Change Like A Tree Quotes & Sayings

Sara Kendell once read somewhere that the tale of the world is like a tree. The tale, she understood, did not so much mean the niggling occurrences of daily life. Rather it encompassed the grand stories that caused some change in the world and were remembered in ensuing years as, if not histories, at least folktales and myths. By such reasoning, Winston Churchill could take his place in British folklore alongside the legendary Robin Hood; Merlin Ambrosius had as much validity as Martin Luther. The scope of their influence might differ, but they were all a part of the same tale. — Charles De Lint

Squinting in the darkness Anya could just make out a strange curving symbol scratched into the bark. Baba Zosia scored a line through it, disfiguring the symbol. Anya felt something in the air change and give, like the forest had let out a breath it had been holding around them. Something like static pricked the back of her neck as Baba Zosia cut her finger and smeared blood on the tree. The strange symbol melted into the bark, healing the tree to appear like nothing had been carved on it to begin with. Lifting her hands towards the campsite Baba Zosia started to chant softly in the complicated language of the tribe. Magic thrummed through the air, making Anya's own flare and itch under her skin. She rubbed her arms to stop it. Around her a breeze picked up and the campground, with its tracks in the mud and stains from the fires all melted away until there was nothing but autumn leaf litter and debris in its place. It looked like it hadn't been disturbed for years. — Amy Kuivalainen

My fingers are callused from gripping tree limbs, and my nails are short and grubby with bark. They are like the talons of a bird that lives only in trees. — Ned Hayes

Living democracy grows like a tree, from the bottom up. — Vandana Shiva

Deep down inside we know that the best gifts don't come from catalogs or shopping malls. They don't come in brightly-colored packages or fancy envelopes and they're not sitting under a tree somewhere ... The best gifts come from the heart. They come when we look at each other, REALLY look at each other and say 'You mean a lot to me' or 'I'm so glad you're a part of my life.' A gift like that will never go out of style or be forgotten or be returned for a different size. A gift like that can change the world. — Ron Atchison

I have a weird graphic I made for myself once, and it's the "lineage tree" of everyone that has inspired me and more importantly given me the permission to be myself in my work. There's a slew of people from theater: Erwin Piscator, Chekhov, Mac Wellman, Stein; and then a whole lot of wonderful works that are called novels: everything from Tristram Shandy to Bouvard and Pecuchet, to Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Finnegan's Wake and Invisible Man, and then contemporary writers I'm currently reading like Renee Gladman and Anakana Schofield. There are many more in my graphic also: there's Beckett's novels and Melancholy of Resistance, and there's Reznikoff and Dos Passos, there are contemporary poets I admire like Jena Osman, dance-writers like Michelle Ellsworth, and books I can't help read for fun like Muriel Spark. But there's Groucho Marx and Oscar Wilde. It's a huge question and the answers would likely change daily. But these I'm talking about here are in the pantheon. — Thalia Field

It is an age lurching along the lip of a dark precipice, peeking fearfully into chaos's empty eyes, enrapt, like a giddy rat trying to stare down a hungry cobra. The gods are restless, tossing and turning and wakening in snippets to conspire at mischief. Their bastard offspring, the hundred million spirits of rock and brook and tree, of place and time and emotion, find old constraints are rotting. The Postern of Fate stands ajar. The world faces an age of fear, of conflict, of grand sorcery, of great change, and of greater despair amongst mortal men. And the cliffs of ice creep forward.
Great kings walk the earth. They cannot help but collide. Great ideas sweep back and forth aross the face of a habitable world that is shrinking. Those cannot help but fire hatred and fear amongst adherents of dogmas and doctrines under increasing pressure.
As always, those who do the world's work most dearly pay the price of the world's pain. — Glen Cook

Opinions that are well rooted should grow and change like a healthy tree. — Irving Bacheller

Once sin is allowed to settle in your heart, it will not be turned out at your bidding. Custom becomes second nature, and its chains are not easily broken. The prophet has well said, "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard its spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil" (Jeremiah 13:23). Habits are like stones rolling down hill--the further they roll, the faster and more ungovernable is their course. Habits, like trees, are strengthened by age. A boy may bend an oak when it is a sapling--a hundred men cannot root it up, when it is a full grown tree. A child can wade over the Thames River at its fountain-head--the largest ship in the world can float in it when it gets near the sea. So it is with habits: the older the stronger--the longer they have held possession, the harder they will be to cast out. — J.C. Ryle

If you're looking at a single withered tree, it can seem like a grievous wound to the forest. But from the forest's perspective, that tree's remains will nourish other plants, acting for the good of the whole forest. If you change your perspective, a situation right in front of you can reverse itself. — Isuna Hasekura

