“You know why they call it the Garden State, don't you? It's like the Garden of Eden-- everyone is from there originally, but no one you meet actually lives there anymore.”

“Eden is within you; it is your life's garden. It is from this internal garden that you experience your external life. If you see weeds, pluck them!”

“Henry Mitchell, in his book One Man's Garden, observes that "it is not important for a garden to be beautiful" in everyone's eyes. But "it is extremely important for the gardener to think it is a fair substitute for Eden." Perhaps this is an overstatement, or perhaps it is a theological truth.”

“Nobody can stay in the garden of Eden," Jacques said. And then: "I wonder why.”

“Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.”

“The essence of Christianity is told us in the Garden of Eden history. The fruit that was forbidden was on the tree of knowledge. The subtext is, 'All the suffering you have is because you wanted to find out what was going on. You could be in the Garden of Eden if you had just kept your fucking mouth shut and hadn't asked any questions.”