Quotes by American Authors - Page 244

...trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.
Ray Bradbury
The three species of pine native to Wisconsin (white, red and jack) differ radically in their opinions about marriageable age. The precocious jackpine sometimes bloom and bears cones a year or two after leaving the nursery, and a few of my 13-year-old jacks already boast of grandchildren. My 13-year-old reds first bloomed this year, but my whites have not yet bloomed; they adhere closely to the Anglo-Saxon doctrine of free, white, and twenty-one.
Aldo Leopold
We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
Douglas R. Hofstadter
There is a fearful moment of reckoning before us should it ever chance that when all our trees shall have been sacrificed on the altar of the patron-fiend of news, the newspaper supply shall suddenly be cut off and we find ourselves some fine morning minus our tidbits of shame and failure and disaster, left to the companionship of our own thoughts. Dante never imagined a terror like this.
Adeline Knapp
I have sometimes thought that the reason the trees are so quiet in the summer is that they are in a sort of ecstasy; it is in winter, when the biologists tell us they sleep, that they are most awake, because the sun is gone and they are addicts without their drug, sleeping restlessly and often waking, walking the dark corridors of forests searching for the sun.
Gene Wolfe
Death is like that, it blinks, we blink; not always able to see the Stop signs, hiding behind trees in the corner of the roads.
Anthony Liccione
A tree can be tempted out of its winter dormancy by a few hours of southerly sun—the readiness to believe in spring is stronger than sleep or sanity.
Amy Leach
Every falling leaf reminds me that I too will soon be separated from these trees. Trying to capture freedom is like trying to catch a falling leaf. Occasionally you may grab one out of the air and hold it in your hands, but now what?
Daniel J. Rice
I hear hundreds of years of life. I hear wind and rain and fire and beetles. I hear the seasons changing and birds and squirrels. I hear the life of the trees this wood came from.
Garth Stein
If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top – ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.
Mark Twain
Here I find the true nature of the tree - not in the bulk of its shape but in the way its form alters my vision of the world.
Stefanie Brook Trout
Because it wasn't merely that the trees were speaking to them. It was that the trees themselves were sentient beings, capable of watching their movements. Was it only the trees in this strange wood, or did every tree observe their movements? Had they always been trying to speak to them? There was no way of knowing, either, if the trees were good of bad, if they lived or hatred humans, if they had principles or compassion. They were like aliens, Gansey thought. Aliens that we have treated very badly for a very long time.
Maggie Stiefvater
He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.
Denis Johnson
In November, the trees are standing all sticks and bones. Without their leaves, how lovely they are, spreading their arms like dancers. They know it is time to be still.
Cynthia Rylant
If the day comes when our descendants can venture with wonder into chestnut forests, we will have gained back more than a perfect tree. We will have gained a new reason for hope.
Susan Freinkel
You've got nothing that lasts, you know. That's not the first town that ever stood there. There was one before that, and one before that, and one before that one, on back for 900 years. But this tree has stood here all along. What do you make of that, boy?
Natalie Babbitt
Trees down south have a difference to them, a subtle, slinking movement, mile by mile- a gracefulness, a swagger. Lanky trees stretching out their wiry thin, Spanish moss-covered branches, moss that sways and beckons ... come here, come here, it says.
Suzanne Palmieri
She saw night lights in the rooms of the babies who dreamed soft seersucker dreams, drugged happy with the heat, their pink baby bodies curled against worn out cotton, not fearing Hitler yet, their strong, tiny hearts beating in unison with the trees and the creeks and the bayou
Rebecca Wells
The next morning, the earth was strewn with debris from the windstorm the night before. An audience of trees looked down on severed limbs cast about the ground, their hunched and beaten postures reminding me of a congregation of amputees gathered in the wake of a war.
John Burley
That's my little piece of heaven. Go ahead."Ciro followed Remo through the open door to a small enclosed garden. Terra-cotta pots positioned along the top of the stone wall spilled over with red geraniums and orange impatiens. An elm tree with a wide trunk and deep roots filled the center of the garden. Its green leaves and thick branches reached past the roof of Remo's building, creating a canopy over the garden. There was a small white marble birdbath, gray with soot, flanked by two deep wicker armchairs. Remo fished a cigarette out of his pocket, offering another to Ciro as both men took a seat. "This is where I come to think.""Va bene," Ciro said as he looked up into the tree. He remembered the thousands of trees that blanketed the Alps; here on Mulberry Street, one tree with peeling gray bark and holes in its leaves was cause for celebration.
Adriana Trigiani
There were so many things a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree.
Ray Bradbury
They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.
