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Wherever humans garden magnificently, there are magnificent heartbreaks.
Henry Mitchell

There are several ways to lay out a little garden; the best way is to get a gardener.

Karel Capek

Men are like plants--they never grow happily unless they are well cultivated.

Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1721)

Nothing is more completely the child of Art than a Garden.

Sir Walter Scott

If one were as good a gardener in practice as one is in theory, what a garden would one create!

V. Sackville-West

Opportunity is missed by most people because
it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
- Thomas A. Edison

It is in society as in nature--not the useful, but the ornamental, that strikes the imagination.
Sir Humphrey Davy (1829)

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.

John Ruskin

My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant's point of view.

~H. Fred Ale

If you have any doubts that we live in a society controlled by men, try reading down the index of contributors to a volume of quotations, looking for women's names.
� Elaine Gill

O amateurs of gardening, be amateurs of humanity also.

Charles Joseph, Prince de Ligne (1781)

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow
-Helen Keller

(Can anyone add to the thought of the day? The one by Elaine Gill, day before yesterday, seemed like a challenge. <img src="/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> Trish)

Gardening is not a rational act.

Margaret Atwood

Gardening has compensations out of all proportion to its goals. It is creation in the pure sense.

Phyllis McGinley

The trouble with gardening...is that it does not remain an avocation. It becomes an obsession.

Phyllis McGinley

Gardening is a madness, a folly that does not go away with age. Quite the contrary.


May Sarton:

A garden isn't meant to be useful. It's for joy.

Rumer Godden

Early to bed, early to rise,
Work like hell: fertilize.


- Emily Whaley, Charleston, N.C.

Gardens are the result of a collaboration between art and nature.

Penelope Hobhouse

There is a kind of immortality in every garden.

Gladys Taber

There's little risk in becoming overly proud of one's garden because by its very nature is humbling. It has a way of keeping you on your knees.

JoAnn R. Barwick

A garden has a curious innocent way of consuming cash while all the time you are under the illusion that you are spending nothing.

Esther Meynell

I never apologize.
I'm sorry, but that's just the way I am.

Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, ''I'm going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that's tough. I am going to snow anyway.''

Maya Angelou

I've arrived at this outermost edge of my life by my own actions. Where I am is thoroughly unacceptable. Therefore, I must stop doing what I've been doing.

Alice Koller

Jane Addams is best known as the founder and, for its early history, the leader of Hull-House in Chicago, one of the most successful settlement houses. She also worked for women's rights and peace, and wrote several books on social ethics.

� Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.

Jane Addams

One sad thing about this world is that the acts that take the most out of you are usually the ones that other people will never know about.

Anne Tyler

Actions lie louder than words.

Carolyn Wells

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Virginia Woolf

Bella Abzug (1920-1998)
First Jewish Congresswoman, Bella Abzug was known for her wide-brimmed hats and fiery personality, as well as her work for feminism, peace, and civil liberties.

� I've been described as a tough and noisy woman, a prize fighter, a man-hater, you name it. They call me Battling Bella, Mother Courage, and a Jewish mother with more complaints than Portnoy.

Famous women's birthdays today:

HENRIETTE WYETH-1907-ARTIST. OFTEN CALLED "FIRST LADY OF AMERICAN ART". LLA 1990=PRESENTED BY HELEN HAYES
SARAH BERNHARDT (1844-1923) CLASSIC ACTRESS
JOAN FONTAINE-1917-ACTRESS
CATHERINE DENEUVE-1943-ACTRESS, MODEL

� Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows me to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style.

� There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.

� The main thing in one's own private world is to try to laugh as much as you cry.

Maya Angelou

Isabel Allende (1942-)

Isabel Allende, a novelist and journalist, left Chile with her husband and children when her uncle, Chilean president Salvador Allende, was overthrown in a coup. After a time in Venezuela, Isabel Allende came to live and write in the United States.

Selected Isabel Allende Quotations

� How can one not speak about war, poverty, and inequality when people who suffer from these afflictions don't have a voice to speak?

