c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
Elizabeth walked past just as Mrs. Ferguson, pulling down her wide-brimmed hat, announced that teenagers today were the most inconsiderate creatures she had ever seen. 'I'm afraid I have to agree with you,' Elizabeth had heard her twin say mournfully, clearly distinguishing herself from the inconsiderate teenagers milling all around them.
— Francine Pascal, Rags to Riches
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, The Faithful Gardener: A Wise Tale About That Which Can Never Die
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?
— Chuck Palahniuk, Survivor
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. In the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.
— Max Ehrmann
To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature.
— Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree
But the trees seemed to know me. They whispered among themselves and beckoned me nearer. And looking around, I noticed the other small trees and wild plants and grasses had sprung up under the protection of the trees we had placed there. The trees had multiplied! They were moving. In one small corner of the world, Grandfather's dream was coming true and the trees were moving again.
— Ruskin Bond, Rusty, the Boy from the Hills
In a forest of a hundred thousand trees, no two leaves are alike. And no two journeys along the same path are alike.
— Paulo Coelho, Aleph
Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929
— John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed
The very idea of "managing" a forest in the first place is oxymoronic, because a forest is an ecosystem that is by definition self-managing.
— Bernd Heinrich, The Trees in My Forest
She was sitting in a garden more beautiful than even her rampaging imagination could ever have conjured up, and she was being serenaded by trees.
— Lynn Kurland, Spellweaver
The few trees still upright were stripped of their branches, lonely flagpoles without a nation to claim them.
— Mike Mullin, Ashfall
Trees there were, old as trees can be, huge and grasping with hearts black as sin. Strange trees that some said walked in the night.
— Neil Gaiman, Fables and Reflections
The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.
— George Orwell
To be without trees would, in the most literal way, to be without our roots.
— Richard Mabey, Beechcombings: The narratives of trees
Why pay money for the horror movies? Just go to a street without trees!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
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.
— Jane Austen
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, House of Dark Shadows
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, Slices
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)
— Sarah Turnbull, Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris
Trees, how many of 'em do we need to look at?
— Ronald Reagan
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, The Man Who Planted Trees: Lost Groves, Champion Trees, and an Urgent Plan to Save the Planet
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-Exupéry, Flight to Arras
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, Echoes from the Macabre: Selected Stories
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 Lacuna
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, Selected Stories Of 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.
— Michael Yarus
The magic of a tree is metaphorical. It celebrates its place. I brings comfort and beauty. Trees celebrate life.
— Brent M. Jones
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, Secrets of a Summer Night
Trees are metaphorical. Their magic is that they bring beauty, comfort, and peace to the land. They celebrate life itself.
— Brent M. Jones
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, No Matter the Wreckage
[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, The Man Whom the Trees Loved
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, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
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.
— C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
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.
— C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy
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.
— C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
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.
— C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian
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, News of the World
Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, are another wonder of Outside to me.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
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.
— Deborah Levy, Hot Milk
If redwoods are the backbone of California, oaks are of England.
— Tracy Chevalier, At the Edge of the Orchard
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, At the Edge of the Orchard
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, After the Ballet
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, Island of a Thousand Mirrors
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, Wrinkles in Memory
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, At the Edge of the Orchard
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, American Heartwood
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, The Light Fantastic
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, A Kind of Magic
We are part of a system that includes trees. Without trees, we will eventually all
— Ned Hayes, The Eagle Tree
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, The Dark Hills Divide
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, The Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
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 Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
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 Eagle Tree
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 Eagle Tree
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 Eagle Tree
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.
— Heather Crews, Psychopomp
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, Slasher Girls & Monster Boys
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 Woman Who Walked in Sunshine
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, Chill
She thought of the things that lovely young women usually think about when they are relaxing in treetops and unhampered by underwear.
— Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction
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, Bookish Hearts
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, The Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
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, The Eagle Tree
Real love ought to be more like a tree and less like a flower.
— Mya Robarts
I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do.
— Willa Cather
Trees are what paper was, and wants to be.
— Jo Walton, Among Others
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, Assassin's Quest
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
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, The Shoemaker's Wife
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
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, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
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, The Witch of Belladonna Bay
27. TreesI shall say absolutely nothing about the spindle tree.
— Sei Shōnagon, The Pillow Book
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, who ever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my own smallest special detail. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my father, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
— Hermann Hesse
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
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
Above us was a canopy, the stretching arms of cedar and spruce and Douglas fir. We knew to follow in silence, watching our steps, heads bowed. We were in a temple.
— Richard Payment, For Want of Wonders
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, In November
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, Train Dreams
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, The Raven Boys
I love the start of autumn when the trees in my garden change the colour of their leaves in one last dazzling display.
— Michael Caine, The Elephant to Hollywood
This afternoon I sat at my window and alternately wrote at my new serial and watched a couple of dear, amusing, youngish maple-trees at the foot of the garden. They whispered secrets to each other all the afternoon. They would bend together and talk earnestly for a few moments, then spring back and look at each other, throwing up their hands comically in horror and amazement over their mutual revelations. I wonder what new scandal is afoot in Treeland.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily's Quest
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, Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland
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
I hear the trees whispering sometimes. They don't talk to everyone. Or maybe they do, but not everyone listens. Do you hear them?
