Arbor Quotes & Sayings

I was reminded of another very special word when I was driving into Ann Arbor this morning, and that word is homecoming. Our family's had three homecomings to Ann Arbor, Michigan, in my lifetime. — Jim Harbaugh

Modern elites live in bubbles of liberal affluence like Ann Arbor, Brookline, the Upper West Side, Palo Alto, or Chevy Chase. These places used to have impoverished neighborhoods nearby, but the poor people got chased out by young singles living in group homes, hipsters, and urban homesteading gay couples. — P. J. O'Rourke

You do not recognize what truth is, so you call it a trick. That is why you are not wise, Jenna Zan Arbor. Wisdom is something you cannot identify because you cannot measure it with your instruments. - Qui-Gon Jinn — Jude Watson

The great object to be attained through the observance of Arbor Day is the cultivation of a love for nature among children, with the confident expectation that thereby the needless de-struction of the forests will be stayed, and the improvement of grounds about school buildings and residences will be promoted. — Andrew S. Draper

It's Thursday, March twenty-ninth!" she basically screamed, a demented smile plastered to her face. "You are really excited about knowing the date!" I yelled back. "HAZEL! IT'S YOUR THIRTY-THIRD HALF BIRTHDAY!" "Ohhhhhh," I said. My mom was really super into celebration maximization. IT'S ARBOR DAY! LET'S HUG TREES AND EAT CAKE! COLUMBUS BROUGHT SMALLPOX TO THE NATIVES; WE SHALL RECALL THE OCCASION WITH A PICNIC!, etc. — John Green

To be alive on the planet is to surrender to being her partner. To be in service of the Earth is to be enraptured by her. — Julianne Skai Arbor

The school children of New York State planted more than 200,000 trees within ten years from the time Arbor Day was recognized. Few similar efforts in years have been more thoroughly commendable than the effort to get our people practically to show their appreciation of the beauty and usefulness of trees. — Andrew S. Draper

Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses. — Toni Morrison

Thanksgiving is the holiday that encompasses all others. All of them, from Martin Luther King Day to Arbor Day to Christmas to Valentine's Day, are in one way or another about being thankful. — Jonathan Safran Foer

He watched the sun rise beyond the grape arbor. In the thin golden light the young leaves and tendrils of the Scuppernong were like Twink Weatherby's hair. He decided that sunrise and sunset both gave him a pleasantly sad feeling. The sunrise brought a wild, free sadness; the sunset, a lonely yet a comforting one. He indulged his agreeable melancholy until the earth under him turned from gray to lavender and then to the color dried corn husks. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

I grew up in Ann Arbor, about 25 miles west of Detroit. And when you grow up in that area, you get a healthy dose of Motown automatically. — Mayer Hawthorne

The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either. — Mary Gaitskill

businessman. And the economy right now is terrible." She turned to her father. "Do you mean that old dump on Arbor Drive? There's nothing down there but empty buildings. No one will go down there for ice cream." "Ah, that's where you're wrong, Virginia." Her father pointed at her with one hand while gripping the arm of his chair with the other. "The city council wants to renovate the entire area. They're adding a bike path and a new boat launch. That whole stretch along the lake will become just like the old Atlantic City boardwalk." Like the fish that got away, every time her father told this story, it grew in size. There was just no telling — Tracy Brogan

Sonya wasn't listening. Her gaze was totally fixated on the road we'd pulled off onto. We came to a red light, where I caught sight of a cheery sign: WELCOME TO ANN ARBOR, MICHIGAN. — Richelle Mead

I was living and dying in all the fibers of what is chewed and digested and in all the fibers that absorb the sun, consuming and digesting. Under the thatched arbor of a restaurant on a river-bank, where Olivia had waited for me, our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes stared into each other's with the intensity of serpents' - serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn, as we were aware, in our turn, of being swallowed by the serpent that digests us all, assimilated ceaselessly in the process of ingestion and digestion, in the universal cannibalism that leaves its imprint on every amorous relationship and erases the lines between our bodies and sopa de frijoles, huachinango a la vera cru-zana, and enchiladas. — Italo Calvino