� We live in an era where masses of people come and go across a hostile planet, desolate and violent. Refugees, emigrants, exiles, deportees. We are a tragic contingent.

� Write what should not be forgotten.

� While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things. Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin.

� Erotica is using a feather, pornography is using the whole chicken.

� For women the best aphrodisiacs are words.

Marian Anderson (1902-1993)

An African American singer, Marian Anderson found more success and fame in Europe than America until in 1939 the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) refused to allow her to sing in their Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. In part because of the public attention brought by this incident, Marian Anderson became one of the best-known African American women of the 20th century.
Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR)

Marian Anderson

Selected Marian Anderson Quotations

� I could not run away from the situation. I had become, whether I liked it or not, a symbol, representing my people. I had to appear.

� I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time hating people.

� the Sisterhood is in all of us. It is every woman who is keeping the dream alive. And the oldest dreamkeepers, the Grandmothers, are in danger at this very moment. We must write and we must act to keep the knowledge and the powers of woman alive.

Lynn Andrews

There is material enough in a single flower for the ornament of a score of cathedrals.

John Ruskin (1851)

Diane Arbus (1923-1971)

Diane Arbus was a photographer and also taught at Parsons School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design, and Cooper Union. After early work in fashion photography, Diane Arbus became known more for her portraits of unusual subjects and for her portraits of celebrities.

Selected Diane Arbus Quotations

� I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

� There are things which nobody would see unless I photographed them.

� Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that's what people observe. You see someone on the street and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.

� It gets to seem as if way back in the Garden of Eden after the Fall, Adam and Eve had begged the Lord to forgive them and He, in his boundless exasperation, had said, ''All right, then. Stay. Stay in the Garden. Get civilized. Procreate. Muck it up.'' And they did.

Elizabeth Arden (1884 - 1966)
Elizabeth Arden sold cosmetics -- but she really sold "youth and beauty" to the women of her time. Elizabeth Arden was her adopted name, chosen from the first name of her first partner, and the title of a Tennyson poem.

Selected Elizabeth Arden Quotations

� There's only one Elizabeth like me and that's the Queen.

� I only want people around me who can do the impossible.

� Dear, never forget one little point. It's my business. You just work here.

� I pick good women, but I haven't had any luck with my men.

� Nothing that costs only a dollar is worth having.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

Hannah Arendt, a political philosopher, specialized in analyzing the rise of totalitarianism, with special attention to Nazi Germany.

Selected Hannah Arendt Quotations

� The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be either good or evil.

� The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

� The right to marry whoever one wishes is an elementary human right compared to which "the right to attend an integrated school, the right to sit where one pleases on a bus, the right to go into any hotel or recreation area or place of amusement, regardless of one's skin or color or race" are minor indeed. Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence; and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs. [i[[Dissent, Winter 1959]

Nancy Astor (1879-1964)

Nancy Astor, born in Virginia, married an English heir, Waldorf Astor, as her second husband. When her husband was elevated to the House of Lords, Nancy Astor ran for his seat in Parliament, and became, in 1919, the first woman seated in the British Parliament. Nancy Astor supported women's rights and, during World War II, worked to keep up the morale of the British people and American troops stationed in the Plymouth area near her home.
Nancy Astor was known for her sharp wit.

Selected Nancy Astor Quotations

� No one sex can govern alone. I believe that one of the reasons why civilization has failed so lamentably is that it had one-sided government.

� We are not asking for superiority for we have always had that; all we ask is equality.

� Women have got to make the world safe for men since men have made it so darned unsafe for women.

Corazon Aquino (1933 - )
Corazon Aquino was the first woman to run for President in the Philippines and was attending law school when she met her future husband, Benigno Aquino, who was assassinated in 1983 when he returned to the Philippines to renew his opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos. Corazon Aquino ran for President againt Marcos, and she won the seat despite Marcos' attempt to portray himself the winner.

� It has often been said that Marcos was the first male chauvinist to underestimate me.

