Cherry Ripe http://www.bartleby.com/106/91.html
“I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.”
No. 477 (6 September 1712).
The Spectator (1711–1714)
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Joseph Addison 226
politician, writer and playwright 1672–1719Related quotes

Cherry-Ripe http://www.bartleby.com/101/168.html.
Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham (1857)

Recreation (1919)
Context: Colonel Roosevelt liked the song of the blackbird so much that he was almost indignant that he had not heard more of its reputation before. He said everybody talked about the song of the thrush; it had a great reputation, but the song of the blackbird, though less often mentioned, was much better than that of the thrush. He wanted to know the reason of this injustice and kept asking the question of himself and me. At last he suggested that the name of the bird must have injured its reputation. I suppose the real reason is that the thrush sings for a longer period of the year than the blackbird and is a more obtrusive singer, and that so few people have sufficient feeling about bird songs to care to discriminate.

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)

“I am much more a gardener than an architect.”
Audio Interview http://www.geekson.com/archives/archiveepisodes/2006/episode080406.htm with Geekson http://www.geekson.com in Episode 54, (4 August 2006)
Context: There are many different kinds of writers, I like to use the analogy of architects and gardeners. There are some writers who are architects, and they plan everything, they blueprint everything, and they know before the drive the first nail into the first board what the house is going to look like and where all the closets are going to be, where the plumbing is going to run, and everything is figured out on the blueprints before they actually begin any work whatsoever. And then there are gardeners who dig a little hole and drop a seed in and water it with their blood and see what comes up, and sort of shape it. They sort of know what seed they've planted — whether it's an oak or an elm, or a horror story or a science fiction story, but they don't how big it's going to be, or what shape it's going to take. I am much more a gardener than an architect.