Rootless Quotes & Sayings

Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness, of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress. — Meg Wolitzer

I felt naked beneath the wildness of her eyes. I felt alive. Unknown. And I knew then that the world contained so many things I would never understand. — Chris Howard

Far away from my country I would be like those trees they chop down at Christmastime, those poor rootless pines that last a little while and then die. — Isabel Allende

The scientific and societal achievements of the modern age are undisputable. But after the French Revolution, modernity increasingly emancipated itself from Christian roots, thereby becoming rootless itself. — Walter Kasper

I like to see flowers growing, but when they are gathered, they cease to please. I look on them as things rootless and perishable; their likeness to life makes me sad. I never offer flowers to those I love; I never wish to receive them from hands dear to me. — Charlotte Bronte

You take what you can get, I reckon. You take what you can get. — Chris Howard

The corrupt man is nearly always rootless, deeply aware of his rootlessness. — Robert Payne

Many people, for many reasons, feel rootless - but orphans and abandoned or abused children have particular cause. — Christina Baker Kline

We were the masters of nature, the masters of the world. We had transcended everything - death, fatigue, our natural needs. We were stronger than cold and hunger, stronger than the guns and the desire to die, doomed and rootless, nothing but numbers, we were the only men on earth. At — Elie Wiesel

I am a rootless individual, but when I land in Belize, I have that feeling of comfort that I am returning home. — Michael Ashcroft

Without acquainting me with the language or the literature or the oral family histories which my ancestors had loved, they volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.
But in fact we were always like this,
rootless, dismembered: knowing it makes the difference.
Birth stripped our birthright from us,
tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves
so early on
and the whole chorus throbbing at our ears
like midges, told us nothing, nothing
of origins, nothing we needed
to know, nothing that could re-member us. — Adrienne Rich

The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any type of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of his country are the sides of his skull. — Flannery O'Connor

I carry my heart like a crucifix, but I remember once you told me that sorrow can be a blessing too. You told me that what is coming is better than what is gone. You've carried my heavy heart to light with ease. I believe in lovely souls ever since burrowing inside of yours. So many storms have ravaged me at sea, but I know those eyes. I know lighthouses guide the rootless home. Maybe you can find light in me as well, and from there find a fire to sleep by. We are here, and we are alive, and that is hope. — Elijah Noble El

Sons of suicides seldom do well. Characteristically, they find life lacking a certain zing. They tend to feel more rootless than most, even in a notoriously rootless nation. They are squeamishly incurious about the past and numbly certain about the future to this grisly extent: they suspect that they, too, will kill themselves. — Kurt Vonnegut

Country things are the necessary root of our life - and that remains true even of a rootless and tragically urban civilization. To live permanently away from the country is a form of slow death. — Esther Meynell

I am a freak in secondhand velour, a leper who uses L'Oreal Anti-sticky Mega Gel. I am rootless, ripped from all foundations, an orphan raising an orphan and wanting to take away everything there is and replace it with stuff I've made. — Dave Eggers

When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as "rootless and stemless." We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don't condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is. — W. Timothy Gallwey

The truth is, it is the younger inexperience gangsters who often cut down the older original gangsters. The best way for this young thug to prove himself to others, is to simply cut down an established gangster.
Thus, this cruel cycle of senseless violence repeats itself, with the younger being more vicious and rootless than his predecessor. It's the dog, who kills the lion, and once he has killed the lion, he's no longer a dog; he's now a lion himself. — Drexel Deal

A beautiful woman without fixed principles may be likened to those fair but rootless flowers which float in streams, driven by every breeze. — Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

This rootless shifting east and west
I can't suppress a smile myself
but how else can I make
the whole world my home.
If any of my old friends
come around asking
say I'm down at the river
by the Second Fushimi Bridge. — Baisao

It had been a windy night, that night where his life had taken its turning. The atmosphere, in flood, was trying to wash the trees right off the hills. The big oaks twisted and shuddered like black flames in the moonlight, and the white grass rippled and bannered.

The wind that night made him feel his chronic longing. The wind, trying to stampede the trees, was roaring for a grand, universal departure to another solar system, a better deal, and the grass struggled to join the rootless giant of the air. All that lives strives to fly, to master time. All tribes of beings strain to rise in insurrection, all knowing their time is short, all, when the wind blows, wanting to climb aboard. ("The Growlimb") — Michael Shea

Worry is a sin, even I know that, yet I am more than just a lily of the field. I'm a lily that's been plucked from the ground and laid at your feet. When it comes to you, I'm rootless and helpless and at your mercy for sunshine and water. And I'm not even supposed to be yours. How can I not worry? — Sierra Simone

Were we just two more rootless jungle-dwelling erotomaniacs creamining in their pre-faded jeans over Historical New England, dreaming the old agrarian dream in their rent-a-car convertible — Philip Roth

She, whose life had blown up, emptying her of history and leaving in its place only that dark dream of majesty, that illusion so powerful that it demanded to enter the sphere of what-was-real - she, rootless Bilquis, who now longed for stability, for no-more-explosions, had discerned in Raza a boulder-like quality on which she would build her life. He was a man rooted solidly in an indeflectible sense of himself, and that made him seem invincible. — Salman Rushdie

Those who choose to have no real purpose in life are ever rootless and dissatisfied, tossed by their aimlessness into ever-changing situations. — Seneca.

