Over The Garden Wall Quotes & Sayings

Besides, you have to remember that the thinner air out here slows down the intellectual process, the result of less oxygen flowing to the brain.'
He grinned and looked at her sideways. 'Is that a doctor thing?'
'No that's a Scully thing ... The doctor thing is, get some sleep ... or you'll be useless in the morning.'
He nodded as he waved a weary good night over his shoulder, sidestepping a garden wall just before he tripped over it. Another wave- I'm okay, I know what I'm doing- before he disappeared into the passageway. — Charles Grant

The Flower

Once in a golden hour
I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower,
The people said, a weed.

To and fro they went
Thro' my garden-bower,
And muttering discontent
Cur'd me and my flower.

Then it grew so tall
It wore a crown of light,
But thieves from o'er the wall
Stole the seed by night.

Sow'd it far and wide
By every town and tower,
Till all the people cried,
"Splendid is the flower."

Read my little fable:
He that runs may read.
Most can raise the flowers now,
For all have got the seed.

And some are pretty enough,
And some are poor indeed;
And now again the people
Call it but a weed. — Alfred Tennyson

In his or her life, each person can take one of two attitudes: to build or to plant. Builders may take years over their tasks, but one day they will finish what they are doing. Then they will stop, hemmed in by their own walls. Life becomes meaningless once the building is finished. Those who plant suffer the storms and the seasons and rarely rest. Unlike a building, a garden never stops growing. And by its constant demands on the gardner's attentions, it makes of the gardener's life a great adventure. — Paulo Coelho

The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary delicate balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes. — Thomas Moore

The two of them froze and stared at each [sic] from across the silent, woolly garden.
And Ian, as he always did when he saw Falconbridge, felt a certain amount of shame. They had both shamed each other, on that fateful night, and really, it was hardly conversation kindling.
'Good morning,' Ian said politely.
'Good morning.'
Their voices echoed absurdly in the cool morning air.
A silence. Ian supposed it would be just a little too ironic if he scrambled up a fruit tree and clambered over a wall instead of walking past the duke, back to where he'd tethered his horse. — Julie Anne Long

I remember when the houses used to whiz by as I walked - nearly running - to and from home. Ma would ask me afterwards about what I'd seen, whether certain neighbours were out, what I thought about someone's new garden wall. I'd never noticed; it had all gone past in a flash. Now I have plenty of time to look at everything, and no one to tell what I've seen. — Emma Healey

In the garden of our house, when I was three. My brothers and I had a jumping wall. I remember it as enormously high, but it was probably only about a foot and a half. — Juliet Stevenson

History
Even Eve, the only soul in all of time
to never have to wait for love,
must have leaned some sleepless nights
alone against the garden wall
and wailed, cold, stupefied, and wild
and wished to trade-in all of Eden
to have but been a child.
In fact, I gather that is why she leapt and fell from grace,
that she might have a story of herself to tell
in some other place. — Jennifer Michael Hecht

Have you ever sailed across an ocean, Donald? On a sail boat surrounded by sea with no land in sight. Without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come. To stand at the helm of your destiny. I want that, one more time. I want to be in the Piazza Del Campo in Sienna. To feel the surge as ten race horses go thundering by. I want another meal in Paris, at L'Ambroisie in the Place Des Vosges. I want another bottle of wine. And then another. I want the warmth of a women in the cool set of sheets. One more night of jazz at the Vanguard. I want to stand on summits and smoke cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can. Walk on the wall again. Climb the tower. Ride the river. Stare at the frescoes. I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book. Most of all I want to sleep. I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy. Give me that. Just one time. — Anonymous

When they have opened a gap in the ... wall of separation between the Garden of the Church and the wildernes of the world, God hath ever ... made his Garden a Wildernesse. — Roger Williams

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. — Ray Bradbury

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

It was-this always seems to shock people all over again- a happy childhood. For the first few months I spent a lot of time at the bottom of the garden, crying till I threw up and yelling rude words at the neighborhood kids who tried to make friends. But children are pragmatic, they come alive and kicking out of a whole lot worse than orphanhood, and I could only hold out so long against the fact that nothing would bring my parents back and against the thousand vivid things around me, Emma-next-door hanging over the wall and my new bike glinting red in the sunshine and the half-wild kittens in the garden shed, all fidgeting insistently while they waited for me to wake up again and come out to play. I found out early that you can throw yourself away, missing what you've lost. — Tana French

