Roots How Quotes & Sayings

Hayek was never a popular author to the extent that everyone was reading him at the corner newsstand. But the Austrian refugee showed how the roots of Hitler's tyranny and the bases of Marxist collectivism were one and the same. His work had a profound influence on a generation of freedom loving young conservatives. Even — William J. Bennett

i have never understood.
will
probably never understand.
the white mans lust
to eat the world.
to eat the universe. (mars is next)
why he was born with such a rabid
starvation.
why he feigns for power
like
crack rock. doing everything. and anything.
to have it.
no matter how deranged.
why he is in so much pain
he needs to rip the roots of happiness
from the earth
and
burn them into
his smile.
what happened in his relationship with our mother.
that he needs to set a person on fire.
watch them burn.
to
feel powerful.
not every white man
is
born this way,
but,
it stands to remain
there are many
who
are. — Nayyirah Waheed

What disconcerts the modern world at its very roots is not being sure, and not seeing how it ever could be sure, that there is an outcome-a suitable outcome to evolution. Half our present uneasiness would be turned to happiness if we could once make up our minds to accept the facts and place the essence and the measure of our modern cosmogonies within a noogenesis. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

You told me trees could speak
and the only reason one heard
silence in the forest
was that they had all been born knowing different languages.

That night I went into the forest
to bury dictionaries under roots,
so many books in so many tongues
as to insure speech.

and now this very moment,
the forest seems alive
with whispers and murmurs and rumblings of sound
wind-rushed into my ears.

I do not speak any language
that crosses the silence around me
but how soothing to know
that the yearning and grasping embodied
in trees' convoluted and startling shapes
is finally being fulfilled
in their wind shouts to each other.

Yet we who both speak English
and have since we were born
are moving ever farther apart
even as branch tips touch. — Carol Goodman

The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper. — Zadie Smith

A forest," William said, his expression distant. "Where the ground is dry soil and stone. Where tall trees grow and centuries of autumn carpet their roots. Where the wind smells of game and wildflowers."
"Why, that was lovely, Lord Bill. Do you ever write poetry? Something for your blueblood lady?"
"No."
"She doesn't like poetry?"
"Leave it."
Hehe. "Oh, so you have a lady. How interes
— Ilona Andrews

I still wasn't convinced that tossing a shoe didn't mean you harbored an anger-management problem, but I did understand love now. How it wrapped around you and made you more aware of the prickles on your skin, the roots of your hair, the intensity of every touch and every inch of you. It was like life on hi-def. Everything was sharper. — Erin McCarthy

These same ABCs couldn't speak Chinese and didn't care---but you don't have shit without your native tongue. African slaves were forced by threat of physical punishment to abandon their native languages, but a lot of us just gave ours up with a shrug---these Uncle Chans convinced us to assimilate, shut the fuck up, and play the part. What they didn't understand is that after your have the money and degrees, you can't buy your identity back. I wasn't worried about degrees, but I cared about my roots. Even if I hated what it meant to be an Asian in t he American wilderness, i respected the Chinese home I was raised in. Usually I wasn't so vocal about Asian identity, but without my parents around, I felt a sudden duty to say something myself. It's funny how annoying I thought my mom was, but as soon as she wasn't around, i carried the torch for her. — Eddie Huang

I did not understand the pervasiveness of sin-how I simultaneously wove it and got caught in it, and just how far-reaching its effects were. We always assume that its great gnarled roots lie somewhere else; at least I know I did. I always felt certain that someone else was responsible for casting shadows on my vista. — Carolyn Weber

May your roots go down deep into the soil of God's marvelous love; 18-19 and may you be able to feel and understand, as all God's children should, how long, how wide, how deep, and how high his love really is; and to experience this love for yourselves, though it is so great that you will never see the end of it or fully know or understand it. And so at last you will be filled up with God — Anonymous