It was still late summer elsewhere, but here, high in Appalachia, fall was coming; for the last three mornings, she'd been able to see her breath.
The woods, which started twenty feet back from her backdoor like a solid wall, showed only hints of the impending autumn. A few leaves near the treetops had turned, but most were full and green. Visible in the distance, the Widow's Tree towered above the forest. Its leaves were the most stubborn, tenaciously holding on sometimes until spring if the winter was mild. It was a transitional period, when the world changed its cycle and opened a window during which people might also change, if they had the inclination. — Alex Bledsoe

When people visit my farm they often envision their dog, finally off-leash in acres of safely fenced countryside, running like Lassie in a television show, leaping over fallen tree trunks, shiny-eyed with joy at the change to run free in the country. While they're imagining that heartwarming scene, their dog is most likely gobbling up sheep poop as fast as he can. Dog aren't people, and if they have their own image of heaven, it most likely involves poop. — Patricia B. McConnell

Change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom. — Gloria Steinem

It's time for us to join the line of your madmen all chained together.
Time to be totally free, and estranged.
Time to give up our souls, to set fire to structures and run out in the street.
Time to ferment.
How else can we leave the world-vat and go to the lip?
We must die to become true human beings.
We must turn completely upside down
like a comb in the top of a beautiful woman's hair.
Spread out your wings as a tree lifts in the orchard.
As seed scattered on the road,
as a stone melts to wax,
as a candle becomes the moth.
On a chessboard the king is blessed again with his queen.
With our faces so close to the love mirror, we must not breathe, but change to a cleared place where a building was and feel the treasure hiding inside us.
With no beginning or end,
we live in lovers as a story they know.
If you will be the key, we'll be tumblers in the lock. — Rumi

No one should be allowed to stop in one place any longer than necessary. A man isn't a tree, and being settled in one place is his misfortune. It saps his courage, breaks his confidence. When a man settles down somewhere, he agrees to any and all of its conditions, even the disagreeable ones, and frightens himself with the uncertainty that awaits him. Change to him seems like abandonment, like a loss of an investment: someone else will occupy his domain, and he'll have to begin again. Digging oneself in marks the real beginning of old age, because a man is young as long as he isn't afraid to make new beginnings. If he stays in the same place, he has to put up with things, or take action. If he moves on, he keeps his freedom; he's ready to change places and the conditions imposed on him. — Mesa Selimovic

Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf. — Jonas Mekas

When you plant a tree, if it doesn't grow well, you don't blame the tree. You look into the reasons it isn't doing well. It may need fertilizer or more water or less sun. We never blame the tree. Yet we're quick to blame our child. If we know how to take care of her, she will grow well, like a tree. Blaming has no good effect at all. Never blame, never try to persuade using reason and arguments; they never lead to any positive effect. That is my experience. No argument, no reasoning, no blaming, just understanding. If you understand, and you show that you understand, you can love, and the situation will change. — Thich Nhat Hanh

As he strode through the deserted city, he thought of the New Years of his childhood, before he was ten, before the Change, when the city had still glowed with the soft, deep enchantment of sugared angels spreading their sparkling wings in bakery windows, and bells whose limpid sounds rose like the sea at a moonlit tide, and glass ornaments turning slowly this way and that on dark tree branches, gathering in their reflections the whole wondrous, promise-filled world. — Olga Grushin

A farmer friend of mine told me recently about a busload of middle school children who came to his farm for a tour. The first two boys off the bus asked, "Where is the salsa tree?" They thought they could go pick salsa, like apples and peaches. Oh my. What do they put on SAT tests to measure this? Does anybody care? How little can a person know about food and still make educated decisions about it? Is this knowledge going to change before they enter the voting booth? Now that's a scary thought. — Joel Salatin

My social life changed. Before, I had yearned for company, especially the company of women, and had gone seeking it. Now I no longer went seeking, but taught myself (not always easily) to make do with the company that came.
I felt older. I felt that I had seen ages of the world come and go. Now, finally, I really had lost all desire for change, every last twinge of the notion that I ought to get somewhere or make something of myself. I was what I was. "I will stand like a tree," I thought, "and be in myself as I am." ...
I went regularly about my duties, my meals, my lying down and rising. My days and tasks seemed not to be accumulating toward anything. I was making nothing of myself. — Wendell Berry

If you don't like where you are, then change it. You are not a tree! — Jim Rohn

If a man seeks to change the world, he should first understand it.' The apprentice trotted the words out as if by rote, evidently relieved to be asked a question he knew the answer to. 'The smith must learn the ways of metals, the carpenter the ways of wood, or their work will be of but little worth. Base magic is wild and dangerous, for it comes from the Other Side, and to draw from the world below is fraught with peril. The Magus tempers magic with knowledge, and thus produces High Art, but like the smith or the carpenter, he should only seek to change that which he understands. With each thing he learns, his power is increased. So must the Magus strive to learn all, to understand the world entire. The tree is only as strong as its root, and knowledge is the root of power. — Joe Abercrombie

