Mirabel Quotes & Sayings

There can be no other occupation like gardening in which, if you were to creep up behind someone at their work, you would find them smiling. — Mirabel Osler

Green thoughts emerge from some deep source of stillness which the very fact of winter has released. — Mirabel Osler

I'm not sure how far the decent is, because I'm still falling. But I've hit rock-bottom about half a dozen times in my life, — Zack Love

There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move. — Mirabel Osler

But there was no plan.
For the first time in her pirating life, someone had bested her.
It's not him, Andi's mind whispered. It can't be him.
And yet, the Marauder was a corpse. It was already growing cold in the cabin, Andi's breath appearing before her in the white clouds.
Do something, Andi's mind screamed. Get us out of this. You can't go back, Andi, you can never go back.
Fear spiked through her, in and around, trying to still her like the ship.
But she was the Bloody Baroness. She was the captain of the Marauder, the greatest starship in Mirabel, and she had a crew waiting on her word. — Sasha Alsberg

In al-Qaeda we see a terrorist grouping with, in many ways, a medieval ideology, employing today's technology to great advantage. It works in a thoroughly modern way, virtual, amorphous, franchised and unbounded by geography. It has recruited people from all over the world. It understands the power of images, both in its campaign of terror and in its recruitment and proselytising material. It skillfully exploits the instant communications and social networking of the IT age. — Eliza Manningham-Buller

As for garden photographers, how differently they see things. With what ease the camera seems to compose a picture of great beauty with its discriminating lens. The naked eye can't censor some ugly sight on the periphery of vision; the photographer takes the perfect shot and picks for us just what we need to see. — Mirabel Osler

To be able to walk under the branches of a tree that you have planted is really to feel you have arrived with your garden. So far we are on the way: we can now stand beside ours. — Mirabel Osler

I'm a normal guy at heart. But on stage, they don't pay me for normal. — CeeLo Green

Reading books about gardens is a potent pastime; books nourish a gardener's mind in the same way as manure nourishes plants. — Mirabel Osler

The right of dissent, or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That's the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism. — Edward R. Murrow

To free one's self from preconceived notions, prejudices, and conditioned responses is essential to understanding truth and reality. — Bruce Lee

At the heart of gardening there is a belief in the miraculous. — Mirabel Osler

It's almost like these games are the modern day comic books, especially when you play Alone in the Dark. There's a real story that goes along with it and a movie seemed like the right kind of transition to make. — Christian Slater

Have you ever noticed how few sitting places you find in private gardens? How seldom the versatility and importance of benches is considered? True gardeners, with their peerless taste, dexterity and inspired planting, never stop ... To sit is almost an offence, a sign of depravity and an outrage towards every felicitous refinement that has gone into making a garden. — Mirabel Osler

He had little sympathy...for Mirabel, and little for what I have called the New Sensibility of the early 'twenties, for its flat bleakness, its lawless versification, its unheroic tone, its unintelligible images, its 'modernity' in short. — Jocelyn Gibb

Boyd Shreave tore the page from Eugenie Fonda's memoir and, with a contemptuous flourish, wiped his ass with it. — Carl Hiaasen

Crouchers move through a garden at a stoop: naming, gasping, horraying, admiring or coveting plants; Gapers saunter, smiling or sighing at what they find, succumbing to an intangible beatitude that takes them for a brief escape into another dimension. Both sorts of gardener are besotted; both get their hands dirty; think and talk gardening; but on the threshold of another's garden, each use a different set of whiskers. — Mirabel Osler

Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality, are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens, why not in our own. — Mirabel Osler

Some cats are angry at being called cats. To achieve peace with them, never call them by their real name — Bangambiki Habyarimana

In a letter, once, he drew me a picture, or allegorical diagram, imitated from the well-known frontispiece of Hobbes's Leviathan, which showed a Leviathan of human values. In the head there stood a figure labeled SAINT. In the heart, a figure labeled HERO. Twittering round the huge figure there was an insect-like object dressed as a man of fashion of the seventeenth century and labeled GENTLEMAN; from its mouth there issued a balloon in which was written in tiny letters: 'and where do I come in?'. Mirabel, he went on to say, was no part of the Everlasting Gospel, a phrase of Blake's that he had his own meaning for. Perhaps the hunger for magnitude that made him admire Gilgamesh and the Edda, and made Spenser and Milton his favourites, disabled him from an appreciation, which I could not deny, for a world of elegant cuckoldry and cynic wit, so seemingly heartless, a trifler's scum of humanity that sought to be taken for its cream. — Jocelyn Gibb

I'm not a garden expert in any sense of the meaning, only someone who blunders about in the shrubbery. — Mirabel Osler

I wish more fantasy, especially the dominant fantasy that draws heavily on British and Christian lore, would wrestle with its own ethnospecific nature and what that means when the story is set somewhere where more than one belief system is in operation. If all you do is pay lip service to it, you can get the kind of thing where the writer has thrown one Hindu god into a Christianist fantasy (rendering said god by default a demon or otherwise inferior to the dominant religious system of the story, which is such an insult), and the hero is able to vanquish it by chanting a spell in church Latin. — Nalo Hopkinson