There are times in every person's life when they feel lonely, isolated, like maybe they don't belong. For adoptees, this is often exacerbated by the circumstances. Because you were given up, you have a built-in scapegoat; you can blame everything that you feel on the fact that you were adopted. But, I want you to know that this is a fallacy. Finding your biological parents will not fill in the void that you feel. You will get answers to your questions, but no one can fill in the missing pieces except for you. Before you go on a search, take the time to get to know yourself very well. Heal the hurts you've experienced. Acknowledge the past and how it has affected you. Become a whole person who is seeking roots, not a damaged person who is seeking fulfillment. — Janet Louise Stephenson

We do what we have to, to live. Sometimes that means breaking a rocks heart, or pushing roots down into ground that screams againest the intrusion. As for you-how else should our children climb to the star's but up our branches? We made our peace with that fact a long time ago, that we would be used and maybe forgotten. So be it. What you learn in your climbing will make all the life on this planet greater, more precious. And when it comes to that, who writes the things written in your body, your life? And who reads?-Our cases aren't that much different? — Diane Duane

How do you eat your roots? — Kamila Shamsie

There is, I know not how, a certain presage, as it were, of a future existence; and this takes the deepest root, and is most discoverable, in the greatest geniuses and most exalted souls. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

The Church is the only entity equipped to penetrate to the spiritual roots of our moral illnesses. We are to call out the fruit of the Holy Spirit in the economy, enlisting the weapons of love, joy, patience, goodness, kindness and self-control, which are the foundation of true freedom. Many Christian teachers rightly point out that our society's willingness to take on the slavery of debt in exchange for stuff is an expression of the deep emptiness that people are seeking to fill within themselves. One of the most powerful aspects of the Gospel is that this emptiness can only be filled by the loving reconnection with the Father that Jesus offers. For this reason, it is less critical that we condemn the world's decadence than that we make an appeal to human desire and how it is genuinely fulfilled. — Stephen K. De Silva

A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life -- kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction. — Zachary Mason

He was curiously calm. Men were supposed to go mad with grief when their children died, he knew. They were supposed to tear their hair out by the roots, to curse the gods and swear red vengeance. So why was it that he felt so little? The boy lived and died believing Robert Baratheon his sire. Jaime had seen him born, that was true, though more for Cersei than the child. But he had never held him. "How would it look?" his sister warned him when the women finally left them. "Bad enough Joff looks like you without you mooning over him." Jaime yielded with hardly a fight. The boy had been a squalling pink thing who demanded too much of Cersei's time, Cersei's love, and Cersei's breasts. Robert was welcome to him. And now he's dead. — George R R Martin

The roots of the Divine are entrenched in this body. If you nurture the roots, how can you avoid the flowering? — Jaggi Vasudev

The more deeply I search for the roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is, for lack of a better word, spiritual ... what other word describes the collection of values and assumptions that determine our basic understanding of how we fit into the universe? — Al Gore

No matter how strong and dedicated a leader may be, he must find root and strength amongst the people. He alone cannot save a nation. He may guide, he may set the tone, he may dedicate himself and risk his life, but only the people may save themselves. — Ferdinand Marcos

We are, a lot of the time, baffled by the news we see on the front pages of our newspapers, often because the stories are complex, and we missed the beginning of them anyway. (How far back do we have to go to find the roots of the Euro crisis? To 2008? 1999, when the currency came into being? 1992? 1945?) That is one of the reasons why natural disasters and murders and cases involving missing children become so involving: we understand them. — Nick Hornby

With no navigational skills, her travels became aimless, and after several days she began to experience excruciating hunger, as she had not the foresight to pack food before she set out. She drifted through tiny villages and saw juicy fruits and vegetables growing in the gardens of the peasants, but could not bring herself to beg for food or attempt to steal it. She ate small beetles and grasshoppers, since she had no hunting skills. She chewed on the bitter roots of sassafras trees, which turned her stomach sour but provided a small amount of nourishment. How — Brian Edwards

