Quotes about trees
page 5

“If invisible people eat invisible food does invisible wind blow invisible trees?”

Cecelia Ahern book If You Could See Me Now

Source: If You Could See Me Now

People, Food

“The trees like lungs filling with air
My sister, the mean one, pulling my hair”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Sister

“What miracle is this? This giant tree.
It stands ten thousand feet high
But doesn't reach the ground. Still it stands.
Its roots must hold the sky.”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Source: House of Leaves

“Vitally, the human race is dying. It is like a great uprooted tree, with its roots in the air. We must plant ourselves again in the universe.”

D.H. Lawrence book Lady Chatterley's Lover

Source: Lady Chatterley's Lover

Universe

“It is said that in some countries trees will grow, but will bear no fruit because there is no winter there.”

John Bunyan (1628–1688) English Christian writer and preacher

Winter, Country

“You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Flowers, Bird, Help

“Simon was still trying to work out how Shadowhunter government and also Shadowhunter family trees worked. They all seemed to be related to each other and it was very disturbing.”

Cassandra Clare (1973) American author

Source: Welcome to Shadowhunter Academy

Family

“In my childhood I led the life of a sage, when I grew up I started climbing trees”

Philip Roth book The Ghost Writer

Source: The Ghost Writer

Life, Childhood

“Time for bed.” I held my fist out. One by one, my flock stacked theirs on top, and then we headed up into the trees to sleep the sleep of the innocent. Well, okay, maybe not so innocent. But the sleep of the much less guilty than others, for sure.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Final Warning

Sleep, Time

“I said to the almond tree: "Speak to me of God."
and the almond tree blossomed.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

The Fratricides (1964)
Source: Report to Greco

God

“Out of used furniture she made a tree.”

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) poet from the United States

Source: The Complete Poems

“Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads
The wind is passing by.”

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) English poet

Who Has Seen the Wind? http://www.repeatafterus.com/title.php?i=1191, st. 2 (1872).

“All it takes,” said Crake, “is the elimination of one generation. One generation of anything. Beetles, trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French, whatever. Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it’s game over forever.”

Margaret Atwood book Oryx and Crake

Source: Oryx and Crake

Game, Time

“The Lorax: Which way does a tree fall?
The Once-ler: Uh, down?
The Lorax: A tree falls the way it leans. Be careful which way you lean.”

Dr. Seuss The Lorax

Source: The Lorax

Way

“Two lost things that had survived the seas and arrived on a coastline. What did they do? They implanted themselves in the sand and grew into trees and lined the beaches. Sometimes a lot can come of being all washed up. You can really grow.”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Book of Tomorrow

Sea

“Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.”

Frank O'Hara book Meditations in an Emergency (book)

Source: Mayakovsky, st. 4, from Meditations in an Emergency (1957).

Beauty, Thinking, Laughter, Waiting

“Maybe God created the desert so that man could appreciate the date trees”

Paulo Coelho book The Alchemist

Source: The Alchemist

God

“Thalia blushed. "Hi, Lord Apollo."

Zeus's girl, yes? Makes you my half sister. Used to be a tree, didn't you? Glad you're back. I hate it when pretty girls turn into trees. Man, I remember one time—”

Rick Riordan book The Titan's Curse

Source: The Titan's Curse

Hate, Girl, Sister, Time

“Pick a tree. I'll carve our initials into it." -Fang”

James Patterson (1947) American author

“It didn't matter if I got bitten by a dog or I ripped my pants on the fence post or I poked myself in the eye with a tree branch that I was crawling over, it was all about the shortcut. My whole life I took the shortcut, and I ended up lost.”

Anthony Kiedis book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

Life, Dogs

“A great book is a homing device
For navigating paradise.

A good book somehow makes you care
About the comfort of a chair.

A bad book owes to many trees
A forest of apologies.”

J. Patrick Lewis (1942) American children's writer and poet

Books, Home

“i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

65 - This poem was used by Eric Whitacre for an a capella SATB chorus titled "i thank you God".
XAIPE (1950)

God, Dreams, Nature

“Josh speculated about the hypothetical contents of an imaginary porn magazine for intelligent trees that would be entitled Enthouse.”

Lev Grossman The Magicians

Source: The Magicians

Intelligence

“We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

Source: " A Wind Storm in the Forests of the Yuba http://books.google.com/books?id=zj2gAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA55", Scribner's Monthly, volume XVII, number 1 (November 1878) pages 55-59 (at page 59); modified slightly and reprinted in The Mountains of California http://www.sierraclub.org/john_muir_exhibit/writings/the_mountains_of_california/ (1894), chapter 10: A Wind-Storm in the Forests  <br class="br">Context: We all travel the milky way together, trees and men; but it never occurred to me until this storm-day, while swinging in the wind, that trees are travelers, in the ordinary sense. They make many journeys, not very extensive ones, it is true; but our own little comes and goes are only little more than tree-wavings — many of them not so much.

