"Death never takes the wise man by suprise; he is always ready to go." -- Jean de la Fontaine (1678)
"Death must be distinguished from dying, with which it is often confused." -- Sydney Smith (18c-19c)
"Kill them all; God will recognize his own." -- Arnald Amaury, abbot of Citeaux, at the massacre of Béziers, 1209.
"You should never have your best trousers on when you go out to fight for freedom and truth." -- Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People.
"What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war." -- Símone Weil
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In the garden
I will die.
In the rosebush
they will kill me.
- Garcia Lorca
Old gardeners never die.
They just spade away and then throw in the trowel.
- Herbert V. Prochnow
Death is more universal than life - everyone dies but not everyone lives.
- Author Unknown
I don't feel good.
- Luther Burbank's last words
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness be dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets - East Coker # 130, 1943
I am spending delightful afternoons in my garden, watching everything living around me. As I grow older, I feel everything departing, and I love everything with more passion.
- Emile Zola
Be happy while you're living,
For you're a long time dead.
- Scottish Proverb
If you rest, you rust.
- Helen Hayes
Old gardeners do die, and plenty are slowly spading away.
We did not come from dust, nor shall we return to dust, nor are we dust in the wind.
You are deluding yourself if you think that death is an illusion.
Springtime for birth, Summertime for growth; and all Seasons for dying.
All the living stand on the dead.
The living produce the living, the dead decay into compost.
Everyday, the Angel of Death visits the garden - someday too I will touch Her wing.
Being dead means nothing to the dead.
Honor the dead by showing compassion for the living.
Graveyards and landscape gardens, coffins and flowers - fitting friends.
- Michael P. Garofalo, Pulling Onions
"Look at us", said the violets blooming at her feet,"all last winter we slept in the seeming death...
but at the right time God awakened us, and here we are to comfort you."
- Edward Payson Rod
There the wild flowers spring and the wee birdies sing,
And in sunshine the waters are sleepin',
But the broken heart it kens nae second spring again,
Though the waefu may cease frae their greetin'.
Oh, ye'll tak the high road, and I'll tak the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland afore ye;
But me and my true love will never meet again
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.
- The Bonnie Banks O' Loch Lomond
I do not wish to die -
There is such contingent beauty in life:
The open window on summer mornings
Looking out on gardens and green things growing,
The shadowy cups of rose flowering to themselves-
Images of time and eternity-
Silence in the garden and felt along the walls.
The room is suddenly filled with sun,
Like a sacrament one can never be
Sufficiently thankful for. Door ajar,
The eye reaches across from one
Open window to another, eye to eye,
And then the healing spaces of the sky ......
- Alfred Leslie Rowse, 1903-
Even as a caterpillar, when coming to an end of a blade of grass, reaches out to another blade of grass and draws itself over to it, in the same way the Soul, leaving the body and unwisdom behind, reaches out to another body and draws itself over to it.
- Upanishads
The timing of death, like the ending of a story, gives a changed meaning to what preceded it.
- Mary C. Bateson
Henry Mitchell, the great 20th century garden writer, reportedly died planting daffodils with his neighbor.
Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead.
It is going on all the time. We are in it now.
- Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Love this Earth as if you won't be here tomorrow;
show reverence for your Garden as if you will be here forever.
- Scottish proverb
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night.
It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime.
It is the little shadow which runs across the grass
and loses itself in the sunset.
- Crowfoot
Earth knows no desolation. She smells regeneration
in the moist breath of decay.
- George Meredith
There is a kind of immortality in every garden.
- Gladys Taber
When gardening, I have one gift you won't find in any manuals.
I know it's strange, but I can change perennials to annuals.
- Dick Emmons
In the long run we are all dead.
- John Maynard Keynes
After killing off a number of plants inadvertently, it may be hard
to face horticultural euthanasia. ... But the misfortune of these
mistakes goes beyond a small blot on your garden. The sad relics
are the lessons your are refusing to learn. ... After four or five
years you have to make an assessment of your selections and stop
nursing along specimens that long for requiescat in pace. You will
be amazed what a lift it will give to your whole garden to
be rid of these ghosts.
- Patricia Thorpe, Growing Pains, 1994
For we must bear in mind that the greater number of garden pictures
known to us are taken from tombs.
- Marie Luise Gothein, A History of Garden Art, 1928
Men fear silence as they fear solitude, because both give them
a glimpse of the terror of life's nothingness.
- Andre Maurois
For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death (or of anything else) as natural, death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled.
It can only be denied.
- Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor
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