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I have to keep up with the scientific literature as part of my job, but increasingly I found myself reading things that weren't really relevant to my academic work, but were relevant to gardening.

Most young people find botany a dull study. So it is, as taught from the text-books in the schools; but study it yourself in the fields and woods, and you will find it a source of perennial delight.

I don't like to read. The only things I read are gossip columns. If someone gives me a book, it had better have lots of pictures.

My books are, in a way, a record of my life - that part of it that came to flower and fruit in my mind.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming of themselves like grass.

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

You will be hard pressed to read another book that understands you as well as 'Leaves of Grass' does. It was made for you in the way that the constellations were made for you. It understands and makes space for your doubts, your love, the guilt and passions of your life and waits for you.

I know my corn plants intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.