My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots. — Kate Zambreno

All the best and worse things in us are bound up in the legacy of our family. As children we ardently trust in the stability or, in some cases, the instability we were born into. No matter which...we embraced what was decent while simultaneously suppressing what was deficient yet both traits weaved roots of faithfulness and consternation into the very fabric of who we've become. This now plays significantly into how we nurture our own families and how we relate to others. Our love, our fears, our insecurities, and our loyalties all draw from how we were raised as well as our inherent desire to shift its paradigm to optimistically better the life of not just our children...but our children's children. That's the gift and or the curse of a legacy. Which will you leave behind? — Jason Versey

Without where I am from and who I am from, I am nothing, even if the glass is gone and conifers are growing through where the roof should be. All those wide-worlders in transit, all those misplaced, thrown-away people who know as little as they care about their roots - how do they do it? How do they know who they are? — David Mitchell

I think I'm beginning to understand
how hearts fit together.
Not like diseased carnations that lean against their crutches.
Not like vines that twine tight, throttling their hosts.
But like two trees:
two systems of deep, untangled roots,
two patterns of flowering branches,
whose leaves drink their own sunlight
and breathe their own air.
Two trees with something slung between them,
a hammock or a tapestry or a swing,
some third, beautiful thing
that neither would die without.
Hearts fit together like hands.
Not by necessity.
By choice. — Riley Redgate

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. — Christopher Ryan

I do believe in simplicity. It is astonishing as well as sad, how many trivial affairs even the wisest thinks he must attend to in a day; how singular an affair he thinks he must omit. When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation of all incumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. Probe the earth to see where your main roots run. — Henry David Thoreau

A trade unionist - of course I am. First, last, and all the time. How else to strike at the roots of the evils undermining the moral and physical health of women? How else grapple with the complex problems of employment, overemployment, and underemployment alike, resulting in discouraged, undernourished bodies, too tired to resist the onslaughts of disease and crime? — Maud Younger

Network marketing is really the greatest source of grass-roots capitalism, because it teaches people how to take a small bit of capital, that is your time, and build the American dream. — Jim Rohn

Things that scare me are the loss of control, dealing with the unknown and the unseen. Something that's not supposed to be there and you don't know where it came from, or what it wants from you, or how to defend yourself against it. That's the root of the things I find scary. — Oren Peli

How many young college graduates have taken demanding jobs in high-powered firms, vowing that they will work hard to earn money that will enable them to retire and pursue their real interests when they are thirty-five? But by the time they reach that age, they have large mortgages, children to school, houses in the suburbs that necessitate at least two cars per family, and a sense that life is not worth living without really good wine and expensive holidays abroad. What are they supposed to do, go back to digging up roots? No, they double their efforts and keep slaving away. — Yuval Noah Harari

Our role as gardeners is to choose, plant and tend the best seeds within the garden of our consciousness. Learning to look deeply at our consciousness is our greatest gift and our greatest need, for there lie the seeds of suffering and of love, the very roots of our being, of who we are. Mindfulness ... is the guide and the practice by which we learn how to use the seeds of suffering to nourish the seeds of love. — Nhat Hanh

Gratefulness is the great task, the how of our spiritual work, because, rightly understood, it re-roots us. — David Steindl-Rast

We can't run away from what defines our fates. Who we are and what we believe in grow from the roots of our past, no matter how much we might try to deny it. — Gail Tsukiyama

Marriage exists as an institution of exploitation, it is not togetherness. That is why no happiness comes out of it as a flowering. It cannot. Out of the roots of exploitation how can ecstasy be born? — Rajneesh

Surely a large part of the zealous repression of radical protest in America has its roots in the fact that millions of men who are apparently "insiders" know how vulnerable the system is because they know how ambiguous their own attachments to it are. The slightest challenge exposes the fragile foundations of legitimacy of the state. — John Schaar

It is now generally accepted that the roots of our ethics lie in patterns of behavior that evolved among our pre-human ancestors, the social mammals and that we retain within our biological nature elements of these evolved responses. We have learned considerably more about this responses, and we are beginning to to understand how they interact with our capacity to reason. — Peter Singer