Sugar had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina: possibly the most luscious of the world's garden cities. Behind every wrought-iron gate or exposed-brick wall in the picturesque peninsula blooming between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers lay a sweet-scented treasure trove of camellias, roses, gardenias, magnolias, tea olives, azaleas and jasmine, everywhere, jasmine.
With its lush greenery, opulent vines, sumptuous hedgerows and candy-colored window boxes, it was no wonder the city's native sons and daughters believed it to be the most beautiful place on earth.
In her first years of exile Sugar had tried to cultivate a reminder of the luxuriant garden delights she had left behind, struggling in sometimes hostile elements to train reluctant honeysuckle and sulky sweet potato vines or nurture creeping jenny and autumn stonecrop. — Sarah-Kate Lynch

I plant rosemary all over the garden, so pleasant is it to know that at every few steps one may draw the kindly branchlets through one's hand, and have the enjoyment of their incomparable incense; and I grow it against walls, so that the sun may draw out its inexhaustible sweetness to greet me as I pass. — Gertrude Jekyll

If the art of gardening is at last to turn back from her extravagances and rest with her other sisters, it is, above everything, necessary to have clearly before you what you require ... It is certainly tasteless and inconsistent to desire to encompass the world with a garden-wall, but very practicable and reasonable to make a garden ... into a characteristic whole to the eye, heart, and nderstanding alike. — Friedrich Schiller

It's over the garden wall and we're going to see the Wizard, come what may and hell to pay.
-Elphaba — Gregory Maguire

Successful writers say you should never work from a desk with a view, and the view I have from this one is a huge distraction. There's a garden bursting with fresh vegetation, and just beyond the high wall at the end of it, I can see the sign of the local pub across the road. Distractions, eh? I'm so easily led. — Matt Roper

Imagination. As he pulled into the driveway of number four, the first thing he saw - and it didn't improve his mood - was the tabby cat he'd spotted that morning. It was now sitting on his garden wall. He was sure it was the same one; it had the same markings around its eyes. "Shoo!" said Mr. Dursley loudly. The cat didn't move. It just gave him a stern look. Was this normal cat behavior? Mr. Dursley wondered. Trying — J.K. Rowling

Death is only an old door/Set in a garden wall. — Nancy Byrd Turner

These handkerchief gardens are a traditional German solution to apartment dwellers' yearning for a tool shed and a vegetable garden. They make a patchwork of green in odd corners of urban land, along train lines or canals or, as here, in the lee of the Wall. — Anna Funder

Let us consider the farmer who makes his straw hat his
sweetheart; or the old woman who makes a floor lamp her son;
or the young woman who has set herself the task of scraping
her shadow off a wall....

Let us consider the old woman who wore smoked cows'
tongues for shoes and walked a meadow gathering cow chips
in her apron; or a mirror grown dark with age that was given
to a blind man who spent his nights looking into it, which
saddened his mother, that her son should be so lost in
vanity....

Let us consider the man who fried roses for his dinner,
whose kitchen smelled like a burning rose garden; or the man
who disguised himself as a moth and ate his overcoat, and for
dessert served himself a chilled fedora.... — Russell Edson

You'll never have a garden - a garden needs walls and you have no walls. — Russell Page

The world has different owners at sunrise ... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Kestrel climbed down and studied the garden in the lamplight thrown from her sunroom. She chewed the inside of her cheek, and was wondering whether books stacked on the chair on top of the table would make a difference when she heard something.
The grate of a heel against pebbles. It came from beyond the door, and the other side of the wall.
Someone had been listening.
Was listening still.
As quietly as she could, Kestrel took the chair down from the table and went inside.


Before Arin left for the mountain pass, during the coldest hours of the night, he found time to order that every piece of furniture light enough for Kestrel to move be taken from her suite. — Marie Rutkoski

Nature does not complete things. She is chaotic. Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall. — Robert Frost

The bottom of his garden joins the bottom of ours, and of course I had several times seen him, sitting among the scarlet-beans in his little arbour, or working at his little hotbeds. I used to think he stared rather, but I didn't take any particular notice of that, as we were newcomers, and he might be curious to see what we were like. But when he began to throw his cucumbers over our wall
"
"To throw his cucumbers over our wall!" repeated Nicholas in great astonishment.
"Yes, Nicholas, my dear," replied Mrs. Nickleby, in a very serious tone; "his cucumbers over our wall. And vegetable-marrows likewise."
"Confound his impudence!" said Nicholas, firing immediately. "What does he mean by that?"
"I don't think he means it impertinently at all," replied Mrs. Nickleby.
"What!" said Nicholas, "cucumbers and vegetable-marrows flying at the heads of the family as they walk in their own garden and not meant impertinently! — Charles Dickens