Men, Way, Travel

“It isn't often that Aunt Dahlia, lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Right Ho, Jeeves

Source: Right Ho, Jeeves (1934)

Men, Strong, Passion

“His grandfather had often told him that he tried too hard to move trees when a wiser man would walk around them.”

Patricia Briggs book Hunting Ground

Source: Hunting Ground

“And see the peaceful trees extend
their myriad leaves in leisured dance—
they bear the weight of sky and cloud
upon the fountain of their veins.”

Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) poet, critic, translator

Peace, Dance

“The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.”

Louise Penny book The Brutal Telling

Source: The Brutal Telling

Beauty, Nature, Time, Perfection

“The first of the
line is tied to a tree and the last is being eaten by the ants.”

Gabriel García Márquez book One Hundred Years of Solitude

Source: One Hundred Years of Solitude

“[Roland] jerked back too fast to see, and his fist was suddenly connecting with my chin. I didn't pass out, but my body went limp. Part of me was screaming silently. The other part was saying, 'Oh, what pretty trees.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Blue Moon

Source: Blue Moon

Jerk, Parting

“For, through the twilight sounds of crickets and sighing trees, a faint, surprising wisp of music came floating to them and all three turned toward it, toward the wood.”

Natalie Babbitt book Tuck Everlasting

Source: Tuck Everlasting

Music

“Water and stone
Flesh and bone
Night and morn
Rose and thorn
Tree and wind
Heart and mind”

Juliet Marillier book Cybele's Secret

Source: Cybele's Secret

Water, Heart, Night

“My troubles are all over, and I am at home; and often before I am quite awake, I fancy I am still in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with my friends under the apple trees.”

Anna Sewell book Black Beauty

Source: Black Beauty

Home

“Do you say that tree isn't pretty cause it doesn't look like that tree? We're all trees. You're a tree. I'm a tree. You've got to love your body, Eve. You've got to love your tree. Love your tree. (Leah)”

Eve Ensler (1953) American playwright, performer, feminist, activist and artist

Source: The Good Body

Love

“I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

Bird, Singing

“People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Children, People

“A few minutes ago every tree was excited, bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling, tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship. But though to the outer ear these trees are now silent, their songs never cease. Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings, while incense is ever flowing from the balsam bells and leaves. No wonder the hills and groves were God's first temples, and the more they are cut down and hewn into cathedrals and churches, the farther off and dimmer seems the Lord himself.”

John Muir book My First Summer in the Sierra

Terry Gifford, EWDB, pages 243-244
Source: 1860s, My First Summer in the Sierra, 1869

Life, God, Music

“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree.”

Emily Brontë (1818–1848) English novelist and poet

Beauty, Autumn

“You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest,
and I smile, and am silent,
and even my soul remains quiet:
it lives in the other world
which no one owns.
The peach trees blossom,
The water flows.”

Li Bai (701–762) Chinese poet of the Tang dynasty poetry period

World, Smile, Home, Soul

“Then the two friends leaned back and watched the sun rise clear of the trees.
“Best time of day,” said Will.
Yes,” Horace agreed. “What’s for breakfast?”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: Erak's Ransom

Time, Sun

“Ask the dust on the road! Ask the Joshua trees standing alone where the Mojave begins. Ask them about Camilla Lopez, and they will whisper her name.”

John Fante (1909–1983) 1909–1983; American novelist, short story writer and screenwriter of Italian descent

Source: The Big Hunger

“They will come back, come back again,
As long as the red earth rolls.
He never wasted a leaf or a tree.
Do you think he would squander souls?”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

Soul, Thinking

“If trees could speak they wouldn't”

Dorianne Laux (1952) American poet

Source: Facts About the Moon

“A tree doesn't make a thunderstorm, but any fool knows where lightning's going to strike.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Wise Man's Fear

Source: The Wise Man's Fear

Fools

“Trace cursed. He actually wanted to hit something, but a tree would break his knuckles, he didn't want to put another dent in the truck, and Dare would hit back.”

Lori Foster (1958) American writer

Source: Trace of Fever

“I'm on such a dangerous road, Milena. You're standing firmly near a tree, young, beautiful, your eyes subduing with their radiance the suffering world.”

Franz Kafka book Letters to Milena

Source: Letters to Milena

World, Beauty, Suffering

“A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.”

Joanne Harris book Runemarks

Source: Runemarks

“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Life, Summer

“Sometimes it’s like people are a million times more beautiful to you in your mind. It’s like you see them through a special lens — but maybe if it’s how you see them, that’s how they really are. It’s like the whole tree falling in the forest thing.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

People, Beauty, Time

“It was a pleasure, Enna, Finn, tree rat."
"Did she just call you tree rat?”

Shannon Hale River Secrets

Source: River Secrets

Pleasure

“The first rule of hurricane coverage is that every broadcast must begin with palm trees bending in the wind.”