How deep congenital sex-inversion roots may be gathered from the fact that the pleasure-dream of the male Urning has to do with male persons, and of the female with females. — Richard Von Krafft-Ebing

We all fall off our horse but how many get back on? It's frightening to realize our vulnerability after a fall but we must put fear aside to progress. — Daria Hosseinyoun

Every person needs to feel significant. We want our lives to count. We yearn to believe that in some way we are important and that hunger for significance-a drive as intense as our need for oxygen-doesn't come from pride or ego. It comes from God because he wants each of us to understand how important we are ... We must seek our roots, our origin, and our destiny so that we can know our present value ... We can help each other realize that we are persons of significance being made in the image of God. — R.C. Sproul

I didn't know where this stuff was coming from - all of a sudden I was a little magickal sprite, bonding with my stone, feeling my earth roots, la la la ...
All I can is describe the way it felt. And that was how it felt. So sue me.
Was I swaying? I felt like I might be swaying. — Cate Tiernan

When we teach a child to sing or play the flute, we teach her how to listen. When we teach her to draw, we teach her to see. When we teach a child to dance, we teach him about his body and about space, and when he acts on a stage, he learns about character and motivation. When we teach a child design, we reveal the geometry of the world. When we teach children about the folk and traditional arts and the great masterpieces of the world, we teach them to celebrate their roots and find their own place in history. — Jane Alexander

And what good has all your reading done you? Out of all the things you have read, how much has really stayed in your soul, what roots have grown there that will, in a good time, bring forth fruit? Examine your heart carefully. If you compare the whole of what you know with what you don't know, you will find that your knowledge is like a small stream dried up in the summer heat compared to the ocean of your ignorance. And even granted that you do know a lot, what difference does it make? — Francesco Petrarca

(Hadley and Mary in the carriage)
"Might I repeat how utterly charming you look?"
"You are very kind," she replied, down casting her eyes as a flash of heat invaded her cheeks. "But even if I were dressed in the finest of gowns, I could never be a lady of fashion."
"Never let that disturb you, my pet." He fingered a mass of curls that had settled over her shoulder just above the expanse of her modestly covered bosom. "I find fashion and beauty are rarely synonymous."
When he caressed a stray lock between thumb and fore!nger and raised it to his lips, Mary felt the dizzying sensation from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. — Victoria Vane

The average household might prepare for root canal, traffic accident, unemployment or illness, but how the household will meet, manage and even survive violent crime is the most neglected area of household management. — John Longenecker

I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts. — Elizabeth Strout

We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn't a human relation, whether of parent and child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn't move in a strange direction. We don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that wasn't made for a simpler age. We have changed our environment faster than we can change ourselves. — Walter Lippmann

My favourite poem is called 'Roots and Wings' - it's a very moving poem about how if you've got real roots you can fly. — David Miliband

This is the effect of panic, a natural effect, you could say that animal nature is like this, plant life would behave in exactly the same way, too, if it did not have all those roots to hold it in the ground, and how nice it would be to see the trees of the forest fleeing the flames. — Jose Saramago

It's not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere, it's more like a song on a policeman's radio, how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple to slice into pieces. — Richard Siken

If we no longer talk freely and openly about faith, we won't understand the language or the significance of faith, we'll misinterpret the religious words and deeds of others, and we'll underestimate the power faith can have in the lives of those deeply committed to their spiritual beliefs. This may present a serious risk to a generation whose most troubling conflicts promise to involve people who are primarily motivated by a very different faith. If we don't understand the faith roots of our American culture, how will we be able to defend it against theirs? — Ben Carson

Bitterness is like a weed. Remember how hard it always was to pull out thistles once they root? Remember how deep those roots grow, and how if you just snapped off the end of it, the plant would grow right back? You have to dig down deep inside. Let God search your heart. Let Him show you what's there and help you root out all that bitterness. Then you can pray for forgiveness. — Lynn Austin