Where are these rational practices to be taught and acquired? Not within the four walls of a bare building, in which formality predominates ... But in the nursery, play-ground, fields, gardens, workshops, manufactures, museums and class-rooms ... The facts collected from all these sources will be concentrated, explained, discussed, made obvious to all, and shown in their direct application to practice in all the business of life. — Robert Owen

Set in the remote and harsh high desert landscape of Idaho, Outpost is an artist live/work studio and sculpture garden for making and displaying art. An important aspect of the complex is the protected paradise garden, which is separated from the wild landscape by thick masonry walls. The materials used in the structure, including concrete block, car-decking, and plywood, require little to no maintenance, and are capable of withstanding the extreme weather that characterize the desert's four seasons. — Tom Kundig

The old church tower and garden wall
Are black with autumn rain
And dreary winds foreboding call
The darkness down again — Emily Bronte

Even for the dead I will not bind my soul to grief, death cannot long divide; for is it not as if the rose that climbed my garden wall had bloomed the other side? — Alice Cary

One of its most distinctive features was the ninety-six meters high and twelve thousand tons heavy sandstone dome that stood the test of time and wars until it came down during the bombing of Saxony by Anglo-American allied forces during the Second World War. Only the altar, a relief description of Jesus' agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, and the chancel behind it survived. The church then lay dormant for more than forty-five years before it was restored to its former glory as Communist rule enveloped Germany. One of the reasons for the delay was the tensions that ensued before the demolition of the Berlin Wall that divided East and West Germany. — K.T. Tomb

As for rosemary, I let it run all over my garden walls, not only because my bees love it but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship, whence a sprig of it hath a dumb language. — Thomas More

This is really why I made my daughters learn to garden - so they would always have a mother to love them, long after I am gone. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

They arrived home again to a most peculiar sight. The small garden at the front of the Banana House had been transformed. A tidal wave of cushions, beanbags, quilts, hearth rugs, and sleeping bags appeared to have swept up the lawn and broken at the wall. From Indigo's window a multicolored rope of knotted bedsheets came snaking out and ended among the cushions. As Micheal and Caddy watched, a mattress emerged and fell to the ground, followed by a rain of pillows.
"Indigo!" shouted Caddy, jumping out of the car.
Indigo's and Rose's heads appeared in the window above.
"It's all right, Caddy!" Indigo called cheerfully. "We've been doing it all the time you've been gone."
"We keep finding more stuff to land on!" added Rose. "Look! — Hilary McKay

How do you like to go up in a swing,
Up in the air so blue?
Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing
Ever a child can do!
Up in the air and over the wall,
Till I can see so wide,
River and trees and cattle and all
Over the countryside.
Till I look down on the garden green,
Down on the roof so brown-
Up in the air I go flying again,
Up in the air and down! — Robert Louis Stevenson

My love, you are closer to me than myself ...
You shine through my eyes,
Your light is brighter than the Moon ...
Step into the garden so all the flowers ...
Even the tall poplar can kneel before your beauty ...
Let your voice silence the lily famous for its hundred tongues,
When you want to be kind ...
You are softer than the soul ...
But when you withdraw ...
You can be so cold and harsh.
Dear one, you can be wild and rebellious ...
But when you meet him face to face ...
His charm will make you docile like the earth,
Throw away your shield and bare your chest ...
There is no stronger protection than him.
That's why when the Lover withdraws from the world ...
He covers all the cracks in the wall ...
So the outside light cannot come though,
He knows that only the inner light illuminates his world! — Rumi

What did the others give to each other?
Nothingness.
Granger stood looking back with Montag. Everyone must leave something behind
when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a
wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand
touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when
people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The
difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the
touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the
gardener will be there a lifetime. — Ray Bradbury

That's my little piece of heaven. Go ahead."
Ciro followed Remo through the open door to a small enclosed garden. Terra-cotta pots positioned along the top of the stone wall spilled over with red geraniums and orange impatiens. An elm tree with a wide trunk and deep roots filled the center of the garden. Its green leaves and thick branches reached past the roof of Remo's building, creating a canopy over the garden. There was a small white marble birdbath, gray with soot, flanked by two deep wicker armchairs.
Remo fished a cigarette out of his pocket, offering another to Ciro as both men took a seat. "This is where I come to think."
"Va bene," Ciro said as he looked up into the tree. He remembered the thousands of trees that blanketed the Alps; here on Mulberry Street, one tree with peeling gray bark and holes in its leaves was cause for celebration. — Adriana Trigiani

There was a mews in a lane which runs down by one wall of the garden. I lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their — Arthur Conan Doyle