From the moment I bought my ticket, I had a premonition I wasn't returning to New York anytime soon.
You Know, this happens a lot to Russians. The Soviet Union is gone, and the borders are as free and passable as they've ever been. And yet, when a Russian moves between the two universes, this feeling of finality persists, the logical impossibility of a place like Russia existing alongside the civilized world, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, sharing the same atmosphere with, say, Vladivostok. It was like those mathematical concepts I could never understand in high school: if, then. If Russia exists, then the West is a mirage; conversely, if Russia does not exist, then and only then is the West real and tangible. No wonder young people talk about "going beyond the cordon" when they talk of emigrating, as if Russia were ringed by a vast cordon sanitaire. Either you stay in the leper colony or you get out into the wider world and maybe try to spread your disease to others. — Gary Shteyngart

This isn't D.C., Murrary, this is Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is a long-haired, pot-smoking little college town. — Scott Sigler

The Ann Arbor superintendent ridicules what he describes as "simple-minded solutions [that attempt] to make things equal." But, of course, the need is not "to make things equal." He would be correct to call this "simple-minded." Funding and resources should be equal to the needs that children face. The children of Detroit have greater needs than those of children in Ann Arbor. They should get more than children in Ann Arbor, more than kids in Bloomfield Hills or Birmingham. Calling ethics "simple-minded" is consistent with the tendency to label obvious solutions, that might cost us something, unsophisticated and to favor more diffuse solutions that will cost us nothing and, in any case, will not be implemented. — Jonathan Kozol

Although I was paid a salary in Ann Arbor, my wife and children and I drank powdered milk at six cents a quart instead of the stuff that came in bottles. I was a tightwad. — Donald Hall

There would have been a lake. There would have been an arbor in flame-flower. There would have been nature studies - a tiger pursuing a bird of paradise, a choking snake sheathing whole the flayed trunk of a shoat. There would have been a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx. There would have been those luminous globules of gonadal glow that travel up the opalescent sides of juke boxes. There would have been all kinds of camp activities on the part of the intermediate group, Canoeing, Coranting, Combing Curls in the lakeside sun. There would have been poplars, apples, a suburban Sunday. There would have been a fire opal dissolving within a ripple-ringed pool, a last throb, a last dab of color stinging red, smarting pink, a sigh, a wincing child. — Vladimir Nabokov

Like the trees, we are visitors, guests of the earth. — Kim Stafford

When I went to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, what I really wanted to be was a radio announcer. — Mike Wallace

How I would love to be transported into a scented Elizabethan garden with herbs and honeysuckles, a knot garden and roses clambering over a simple arbor. — Rosemary Verey

We shall serve him lies and Arbor gold, and he'll drink them down and ask for more. — George R R Martin

That's one of the most important things to me is that Detroit and Ann Arbor got my back. If you don't have hometown love, then what's the point? — Mayer Hawthorne

I went to hockey camp at Michigan because my dad has some relatives in the Ann Arbor area. We went to visit them as kids, and you start to learn the language from being around people. At the same time, when I got to college, I thought my English was better than it really was. I learned a lot over my four years. — Carl Hagelin

Yesterday I wrote the majority of a song called 'Burn the Nightclub Down' which was about kind of driving into Cleveland full of dread at the prospect of playing at this night club and actually just the night before I had called my girlfriend whose birthday it was. And it's her birthday and here I am on the road in some hellhole in Ann Arbor in Michigan. — Rhett Miller

What we did do was got to Chinese school. Whether you lived in D.C., Ann Arbor, New York, or Orlando, if there were Chinese people, there were Chinese schools where you went every Sunday to take Chinese Language and cultural classes. Chinese people would drive hours from every direction to take their kids to school. All teachers were volunteers and the parents chipped in to keep it going. While the rest of America went to church, we learned how to read right to left. — Eddie Huang

