What are flowers without the bees,
What of grasses without the breeze?
Nothing the wind if not for the trees,
Nada la quesadilla sin el cheese.
—Terri Guillemets
ha ha
A life with papers
Any real writer — or reader — has had a papercut on the forehead at least once.
—Terri Guillemets
They’ll be back
you can shout it to every star
bare your soul up to the moon
cast your problems nightly afar —
but they always flood back by noon
—Terri Guillemets
Stages of Papago Orange Blossom
segmented,
fermented,
demented.
—Terri Guillemets
entry in my beer tasting journal for Huss Brewing Co.’s Papago Orange Blossom, a delicious Arizona vanilla mandarin wheat ale
There are actually eight
It’s a sin to waste chocolate. It’s in the Bible.
—Terri Guillemets
P.S. Thanks to my mom for letting me know that she saw a Viabella greeting card with this quote on it at a nearby store. The inside reads: “Wishing you a birthday that’s sinfully delicious.”
Unreasonably warm in Phoenix
We live in a desert Arizona town
where winter is brown and green
and summer is green and brown
with 300 annual days of sunscreen
our autumn’s unreasonably warm
and spring time is mostly too hot
here we live for every rain storm
and the seasons—well, they’re not.
—Terri Guillemets
Poem of the April Palo Verde
Yellow.
Freaking.
Everywhere.
—Terri Guillemets
Classics declassified
Grass of Walt
[D!@%] of Moby
Boz gets Lit
Bard’s the [$h¡t]
—Terri Guillemets
Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare
image created 2023 with TapUniverse AI Art Generator, Rhonna Collage,
Calm in a cup
Tea is a magical calming elixir — like, as if coffee had a therapist.
—Terri Guillemets
Splat!
I don’t cry over spilt milk, but a fallen scoop of ice cream is enough to ruin my whole day.
—Terri Guillemets
P.S. Thank you to crossword constructor Judge Victor Fleming of Arkansas and his puzzle partner Bonnie Gentry of Arizona for turning this quotation into a crossword puzzle titled “Mishap to Avoid at Ben & Jerry’s,” published in Simon & Schuster Mega Crossword Puzzle Book #7. Judge Fleming is also responsible for outing me in a 2008 article at a time when I had been trying to run The Quote Garden in a more-or-less anonymous manner. But since it happened anyway, I decided to go with it and very shortly thereafter added my photo to the website and shared a little more about myself. So it turned out to be a good thing even though at first I was a tad mortified.
Real funny
My life is half reality show, half Saturday morning cartoons.
—Terri Guillemets
Talking inside out
Friends make you smile — best friends make you giggle ’til you pee
—Terri Guillemets
Nineteen eighty-seven
Been collecting quotes
since nineteen eighty-seven,
Be collecting them ’til
the day I go to Heaven.
And if by chance
it’s to the contrary,
Here’s hoping Hell
has a great library!
—Terri Guillemets
P.S. I had this on the “about me” page of The Quote Garden until I was going through the memory box my mom made for me and came across the essay I wrote in school about The Scarlet Letter, which was the book that really got me seriously hooked on collecting quotations. And this essay was dated October 1986. I had only taken a best guess about the 1987 date. So now with dated proof, I had to ‘eighty-six’ this silly little autobio poem. But I’m keeping it anyway as a scrapbook memory for myself. I’ve yet to attempt a rewrite rhyming the proper year, although ‘Styx’ has great literary potential.