Dead Trees Quotes

• If you look closely at a tree you'll notice it's knots and dead branches, just like our bodies. What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.

  Matthew Fox

  Beauty, Imperfection, Tree

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• The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Winning, Sky, Tree

  36 Copy quote

• Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph-green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.

  Cyril Connolly

  Tree, Green, Epitaph

  David Pryce-Jones, Cyril Connolly (1983). “Cyril Connolly: journal and memoir”, HarperCollins

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• They were trying to run, trying to hide. But the rock would not hide them; the dead tree gave no shelter.

  Stephen King

  Running, Rocks, Tree

  Stephen King (2008). “Carrie”, p.47, Anchor

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• As I look back on my fondness for the outdoors, and specifically the elements in nature that I find visually stimulating, I am surprised at how often the theme of dead trees arise. I guess it's that each one seems to have a story of its own, representing many years of living through everything that nature could throw at them.

  Cory Trepanier

  Years, Tree, Looks

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• If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

  Carl Linnaeus

  Motivational, Death, Nature

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• At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it.

  Albert Camus

  Sky, Tree, Looks

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• The old dead trees are the most fascinating - the countless trees lying in the gullies and up the hills that fell perhaps a century ago, pulling up their roots from the earth as they toppled. The great upheavals left rocks in their huge tentacles and, as they slowly rot, the trunks are home to populations of creatures, from goannas to wild pigs. As grey as tombstones in a cemetery they lie there, having outlasted generations of farmers, as they'll outlast me. In their own way they are as beautiful, more beautiful, than living trees.

  Phillip Adams

  Beauty, Beautiful, Tombstone

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• A dead tree, falling, made less havoc than a live one. It seemed as though a live tree went down fighting, like an animal.

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

  Fall, Fighting, Animal

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• Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Inspirational, Life, Insperational

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “The Maine Woods: The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, Volume III (of 20)”, p.71, Trajectory Inc

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• You like it under the trees in autumn, because everything is half dead. The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves and repeats words without menaing.

  Wallace Stevens

  Moving, Fall, Autumn

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens”, p.288, Vintage

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• Jesus cursed a living tree and it died; Mohammed blessed a dead tree and it lived.

  John Remsburg

  Jesus, Blessed, Tree

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• A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is shadow under this red rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

  T. S. Eliot

  Morning, Fear, Rocks

  The Waste Land l. 25 (1922)

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• There appears to be a deeply embedded uneasiness in our culture about throwing away junk that can be reused. Perhaps, in part, it is guilt about consumption. Perhaps it also feels unnatural. Mother Nature doesn't throw stuff away. Dead trees, birds, beetles and elephants are pretty quickly recycled by the system.

  William Booth

  Mother, Elephants, Tree

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• I can drown a drink of water. I can kill a dead tree. Don't mess with Muhammad Ali.

  Muhammad Ali

  Boxing, Water, Tree

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• The real jewel of my disease-ridden woodlot is the prothonotary warbler. ... The flash of his gold-and-blue plumage amid the dank decay of the June woods is in itself proof that dead trees are transmuted into living animals, and vice versa.

  Aldo Leopold

  Real, Animal, Jewels

  Aldo Leopold (2013). “Aldo Leopold: A Sand County Almanac & Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology: (Library of America #238)”, p.104, Library of America

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• The Good Lord Bird don't run in a flock. He Flies alone. You know why? He's searching. Looking for the right tree. And when he sees that tree, that dead tree that's taking all the nutrition and good things from the forest floor. He goes out and he gnaws at it, and he gnaws at it till the thing gets tired and it falls down. And the dirt from it raises other trees. It gives them good things to eat. It makes 'em strong. Gives 'em life. And the circle goes 'round.

  James McBride

  Running, Strong, Fall

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• He kissed back, all the pages spread out around us like riddles waiting to be solved. Let them wait. Let my genes unravel, my hinges come loose. If my fate rests in the hands of a madman, let death come and bring its worse. I'll take the ruined craters of laboratories, the dead trees, this city with ashes in the oxygen, if it means freedom. I'd sooner die here than live a hundred years with wires in my veins.

  Lauren DeStefano

  Mean, Fate, Hands

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• To me, all the juice of a book is in an unpublished manuscript, and the published book is like a dead tree - just good for cutting up and building your house with.

  Christina Stead

  Book, Cutting, House

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• What I really think is that our current model of copyright is fundamentally broken. We badly need to replace it with a different system for remunerating creators, which gets it the hell out of the face of the public (who were never aware of it to begin with in the pre-internet dead tree era). Unfortunately, the current copyright model is enshrined in international trade treaty law, making it almost impossible to work around.

  Charles Stross

  Thinking, Law, Broken

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• A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough.

  Robin Hobb

  Dirty, Men, Rivers

  Robin Hobb (2013). “The Complete Soldier Son Trilogy: Shaman’s Crossing, Forest Mage, Renegade’s Magic”, p.102, HarperCollins UK

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• Tragedy was foresworn, in ritual denial of the ripe knowledge that we are drawing away from one another, that we share only one thing, share the fear of belonging to another, or to others, or to God; love or money, tender equated in advertising and the world, where only money is currency, and under dead trees and brittle ornaments prehensile hands exchange forgeries of what the heart dare not surrender.

  William Gaddis

  Heart, Drawing, Hands

  William Gaddis (1955). “The Recognitions: A Novel”

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• I am a veteran of the War on Christmas. I am just emerging from a battlefield strewn with dead trees and torn shreds of brightly colored wrapping paper.

  Henry Rollins

  War, Tree, Wrapping Paper

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• Sycamore trees were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt and are the first trees represented in ancient art. The sycamore, also, was sacred. Peasants gather around them in rituals. In the Land of the Dead there was a sycamore in whose branches the goddess Hathor lived; she leaned out of it giving sustenance and water to deceased souls. In Memphis, Hathor's epithet was Lady of the Sycamore.

  Larry Gates

  Life, Art, Egypt

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• In the battlefield men grapple each other and die;
  The horses of the vanquished utter lamentable cries to heaven,
  While ravens and kites peck at human entrails,
  Carry them up in their flight, and hang them on the branches of dead trees.

  Li Bai

  Veterans Day, Horse, Men

  Li Po, “Nefarious War”

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