The very concept of home has become tarnished, misty, elusive. As never before, we are living in a rootless age. So many of us are refugees, living out of suitcases, car trunks, cardboard boxes, desperate to go back to a home that no longer exists. — Chris Atack

This world, in which reason is more and more at home, is not habitable. It is hard and cold like those depots in which are piled up goods that cannot satisfy: neither clothe those who are naked, nor feed those who are hungry; it is as impersonal as factory hangars and industrial cities in which manufactured things remain abstract, true with statistical truth and borne on the anonymous circuit of the economy, resulting from skilful planning decisions which cannot prevent, but prepare disasters. There it is, the mind in its masculine essence, living on the outside, exposed to the violent, blinding sun, to the trade winds that beat against it and beat it down, on a land without folds, rootless, solitary and wandering and thus already alienated by the very things which it caused to be produced and which remain untameable and hostile. — Emmanuel Levinas

I live in a Moomin house in East London which I fill with blankets and nice crockery and get people round for dinner. When you travel a lot, you feel rootless and adrift - this is my sanctuary, where I can breathe out. — Bat For Lashes

Men fear wanderers for they have no rules. The Danes came as strangers, rootless and violent, and that, I thought, was why I was always happier in their company. — Bernard Cornwell

The physical suffering of the disease and its aspect of evil mystery were expressed in a strange Welsh lament which saw "death coming into our midst like black smoke, a plague which cuts off the young, a rootless phantom which has no mercy for fair countenance. Woe is me of the shilling in the armpit! It is seething, terrible ... a head that gives pain and causes a loud cry ... a painful angry knob ... Great is its seething like a burning cinder ... a grievous thing of ashy color." Its eruption is ugly like the "seeds of black peas, broken fragments of brittle sea-coal ... the early ornaments of black death, cinders of the peelings of the cockle weed, a mixed multitude, a black plague like halfpence, like berries. ... — Barbara W. Tuchman

When your party is controlled by a billionaire rootless international financier who expresses 'no sense of guilt' for collaborating with the Nazis, you might want to ease up on lecturing the rest of us about the evil rich. — Ann Coulter

I wished I was old. I was tired of being so young, so stupidly knowing, so stupidly forgetful. I was tired of having to be anything at all. I felt like the Internet, full of every kind of information but none of it mattering more than any of it, and all of its little links like thin white roots on a broken plant dug out of the soil, lying drying on its side. And whenever I tried to access myself, whenever I'd try to click on me, try to go any deeper than a single fast-loading page on Facebook or MySpace, it was as if I knew that one morning I'd wake up and try to log on to find that not even that version of I existed any more, because the servers all over the world were all down. And that's how rootless. And that's how fragile. — Ali Smith

The kind of society we live in can contribute to loneliness. Mobility and constant change tend to make some individuals feel rootless and disconnected. — Billy Graham

Until then I had floated at random, like a rootless aquatic plant, relying entirely on the opinions of others. — Soseki Natsume

[T]ruly grand and powerful theories [ ... ] do not and cannot rest upon single observations. Evolution is an inference from thousands of independent sources, the only conceptual structure that can make unified sense of all this disparate information. The failure of a particular claim usually records a local error, not the bankruptcy of a central theory. [ ... ] If I mistakenly identify your father's brother as your own dad, you don't become genealogically rootless and created de novo . You still have a father; we just haven't located him properly. — Stephen Jay Gould

Exultation that does not flow from education, affections that do not flow from knowing, savoring that does not flow from seeing, feeling that does not flow from thinking - are hollow and rootless - noisy gongs and clanging cymbals. And God is not glorified by artificial and empty passions. True delight is rooted in true doctrine. God-centered exultation is rooted in God-centered education. — John Piper

Ye lost your parents young, mo nighean donn, and wandered about the world, rootless. Ye loved Frank" - his mouth compressed for an instant, but I thought he was unconscious of it - "and of course ye love Brianna and Roger Mac and the weans ... but, Sassenach - I am the true home of your heart, and I know that. — Diana Gabaldon

I think we are all about to become rootless. It may be time. The soil has become poisonous. — Stan Goff

