Chinon

"What Family doesn't have its ups and downs." 

(Eleanor of Aquitaine-The Lion in Winter. James Goldman)

"It is my feeling that time ripens all things; with time all things are revealed; time is the father of truth."

(Francoise Rabelais)

Villandry

"After I'd drawn the grasses, I started seeing. Whereas if you'd just photographed them, you wouldn't be looking as intently as you do when you are drawing, so it wouldn't affect you so much."

(Martin Gayford/David Hockney)

" Drawing is the art of being able to leave an accurate record of the experience of what one isn't, of what one doesn't know."

(Brett Whiteley)

Giverny

"My life has been nothing but a faliure."

(Claude Monet)

"Monets garden must be included with his works, because he combined the magic of an adaptation of nature with the work of a painter of light."

(George Clemenceau)

Vernon and Giverny

"France has the only two things toward which we drift as we grow older. Intelligence and good manners."

(F Scott Fitzgerald)

"If there were no frenchwomen, life wouldn't be worth living."

(Friedrich Engels)

Flossy

"A child is a curly, dimpled lunatic."

(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"How is it that little children are so intellegent and men so stupid? It must be education that does it."

(Alexander Dumas)

Florence

"A wise parent humours the desire for independent action so as to become the friend and advisor when his absolute rule shall cease."

(Elizabeth Gaskell)

"In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up , there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice."

(Charles Dickens)

The New Forest

"Leaves turn to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves."

(David Mitchell)

"I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do."

(Willa Cather)

The New Forest

"He that planteth a tree is a servant of god, he provideth a kindness for many generations, and faces that he hath not seen shall bless him."

(Henry van Dyke)

"It was very sad under the trees. Although the spring was well adsvanced in the deep shade there was nothing but death rotton leaves, grey and white fungi and over everything a funeral hush."

(Nathanael West)