Quotes About Harmony

Barbecue brings people together, it always did and always will. Even in the sixties, during the race movements, barbecue was one of the things that held down the tensions. At a barbecue, it didn't matter who you were.

It's astonishing, actually, how much anger an animal's assault on your garden can incite.

there is room enough for a world between a lilac and a wall.

It is too late in the day-there are simply too many of us now-to follow Thoreau into the woods, to look to nature to somehow cure or undo culture.

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again.

Here, then, is one way in which we would do well to go a little native: backward, or perhaps it is forward, to a time and place where the gathering and preparing and enjoying of food were closer to the center of a well-lived life.

There may or may not be a correlation between the beautiful and the good, but there probably is one between beauty and health. (Which, I suppose, in Darwinian terms, is the good.)

In wildness is the preservation of the world," Thoreau once wrote; a century later

the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.

Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature.

Eat Your View!

If we could hear the squirrel's heartbeat, the sound of the grass growing, we should die of that roar

For though we may be the earth's gardeners, we are also its weeds. And we won't get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role—that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

antidotes to our abstraction.

Michael Pollan

either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild.

Generally, I don't need any music to dance. For me, dance is not because of the music. It is simply because I've found the rhythm of life.

I love Ashford & Simpson, and I love the Brothers Gibb. They are amazing.

Kindness boggles my mind. It's the only force in nature that increases simultaneously for the giver and the receiver.

In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead.

When you are accompanying someone, you are listening to them the way you listen to a Bach Chorale, where four parts are going on at the same time, all of which are gorgeous melodies, all being played simultaneously.

I sang before I acted, but I always wanted to do them simultaneously.

In my 40s, the two cultures finally came to peace with one other inside me, and I have come to identify myself as both 100% Chinese and 100% American simultaneously.

Yes, you can be passionate about school and fashion simultaneously. The two are not mutually exclusive - one doesn't cancel out the other.