We can, if we so choose, wander aimlessly over the continent of the arbitrary. Rootless as some winged seed blown about on a serendipitous spring breeze.
Nonetheless, we can in the same breath deny that there is any such thing as coincidence. What's done is done, what's yet to be is clearly yet to be. In other words, sandwiched as we are between the "everything" that is behind us and the "zero" beyond us, ours is an ephemeral existence in which there is neither coincidence nor possibility. — Haruki Murakami

If you're serious about shaking off your foreignness, Salad baba, then don't fall into some kind of rootless limbo instead. Okay? We're all here. We're right in front of you. You should really try and make an adult acquaintance with this place, this time. Try and embrace this city, as it is, not some childhood memory that makes you both nostalgic and sick. Draw it close. The actually existing place. — Salman Rushdie

Love is healing, even rootless love. — May Sarton

the seedy-garish world of back-street London... restless rootless... beautiful, amoral, modern siren of doom in a jungle of dance halls, caffs and pubs. — Mark McShane

In Udi's vocabulary, Jewish was equated with the ills of exile: rootless parasitic, superstitious. Yet here, in the Western Wall's solitary dignity, was beauty. In this world of stone, he felt softness; in this quarry of memory, peace. — Yossi Klein Halevi

Buffett was a billionaire who drove his own car, did his own taxes, and still lived in a home he had bought in 1958 for $31,500. He seemed to answer to a deeply rooted, distinctly American mythology, in which decency and common sense triumphed over cosmopolitan guile, and in which an idealized past held firm against a rootless and too hurriedly changing present. — Roger Lowenstein

I knew it was a day of endings, one way or another. — Chris Howard

Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones. — George MacDonald

Stranger, think long before you enter,
For these corridors amuse not passing travellers.
But if you enter, keep your voice to yourself.
Nor should you tinkle and toll your tongue.
These columns rose not, for the such as you.
But for those urgent pilgrim feet that wander
On lonely ways, seeking the roots of rootless trees.
The earth has many flowery roads; choose one
That pleases your whim, and gods be with you.
But now leave! - leave me to my dark green solitude
Which like the deep dream world of the sea
Has its moving shapes; corals; ancient coins;
Carved urns and ruins of ancient ships and gods;
And mermaids, with flowing golden hair
That charm a patch of silent darkness
Into singing sunlight. — G.A. Kulkarni

The wonderful thing about extended travel - the whole lifestyle, with the come-and-go friendships and the rootless freedom - is that it breaks you out of ruts you've carved into your everyday life. But when you never stop traveling, travel itself becomes a rut. At some point, you're no longer gaining a richer perspective on your life. It's more like you're running away. — Seth Stevenson

History has tongues Has angels has guns has saved has praised Today proclaims Achievements of her exiles long returned Now no more rootless, for whom her printed page Glazes their bruised waste years in one Balancing present sky. — Stephen Spender

I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
...
I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
People want to push the buttons and see me glow. — Marge Piercy

Our modern, rootless times do seem to be a particularly inhospitable environment for loyalty. We come and go so relentlessly that our friendships can't but come and go too. What sort of loyalty is there in the age of Facebook, when friendship is a costless transaction, a business of flip reciprocity ... Friendship held together by nothing more permanent than hyperlinks is hardly the stuff of selfless fidelity. — Eric Felten

The historian without his facts is rootless and futile; the facts without their historian are dead and meaningless. — E.H. Carr

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find our actual place in the fabric of nature. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go. That we even do science is a hopeful glimmer of mental health. However, it's not enough merely to accept these insights intellectually while we cling to a spiritual ideology that is not only rootless in nature but also, in many ways, contemptuous of what is natural. — Ann Druyan

Finn drifted around, rootless and aimless as dandelion fluff in the wind. — Laura Ruby

I gripped against her like she was metal and I was all full of lightning, charged up and jagged and of that moment alone. — Chris Howard

He was nineteen years old, homeless and rootless, with no family and no purpose in life. — Ken Follett

Absence ... smothers into decay a rootless fancy but often nourishes the least seed of a true affection into full-flowering love. — Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

They came into being simultaneously in a garden, Eve and Adam, fully grown and naked and enjoying you could say the first Big Bang, and they had no idea how they got there until a snake led them to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and when they ate its fruit they both simultaneously came up with the idea of a creator-god, a good- and-evil decider, a gardener-god who made the garden, otherwise where did the garden come from, and then planted them in it like rootless plants. And — Salman Rushdie

Globalization is not just about changing relations between the 'inside' of the nation-state and the 'outside' of the international system. It cuts across received categories, creating myriad multilayered intersections, overlapping playing fields, and actors skilled at working across these boundaries. People are at once rooted and rootless, local producers and global consumers, threatened in their identities yet continually remaking those identities. — Philip G. Cerny

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless ... speciesless. — John Fowles

Since violence is largely a male pastime, cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed dangerous subcultures of rootless young men. — Steven Pinker

Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison's. — Dorothy Dunnett