Paint and Nectar Quotes

“What if even then, God had plans for a second garden? Another tree, and another chance to reach out and accept the abundance of life? What if in Eden, God was planning Gethsemane?"
The question echoed through Lucy, growing in power with each reverberation within her soul.
She held a flower in her hands. The sweet, exotic perfume floated deep into Lucy's heart---carrying Ms. Beth's words right along beside it. Lucy hesitated, allowing the words to take effect. "Are you circling a closed Eden, or have you chosen to step into Gethsemane, through the open gate?"
Lucy blinked. She had never thought of it like that.
"Maybe what you thought was a closed gate meant to punish you is actually God's way of protecting you from remaining in a place where you won't and can't receive His life."
The truth washed Lucy's heart with color. As it brushed over the harsh edges with water, watercolor blooms began to blend one into the other, filling her with understanding.
Lucy's heart swelled as the long-dry soil soaked up this water.
"Where you're preoccupied with your failures and your fears and the desire to preserve all you might lose, God has a plan to preserve something else. To root you in a place where life can grow within you once more, freely and abundantly. A garden of death for a garden of life, where through His own resurrection Jesus returns all that was stolen.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“For now, she would dance among the garden.
When azaleas bloom in winter.
When hurricanes come in fall.
Maybe the paint was not so much these out-of-season moments, but more what was growing in between them. The clumsy grasp to keep summer's blooms in winter would inevitably fail. And yet hope always came rising up, resurrected from the frozen ground.
For as garden turns to garden, flowers turn to dust, and glory goes to glory, the changes are within us.
And maybe beauty's greatest achievement isn't in the staying... but that in its return, again and again, it paints the eternal---all the beautiful things that will never fade.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“A trellis filled with roses arched above the patio, leading to a winding garden path made out of stones that Lucy wanted to skip along. Flowers in reds and pinks and whites and purples bloomed from the curved edges of the yard, so beautiful they reminded Lucy of something out of Eliza's paintings.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“So Eliza walked the path to East Bay Street that summer evening alone, wearing a scoop-neck black dress and her hair in Victory Rolls so that she felt like a dark-haired Ingrid Bergman in that new movie Notorious.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“If you want to sprout roots, my dear, then tend them carefully. Roses are fragile before they're strong. It's as true for plants as it is for life.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“up this water. “Where you’re preoccupied with your failures and your fears and the desire to preserve all you might lose, God has a plan to preserve something else. To root you in a place where life can grow within you once more, freely and abundantly. A garden of death for a garden of life, where through His own resurrection Jesus returns all that was stolen.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Lucy, it’s not defeat to admit you’ve exhausted all possibilities. Sometimes life prohibits opportunities. Giving up too early is defeat. Holding on too long is denial. But admitting it, at the proper time—that is maturity.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Because, my sweet daughter, much as we try, we cannot make the bluebirds stay forever. And though that fact may grieve us, and we may be tempted to despair, we must always remember this power—that in accepting the comings and goings of the beautiful from our lives, we cannot change their temporality, but we can be changed by them. We can allow beauty to point us toward the God who made it. And so we paint them, my dear Eliza, not to save them forever, but by them to remember. By them, to become more beautiful in our own hearts. And that my girl, is the reason behind preservation, and why it’s so important.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“If I can’t eat cookies and keep a man interested, then he’s not a man I want around.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Beauty arrests our attention to look upward. It reminds us that there are things in life, such as love and the divine, that we long for so ardently we know—even if we only know it for a fleeting moment—that our yearnings are far deeper than our eyes can see. And that’s what faith is, I think.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Contentment and joy and grief all blurred together---and in a way, Eliza had become the color. And the world, the water, so that all the pieces of her blended in unexpected ways as the canvas was turned a little to the left, a little to the right, and the pink dripped down into the blue, down into the yellow, down into the brown, and so on; life and loss and harvest from season to season. A garden's blooms, continually returning for another encore until the circularity of it all becomes in itself a promise through the winter and the spring and the summer and the fall. Always turning, always returning color to the ground and color to the sky.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“What you thought was bound for destruction, I will recover for future generations. I am the God of endless hope, and I will restore the life in these walls. You won't have to look beyond my provision for you. My provision is sufficient. It's beauty and resurrection---a second garden as my resurrection makes way for your own.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“The beauty of the garden had inspired her art, her attempts to revitalize and preserve the city and redefine it for new generations. But she never imagined the inverse may also hold true. That her art might come to life.
And paint became nectar in a new, beautiful promise.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“She heard the twitter of the bluebirds whose families had lived here for decades and longer, and she saw one out-of season, beautifully pure gardenia. And the fragrance of it was so sweet, so innocent, that it was fairy dust to her senses. Smelling it sent her tumbling back and forth through time.
And she was at once a young woman dancing in William's arms and an older woman returning to Eden with a new appreciation for its hard-won innocence.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“The fragrance of the gardenias along the porch carried on the breeze. The blooms were always sweetest from freshly opened buds. But they had to fall, they had to change, for the roots to grow. So that next season, more buds would open, and the fragrance would spread even farther.