Carl Hiaasen (1953) journalist, columnist and novelist from the United States

“That should have been my strategy! By the time I’ve worked through the emotions of surprise, admiration, anger, jealousy, and frustration, I’m watching that reddish mane of hair disappear into the trees well out of shooting range.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Jealousy, Time, Anger

“Time cannot be packaged and ribboned and left under trees for christmas morning. Time can't be given. But it can be shared”

Cecelia Ahern (1981) Irish novelist

Source: The Gift

Time, Christmas

“Give me the storm and tempest of thought and action, rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith! Banish me from Eden when you will; but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge!”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Source: The Works Of Robert G. Ingersoll, Vol. Iii

Faith, Knowledge, Dead

“If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Variant: It ought to come like the leaves to the trees, or it better not come at all.

Nature

“a tree is never just a tree, it is bigger and deeper and wiser than a girl like you will ever be.”

Juliet Marillier book Heir to Sevenwaters

Source: Heir to Sevenwaters

Girl

“The three girls were sitting and lying beside her, holding one another, weeping, their arms and legs and hair tangled like the roots of close trees, sobs shaking them like leaves in a high wind.”

Shannon Hale Forest Born

Source: Forest Born

Girl, Lying

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960) <br class="br">Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

People, Health, Books, World

“When the ax came into the forest the trees said the handle is one of us.”

Alice Walker (1944) American author and activist

“Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches.”

Zora Neale Hurston book Their Eyes Were Watching God

C. 2, p. 10.
Source: Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Life, Suffering

“I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Letter to Cassandra (1811-05-31) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters
Source: Jane Austen's Letters

Dead

“Through three cheese trees three free fleas flew. While these fleas flew, freezy breeze blew. Freezy breeze made these three trees freeze. Freezy trees made these trees' cheese freeze. That's what made these three free fleas sneeze.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

“Caddy smelled like trees.”

William Faulkner book The Sound and the Fury

Source: The Sound and the Fury

“In the morning light, I remembered how much I loved the sound of wind through the trees. I laid back and closed my eyes, and I was comforted by the sound of a million tiny leaves dancing on a summer morning.”

Patrick Carman book The Tenth City

Source: The Tenth City

Love, Light, Dance, Summer

“i was momentarily sidetracked by the vision of Eric herding a cow into a trailer and driving it to the shoulder of the the interstate and shooing it into the trees.”

Charlaine Harris book Living Dead in Dallas

Source: Living Dead in Dallas

“No matter how dim the light filtering through the trees is, you can still try your best to grasp it. -Kaien Cross”

Matsuri Hino Japanese manga artist

Source: Vampire Knight, Vol. 16

Light

“For we are like tree trunks in the snow. In appearance they lie smoothly and a little push should be enough to set them rolling. No, it can't be done, for they are firmly wedded to the ground. But see, even that is only appearance.”

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) author

Lie, Wedding, Appearance

“You have more balls than a Christmas tree.”

Danielle Steel (1947) American author of romance novels

Christmas

“The wrongs done to trees, wrongs of every sort, are done in the darkness of ignorance and unbelief, for when the light comes, the heart of the people is always right.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

about 1900, page 429
John of the Mountains, 1938

People, Light, Heart

“and even the trees we walked
under
seemed
less than
trees
and more like everything
else.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Source: You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

“The full moon rises. The fog clings to the lowest branches of the spruce trees. The man steps out of the darkest corner of the forest and finds himself transformed into…

A monkey?

I think not.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Thinking

“Love does not grown on trees or brought in the market, but if one wants to be "LOVED" one must first know how to give (unconditional)LOVE..”

Kabir (1440–1518) Indian mystic poet

Love

“I was a pebble. I was a leaf. I was the jagged branch of a tree. I was nothing to them and they were everything to me.”

Cheryl Strayed book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Source: Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

“I will be waiting by candlelight in our tree house of the mind.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

Source: Horns

Waiting, Housing

“An oak tree is an oak tree. That is all it has to do. If an oak tree is less than an oak tree, then we are all in trouble.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Being Peace

“Laila: Tell your secrets to the wind but don't blame it for telling the trees.”

Khaled Hosseini book A Thousand Splendid Suns

Source: A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007)

Secret

“Image: An Oak Tree. The oak that resists the wind loses its branches one by one, and with nothing left to protect it, the trunk fi nally snaps. The oak that bends lives long er, its trunk grow ing wider, its roots deeper and more tenacious.”

Robert Greene book The 48 Laws of Power

Source: The 48 Laws of Power

“I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees,
Which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please!”

Dr. Seuss The Lorax

Source: The Lorax (1971)
Context: I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees,
Which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please!
But I'm also in charge of the brown Bar-ba-loots,
Who played in the shade in their Bar-ba-loot suits,
And happily lived, eating Truffula fruits.
Now, thanks to your hacking my trees to the ground,
There's not enough Truffula fruit to go 'round!
And my poor Bar-ba-loots are all getting the crummies
Because they have gas, and no food, in their tummies!