man, he had invented a sandwich made of peanut butter, bacon, and mango chutney, he thought he might die of pleasure.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party: A Novel

“Time had ceased quivering and coiling back on itself. It had become taut and resonant and she was enfolded in its infinite smoothness.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party

“the roasted-paper smell of very old books, and the seared ink of photocopied pages.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party

“Walls shift as the day’s warmth rushes out and coolness from the garden flows in to take its place. Couches exhale. In the attic, objects made of suede and velvet stir. Forgotten horsehair mattresses sigh and wonder. Something flutters.”
― Grace Dane Mazur, The Garden Party