If you don't like where you are, change it. You're not a tree. — Jim Rohn

And if I may be so bold to offer my last piece of advice for someone seeking and needing to make changes in their life. If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree. You have the ability to totally transform every area in your life-and it all begins with your very own power of choice. — Jim Rohn

What did the others give to each other?
Nothingness.
Granger stood looking back with Montag. Everyone must leave something behind
when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a
wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand
touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when
people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away. The
difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the
touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the
gardener will be there a lifetime. — Ray Bradbury

The System Map is like an internal family tree, though it can be drawn out in whatever format, in whatever way is easy for the System to understand. It will contain and illustrate information such as who split off from whom and how you all relate to each other. As you become more aware of your System over time, your System Map may grow as you encounter newly discovered parts. It may also change over time as you come to have greater understanding of your System and how you all relate to and interrelate with each other. — A.T.W.

When we reject our origins, we become the product of whatever soil that we find ourselves planted; the colors of our leaves change as we consume borrowed nutrients with borrowed roots and, like a tree, we grow. — Mike Norton

You know, Mo, I've been thinking of the Elephantarium lately. You remember Atoul, the white elephant? Well, he taught me that all things need to change form to live. When we die, we change into ashes, gases, things like that. They carry on until they change. The ashes may help a tree grow, the gases could mingle with others and become ... something else! That means you and I are going to change and ... ah ... well ... " His voice stuck in his throat. He stopped, cleared his throat, turned, and walked to Mo. He rubbed the soft leathery skin on the underside of her ear. "and you ... You will become something greater and more wonderful than you can imagine! You will soar in the cosmos, become part of all things, you will sit at HIS side and help rule all of nature." Bram's whole being felt the impact ... The thought of not being with her. "I will be waiting for you, okay? I'll meet you there." pg 317 — Ralph Helfer

The house, the pond, the tree - it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered - smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not. — Lauren Oliver

But at some point in her passage, the trees began to change. They stretched taller, and the soft, pale bark darkened, roughened. She put her hand to a tree and touched the lichen growing dark green upon brown, and it felt like old cork, dry and crumbling. Here the sun mellowed, took on the cast of late afternoon, and the shadows seemed to fall a bit longer; the forest had sunk into a deeper silence, magnifying what sounds did arise. The sudden, quick crash of a fox bounding through the brush was as loud as the slam of a great wooden door. — Malinda Lo

If you don't like how things are, change it. You are not a tree.
— Jim Rohn

Knowing that all of manifestation and creation starts on the most subtle levels, and then sequentially unfolds itself like the seed growing into a tree, it is also the level from which change occurs, from which any form of transformation from one state into the next occurs. — Maha Devi Li Ra La

Like a dead branch falling from a tree, which them decomposes and nourishes the soil, your disappointments can transform into the elements of change and growth. — Ethan Hawke

If you don't like how something is going for you, change it. If something isn't enough, change it. If something doesn't suit you, change it. If something doesn't please you, change it. You don't ever have to be the same after today. If you don't like your present address change it - you're not a tree! — Jim Rohn

I try to grow like a tree, and hope that I can reach my full potential by the end of this short life. Change is good but growth is better. — Christofer Drew

Change like a tree
When it is winter
Don't complain or fear
Just wait for the spring
To bloom and sing — Debasish Mridha

You know that smell, when you put your nose up to a pine tree?" I told her I did perfectly. "No matter how long it has been, you always will. Like you are storing a part of that tree in your own body ... Everything stays true. You are yourself, no matter how much you have to change. — Ramona Ausubel

Symptoms of Love ...
The quickening of my heart I can hear my breath as it passes through my body like wind through branches of a tree.
The sensation in my chest the dreams in my head my body reacts as if exposed to a sudden change in the elements.
My mind wanders not focused on one particular thing like an innocent long ago in his youth. Oh how I desire to be with you when our bodies will meet and become one. — M.I. Ghostwriter

Science can never be a closed book. It is like a tree, ever growing, ever reaching new heights. Occasionally the lower branches, no longer giving nourishment to the tree, slough off. We should not be ashamed to change our methods; rather we should be ashamed never to do so. — Charles V. Chapin

I felt the bark of the trees on either side of me as I walked. It was very soothing. Here in the LBA Woods, the trees grew very close together and when I did not walk on the path, I would reach out with my fingertips and touch their bark as I passed. The skin of the trees was warm in the sunlight, and rough, and I imagined that each tree contained a soul. Like an Ent. I knew this idea was not a true thing, but still I felt good that the trees were here. — Ned Hayes