Robin Hobb
The trees reach up above me toward the sky, stretching out their great limbs in an intricate pattern that reminds me of the pattern of light... the pattern shifting back and forth as I climb.
Ned Hayes
My arms sometimes move on their own in big flapping motions, as if I might take off, and my hands spin like a hummingbird’s wings.
Ned Hayes
This tree was a vast cylinder of wood. It filled the sky. The limbs reached out above me, a great canopy sheltering the rest of the trees, as if they were its children.
Ned Hayes
I saw the Eagle Tree for the first time on the third Monday of the month of March, which I guess could be considered auspicious if I believed in magic or superstition or religion...
Ned Hayes
She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.
Tom Robbins
The coast redwood is a so-called relict species. It is a tiny remnant of a life form that once spread in splendor and power across the face of nature. The redwood has settled down in California to live near the sea, the way many retired people do.
Richard Preston
The K-T impact had no evident long-lasting effect on the redwoods. It's possible that, after the impact, the redwoods sprouted up from the remains of their root systems, rising up in fairy rings in a ruined world ...
Richard Preston
... tree has had a stroke, and its top dies. A redwood can deal with a stroke. It simply grows a new top in a few centuries.
Richard Preston
The coast redwood is the tallest species of tree on earth. The tallest redwoods today are between 350 and close to 380 feet in height--thirty-five to thirty-eight stories tall. The crown of a tree is its radiant array of limbs and branches, covered with leaves. The crowns of the tallest redwoods can sometimes look like the plume of exhaust from a rocket taking off.
Richard Preston
Turning, she looked out at the icy landscape, the soaring trees, branches dark and bitten blue with frost. And for a moment, she had something like a premonition, a feeling that something terrible was watching her, something hungry and sick. She could nearly hear it out there, panting between the trees, its breath ragged and spoiled.
McCormick Templeman
The branches are a storm around me, and I fall into a deep well of green. The needles and limbs rush past. It is a whirling motion of green and brown branches.
Ned Hayes
The forest was all around me now... The ground soft and warm with light and growth... I could almost hear the ceaseless excavations of the flowing bloodstream underneath the earth skin of this vast organism. I touched the outreaching roots of the trees... I could feel that nearly invisible network of capillary roots... I breathed in and out. I was part of the forest. I was alive.
Ned Hayes
A rising tower of wood and needles and branches and great slabs of bark that has grown for hundreds of years. An impossible castle made from air and sunlight, fixed in place by the power of photosynthesis and chlorophyll. Magic. With lights.
Ned Hayes
I fall for centuries of life. First sunlight touches this hillside; and buried inside the earth, a seed stirs, turning slowly in the deep soil like a tadpole turning itself in a dank pool.
Ned Hayes
Many people think trees grow so big from soil and water, but this is not true. Trees get their mass from the air. They gobble up airborne carbon dioxide and perform an act of chemical fission by using the energy from sunshine... Essentially, trees are made of air and sunshine.
Ned Hayes
I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone.
Ned Hayes
The wind is blowing hard around me, the sound is rising in my chest again, and I feel I can fly.And then the branch has shifted under my feet, the deep furrows of the bark have left my back, and I have no time to spread my arms. I am not flying. I am falling.
Ned Hayes
Most of the trees are already dying. All across North America from Mexico to Alaska, forests are dying. Seventy thousand square miles of forest—that's as much land as all of the state of Washington—that much forest has died since I was born. What if I am growing up in a world that will not have trees anymore by the time I am my grandfather's age?
Ned Hayes
I do not like this idea that we have begun to kill off—at great velocity and accelerating speed—all of the things that sustain us. I didn’t like it at all when I first thought of it, but most people around me do not seem that disturbed by it, even though the knowledge of this is obvious and readily available to anyone who looks up trees on the Internet. At least, no one seems bothered, because no one has taken action to amend it. So they must not care. That is the only explanation I can think of for the lack of reaction to this fact.
Ned Hayes
I reached down to feel the soil, and I touched the outreaching roots of the trees that bore horizontally and vertically hundreds of feet through the forest. I stroked the earth with my palm, and I could almost feel that invisible network of capillary roots that sucks moisture and nutrients out of every inch of the soil I was standing on. I breathed in and out. I was part of the forest. I was alive.
Ned Hayes
Twenty minutes into our walk away from the wall put us deep in a forest of fir, pine, cottonwood, and aspen trees. The lush forest floor was alive and danced with shadows cast from an endless parade of swaying trees. As we approached early evening it was cool and peaceful. The sound of the trees moving in the wind high above seemed like a friendly traveling companion, calling us farther and farther into the depths of the forest.
