Rings Of A Tree Quotes & Sayings

When he combs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he can stand as still as a tree, when he wants the doves to flutter softly, crooning as they come, down upon his shoulders, those silly, fat, trusting woodies with the pretty wedding rings round their necks. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air--all the birds come; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages. — Angela Carter

Everyone had very uncreased necks, which meant no prolonged inclining of the head, which meant no reading. Linda's own neck looked like a finger, but she reassured herself that the creases were like tree rings marking her substance. — Tony Tulathimutte

Like rings in a large tree trunk that had been logged and exposed, every year of her life was visible in the wrinkles that lined her face, neck and arms. She was a living, breathing fossil. — S.W. Lothian

Amsterdam is like the rings of a tree: It gets older as you get closer to the center. — John Green

There's a lady who's sure
All that glitters is gold.
And she's buying a stairway to heaven.
And when she gets there she knows
If the stores are closed.
With a word she can get what she came for.
There's a sign on the wall
But she wants to be sure.
Cause you know sometimes words have
Two meanings.
In a tree by the brook there's a songbird
Who sings sometimes.
All of our thoughts are misgiven.
There's a feeling I get when I look
To the West.
And my spirit is crying for leaving.
In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke
Through the trees.
And the voices of those who stand looking. — Led Zeppelin

During our mortal schooling in submissiveness, we will see the visible crosses that some carry, but other crosses will go unseen. A few individuals may appear to have no trials at all, which, if it were so, would be a trial in itself. Indeed, if, as do trees, our souls had rings to measure the years of greatest personal growth, the wide rings would likely reflect the years of greatest moisture-but from tears, not rainfall. — Neal A. Maxwell

[D]espite her alternative leanings, it turned out Crystal was not particularly psyco-babbly or airy-fairy or tree-huggy, as one might have expected.
In fact, the first thing she did was write a list. She said writing lists helped calm her down when she was stressed about anything because it put problems in order. You can look at a list of things and see how you can tackle each one separately without feeling sick about it, she said. Whereas if they all just stayed jumbled in your mind in one great bit sticky ball you never got to consider them individually.
She actually spoke a lot of sense for someone with toe rings and a Chinese tattoo. — Sarah-Kate Lynch

Photography is an imprint or transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to the thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables. The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches. — Rosalind E. Krauss

When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. — Hermann Hesse

I've enjoyed every age I've been, and each has had its own individual merit. Every laugh line, every scar, is a badge I wear to show I've been present, the inner rings of my personal tree trunk that I display proudly for all to see. Nowadays, I don't want a "perfect" face and body; I want to wear the life I've lived. — Pat Benatar

Soon the trees affected not only her mood but her understanding. Each year a trunk put on a new ring of growth, and within those rings she found the tree's own story. She listened to the scent of it, the feel, the sound, and her mind gave it words- soil, water, sap, light ... and before, night and rain, dry and sun, wind and night ... the drowsy stillness of leaves in a rainfall, the sparkling eagerness of leaves in the sun, and always the pulling up of the branches, the tugging down of the roots, the forever growing in tow directions, joing sky and soil, and a center to keep it strong ...
-Rin, Forest Born — Shannon Hale

Wisdom is a tree of slow growth; the rings around its trunk are earthly lives, and the grooves between are the periods between lives. Who grieves that an acorn is slow in becoming an oak? — Elsa Barker

We always feel younger than we are. I carry inside myself my earlier faces, as a tree contains its rings. The sum of them is me. The mirror sees only my latest face, while I know all my previous ones. — Tomas Transtromer

Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made - imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell ... Meals' ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominos. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on toast; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup, studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness. This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. — Tamar Adler

I used to picture time as a rope you followed along, hand over hand, into the distance, but it's nothing like that. It moves outward but holds everything that's come before. Cut me open and I'm a tree trunk, rings of nostalgia radiating inward. All the years are nested inside me like I'm my own personal one-woman matryoshka doll. I guess that's true for everybody, but then I drive everybody crazy with my nostalgia and happiness. I am bittersweet personified. — Catherine Newman

Technically, just like with the rings of a tree or Carbon-14, it had to be possible to measure the passage of time by the melting of vanilla ice cream. — Herman Koch

Someone could cut through the mess in our house and look at it like one might look at rings on a tree or layers of sediment. They'd find the black-and-white hairs of a dog we had when I was six, the acid-washed jeans my mother once wore, the seven blood-soaked pillowcases from the time I skinned my knee. All our family secrets rest in endless piles. — Holly Black

It really does look like the rings of a tree," she said. "No," said Kaz. "It looks like a target. — Leigh Bardugo

Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled. — Anne Michaels

The lines in the corners of her eyes spoke of years of wisdom, as a tree with the number of rings increasing with each passing year. She was a small frame of a woman with piercing eyes that suggested that they knew you, understood you even. — F.C. Malby

Brother woke just after midnight and he didn't make a sound, and as he climbed from out of bed with severed rings around his head, his feet didn't touch the ground. I could feel it then-a tiny miracle-so I followed him into the woods, crossed beneath the trees but only I left my prints in tow, he was afloat. He found a lonely tree and tied himself within its limbs, and he said to me these words: 'Don't you fear for me, I am where I'm supposed to be.' — Radical Face

Trouble results when the speed of growth exceeds the speed of nurturing human resources. To use the analogy of growth rings in a tree, when unusually rapid growth caused the rings to grow abnormally thick, the tree trunk weakens and is easily broken. — Akio Toyoda

In the bush he taught the knots I use to tie my blanket to my saddle Ds also the way I stand to use a carpenter's plane and the trick of catching fish with a bush fly and a strip of greenhide these things are like the dark marks made in the rings of great trees locked forever in my daily self. — Peter Carey

Sing! Who sings To her who weareth a hundred rings? Ah, who is this lady fine? The Vine, boys, the Vine! The mother of the mighty Wine, A roamer is she O'er wall and tree And sometimes very good company. — Bryan Procter

Could a scar be like the rings of a tree, reopened with each emotional season? — Magenta Periwinkle

I should say that, in addition to my tree - love (it was originally called The Tree), it arose from my own pre-occupation with the Lord of the Rings , the knowledge that it would be finished in great detail or not at all, and the fear (near certainty ) that it would be 'not at all'. The war had arisen to darken all horizons. But no such analyses are a complete explanation even of a short story ... — J.R.R. Tolkien

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. — Mary McCarthy

Yet friendship, I believe, is essential to intellectuals. It is probably the growth hormone the mind requires as it begins its activity of producing and exchanging ideas. You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk. In the course of my history, not love or marriage so much as friendship has promoted growth. — Mary McCarthy

When I look back on the sixteen years Perry and I have been married, I can see the places where we've made each other better. There are parts of us etched into each other like the rings in the trunk of a tree. We've grown, we've changed, we've been forever marked. And ultimately, we are so much better together than either of us would be on our own. — Melanie Shankle

Legolas was standing, gazing northwards into the darkness, thoughtful and silent as a young tree in a windless night. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Love is ordinary, love is dull, love is the natural condition of the human heart, love is the message we carry branded on us from the womb but only the best of us will dare to read it and, even when we dare to read it to people who can never understand, it is still there in us like the rings in a tree or the ridges in a shell, part of us, marking the years and the drought and the growth, even if nobody sees it until the tree is cut down. — Andrew Nicoll

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. — Philip Larkin