� I would rather die a meaningful death than to live a meaningless life.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)
Jane Austen is considered one of the foremost writers of the early 19th century. Her fiction focuses on relationships and the attempts by her heroes and heroines to find fortune and romance. Her ironic tone often comes through whether speaking as the narrator of a tale or through one of the characters.

Selected Jane Austen Quotations

� One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

� A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

� It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should refuse an offer of marriage.

� Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!

� Nobody minds having what is too good for them.

� I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me that trouble of liking them.

Joan Baez (January 9, 1941 - )

Joan Baez, American folksinger, is of Mexican, Scottish, and English descent. Many of her songs have a political message, and she has been an activist for peace and human rights.

Selected Joan Baez Quotations

� I've never had a humble opinion. If you've got an opinion, why be humble about it?

� As long as one keeps searching, the answers come.

� The easiest kind of relationship is with ten thousand people, the hardest is with one.

� You don't get to choose how you're going to die. Or when. You can decide how you're going to live now.

Pearl Bailey (1918-1990)

Pearl Bailey, an entertainer who combined singing with ad libs, was in 1975 a special ambassador to the United Nations. She's perhaps most famous for her version of Hello, Dolly!

Selected Pearl Bailey Quotations:

� Everybody wants to do something to help, but nobody wants to be the first.

� A crown, if it hurts us, is not worth wearing.

� To talk to someone who does not listen is enough to tense the devil.

� We look into mirrors but we only see the effects of our times on us -- not our effects on others.

Faith Baldwin Quotes

�Character builds slowly, but it can be torn down with incredible swiftness.

�We, too, the children of the earth, have our moon phases all through any year; the darkness, the delivery from darkness, the waxing and waning.

�Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.

Lucille Ball (1911 - 1989)

Lucille Ball began her career in musical comedy, became a success in radio comedy, starred in several movie comedies, and achieved her greatest popular success with her TV show, I Love Lucy, first airing in 1951 and running until 1957. She also starred in The Lucy Show (1962-68) and Here's Lucy (1968-74). Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, who produced I Love Lucy together as well as starred in the show, were married from 1940 to 1960. Lucille Ball managed Desilu Productions from 1962 to 1967 and Lucille Ball Productions from 1967 to 1989.

Selected Lucille Ball Quotations

� I never thought I was funny. I don't think funny.

� I'm not funny. What I am is brave.

� The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age.

� I would rather regret the things that I have done than the things that I have not.

� Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead.

� My God, I'm outliving my henna.

Clara Barton (December 25, 1821 - April 12, 1912)

Clara Barton, who had been a schoolteacher and the first woman to be a clerk at the US Patent Office, served in the Civil War nursing soldiers and distributing supplies for the sick and wounded. She spent four years tracking down missing soldiers at the end of the war. Clara Barton established the first permanent American Red Cross society and headed the organization until 1904.

Selected Clara Barton Quotations

� I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.

� The conflict is one thing I've been waiting for.

I'm well and strong and young -- young enough to go to the front. If I cannot be a soldier, I'll help soldiers.

� I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.

� Others are writing my biography, and let it rest as they elect to make it. I have lived my life, well and ill, always less well than I wanted it to be but it is, as it is, and as it has been; so small a thing, to have had so much about it!

Mary Catherine Bateson Quotes

Women's Voices: Quotations by Women

Most higher education is devoted to affirming the traditions and origins of an existing elite and transmitting them to new members.

Worlds can be found by a child and an adult bending down and looking together under the grass stems or at the skittering crabs in a tidal pool.

We are not what we know but what we are willing to learn.

Mary Ritter Beard (1876 - 1958)
Mary Ritter Beard was writing about women's history before women's history was an accepted academic field -- her major works were published in the 1930s and 1940s.

Selected Mary Ritter Beard Quotations

� The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind.

� Woman's success in lifting men out of their way of life nearly resembling that of the beasts -- who merely hunted and fished for food, who found shelter where they could in jungles, in trees, and caves -- was a civilizing triumph.