When I was younger we had a grape arbor, and my mom would go out and pick grapes and make grape jam in the sink - boil it, put it in jars, and give it away as gifts. — Taylor Swift

My poor father who is dead" (it is the sacristan who is speaking,) "was in his lifetime a grave-digger. He was of an agreeable disposition, the result, no doubt, of the calling he followed, for it has often been pointed out that people who work in cemeteries are of a jovial turn. Death has no terrors for them; they never give it a thought. I, for instance, monsieur, enter a cemetery at night as little perturbed as though it were the arbor of the White Horse. And if by chance I meet with a ghost, I don't disturb myself in the least about it, for I reflect that he may just as likely have business of his own to attend to as I. — Arthur Machen

She said that the planting of trees, like the education of children, was a gift to the future. — Cassandra Danz

Arbor Day is not like other holidays. Each of those reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future. — Julius Sterling Morton

In a matter of seconds, the sky darkened and the first fat drops of rain splashed around us. We went from table to table to gather our guests, smiling to mask our nervousness as the wind blew harder. As I watched the empty chairs overturning and the linens on the grape arbor flapping like sails, I was seized with a sudden fear. The wind whipped the trees; the creak of branches presaged the first sharp flash of lightning, followed by a thunder crack that set my heart pounding. — Rosie Genova

We are the ironborn, and once we were conquerors. Our writ ran everywhere the sound of the waves was heard. My brother would have be content with the cold and dismal north, my niece with even less ... but I shall give you Lannisport. Highgarden. The Arbor. Oldtown. The riverlands and the Reach, the kingswood and the rainwood, Dorne and the marches, the Mountains of the Moon and the Vale of Arryn, Tarth and the Stepstones. I say we take it all! I say, we take Westeros. — George R R Martin

I drove across country in my yellow 1970 VW bug (which I drove until 1986) to Los Angeles, having had enough cold weather in 5 years in Ann Arbor, and found a job within a few days. — W. Richard Stevens

The primary purpose of the Legislature in establishing "Arbor Day," was to develop and stimulate in the children of the Commonwealth a love and reverence for Nature as revealed in trees and shrubs and flowers. In the language of the statute, "to encourage the planting, protection and preservation of trees and shrubs" was believed to be the most effectual way in which to lead our children to love Nature and reverence Nature's God, and to see the uses to which these natural objects may be put in making our school grounds more healthful and at-tractive. — Andrew S. Draper

At home, loss was everywhere; she could barely see past it, like trying to look out a windowpane covered in fingerprints. She would always feel trapped behind that window, between her and the rest of the world, but at least in Ann Arbor, the glass was clearer. Whenever — Brit Bennett

O days remember'd well! remember'd all!
The bitter sweet, the honey and the gall;
Those garden rambles in the silent night,
Those trees so shady, and that moon se bright,
That thickset alley by the arbor clos'd,
That woodbine seat where we at last repos'd;
And then the hopes that came and then were gone,
Quick as the clouds beneath the moon past on. — George Crabbe

Michigan State is always welcome at Ann Arbor. Your teams in all the various branches of athletics are more frequent visitors here than those of any other institution. This is as it should be, for not two universities are closer together in every way than Michigan State and Michigan. — Fielding H. Yost

In 1975, I quit my tenure, and we moved from Ann Arbor to New Hampshire. It was daunting to pay for groceries and the mortgage by freelance writing - but it worked, and I loved doing it. — Donald Hall

And as John F. Kennedy described the ideals behind what would become the Peace Corps, he issued a challenge to the students who had assembled in Ann Arbor on that October night: "on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country," he said, will depend the answer whether a free society can compete. I think it can," he said. — Barack Obama

You are Alayne, and you must be Alayne all the time." He put two fingers on her left breast. "Even here. In your heart. Can you do that? Can you be my daughter in your heart?"
"I ... " I do not know, my lord, she almost said, but that was not what he wanted to hear. Lies and Arbor gold, she thought. "I am Alayne, Father. Who else would I be? — George R R Martin