— J.J. Brown, Brindle 24
Do you believe in God, Martin?'And he answered, 'Yes, because of His trees. Don't you?''I'm not sure...''Oh, my poor, blind Stephen! Look again, go on looking until you do believe.
— Radclyffe Hall
On increasingly warm nice days I liked to sit toward noon on the bench encircling the cherry tree and look at the bare trees, the freshly plowed fields, the green strips of winter planting, the meadows that were already sprouting, and through the fragrance which swells out of the ground with the advent of spring contemplate the mountains, gleaming with the colossal quantities of snow still on them.
— Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer
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, A Sudden Light
Even a lamb can defend itself, but a tree cannot even do that. If you are a just person, you never harm any tree, those defenceless angels!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Do jungle animals understand the true nature of the trees among which they have their daily being? In the parent-forest, amid those mighty trunks, we shelter and play; but whether the trees are healthy or corroded, whether they harbour demons or good spirites, we cannot say. Nor do we know the greatest secret of all: that one day we, too, will become as arboreal as they. And the trees, whose leaves we eat, whose bark we gnaw, remember sadly that they were animals once, they climbed like squirrels and bounded like deer, until one day they paused, and their legs grew down into the earth and stuck there, spreading, and vegetation sprouted from their swaying heads. They remember this as a fact; but the lived reality of their fauna years, the how-it-felt of that chaotic freedom is beyond recapture. They remember it as a rustle in their leaves.
— Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh
I thought all the trees were whispering to each other, passing news and plots along in an unintelligible language; and the branches swayed and groped without any wind. They do say the trees do actually move, and can surround strangers and hem them.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
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, This Side of a Wilderness
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
— Bill  Vaughn
Your growing antlers,' Bambi continued, 'are proof of your intimate place in the forest, for of all the things that live and grow only the trees and the deer shed their foliage each year and replace it more strongly, more magnificently, in the spring. Each year the trees grow larger and put on more leaves. And so you too increase in size and wear a larger, stronger crown.
— Felix Salten, Bambi's Children
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, Things That Are
The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity...and some scare see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.—William Blake (1757-1827)
— Hilary Scharper
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
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, Peace
I stroke the bleached bones of ancient trees felled long-ago by industry or cold desperation and wonder of another almost summer when two fell asleep beneath her arms, curling into each other like wind-swept branches on the edge of tomorrow ...
— Kate Mullane Robertson
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, This then is upland pastures: being some out-door essays dealing with the beautiful things that the spring and summer bring
Trees were made of vibrant green leaves sitting on the shoulders of shy green leaves too embarrassed to show themselves.
— Kevin James Moore, The Go-Go Girl
We don't want to focus on the trees (or their leaves) at the expense of the forest.
— Douglas R. Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop
She was talking to a tree. Just talking to a tree. Totally normal. People probably did it every day here. They're only trees. She fought an insane urge to laugh.
— Ruth Frances Long, The Treachery of Beautiful Things
Love is like encountering a forest and having to chop down every tree but one. Oh, and you have to chop down each tree by hugging it until it falls. 
— Dark Jar Tin Zoo, Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.
Lonely trees are not lonely
—  they have their eternal companies: Songs of the birds
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, A Sand County Almanac And Sketches Here And There
trees [-] Inside their wooden samurai armor they are geisha beauties, each one a ‘person-of-the-arts,’ limbs dancing, arranging flowers, carrying the wind’s music, the calligraphy of their roots pure poetry, rhyming earth and berth.
— Tirumalai S. Srivatsan
A street without trees is a street only for the sick-minded people whose god is nothing but money!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady's knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires.("The Basilisk")
— R. Murray Gilchrist, Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror
By respecting the trees, you prove that you are a person who deserves to be respected!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Trees make man happy in thousands of different ways; in return, man hurts the trees in thousands of different ways! What an honourable being man is!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
By now, at the end of a sloping alley, we had reached the shores of a vast marsh. Some unknown quality in the sparkling water had stained its whole bed a bright yellow. Green leaves, of such a sour brightness as almost poisoned to behold, floated on the surface of the rush-girdled pools. Weeds like tempting veils of mossy velvet grew beneath in vivid contrast with the soil. Alders and willows hung over the margin. From where we stood a half-submerged path of rough stones, threaded by deep swift channels, crossed to the very centre.("The Basilisk")
— R. Murray Gilchrist, Terror by Gaslight: More Victorian Tales of Terror
Leaves turned to soil beneath my feet. Thus it is, trees eat themselves.
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Quick, someone's coming! Look real!
— Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men
...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 Martian Chronicles
I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.
— Bill McKibben, Wandering Home: A Long Walk Across America's Most Hopeful Landscape: Vermont's Champlain Valley and New York's Adirondacks
People here had redwood trees in their backyards. You were never far from the infinite.
