“A garden should make you feel you've entered privileged space -- a place not just set apart but reverberant -- and it seems to me that, to achieve this, the gardener must put some kind of twist on the existing landscape, turn its prose into something nearer poetry.”

“You have, to dream things out. It keeps a kind of an ideal before you. You see it first in your mind and then you set about to try and make it like the ideal. If you want a garden,—why, I guess you've got to dream a garden.”

“Some places speak distinctly. Certain dank gardens cry aloud for a murder; certain old houses demand to be haunted; certain coasts are set apart for shipwrecks.”

“But something that never escapes me as I putter about the garden, physically and mentally: desire and curiosity inform the inevitable boundaries of the garden, and boundaries, especially when they are an outgrowth of something as profound as the garden with all its holy restrictions and admonitions, must be violated.”

“You are the drop,and the oceanyou are kindness,you are anger,you are sweetness,you are poison.Do not make me more disheartened.you are the chamber of the sun,you are the abode of venus,you are the garden of all hope.Oh, Beloved, let me enter.”

“I am writing in the garden. To write as one should of a garden one must write not outside it or merely somewhere near it, but in the garden.”