Prayer is how we isolate the real problems. And prayer is how we get up behind those problems and attack them at the roots. It's how we isolate the real enemy. It's how we keep him on his heels and off our man. — Priscilla Shirer

It is not quite as dark here as we thought. On the contrary, the interior is pulsating with light. It is, of course, the internal light of roots, a wandering phosphorescence, tiny veins of a light marbling the darkness, an evanescent shimmer of nightmarish substances. Likewise, when we sleep, severed from the world, straying into deep introversion, on a return journey into ourselves, we can see clearly through our closed eyelids, because thoughts are kindled in us by internal tapers and smolder erratically. This is how total regressions occur, retreats into self, journeys to the roots. This is how we branch out into anamnesis and are shaken by underground subcutaneous shivers. For it is only above ground, in the light of day, that we are a trembling, articulate bundle of tunes; in the depth we disintegrate again into black murmurs, confused purring, a multitude of unfinished stories. — Bruno Schulz

So never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself. — Florence Nightingale

Buttressing this argument (that you can prevent children from learning to read or ride bicycles but you can't stop them from learning to talk), Chomsky had pointed to two other universals in human language: that its emergence in children follows a very precise timetable of development, no matter where they live or which particular language is the first they learn; and that language itself has an innate structure. Chomsky has recently reminded audiences that the origins of the structure of language - how semantics and syntax interact - remain as "arcane" as do its behavioral and neurologic roots. Chomsky himself finds nothing in classical Darwinism to account for human language.* And for that reason, says Plotkin, linguistics is left with a major theoretical dilemma. If human language is a heritable trait but one that represents a complete discontinuity from animal communicative behavior, where did it come from? — Frank R. Wilson

A crowd whose discontent has risen no higher than the level of slogans is only a crowd. But a crowd that understands the reasons for its discontent and knows the remedies is a vital community, and it will have to be reckoned with. I would rather go before the government with two people who have a competent understanding of an issue, and who therefore deserve a hearing, than with two thousand who are vaguely dissatisfied.
But even the most articulate public protest is not enough. We don't live in the government or in institutions or in our public utterances and acts, and the environmental crisis has its roots in our lives. By the same token, environmental health will also be rooted in our lives. That is, I take it, simply a fact, and in the light of it we can see how superficial and foolish we would be to think that we could correct what is wrong merely by tinkering with the institutional machinery. The changes that are required are fundamental changes in the way we are living. — Wendell Berry

People carry around with them internalization's fixed-feature space learned early in life. Man is like other members of the animal kingdom , first, last and always a prisoner of his biological organism. No matter how hard he tries, it is impossible for him to the best himself of his own culture, where it has penetrated to the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. — Edward T. Hall

kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts. My — Elizabeth Strout

Dear Woman,
You are a beautiful flower of earth, allow the rain to feed you the same strength as the sun. Don't stop growing through the storms, they are sent to test how solid your soil is not too destroy your roots. — Keysha Jade

From sunrise to sunset, from one day to the next, till our black hair turns white, we eat, we sleep, we bear children and we watch them grow. We watch them get married and in turn bear children of their own. How time flies, we say to ourselves. Then one day, we look down at our feet and we're surprised. Roots have sprouted in the ground of our daily living. — Suchen Christine Lim

It is quite affecting to observe how much the olive tree is to the country people. Its fruit supplies them with food, medicine and light; its leaves, winter fodder for the goats and sheep; it is their shelter from the heat and its branches and roots supply them with firewood. The olive tree is the peasant's all-in-all. — Fredrika Bremer

You ever notice how sometimes, in the middle of July, right downtown, you'll see a flower poking up through a crack in the asphalt. And you think, What a stupid place to set down roots. It'll get run over, or it'll dry up and blow away. But it hangs on, and it grows, and it blooms. Somehow, against the odds, it finds what it needs and it makes that place better for being there. — Cinda Williams Chima

