Patrick

“It does seem odd now, this early-twentieth-century view that social status made one kind of physical activity—work, you could call it—acceptable and another very much not. Gardening, you get a lot hotter and dirtier than you do dusting a room or washing a floor. But gardening was a genteel occupation, housework a demeaning task that you paid someone else to do.”
― Penelope Lively, Life in the Garden

“It occurred to him, not for the first time, that London was more than one city. There was the one he was taxied comfortably about in, whose views were spacious and spoke in agreeable accents of wealth and plenty, while the other was cramped, soiled and barbarous, peopled by a feral race who’d strip you bare and chew the bones.”
― Mick Herron, Real Tigers

“I suppose the fascination of gardening lies a lot in the way one can plan for the future. Especially in such an insecure world. I open my morning paper and read of some fresh new horror the scientists have devised and then I plan some change in the garden that won’t be fully realized for at least five or six years. It’s illogical, of course, but it’s some comfort.”
― Angus Wilson, The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot

“Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations