"I think the first wisdom is to restrain the tongue"

 “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

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"Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books."
••John Lubbock