One of the least arduous but most productive of gardening jobs, the magic of deadheading never fails to delight me. It was a revelation when the principle was explained to me: that flowers are the attempt by the plant to reproduce itself. So if you c...
I could happily lean on a gate all the livelong day, chatting to passers-by about the wind and the rain. I do a lot of gate-leaning while I am supposed to be gardening; instead of hoeing, I lean on the gate, stare at the vegetable beds and ponder.
Alice Munro is not only revered, she is cherished, her stories handled lovingly, turned over and over, gazed at and studied and breathed in with something approaching awe. She has never, over the years, written the way any of her contemporaries have.
In order to keep liking Nick (as opposed to loving him which was completely non-negotiable) Alice sometimes had to look at him obliquely or with her eyes half closed or through a pin hole on a piece of cardboard. Straight on would burn her retinas.
Alice Ward: I'm sorry. I don't know who you are. Why are you talking? Charlene Fleming: I'm Charlene. We just met. We're together. Do we need to do this again? Hi, I'm Charlene.
Do you know what you call those who use towels and never wash them, eat meals and never do the dishes, sit in rooms they never clean, and are entertained till they drop? If you have just answered, 'A house guest,' you're wrong because I have just des...
William Evans: [referring to Alice's brooch] You gonna hock that? Dan Evans: Someday, William... you walk in my shoes, you might understand. William Evans: I ain't ever walking in your shoes.
Lester Bangs: The Doors? Jim Morrison? He's a drunken buffoon posing as a poet. Alice Wisdom: I like The Doors. Lester Bangs: Give me The Guess Who. They got the courage to be drunken buffoons, which makes them poetic.
King of Hearts: What do you know about this unfortunate affair? March Hare: Nothing. Queen of Hearts: Nothing whatever? March Hare: Nothing whatever! Queen of Hearts: [shouts] That's very important! Jury, write that down!
Alice Swallow: [to David] Well, there's nothing else I can say except that I'm glad that before I married you , you showed yourself in your true colors: You're just a butterfly.
Watergate showed more strengths in our system than weaknesses... The whole country did take part in quite a genuine sense in passing judgment on Richard Nixon.
I don’t take up the story and follow it as if it were a road, taking me somewhere... I go into it, and move back and forth and settle here and there, and stay in it for a while. It is more like a house." Alice Munro on reading.
It is hard to bring paedophile rings to justice. Thankfully it does happen. Perhaps the most horrific recent case came before the High Court in Edinburgh in June 2007. It involved a mother who stood by and watched as her daughter of nine was gang-rap...
When I was cooking I enjoyed a sense of being ‘out’ of myself. The action of dicing vegetables and warming oil made my hands tingle and my thoughts switch to a different hemisphere, right brain rather than left, or left rather than right. In my m...
One weekend it rained for 48 hours without stopping. The rain beat like bony fingers against the window panes. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Fungus was growing on the walls. I polished off a bottle of gin sitting huddled over the two-bar electric fire and...
Overregulation stifles creativity. It smothers innovation. It gives dinosaurs a veto over the future. It wastes the extraordinary opportunity for a democratic creativity that digital technology enables.
Technology means you can now do amazing things easily; but you couldn't easily do them legally.
Hey, any idea why Australians speak something that sounds deceptively like English but isn’t? I mean, I’m trying to figure out why I can’t seem to converse with another human being who speaks the same language as I do.
Do you really think I’d let him call my sister a ‘bitch?’ Or you for that matter? Talon Hawk’s dumb, but he’s smarter than that…he’d be crawling around on his hands and knees picking his teeth off the tiles.
I use the word “man” loosely. A better description would be “the most beautiful specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens with a set of XY chromosomes to grace the planet Earth at this moment, or any other era, epoch, or age in history.
I’m not trying to—What do teenagers say nowadays?” he asked my grandmother.“Get all up in her biznez,” Nana said.Without cracking a smile.“That’s right,” he replied. “We’re not trying to get all up in your biznez, Ali.