Gardenias. She had never painted gardenias before.
But they bloomed all at once as she'd never noticed them blooming years prior, and the fragrance was so alluring that the smell of it matched the delicate strokes of her smallest paintbrush, and it was the first of May and the first of so many other things, she was sure.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Help me put these pieces back together. Eliza murmured the prayer.
The words stuck to the roof of Eliza's mouth like an Oh Henry chocolate bar.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“You thought you could create more indigo, and I understand why you wished it, Eliza, for indigo is the color of bluebirds, the color of the twilight sky. Newton insisted it be added to the colors of the rainbow, and once upon a time, its cousin true blue was such a rare pigment, its price rivaled gold. People have fought wars over indigo crops and used it to bolster and brag of their wealth. Why? All in an attempt to make beauty lasting.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Still, she was struck every time she stepped inside by the many ways that nature continued to bloom.
That the bluebirds still nested, and the songbirds remembered how to sing.
That the God who cared for the sparrows had fed them another day. This probably should not surprise her, and yet it often did. Faithfulness, provision, and beauty enduring.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“If looks could kill, Declan would've been deader than the crustaceans in this evening's she-crab soup.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“ Spring 1930
The wind whipped the little white flowers from the pear tree outside Eliza's window overlooking the garden. The flowers would not bloom again this spring.
The racket those branches made was too much to sleep through, so Eliza slipped her wrap around her silken chemise and wandered over toward the window. The garden outside was dark. The garden, once so full of hope and promise, would look different in the morning, after the storm finished ravaging what was left of the February blooms.
But she had already, of course, fallen in love with a different season after her mother and grandmother died in the summer. She had already adopted February over June. So she would simply have to do that again: to tell her heart to see the beauty in March or April or May.
The problem, of course, occurred when the wind roared and the rains flooded everything.
Nothing about this was the way she'd planned.
There was nothing wrong with Robert. There was just nothing right about him either. But why would she pine for the man who'd left her behind? Why, in such uncertain times, should she cease to keep living... so preoccupied by a dream?
Maybe she could find a new dream. And she always had her love for painting, so that was something, at least. When the nectar fell from the trees, she would paint it by memory.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Long ago, I realized that some dreams require...bending."
She glanced into her camera display, and then, clearly satisfied with the photos she'd taken, stood upright to look straight at him. "Do they?"
"Well, of course."
"Or could other aspects of our lives bend to our dreams?”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“She loved people's accents here---she always had. The way everybody managed to say the word y'all in the middle of pronouncing Charleston. Slow as the pace of the river but refined as British tea.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“In what was recognizably a Lowcountry sunset, trees and swamp and flowers blended together by watercolors. Rather than detailing the scene, this piece evoked emotion---with literal drips of color blending past with present, the seen with the unseen. Twilight filled the sky, but the dimming sun flooded the piece with unexpected color and illuminated two figures dancing.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“One shouldn't be fooled by how quickly they startle. Bluebirds just like open spaces, that's all. Open fields where they're free. And when they find a place, they come in hordes, and they keep coming. They're faithful little settlers. They know when they've found a place of beauty.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Beauty arrests our attention to look upward. It reminds us that there are things in life, such as love and the divine, that we long for so ardently we know---even if we only know it for a fleeting moment---that our yearnings are far deeper than our eyes can see. And that's what faith is, I think."
William situated his elbow against the ground and propped his fist against his cheek. "That's really profound."
"Thank you," Eliza smiled. "That's why I like to include bluebirds in my paintings. They're a reminder that while beauty may be fickle in its coming and going, there's a permanence in the impression it leaves on our hearts. There are roots growing within us that sustain its wings. And maybe that, really, makes beauty the greatest witness to glory there is.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“Eliza marveled at the pattern of the veins on the leaves, of the leaves themselves along the branches of the tree---of their falling, then growing once more. Maybe that's one reason she loved her garden so dearly---for while she despised change, she took comfort that nature would always bring another season, another breath, another opportunity. Nature would keep going long after she ceased to be. While perhaps fatalistic, she found peace in remembering she was not at the center of everything nor was she the fulcrum upon which goodness and beauty hinged. Rather, she was, perhaps, their bloom---and bloom she would, gladly.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“But the sunlight had faded, and now she would enjoy the twilight-turned-evening from the beauty of the garden.
Her garden. Was it even possible that might be true? She still thought of the space as belonging to her mother. That she might now possess the place herself was at once an honor and an overwhelming responsibility: this place where red-and-pink camellia petals fluttered to the ground as though creating a carpet for fairies.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar

“There are times in life---sometimes, not always---when the water on paper drips with the color of just the perfect hue, until the effect is something so ethereal that the artist knows it must simply be experienced because she can never produce it again.
And the color shifts over time, shifts still over sunlight, until the watercolors fade completely back into the paper itself, and all that's left is the memory.”
― Ashley Clark, Paint and Nectar