Walled Garden Quotes & Sayings

What won't work - what can't work - is to act like the last years never happened, and that the survival of the [mass media] industry will be found by hiding content behind walled gardens. Instead of sticking their finger in the dike, trying to hold back the flow of innovation, companies need to ride the rapids of progress and seize the opportunities it provides. — Arianna Huffington

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road. — Margaret Atwood

The Daffodil-Yellow Villa
The new villa was enormous, a tall, square Venetian mansion, with faded daffodil-yellow walls, green shutters, and a fox-red roof. It stood on a hill overlooking the sea, surrounded by unkempt olive groves and silent orchards of lemon and orange trees.
... the little walled and sunken garden that ran along one side of the house, its wrought-iron gates scabby with rust, had roses, anemones and geraniums sprawling across the weed-grown paths ...
... there were fifteen acres of garden to explore, a vast new paradise sloping down to the shallow, tepid sea. — Gerald Durrell

The sound of the universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there is a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of the night dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. Every morning around sunrise there is a tropical bird song competition, and it is always a ten way tie for the championship. When the sun comes out the butterflies get to work. The whole house is covered with vines; I feel like any day it will disappear into the foliage complete and I will disappear with it and become a jungle flower myself. The rent is less than what I use to pay in New York City for taxi fare every month. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally a walled garden. — Elizabeth Gilbert

I had looked forward to old age as a time of quietness, a time to draw my horizons about me, to watch memories ripening in the sunlight of a walled garden. But there is the void over my head and the distance within that the tireless signals come from. And astronaut on impossible journeys to the far side of the self I return with messages I cannot decipher. — R.S. Thomas

Ernest once told me that the word paradise was a Persian words that meant walled garden. I knew then that he understood how necessary the promises we made to each other were to our happiness. You couldn't have real freedom unless you knew were the walls were and tended to them. We could lean on the walls because they existed; they existed because we leaned on them. — Paula McLain

They had a house there below Kelsha, one of the old mud-walled jobs, that has long disappeared back into its garden of fuchsia and orange lilies that the mother herself had planted in her first days of marriage, as women do in their gardens, all full of hope. — Sebastian Barry

Over the years, the idea seems to have grown up that brightly coloured flowers are vulgar, and that the only flowers to be admitted to the walled garden of good taste are discreet and pastel-hued. — Craig Brown

On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant that grows growing circular-wise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart an orange tree. This fruit has tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travelers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruits means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings. So at dusk you leave the place you love, not knowing if you can ever return, knowing you can never return by the same way as this. It may be, some other day, that you will open the gate by chance, and find yourself again on the other side of the wall. — Jeanette Winterson

Facebook has focused on the conversation, but not really on absorbing the Web into its walled garden. — David Rusenko

The way that people are watching TV is changing. The landscape of television is changing. Movies are becoming much more insular. They're like a walled garden, where you know what you're going to see and you expect it. But in the world of TV, because it's episodic, you can explore any area because you have time to do that. You can take risks on the kinds of storytelling that you're doing. — Seth Gabel

It matters what you believe. Some beliefs are like walled gardens. They encourage exclusiveness and the feeling of being especially privileged. Other beliefs are expansive and lead the way into wider and deeper sympathies. — Sophia Lyon Fahs

Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use. — Jamais Cascio

The Labyrinth, a walled garden where humans tortured plants and flowers into growing in straight lines and sharp corners so unnatural that it hurt the mind to see, was east of Thorn's court, on the very edge of the Center Kingdom. — Jon Evans

Britain cherishes her eccentrics and wisely holds that the function of government is to build a walled garden in which anarchy can flourish. — Quentin Crisp

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

Maybe I should keep you in a walled garden so you can't ever leave.'
The image this conjured up was so vivid that for a moment he couldn't think how to answer. He glanced down at her, his mouth open as if to speak, but no words came out. The truth was, he thought, feeling humble, feeling stupid, he didn't think he would mind any more than the raelynx did being kept in perpetual service to the princess. 'Men generally don't make very good pets,' he said at last, and she went off in a peal of laughter. — Sharon Shinn

Eleven years she had lived in the dark house and its gloomy garden. He was jealous of the very light and air getting to her, and they kept her close. He stopped the wide chimneys, shaded the little windows, left the strong-stemmed ivy to wander where it would over the house-front, the moss to accumulate on the untrimmed fruit trees in the red-walled garden, the weeds to over-run its green and yellow walks. He surrounded her with images of sorrow and desolation. He caused her to be filled with fears of the place and of the stories that were told of it, and then on pretext of correcting them, to be left in it in solitude, or made to shrink about it in the dark. When her mind was most depressed and fullest of terrors, then, he would come out of one of the hiding-places from which he overlooked her, and present himself as her sole resource. — Charles Dickens

Last summer I was staying at a house in Hampshire which was famous for the brilliance and the originality of its gardens. There were many of them, but the most beautiful of all was a walled garden in which every flower was blue. There were all the obvious things like delphiniums and acronitums and larkspurs, but the most beautiful blue of all came from the groups of cabbages - the ordinary blue pickling cabbage. Set against the blazing blue of the other flowers, it had a bloom and elegance which made it a thing of the greatest delight. — Beverley Nichols