“The tree does not die. It waits.”

— Hermann Hesse , book Demian

Source: Demian (1919), p. 149
Context: Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The tree does not die. It waits." by Hermann Hesse?

Hermann Hesse photo

Hermann Hesse 168

German writer 1877–1962

Related quotes

“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

“I’m not waiting to die, I don’t believe I’ll die, I am waiting for something else.
To arrive. To understand. To be at my destination.”

China Miéville book The Scar

Part 1 “Channels”, Interlude II (p. 65)
The Scar (2002)

“We're waiting for the dinosaurs to die out. They will die. And then we'll move into their homes.”

Kurt Cobain (1967–1994) American musician and artist

1992-02-14 at Kokusai Koryu Centre, Osaka, Japan
Stage banter

“Maybe I'll be like that man in "The Hanging Tree'. Still waiting for an answer.”

Suzanne Collins book Mockingjay

Source: Mockingjay

“It is debasing to die the way one does; it is intolerable to be exposed to an end over which we have no control, an end which lies in wait for us, overthrows us, casts us into the unnameable. ”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

The New Gods (1969)

“I'm tired of waiting to die. Let's go out.”

Charles Bukowski book Hot Water Music

Source: Hot Water Music

“I shall be like that tree; I shall die from the top.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

Predicting that he would go senile, as quoted in The Highway of Letters and its Echos of Famous Footsteps (1893) by Thomas Archer, p. 380

“Some national parks have long waiting lists for camping reservations. When you have to wait a year to sleep next to a tree, something is wrong.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

“It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”

Patrick Rothfuss book The Name of the Wind

Source: The Name of the Wind

“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”

Carrie Fisher book Wishful Drinking

Variant: Resentment is like drinking a poison and waiting for the other person to die.
Source: Wishful Drinking

Related topics