Henry Mitchell > Quotes

“All anybody needs to know about prizes is that Mozart never won one.”
― Henry Mitchell

“The sooner the gardener loses certain kinds of innocence the better, and there is no better place to begin than with the weather.”
― Henry Mitchell

“Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.... I never see a great garden, (even in my mind's eye, which is the best place to see great gardens around here), but I think of the calamities that have visited it, unsuspected by the delighted gardener who supposes, "It must be nice to garden there."
It is not nice to garden anywhere. Everywhere there are startling winds, once in every five centuries floods....
Now the gardener is the one who has seen everything ruined so many times that, even as his pain increases with each loss, he comprehends, truly knows, that where there was a garden once there can be again.”
― Henry Mitchell, The Writer in the Garden

“People thought of Adam as dim, flawed, “Lights are on, but nobody home,” they said about him. Because he had been told so often, Adam had come to agree with them. None of this made Adam think less of himself. In fact, Adam rarely thought of himself at all. He was different that way. Adam looked out at the world and whatever he saw required his total attention. He engaged his visible universe with an absolute, unreserved surrender. The intensity of his observation would have put an angel to shame. Mamaw’s preacher, a man more enlightened than he was educated, and who had some sense of the Spirit that was in Adam, might have said God looked down on Marshall County through Adam’s eyes, loved their little slice of the Appalachians through Adam’s heart, so that people and places there became real through being truly and completely seen and cherished by a selfless soul.”
― Henry Mitchell, Dark on the Mountain

“Nature is not run like a good clock but like a good (more or less) dog. Snarls sometimes. There should be a book, When a Good Spring Does Bad Things.”
― Henry Mitchell, Henry Mitchell on Gardening

“If we war with one another, we set our Soul at conflict with herself. We are one. Particular and peculiar manifestations of our One Soul. There are others, too, who are us, fulfilling our Soul’s potential in ways beyond our imagining. We are the same Soul’s dreaming, all of us, the dreams that stuff is made of. When we finally recognize ourselves in one another the world will be mended. Then”
― Henry Mitchell, Laurel Falls

“Squirrels are blamed for many crimes they are not responsible for, but in this case honesty compels me to say it was the squirrels done it. I saw them.”
― Henry Mitchell, Henry Mitchell On Gardening: Witty and Shrewd Horticultural Essays from the Washington Post's Beloved Columnist

“Everything grows for everybody. Everything dies for everybody, too.”
― Henry Mitchell, The Writer in the Garden