Grey Garden Quotes & Sayings

But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city. — Evelyn Waugh

The Groke looked at the hat. Then she looked at Thingumy and Bob. Then she looked at the hat again. You could see that she was thinking with all her might. Then suddenly she snatched the hat and, without a word, slithered like ann icy grey shadow into the forest. It was the last time she was seen in the Valley of the Moomins, and the last they saw of the Hobgoblin's Hat, too.
At once the colors became warmer again and the garden was filled with the sounds and scents of summer. — Tove Jansson

The moon that hung over the garden like some great priceless pearl, flawed and blemished with grey shadowy ridges as only a very great beauty can risk being. — Anita Desai

The Eliots found it a queer sort of evening - a transition evening. Hitherto the Herb of Grace had been to them a summer home; they had known it only permeated with sun and light, flower-scented, windows and doors open wide. But now doors were shut, curtains drawn to hide the sad, grey dusk. Instead of the lap of the water against the river wall they heard the whisper of the flames, and instead of the flowers in the garden they smelt the roasting chestnuts, burning apple logs, the oil lamps, polish - all the home smells. This intimacy with the house was deepening; when winter came it would be deeper still. Nadine glanced over her shoulder at the firelight gleaming upon the dark wood of the panelling, at the shadows gathering in the corners, and marvelled to see how the old place seemed to have shrunk in size with the shutting out of the daylight. It seemed gathering them in, holding them close. — Elizabeth Goudge

Like the enotmologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious butterflies of the soul, whose beating of wings may one day reveal to us the secrets of the mind. — Santiago Ramon Y Cajal

The Atlantic is a stormy moat, and the Mediterranean,
The blue pool in the old garden,
More than five thousand years has drunk sacrifice
Of ships and blood and shines in the sun; but here the Pacific:
The ships, planes, wars are perfectly irrelevant.
Neither our present blood-feud with the brave dwarfs
Nor any future world-quarrel of westering
And eastering man, the bloody migrations, greed of power, battle-falcons,
Are a mote of dust in the great scale-pan.
Here from this mountain shore, headland beyond stormy headland plunging like
dolphins through the grey sea-smoke
Into pale sea, look west at the hill of water: it is half the planet: this
dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that never close; this
is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars. — Robinson Jeffers

My days could be described as an ever changing palette of blues, greens, browns, and golds. Mostly because of surfing and garden-gazing. On tour, the colors are desaturated by florescent lights and dull grey carpets. — Jason Mraz

It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns ... It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it ... If you want to see the difference between [the garden's] contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy, and fecundity beside dead, steril things. Just so, our 'decency and common sense' show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love. — C.S. Lewis

Flies can be sitting in a garden and completely ignore the beautiful flowers around them. Instead they'll go right for the rotting banana peel or piece of trash. Bees, on the other hand, could be sitting in a room full of trash and find the tiniest speck of fruit or honey to land on. Don't be a fly. Become a bee and stay a bee. Look for the good in every circumstance, even the most horrible and disgusting places. There's always some honey to land on. — Marilyn Grey

Anya had never seen a house uglier house than Baba Yaga's. It was made entirely of mouldy bones in the same interlocking design as a log cabin. A thorny garden grew as high as the fence and skulls, bleached white by the sun, capped each fence post. Two enormous scaly chicken legs came out on either side of the house. Anya snorted in amusement and disgust. Yvan, she noticed, had turned an interesting shade of grey. — Amy Kuivalainen

The rain is, in a sense,
The sole sad friend of those who find themselves
Thinking, wide awake, until the dawn,
Who, in bed, alone, with fevered hands,
Listen to it, soothed. They like the company
Of its faint moan across the sleeping plain,
Its rustling in the garden all night long.

- On the Great Grey Road (Sur ce Grand Chemin Gris...) — Alain-Fournier

The village lay in the hollow, and climbed, with very prosaic houses, the other side. Village architecture does not flourish in Scotland. The blue slates and the grey stone are sworn foes to the picturesque; and though I do not, for my own part, dislike the interior of an old-fashioned pewed and galleried church, with its little family settlements on all sides, the square box outside, with its bit of a spire like a handle to lift it by, is not an improvement to the landscape. Still, a cluster of houses on differing elevations - with scraps of garden coming in between, a hedgerow with clothes laid out to dry, the opening of a street with its rural sociability, the women at their doors, the slow waggon lumbering along - gives a centre to the landscape. It was cheerful to look at, and convenient in a hundred ways. ("The Open Door") — Mrs. Oliphant

The row of villas which lines Western Avenue is like a row of pink graves in a field of grey; an architectural image of middle age. Their uniformity is the discipline of growing old, of dying without violence and living without success. They are houses which have got the better of their occupants, whom they change at will, and do not change themselves. Furniture vans glide respectfully among them like hearses, discreetly removing the dead and introducing the living. Now and then some tenant will raise his hand, expending pots of paint on the woodwork or labour on the garden, but his efforts no more alter the house than flowers a hospital ward, and the grass will grow its own way, like grass on a grave. — John Le Carre

He'd helped us build a garden in our backyard and I'd forced him to watch a season of The Bachelor with me. (" Why does he not just buy more roses?") — R.S. Grey