Quotes from Beverley Nichols

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.

Well, I love geraniums, and anybody who does not love geraniums must obviously be a depraved and loathsome person.

They came on one of April's most brilliant days--a day as sparkling as a newly-washed lemon...a day when even the shadows were a melange of blue and orange and jade, like the shadows that poured from the tipsy brush of Monet.

One of the many reasons why gardens are increasingly precious to us in this day and age is that they help us to escape from the tyranny of speed. Our skies are streaked with jets, our roads have turned to race-tracks, and in the cities the crowds rush to and fro as though the devil were at their heels. But as soon as we open the garden gate, Time seems almost to stand still, slowing down to the gentle ticking of the Clock of the Universe.

Why do insurance companies, when they want to describe an act of God, invariably pick on something which sounds much more like an act of the Devil? One would think that God was exclusively concerned in making hurricanes, smallpox, thunderbolts, and dry rot. They seem to forget that He also manufactures rainbows, apple-blossom, and Siamese kittens. However, that is, perhaps, a diversion.

I think it is silly to be amateur about anything when one has an opportunity of learning.

It seemed to me that a great many fences had been put up all over the world, in the long course of history, that were not necessary. Fences round nations, fences round property. They were supposed to be symbols of security, but they were cheating symbols. They had a precisely opposite effect from that which was intended. They did not prevent crime, they incited it; they led not to peace but to war. A world without fences would be a better world.

For a garden is a mistress, and gardening is a blend of all the arts, and if it is not the death of me, sooner or later, I shall be much surprised.

a cyclamen that looks like a flight of butterflies, frozen for a single, exquisite moment in the white heart of Time...

There are a thousand 'greatest' melodies, just as there are a thousand 'greatest' poems and a thousand 'greatest' pictures, because there are a thousand moods in the mind of man when a certain note rings with the most clarity--when a certain design is most sharply silhouetted against the changing curtain of his mind.

Where the piano is, there is one's treasure, as far as I am concerned....nothing, surely, is more delightful than sitting down at the piano on a summer day, and playing Chopin or Debussy while the natural sunlight drifts over one's shoulders through the vines outside, creating a filigree of shadow in the printed page...a shifting pattern of ghostly leaf and blossom that dances to the mood of the music.

I want to wear out,' he [Oldfield] said very softly. 'To wear out. Not to rust out.

If you are picking a bunch of mixed flowers, and if you happen to see, over in a corner, a small, sad, neglected-looking pink or paeony that is all by itself and has obviously never had a chance in life, you have not the heart to pass it by, to leave it to mourn alone, while the night comes on. You have to go back and pick it, very carefully, and put it in the centre of the bunch among its fair companions, in the place of honour.

The seed of a blue lupin will usually produce a blue lupin. But the seed of a blue-eyed man may produce a brown-eyed bore...especially if his wife has a taste for gigolos.

The low lintels of the cottage have many disadvantages, but they have one supreme advantage. They afford an immediate topic of conversation. They make things start, quite literally, with a bang.

On and on we wander in these pages--and we never reach the point because, happily, there is no point to reach.

Some people find importance in the photographs of those titanic mushrooms of atomic poison which are periodically exploded over the world's deserts; I find greater importance in one very small mushroom which mysteriously springs up in the shadow of the tool-shed.

The one thing of which we are certain, in an uncertain universe, is that energy is never lost. It is transformed, but it never disappears.

There is something dead about a lawn which has never been shadowed by the swift silhouette of a dancing kitten.

We both know, you and I, that if all men were gardeners, the world at last would be at peace.

To be overcome by the fragrance of flowers is a delectable form of defeat.

Marriage - a book of which the first chapter is written in poetry and the remaining chapters in prose.