Patrick Carman
We are part of a system that includes trees. Without trees, we will eventually all
Ned Hayes
A stricken tree, a living thing, so beautiful, so dignified, so admirable in its potential longevity, is, next to man, perhaps the most touching of wounded objects.
Edna Ferber
Age, that brings a dwindling to most forms of life, is at its most majestic in the trees. I have seen living olives that were planted when Caesar was in Gaul. I remember, in Illinois woods, a burr oak which was bent over as a sapling a hundred years ago, to mark an Indian portage trail, and the thews in that flexed bough were still in the prime of life. Compared to that, the strongest human sinew is feeble and quick to decay. Yet structure in both cases is cellular; life in both is protoplasmic. A tree drinks water as I do, and breathes oxygen. There is the difference that it exhales more oxygen than it consumes, so that it sweetens the air where it grows. It lays the dust and tempers the wind. Even when it is felled, it but enters on a new kind of life. Sawn and seasoned and finished, it lays bare the hidden beauty of its heart, in figures and grains more lovely than the most premeditated design. It is stronger, now, than it was in the living tree, and may bear great strains and take many shapes.
Donald Culross Peattie
Prying out a stump reminded him of how deeply a tree clung to the ground, how tenacious a hold it had on a place. Though he was not a sentimental man - he did not cry when his children died, he simply dug the graves and buried them - James was silent each time he killed a tree, thinking of its time spent in that spot. He never did this with the animals he hunted - they were food, and transient, passing through this world and out again, as people did. But trees felt permanent - until you had to cut them down.
Tracy Chevalier
The campus spreads around him like the verdant pleasure garden of an ancient king. He is enraptured by the enormous trees that lift branches like cathedral roofs overhead, shoot roots like polished ballroom floors underfoot. In the hot afternoons he leaves the crowded rooms to study under the protection of these spreading giants.
Nayomi Munaweera
He could not tell all of the California pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bushop from the knobcone and the Monterey.
Tracy Chevalier
If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England.
Tracy Chevalier
Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.
Paulette Jiles
Trees are obviously a lot less mobile than, say, trogons—tropical birds common in Manú—or even ticks. But in a cloud forest, trees structure the ecosystem, much as corals structure a reef. Certain types of insects depend on certain types of trees, and certain sorts if birds depend on those insects, and so on up the food chain. The reverse is also true: animals are critical to the survival of the forest. They are the pollinators and seed dispersers, and the birds prevent the insects from taking over. At the very least . . . global warming will restructure ecological communities. Different groups if trees will respond differently to warming, and so contemporary associations will break down. New ones will form. In this planet-wide restructuring, some species will thrive. . . . Others will fall behind and eventually drop out.
Elizabeth Kolbert
In New York, when a tree dies, nobody mourns that it was cut down in its prime. Nobody counts the rings, notifies the loved ones. There are other trees. We can always squeeze in one more. Mind the tourists. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't wanna live there.
Sarah Kay
They reached the summit of a shallow incline and were greeted with a surprising vista of bluebells that blanketed the forest floor. It was like stumbling into a dream, the cerulean haze seeping between the trunks of oak and beech and ash. The smell of bluebells was everywhere, the perfumed air feeling heavy and rich in her lungs.Pausing by a slender tree trunk, Annabelle curled her arm around it loosely and stared at the stands of bluebells with surprised pleasure. "Lovely," she murmured, her face gleaming in the shadow cast by the canopy of ancient, interlaced branches."Yes." But Hunt was looking at her, not the bluebells, and one glance at his expression caused the blood to tingle in her veins.
Lisa Kleypas
It is unclear how much longer people will write on dried and flattened wood. Trees do so much for humans and for our planet that it hardly seems fair to ask them to carry our thoughts as well. From "Life from an RNA World: The Ancestor Within.
Michael Yarus
Soon the maroon-throated howls would echo back from the other trees, father down the beach, until the whole jungle filled with roaring trees. As it was in the beginning, so it is every morning of the world.
Barbara Kingsolver
To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe.
Henry Ward Beecher
Planting trees, I myself thought for a long time, was a feel-good thing, a nice but feeble response to our litany of modern-day environmental problems. In the last few years, though, as I have read many dozens of articles and books and interviewed scientists here and abroad, my thinking on the issue has changed. Planting trees may be the single most important ecotechnology that we have to put the broken pieces of our planet back together.
Jim Robbins
Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?
Ronald Reagan
He'd grown unused to woods like this. He'd become accustomed to the Northwest, evergreen and shaded dark. Here he was surrounded by soft leaves, not needles; leaves that carried their deaths secretly inside them, that already heard the whispers of Autumn. Roots and branches that knew things.
Michael Montoure