— Amy  Stewart, The Last Bookstore In America
The forest is only waiting for their signal to start trembling, hissing, and roaring from its depths. An enormous, love-maddened, unlighted railway station, full to bursting. Whole trees bristling with living noise makers, mutilated erections, horror.
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night
Did you hear about the lawsuit? Mary asked."No, what?""I hear that he is so big," she lifted her eyebrows to indicate what she meant, "that he put a girl in the hospital and she is suing him, because she can never have babies because of him.""Ewwwwwwwwwww!!!!" the sisters chorused."Could a guy really do that?" Lydia asked.Elizabeth shrugged. "I guess, but he would have to be the size of a friggin' oak tree.
— Heather Lynn Rigaud, Fitzwilliam Darcy, Rock Star
Mothman flew away from town, like a giant bat, and then disappeared from sight behind a thicket of skeletal autumn trees.
— Don Roff, Heebie-Jeebies: Volume One
How do you fight against a mountain? How do you move it when you don't even have a shovel?” “Maybe you don't have to move it,” Etta said, folding the gown over the lid of the trunk. “Maybe you have to climb it.
— Alexandra Bracken, Passenger
Good things never last, bad things never die.
— John Darnielle, Master of Reality
They were both at such an age that they stood on a cusp. They could think in one part of their minds that their whole lives stretched out before them without boundary or limit. At the same time another part guessed that youth was about over for them and what lay ahead was another country entirely, wherein the possibilities narrowed down moment by moment. 
— Charles Frazier
You can look at the world from a mountain or from a rat hole! Most people do the second!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Imagination is haunted by the swiftness of the creatures that live on the mountain - eagle and peregrine falcon, red deer and mountain hare. The reason for their swiftness is severely practical: food is so scarce up there that only those who can move swiftly over vast stretches of ground may hope to survive. The speed, the whorls and torrents of movement, are in plain fact the mountain's own necessity. But their grace is not necessity. Or if it is - if the swoop, the parabola, the arrow-flight of hooves and wings achieve their beauty by strict adherence to the needs of function - so much the more is the mountain's integrity vindicated. Beauty is not adventitious but essential.
— Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain
Ignorance is a limitation.
— Sunday Adelaja, The Mountain of Ignorance
Looking out of a tent door into a world of snow and vanishing hopes. ~George Mallory
— Conrad Anker, The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mt. Everest
My Everest is not your Everest. Your Everest is not mine. We all have an Everest. Each of us. Sometimes the peak is literally Mount Everest but most times it lies deep within us, figuratively occupying a mountainous inner space. It calls us to rise up, to do what we formerly labeled as impossible, and to be who we deeply and desperately want to be. I know that I have found an Everest when my soul furiously pokes me repeatedly until I listen. Heeding this call to passionate adventure of any sort initiates a journey of intense immense proportion that changes every molecule of my being.
— T.A. Loeffler
Sometimes you must behave like a tunnel! If a formidable mountain is on your way, thrust through it!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
I am a Cartesian clear and distinct object on this pyramidal peak of the mountain, where the echoes trail off almost forever the horizon.
— Marieta Maglas- Eschatological Regression
Working on the summit of Mauna Kea was comparable to working on the hospital pulmonary ward with sick people sucking on oxygen cylinders.
— Steven Magee, Health Forensics
The Protestants taught their followers that faith is needed for hard work because every hardship on its own discourages, hence you need faith not to be discouraged. The faith you have, keeps you going and makes you to pass through the valley and the mountain top.
— Sunday Adelaja
No, not conquer, that is too foolish a world. Any man who scales a mountain is still but a man, a transient speck compared to the immensity and permanence of a mountain .
— James Rozoff, Stories Light And Dark: Ten Short Stories
"So I've got to find a mountiain that nobody's ever seen. And work out the answer to a riddle that nobody's ever solved. And kill a bear that nobody can fight." Renn sucked in her breath. "You've go to try." 
— Michelle Paver, Wolf Brother
One isn't improved by being at the top of the mountain, one is improved by the climb."- Poppy (quoting Win)
— Lisa Kleypas, Married By Morning
It is not the mountain that is our problem but the absence of knowledge on how to deal withthe mountain.
— Sunday Adelaja
The backside of mountain is a fight against human nature," he said. "You have to care as much about yourself on the way down as you did on the way up.
— Mitch Albom, For One More Day
Life is like a trek to the mountain top. Everyone will eventually climb to the top. Later, or sooner, doesn't matter. What matters is - the person who holds your hand and prevents you from falling, the one who is always there to ease the climb for you...
— Mehek Bassi
If you are a giant mountain, you cannot escape from being famous; all that you can do is to pray for the fog to cover you up!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
To be a plain means to die for a mountain; to be a mountain means to die for a plain! Thus, to kill a mountain, make it plain; to kill a plain, make it mountain!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
SUMMIT PLUMMETCeleb's conquest of a mountain, then jumping off, too exhausted to descendKamil Ali
— Kamil Ali, Profound Vers-A-Tales
If you are focused on God, then all “mountains” are under your feet.
— Sunday Adelaja
He who hates easiness in life will always find a though mountain to climb!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
Climbing is as close as we can come to flying.
— Margaret Young