Old Trees Quotes - Page 2

• The large white owl that with eye is blind, That hath sate for years in the old tree hollow, Is carried away in a gust of wind.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning

  Eye, Years, Wind

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1873). “Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poetical Works”, p.303

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• The forest of Compiegne. Look at it. Like a kind grandmother dozing in her rocking chair. Old trees practicing curtsies in the wind because they still think Louis XIV is king.

  Billy Wilder

  Kings, Grandmother, Thinking

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• The old woman was the kind who would not cut down a large old tree because it was a large old tree.

  Flannery O'Connor

  Hilarious, Cutting, Tree

  Flannery O'Connor (1971). “The Complete Stories”, p.520, Macmillan

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• Once I witnessed a windstorm so severe two 100-year-old trees were uprooted on the spot. The next day, walking among the wreckage, I found the friable nests of birds, completely intact and unharmed on the ground. That the featherweight survive the massive, that this reversal of fortune takes place among us — that is what haunts me. I don’t know what it means.

  Mary Ruefle

  Mean, Years, Two

  Mary Ruefle (2012). “Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures”, p.206, Wave Books

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• While there may be no "right" way to value a forest or a river, there is a wrong way, which is to give it no value at all. How do we decide the value of a 700-year-old tree? We need only to ask how much it would cost to make a new one, or a new river, or even a new atmosphere.

  Paul Hawken

  Years, Rivers, Giving

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• There are those, however, that are not frightened of grief: dropping deep into the sorrow, they find therein a necessary elixir to the numbness. When they encounter one another, when they press their foreheads against the bark of a centuries-old tree...their eyes well with tears that fall easily to the ground. The soil needs this water. Grief is but a gate, and our tears a kind of key opening a place of wonder thats been locked away. Suddenly we notice a sustaining resonance between the drumming heart within our chest and the pulse rising from the ground

  David Abram

  Fall, Grief, Eye

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• The longer it possesseth a man the more he will delight in it, and the older he groweth the more he shall be subject to it; for it dulleth the spirits, and destroyeth the body as ivy doth the old tree, or as the worm that engendereth in the kernal of the nut.

  Walter Raleigh

  Men, Nuts, Ivy

  Sir Walter Raleigh (1829). “The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt: Miscellaneous works”, p.568

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• There is a part of me that will forever want to be walking under autumn leaves, carrying a briefcase containing the works of Shakespeare and Yeats and a portable chess set. I will pass an old tree under which once on a summer night I lay on the grass with a fragrant young woman and we quoted e.e. cummings back and forth.

  Roger Ebert

  Summer, Autumn, Night

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• A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?

  George Orwell

  Regret, Grandchildren, Tree

  George Orwell (2009). “Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays”, p.223, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Broad-streeted Richmond . . . The trees in the streets are old trees used to living with people, Family trees that remember your grandfather's name.

  Stephen Vincent Benet

  Names, People, Tree

  STEPHEN VINCENT BENET (1928). “JOHN BROWN'S BODY”

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• The vine that has grown old on an old tree falls with the ruin of that tree, and through that bad companionship must perish with it.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Fall, Tree, Vines

  Leonardo Da Vinci, General Press (2016). “The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci”, p.495, GENERAL PRESS

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• Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

  Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Tree, Mind, Age

  Mary Roberts Rinehart (1936). “The doctor”

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• I have never as yet gone a step to see a literary lion; but I would go a considerable way to see Emerson, this pioneer in the moral forests of the New World, who applies his axe to the roots of the old trees to hew them down and to open the paths for new planting.

  Fredrika Bremer

  Roots, Tree, Pioneers

  Fredrika Bremer, Adolph Benson, Carrie Catt (2007). “America of the Fifties: Letters of Fredrika Bremer”, p.16, Applewood Books

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• I love The Inn at Palmetto Bluff, an Auberge Property in Bluffton, South Carolina. Its a spectacular corner of the world, with massive old trees lined with Spanish moss, and alligators swimming in the river.

  Gail Simmons

  Swimming, Rivers, Tree

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• Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family--
  Oh how hideous it is
  To see three generations of one house gathered together!
  It is like an old tree with shoots,
  And with some branches rotted and falling.

  Ezra Pound

  Fall, House, Tree

  Ezra Pound (2015). “Delphi Poetical Works of Ezra Pound (Illustrated)”, p.433, Delphi Classics

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• Heaven and Earth are meeting in a storm that, when it's over, will leave the air purer and the leaves fertile, but before that happens, houses will be destroyed, centuries- old trees will topple, paradises will be flooded.

  Paulo Coelho

  Air, House, Tree

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• One time I saw a tiny Joshua tree sapling growing not too far from the old tree. I wanted to dig it up and replant it near our house. I told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight. Mom frowned at me. "You'd be destroying what makes it special," she said. "It's the Joshua tree's struggle that gives it its beauty.

  Jeannette Walls

  Mom, Nice, Struggle

  Jeannette Walls (2009). “The Glass Castle: A Memoir”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• The yard was full of tomato plants about to ripen, and mint, mint, everything smelling of mint, and one fine old tree that I loved to sit under on those cool perfect starry California October nights unmatched anywhere in the world.

  Jack Kerouac

  Night, California, Perfect

  Jack Kerouac (1986). “The Dharma Bums”, p.17, Penguin

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• We were supposed to grow old together, Dolores. Have kids. Take walks under old trees. I wanted to watch the lines etch themselves into your flesh and know when each and every one of them appeared. Die together.

  Dennis Lehane

  Kids, Tree, Together

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• We are all but recent leaves on the same old tree of life and if this life has adapted itself to new functions and conditions, it uses the same old basic principles over and over again. There is no real difference between the grass and the man who mows it.

  Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

  Philosophy, Real, Philosophical

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• This is what I have heard at last the wind in December lashing the old trees with rain unseen rain racing along the tiles under the moon wind rising and falling wind with many clouds trees in the night wind.

  W. S. Merwin

  Rain, Fall, Moon

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• My feet are like gnarled old tree branches.

  Dennis Rodman

  Basketball, Feet, Tree

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• A new home by a gap in the Meng wall; Of the old trees, a few gnarled willows are left. Those who come in the future, who will they be, Grieving in vain for what others had before?

  Wang Wei

  Time, Wall, Home

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• Four hundred year old trees, who draw aliveness from the earth like smoke from the heart of God, we come, not knowing you will hush our little want to be big; we come, not knowing that all the work is so much busyness of mind; all the worry, so much busyness of heart. As the sun warms anything near, being warms everything still and the great still things that outlast us make us crack like leaves of laurel releasing a fragrance that has always been.

  Mark Nepo

  Heart, Knowing, Years

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• Yet I will look upon thy face again, My own romantic Bronx, and it will be A face more pleasant than the face of men. Thy waves are old companions, I shall see A well remembered form in each old tree And hear a voice long loved in thy wild minstrelsy.

  Joseph Rodman Drake

  Men, Voice, Rivers

  Joseph Rodman Drake (1835). “The Culprit Fay: And Other Poems”, p.77

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