French Garden Quotes & Sayings

My personal life is as monotonous as ever; but they have given me permission to walk in the garden, where there are almost seventeen trees ! This is a great happiness for me. Moreover, I am given a candle in the evenings - that's my second piece of luck. The third will be mine if you answer as soon as possible, and send me the next number of the 0. Z. I am in the same position as a country subscriber, and await each number as a great event, like some landed proprietor dying of boredom in the provinces. Will you send me some historical works ? That would be splendid. But best of all would be the Bible (both Testaments). I need one. Should it prove possible, send it in a French translation. But if you could add as well a Slav edition, it would be the height of bliss. Of — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you possess a library and a garden, you have everything you need. (translation from the French) Si vous possedez une bibliotheque et un jardin, vous avez tout ce qu'il vous faut. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Abroad? Oh no. I went to England in '91, and you stood in the garden at Fontenay and berated me." He shook his head. "This is my nation. Here I stay. A man can't carry his country on the soles of his shoes. — Hilary Mantel

All France, it has often been said, is a garden, and if you love France, as I do, it can be a very beautiful garden. For myself I found it healing and soothing to the spirit; I recovered from the shocks and bruises which I had received in my own country. But there comes a day, when you are well again and strong, when this atmosphere ceases to be nourishing. You long to break out and test your powers. Then the French spirit seems inadequate. You long to make friends, to create enemies, to look beyond walls and cultivated patches of earth. You want to cease thinking in terms of life insurance, sick benefits, old age pensions and so on. — Henry Miller

She set about preparing her supper. It would have to be one of those classically simple meals, the sort that French peasants are said to eat and that enlightened English people sometimes enjoy rather self-consciously - a crusty French loaf, cheese, and lettuce and tomatoes from the garden. Of course there should have been wine and a lovingly prepared dressing of oil and vinegar, but Dulcie drank orange squash and ate mayonnaise that came from a bottle. — Barbara Pym

Within days they'd formed an unholy alliance with a foppish young French vampire in the Garden District who had implausibly golden hair and a streak of ruthlessness as wide as the Mississippi — Deborah Harkness

I think New Orleans is such a beautiful city. It looks like a fairytale when you walk through the French Quarter or the Garden District. There is such a lush sense of color, style, architecture - and the people themselves. — Anika Noni Rose

We are sitting in a garden in a French town. — Paulo Coelho

Ablaze with alabaster one must admit
as long as there is near music kicking around
nowhere more winsome than in the outlandish passage
from April to California, Sunday to Jose, March to French
and all the wilderness and Septembers in between.
Slow ghost thicket, a tempo of someone's own,
please please the quintessentially readymade
and risen stranger, the tremor in the house,
rather than some unfinished crime without dragon
or alibi in the drowsy garden.
O savage, O brightening Niagara,
O briefest, fussy thing in ruffled light,
wait, I am a stranger here myself. — Paul Vangelisti

The easy glamour of the French Riviera in the late 1960s - inspired by Romy Schneider's character in La Piscine - mixed with garden elements. Blueprint, botanical, lattice, Queen Anne's lace and folly prints are paired with cleaner silhouettes and proportions in a fresh palette of green, white and coral. — Tory Burch

I have a very nice garden and extraordinary markets, where there are products from the earth and the sea, in the French Basque country. — Alain Ducasse

As we think about the next 50 years, I remember a story President Kennedy told a week before he was killed. The story was about French Marshal Louis-Hubert-Gonzalve Lyautey, who walked one morning through his garden with his gardener. He stopped at a certain point and asked the gardener to plant a tree there the next morning. The gardener said, "But the tree will not bloom for 100 years." The marshal replied, "In that case, you had better plant it this afternoon. — Newton N. Minow

She had died peacefully, in her sleep, after an evening of listening to all of her favorite Fred Astaire songs, one crackling record after another. Once the last chord of the last piece had died out, she had stood up and opened the French doors to the garden outside, perhaps waiting to breathe in the honeysuckle one more time. — Anne Fortier

I loved rhubarb, that hardy, underappreciated garden survivor that leafed out just as the worst of winter melted away. Not everyone was a fan, especially of the bitter, mushy, overcooked version. Yet sometimes a little bitterness could bring out the best in other flavors. Bitter rhubarb made sunny-day strawberry face the realities of life- and taste all the better for it. As I brushed the cakes with a deep pink glaze made from sweet strawberry and bottled rhubarb bitters, I hoped I would change rhubarb doubters. Certainly, the little Bundt cakes looked as irresistible as anything I had ever seen in a French patisserie. — Judith Fertig