Eleanor Perenyi Quotes

• To garden is to let optimism get the better of judgment.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Garden, Optimism, Essentials

  45 Copy quote

• It takes a while to grasp that not all failures are self-imposed, the result of ignorance, carelessness or inexperience. It takes a while to grasp that a garden isn't a testing ground for character and to stop asking, what did I do wrong? Maybe nothing.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Failure, Ignorance, Character

  Eleanor Perenyi (2010). “Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden”, p.65, Modern Library

  56 Copy quote

• I love blue more than any other color. I am inordinately attracted to any blue substance: to minerals like turquoise and lapis lazuli, to sapphires and aquamarines; to cobalt skies and blue-black seas; Moslem tiles - and to a blue flower whether or not it has any other merit.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Flower, Blue, Color

  23 Copy quote

• Or perhaps you notice a congregation of ladybugs on a rose stalk. Don't invoke the old nursery saying and ask them to fly away home. Their house is not on fire. Your roses are, with aphids, which the ladybugs are feeding on - and you can bless yourself that they have come to your rescue.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Home, Fire, Rose

  Eleanor Perenyi (2010). “Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden”, p.173, Modern Library

  64 Copy quote

• I have spoken to plants myself, and if pressed for conclusions would have to say that those I threatened did better than those I - well, I wouldn't say prayed over, but pleaded with, cajoled. A rhododendron that hadn't bloomed for six years was flatly told it would be removed the following year if there were no flowers. Need I say that it has bloomed profusely ever since?

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Flower, Years, Gardening

  4 Copy quote

• September is the time to begin again. In the country, when I could smell the wood-smoke in the forest, and the curtains could be drawn when the tea came in, on the first autumn evening, I always felt that my season of good luck had come.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Country, Good Luck, Autumn

  Eleanor Perenyi (2016). “More Was Lost: A Memoir”, p.29, New York Review of Books

  6 Copy quote

• [Petunias are] as hopelessly impractical as a chiffon ball dress.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Dresses, Balls, Petunias

  7 Copy quote

• Sooner or later every gardener must face the fact that certain things are going to die on him. It is a temptation to be anthropomorphic about plants, to suspect that they do it to annoy.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Temptation, Gardening, Faces

  6 Copy quote

• Gertrude Jekyll, like Monet, was a painter with poor eyesight, and their gardens - his at Giverny in the Seine valley, hers in Surrey - had resemblance's that may have sprung from this condition. Both loved plants that foamed and frothed over walls and pergolas, spread in tides beneath trees; both saw flowers in islands of colored light - an image the normal eye captures only by squinting.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Love, Wall, Flower

  14 Copy quote

• To see things in black and white is to see the basics, and I would recommend to any designer of gardens that he go out and look at his work by the light of the moon.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Work, Black And White, Moon

  Eleanor Perenyi (2010). “Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden”, p.142, Modern Library

  6 Copy quote

• A garden is a private world or it is nothing.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Garden, Religion, World

  Eleanor Perenyi (2010). “Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden”, p.63, Modern Library

  4 Copy quote

• A gift of flowers to a woman implies that she is as deliciously desirable as the blossoms themselves; but there may be another and hidden message, contained in the old-fashioned phrases like 'shy as a violet, 'clinging vine,' not originally conceived as pejoratives, that tells more of the truth - which is that flowers are also emblems of feminine submission.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Truth, Flower, Shy

  4 Copy quote

• Americans resent the vagaries of weather to a degree unknown to other peoples. ... Weather is a force we have lost touch with. We feel entitled to dominate it, like everything else in the environment, and when we can't are more panic-stricken than primitives who know that when nature is out of control they can only pray to the gods.

  Eleanor Perenyi

  Weather, United States, Degrees

  4 Copy quote

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