The memories are so close I feel your presence everywhere. And I see forward so clearly and sadly to a time when the memories will be distant. I won't be able to picture your painting things scattered on a flat rock in Ammoudi or your bare feet soaking up the sunshine on Valia's garden wall. Now I see them. Long after that I will remember them. — Ann Brashares

I'd never been in love, never felt that surge of feeling or that fall from its graces. I'd only watched as others weathered it: my mother in her garden, Sumner on the front lawn all those years ago, Ashley sobbing from the other side of a wall. I sat kerbside with my best friend and held her, trying to shoulder some of the hurt. There's only so much you can do, in these situations. — Sarah Dessen

The moon has a face like the clock in the hall;
She shines on thieves on the garden wall,
On streets and fields and harbour quays,
And birdies asleep in the forks of the trees. — Robert Louis Stevenson

She got out and shut the door without looking back, picking her way through the snow to the black wooden door in the college wall. At least she hadn't told him not to follow. He watched as she carefully brushed the snow off the latch with her rolled umbrella before touching it with her suede gloves. She left the door half open behind her. He followed. When he reached the door he saw she had paused on the garden path leading to her hall and was doing something in the snow with the tip of her umbrella. Still not looking back, she moved on without waiting for him. When he reached the spot he saw that she had written 'I love you' in the snow. It was that night, he believed ever after, that she became pregnant. — Alan Judd

In Flemish bond, headers alternate with stretchers from brick to brick. Flemish bond is much more popular than English, not because it is stronger, but because it is more economical since every facade has more long faces than short ones, and thus requires fewer bricks. But there were many other patterns - Chinese bond, Dearne's bond, English garden-wall bond, cross bond, rat-trap bond, monk bond, flying bond, and so on - each signifying a different configuration of headers and stretchers. — Bill Bryson

A cat improves the garden wall in sunshine, and the hearth in foul weather. — Judith Merkle Riley

Six years previously, Miss Brodie had led her new class into the garden for a history lesson underneath the big elm. On the way through the school corridors they passed the headmistress's study. The door was wide open, the room was empty.
'Little girls,' said Miss Brodie, 'come and observe this.'
They clustered round the open door while she pointed to a large poster pinned with drawing-pins on the opposite wall within the room. It depicted a man's big face. Underneath were the words 'Safety First'.
'This is Stanley Baldwin who got in as Prime Minister and got out again ere long,' said Miss Brodie. 'Miss Mackay retains him on the wall because she believes in the slogan "Safety First". But Safety does not come first. Goodness, Truth and Beauty come first. Follow me. — Muriel Spark

It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage. — Lauren Oliver

On the warm stone walls, climbing roses were just coming into bloom and great twisted branches of honeysuckle and clematis wrestled each other as they tumbled up and over the top of the wall. Against another wall were white apple blossoms on branches cut into sharp crucifixes and forced to lie flat against the stone. Below, the huge frilled lips of giant tulips in shades of white and cream nodded in their beds. They were almost finished now, spread open too far, splayed, exposing obscene black centers. I've never had my own garden but I suddenly recognized something in the tangle of this one that wasn't beauty. Passion, maybe. And something else. Rage. — Meg Rosoff

When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the Candlestick, etc., and made His Garden a wilderness as it is this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His garden and Paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the wilderness of the World. — Roger Williams

Dad leapt over the garden wall instead of going through the gate. Sadly he didn't do himself a severe injury, and so he lives to embarrass me to death another day. — Louise Rennison

The Garden
En robe de parade.
- Samain
Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.
And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.
In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion. — Ezra Pound

Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and live out his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though he cannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he's walking in the garden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an apple tree, or snoring on a wall in the sun. — Hilary Mantel

He was a prosperous old bachelor, and his open window looked into a prosperous little garden and orchard, and there was a prosperous iron safe let into the wall at the side of his fireplace, and I did not doubt that heaps of his prosperity were put away in it in bags. — Charles Dickens

Perched up on salvaged bricks, the half-pipes made perfect planters with an industrial edge that oddly complemented Sugar's pretty favorites: pansies, lantana, verbena and heliotrope.
She laid two of them by the long wall of the taller building next door and planted a clematis vine at one end and a moonflower vine at the other: the clematis because the variety she picked had the prettiest purple bloom and the moonflower because it opened in the early evening and emanated a heavenly scent just when a person most felt like smelling one. — Sarah-Kate Lynch

I run and run and run. Past the hospital, through the garden, past a pond. And to the cold metal wall. I stop, gulping at the air, my heart racing in my ears. I reach up with one hand and touch the wall. My fingers curl into a fist, but it falls weakly to my side. And that's when I realize there is no where to run. 'But', my heart whispers, 'there is Elder. — Beth Revis