Trees Quotes - Page 2

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 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

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

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

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

Their bony branches grew barer with each tearing wind. Their tall, leaning forms looked like a gateway to a long-abandoned world. They lived. Their roots were much deeper than mine would ever be. One day my tree would fall and die, gnawed by serpents.

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

He who sees a gold bullion more valuable than a tree has surely an intelligence much less than a donkey’s!

Mehmet Murat ildan

I shall go and sit under a tree…. Which tree, Mma?... Oh, there are many trees in this life, she said. It does not matter which tree you choose, as long as you choose the right one.

Alexander McCall Smith

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

... 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 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

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

All around him the branches of the trees had frozen solid, reaching out white fingers of glass that looked as if they would shatter in any breeze, or chime like musical bells. The world looked strangely magical.

Alex Nye

She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.

Every tree bears fruit in its sacred season.

Lailah Gifty Akita

Do you know how when you're moving really fast in a car, and you're looking at the road, you get sick, but if you look at the trees you're fine? She's my trees, man.

Rebecca Timberlake

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

Scattered trees, never thick enough to be a forest, were everywhere. Shasta, who had lived all his life in an almost tree-less grassland, had never seen so many or so many kinds. If you had been there you would probably have known (he didn't) that he was seeing oaks, beeches, silver birches, rowans, and sweet chestnuts. Rabbits scurried away in every direction as they advanced, and presently they saw a whole herd of fallow deer making off among the trees.

Lucy's eyes began to grow accustomed to the light, and she saw the trees that were nearest her more distinctly. A great longing for the old days when the trees could talk in Narnia came over her. She knew exactly how each of these trees would talk if only she could wake them, and what sort of human form it would put on. She looked at a silver birch; it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face, and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his face and hands, and hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah!- she would be the best of all. She would be a precious goddess, smooth and stately, the lady of the wood.

All the trees of the world appeared to be rushing towards Aslan. But as they drew nearer they looked less like trees, and when the whole crowd, bowing and curtsying and waving thin long arms to Aslan, were all around Lucy, she saw that it was a crowd of human shapes. Pale birch-girls were tossing their heads, willow-women pushed back their hair from their brooding faces to gaze on Aslan, the queenly beeches stood still and adored him, shaggy oak-men, lean and melancholy elms, shock-headed hollies (dark themselves, but their wives all bright with berries) and gay rowans, all bowed and rose again, shouting, "Aslan, Aslan!" in their various husky or creaking or wave-like voices.

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.

Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.

Afterwards, I will have to tie the trees to bamboo poles so the wind will not determine their shape. A tree cannot be given form by the vagaries of the wind.

If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England.

Tracy Chevalier

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

Her ashes are scattered under the oak tree in the southernmost farm fields.Louise remembered that tree from the tour with Laurent - firmly planted, ancient, maybe even wise, reaching for the sky. It seemed a tree that would share the secrets of the universe if one sat underneath its branches long enough, like the stories of the Buddha she'd heard in Sunday school as a kid.

Jessica Rosevear Fox

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

A strong wind was blowing and it felt really very cold and seemed so unfamiliar and bizarre. But the trees remembered me. They bowed gently in the breeze…and called me nearer, welcoming me.

Debalina Haldar

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

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

I just managed to go around with one of the Great Spells in my head for years without going insane, didn't I?' He considered the last question form all angles.'Yes, you did,' he reassured himself. 'You didn't start talking to trees, even when trees started talking to you.

Terry Pratchett

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.

We are part of a system that includes trees. Without trees, we will eventually all

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.

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

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

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

Her eye fell everywhere on lawns and plantations of the freshest green; and the trees, though not fully clothed, were in that delightful state when farther beauty is known to be at hand, and when, while much is actually given to the sight, more yet remains for the imagination.

The road simply ended. No cul-de-sac. No sign like the ones they had seen before: "Private Property. No Trespassing." Or "No Motorized Vehicles Beyond This Point." Just road...then trees.

Robert Liparulo

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

The trail of lime trees outside our building is still a public loo. …where else are they supposed to go to the toilet in a city where public toilets are about as common as UFO sightings?” (pp.281-82)

Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?

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.

Life always bursts the boundaries of formulas. Defeat may prove to have been the only path to resurrection, despite its ugliness. I take it for granted that to create a tree I condemn a seed to rot. If the first act of resistance comes too late it is doomed to defeat. But it is, nevertheless, the awakening of resistance. Life may grow from it as from a seed.

Antoine De Saint Exupery

There are rich counsels in the trees.

Herbert P. Horne

As soon as he had disappeared Deborah made for the trees fringing the lawn, and once in the shrouded wood felt herself safe.She walked softly along the alleyway to the pool. The late sun sent shafts of light between the trees and onto the alleyway, and a myriad insects webbed their way in the beams, ascending and descending like angels on Jacob's ladder. But were they insects, wondered Deborah, or particles of dust, or even split fragments of light itself, beaten out and scattered by the sun?It was very quiet. The woods were made for secrecy. They did not recognise her as the garden did. ("The Pool")

Daphne du Maurier

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

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

The sawdust flew. A slightly sweet fragrance floated in the immediate area. It was a sweet but subtle aroma, neither the scent of pine nor willow, but one from the past that had been forgotten, only to reappear now after all these years, fresher than ever. The workmen occasionally scooped up a handful of sawdust, which they put into their mouths and swallowed. Before that they had chewed on pieces of green bark that they had stripped from the cut wood. It had the same fragrance and it freshened their mouths, so at first that was what they had used. Now even though they were no longer chewing the bark with which they felt such a bond, the stack of corded wood was a very appealing sight. From time to time they gave the logs a friendly slap or kick. Each time they sawed off a section, which rolled to the ground from the sawhorse, they would say:'Off with you - go over there and lie down where you belong.'What they were thinking was that big pieces of lumber like this should be used to make tables or chairs or to repair a house or make window frames; wood like this was hard to find.But now they were cutting it into kindling to be burned in stoves, a sad ending for good wood like this. They could see a comparison with their own lives, and this was a saddening thought. ("North China")

Xiao Hong

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.

The magic of a tree is metaphorical. It celebrates its place. I brings comfort and beauty. Trees celebrate life.

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.

Trees are metaphorical. Their magic is that they bring beauty, comfort, and peace to the land. They celebrate life itself.

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

[S]he realized quite abruptly that this thing which took him off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was against her own little will and instincts—was enormous as the sea. It was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky, its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds was but, as it were the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing kettle. Out yonder—in the Forest further out—the thing that was ever roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing.

Algernon Blackwood

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

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers- celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.

To be poor and be without trees, is to be the most starved human being in the world. To be poor and have trees, is to be completely rich in ways that money can never buy.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

Chuck Palahniuk

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