Sarah Bernhardt
Dates: October 22, 1845 - March 26, 1923

Sarah Bernhardt, whose name is virtually synonymous with "stage actress," was a French actress known as "The Divine Sarah." Sarah Bernhardt was very popular in her native France and around Europe, and her numerous tours of the United States brought her fame and popularity in America as well.

Selected Sarah Bernhardt Quotations

� Life begets life. Energy creates energy. It is by spending oneself that one becomes rich.

� Celebrity .... is a sort of octopus with innumerable tentacles. It throws out to right and left, in front and behind, its clammy arms, and gathers in, through its thousand little suckers, all the gossip and slander and praise afloat, to spit out again at the public.

� Mark Twain about Sarah Bernhardt: There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses -- and then there is Sarah Bernhardt.

Annie Besant Quotes

Women's Voices: Quotations by Women

Not out of right practice comes right thinking, but out of right thinking comes right practice. It matters enormously what you think. If you think falsely, you will act mistakenly; if you think basely, your conduct will suit your thinking.

... those who can serve best, those who help most, those who sacrifice most, those are the people who will be loved in life and honoured in death, when all questions of colour are swept away and when in a free country free citizens shall meet on equal grounds.

Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)

Mary McLeod Bethune was an educator who founded Bethune-Cookman College and served as its president. Mary McLeod Bethune served in several capacities during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, including head of the Division of Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration and advisor on selecting officer candidates for the Women's Army Corps. Mary McLeod Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935.

Selected Mary McLeod Bethune Quotations


� We live in a world which respects power above all things.

� The true worth of a race must be measured by the character of its womanhood.

� Whatever the white man has done, we have done, and often better.

� You white folks have long been eating the white meat of the chicken. We Negroes are now ready for some of the white meat instead of the dark meat.

� If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs.

� The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.

� From the first, I made my learning, what little it was, useful every way I could.

Alice Stone Blackwell Quotes

The brain is not, and cannot be, the sole or complete organ of thought and feeling.

Justice is better than chivalry if we cannot have both.

A woman finds the natural lay of the land almost unconsciously; and not feeling it incumbent on her to be guide and philosopher to any successor, she takes little pains to mark the route by which she is making her ascent.

Antoinette Brown Blackwell Quotes

If woman's sole responsibility is of the domestic type, one class will be crushed by it, and the other throw it off as a badge of poverty. The poor man's motto, "Women's work is never done," leads inevitably to its antithesis -- ladies' work is never begun.

... you asked me one day if it seemed like giving up much for your sake. Only leave me free, as free as you are and everyone ought to be, and it is giving up nothing.

Elizabeth Blackwell Quotes

Elizabeth Blackwell, born in Britain, was the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree. She founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and trained nurses in the American Civil War.

Selected Elizabeth Blackwell Quotations

� If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

� It is not easy to be a pioneer -- but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.

� Our school education ignores, in a thousand ways, the rules of healthy development.

Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818 - 1894)

Amelia Bloomer (born Amelia Jenks) was a temperance reformer who became interested in women's rights, and started the publication the Lily. In the Lily, she advocated for dress reform, and wore one of the new costumes herself: a bodice, short skirt, and trousers. Her name became associated with the Bloomer costume.

Selected Amelia Jenks Bloomer Quotations

� When you find a burden in belief or apparel, cast it off.

� The costume of women should be suited to her wants and necessities. It should conduce at once to her health, comfort, and usefulness; and, while it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make that end of secondary importance.

� It will not do to say that it is out of woman's sphere to assist in making laws, for if that were so, then it should be also out of her sphere to submit to them.

� Although the doctrine of innate equality of the race has been proclaimed, yet so far as woman is concerned it has been a standing falsehood.

Boadaceia Quote

If you weigh well the strengths of our armies you will see that in this battle we must conquer or die. This is a woman's resolve. As for the men, they may live or be slaves.

