Weeding Quotes

“Matins

You want to know how I spend my time?
I walk the front lawn, pretending
to be weeding. You ought to know
I'm never weeding, on my knees, pulling
clumps of clover from the flower beds: in fact
I'm looking for courage, for some evidence
my life will change, though
it takes forever, checking
each clump for the symbolic
leaf, and soon the summer is ending, already
the leaves turning, always the sick trees
going first, the dying turning
brilliant yellow, while a few dark birds perform
their curfew of music. You want to see my hands?
As empty now as at the first note.
Or was the point always
to continue without a sign?”
― Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

“Promises, like gardens need weeding from time to time to produce healthy results.”
― Soul Dancer, Pay Me What I'm Worth: Say it. Mean it. Get it.

“Whenever somebody challenges me with the notion that killing carrots is no different to killing cows, I make a point of pointing out how different they would feel if they spent the day weeding in the garden, or the day slaughtering chickens. Just to make it clear how ridiculous they are being, because there can be no doubt, their argument is ridiculous, there isn’t a person out there who given both scenarios would look at them and say “yes they are the same”. I like to state this clearly, because I understand that even if the person challenging me refuses to acknowledge the difference, others who come along later and read the conversation will see both sides to the argument and maybe it will help these new people to not start presenting the same kind of ridiculous logic in opposition towards compassionate living.”
― Mango Wodzak

“After Nicholas hung up the phone, he watched his mother carry buckets and garden tools across the couch grass toward a bed that would, come spring, be brightly ablaze as tropical coral with colorful arctotis, impatiens, and petunias. Katherine dug with hard chopping strokes, pulling out wandering jew and oxalis, tossing the uprooted weeds into a black pot beside her.
The garden will be beautiful, he thought. But how do the weeds feel about it? Sacrifices must be made.”
― Stephen M. Irwin, The Dead Path

“The only inexplicable aspect of the process was that economic theory (which is, after all, what economics students were supposed to know) served almost no function in an investment bank. The bankers used economics as a sort of standardized test of general intelligence.”
― Michael Lewis, Liar's Poker

“It is customary for those who wish to have the most beautiful ones to endeavourer to offer them gifts of those things which they hold most precious in order to win their hearts.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“I looked up at the moon and stars through the glass roof above and gasped at the stunning sight, like a mural painted by a great artist. No wonder Lady Anna had loved this place.
I walked to the orchids and plucked a weed from a small terra-cotta pot that held a speckled pink and white flower. "There you are, beautiful," I whispered, releasing a patch of clover roots from the bark near the orchid's stem. "Is that better?" In the quiet of the night, I could almost hear the flower sigh.
I walked to the water spigot and filled a green watering can to the brim, then sprinkled the flower and her comrades. I marveled at how the droplets sparkled in the moonlight.”
― Sarah Jio, The Last Camellia

“My Latin teacher would say, “We must be grateful that we don’t know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we’d be inconsolable.”
― Alberto Manguel, Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions

“In Maie get a weede hooke, a crotch and a glove,
And weed out such weedes as the corne doth not love.
Slack never they weeding, for dearth nor for cheape,
The corne shall reward it er ever ye reape.

[Found in Helen Nearing, ‘Wise Words on the Good Life’, 1980.”
― Thomas Tusser, Five hundred pointes of good husbandrie Volume 21

“In Maie get a weede hooke, a crotch and a glove,
And weed out such weedes as the corne doth not love.
Slack never thy weeding, for dearth nor for cheape,
The corne shall reward it er ever ye reape.

[Thomas Tusser, ‘Five hundred points of husbandry: directing what corn, grass, is proper to be sown: what trees to be planted: how land is to be improved: with with whatever is fit to be done for the benefit of the farmer in every month of the year’ (1557).]”
― Helen Nearing, Wise Words for the Good Life