Erma Bombeck Quotes

Erma Bombeck (1927-1996)

Columnist Erma Bombeck was known for her quick wit and her wisdom about motherhood and family life. Here are a few selected quotations from Erma Bombeck:


� People shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you'll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.

� The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.

� Spend at least one Mother's Day with your prospective mothers in law before you decide on marriage. If a man gives his mother a gift certificate for a flu shot, dump him.

� Guilt is the gift that keeps on giving.

� Housework is a treadmill from futility to oblivion with stop offs at tedium and counter productivity.

� My theory on housework is, if the item doesn't multiply, smell, catch on fire or block the refrigerator door, let it be. No one cares. Why should you?

� Education is so important when it comes to domesticity. I don't know why no one ever thought to paste a label on the toilet tissue spindle giving 1-2-3 directions for replacing the tissue on it. Then everyone in the house would know what Mama knows.

� Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.

� I just clipped 2 articles from a current magazine. One is a diet guaranteed to drop 5 pounds off my body in a weekend. The other is a recipe for a 6 minute pecan pie.

� Seize the moment. Remember all those women on the 'Titanic' who waved off the dessert cart.

Anne Bradstreet (~1612-1672)

Anne Bradstreet was the first published poet in America. Her father and husband each served as governor of Massachusetts colony. She had eight children, and many famous Americans were her descendents, including William Ellery Channing, Wendell Phillips, and Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Selected Anne Bradstreet Quotations

� If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.

� Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are.

� Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.

Emily Bront� Quotes


I cannot live without my life!


Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)

Gwendolyn Brooks was an Illinois poet laureate who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950.
Selected Gwendolyn Brooks Quotations


� Poetry is life distilled.

� Art hurts.

� Be careful what you swallow. Chew!

� I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

Olympia Brown Quotes

Preaching slogan: No soul saved after the first twenty minutes.

The (otherwise unnamed) wife of Ebenezer Fisher did not approve of women in ministry. She said this about Olympia Brown, to one of Brown's classmates at Canton Theological School: You will see now the consequence of this. Next year there will be fifteen women in the class, and then women will flock to the ministry.

Rita Mae Brown (1944 - )

Rita Mae Brown, a writer, was a gay activist and feminist in the 1960s, founded "Lavender Menace" when she was fired by the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1969. Rita Mae Brown has written Rubyfruit Jungle and other novels including a mystery series.

Selected Rita Mae Brown Quotations

� As a woman, I find it very embarrassing to be in a meeting and realize I'm the only one in the room with balls.

� One survey found that ten percent of Americans thought Joan of Arc was Noah's wife....

� I believe in a lively disrespect for most forms of authority.

� Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself.

� This is a celebration of individual freedom, not of homosexuality. No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.

� What's the point of being a lesbian if a woman is going to look and act like an imitation man?

� Women who love women are Lesbians. Men, because they can only think of women in sexual terms, define Lesbian as sex between women.

� Writers will happen in the best of families.

Gro Harlem Brundtland Quotes

Women power is a formidable force.

Never have so many had such broad and advanced access to health care. But never have so many been denied access to health.

It is simple, really. Human health and the health of ecosystems are inseparable.

The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973)

Pearl S. Buck, a 20th century American woman writer, wrote The Good Earth and many other novels. Pearl Buck grew up in China, spoke Chinese before she spoke English, and often wrote of China and Asia in her fiction.

Selected Pearl S. Buck Quotations

� A good marriage is one which allows for change and growth in the individuals and in the way they express their love.

� When good people in any country cease their vigilance and struggle, then evil men prevail.

� None who have always been free can understand the terrible fascinating power of the hope of freedom to those who are not free.

� To eat bread without hope is still slowly to starve to death.

Billie Burke Quote:


Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese.

Maria Callas Quotes

When music fails to agree to the ear, to soothe the ear and the heart and the senses, then it has missed its point.

When my enemies stop hissing, I shall know I'm slipping.

First I lost weight, then I lost my voice, and now I've lost Onassis.