It's very strange how electronic music formatted itself and forgot that its roots are about the surprise, freedom, and the acceptance of every race, gender, and style of music into this big party. Instead, it started to become this electronic lifestyle which also involved the glorification of technology. — Thomas Bangalter

The effect of the corporation, under the prevailing policy of the free, go-as-you-please method of organization and management, has been to drive the bulk of our people, other than farmers, out of property ownership; and, if allowed to go on as present, it will keep them out ... The paramount problem is not how to stop the growth of property, and the building up of wealth, but how to manage it so that every species of property, like a healthy growing tree will spread its roots deeply and widely in the soil of a popular proprietorship. — Peter S. Grosscup

Having lived in Utah all of my life, I can tell that in many ways I know of no place more lonely, no place more unfamiliar. When I talk about how it is both a blessing and a burden to have those kinds of roots, it can be terribly isolating, because when you are so familiar, you know the shadow. — Terry Tempest Williams

One of the best tricks a garden plays is that you never quite remember how it's going to be, that first day after winter has gone, when you go outside and can stay outside all day fiddling with jobs that aren't pressing enough to weigh heavily but will nevertheless pay dividends. A garden is made up of a thousand small inventions, but each small act is a defence (defiance even) against a world without anchors or safe harbours. — Anna Pavord

In the Twenties, it wasn't a remarkable thing for a singer to be an actor, or even to be involved in politics. If this is our roots, how can you blame the branches for following the course of the roots. — Terrence Howard

The roots of interpersonal conflict are often an excessive concern for oneself, and an inability to pay attention to the needs of others. It is sad to see how often people ruin a relationship because they refuse to recognize that they could serve their own interests best by helping others achieve theirs. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Those who like tranquility and dislike clamor tend to avoid people to seek quietude. They do not know that when one wishes there were no one around, that is egotism; and when the mind is attached to quietude, that is the root of disturbance. How can they reach the state where others and oneself are seen as one, where disturbance and quietude are both forgotten. — Zicheng Hong

Can you imagine an infinite tree? ... A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything? ... if you've ever looked at a tree you've seen how its trunk divides into boughs, which divide yet again to branches, which divide into twigs, which divide again into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket. — Michael Chabon

Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence. — Rainer Maria Rilke

Sahaja Yoga has cured people from cancer, from all kinds of diseases which they call incurable. How? Just by awakening the Kundalini. Sahaja Yogis don't go to any doctor, they had become doctors without studying Medicine. They treat the basics. While science is analysis, like a tree has got some leaves and are showing the symptoms of some disease they try to treat the leaves. But if you have to treat the leaves, you cannot do any justice, you have to go to the roots and treat the sap! And that is how - that is the only way you can treat the tree. — Nirmala Srivastava

Don't you want to be anything. An architect or a gardener, or perhaps a painter?'
'No, I don't ... I'd like to do entirely different things. I'd like to understand what robins say to each other. ... I'd like to see how trees manage to drink water with their roots and get to be so big. — Hermann Hesse

Power is at the root of the human experience. Our attitudes and beliefs
positive or negative
are all extensions of how we define and use power. — Caroline Myss

At a time when we need an urgent national conversation about how schools and curriculum should address the environmental crisis, we're being told that the problems we need to focus on are teacher incompetence, government monopoly, and market competition. The reform agenda reflects the same private interests that are moving to shrink public space-interests that have no desire to raise questions that might encourage students to think critically about the roots of the environmental crisis, or to examine society's unsustainable distribution of wealth and power. — Bill Bigelow

Just as I can't see a clear brook without at least stopping to dangle my feet in it, I can't see a meadow in May and simply pass by. There is nothing more seductive then such fragrant earth, the blossoms of clover swaying above it like a light foam, and the petal-bedecked branches of the fruit trees reaching upward, as if they wanted to rescue themselves from this tranquil sea. No, I have to turn from my path and immerse myself in this richness ...
When I turn my head, my cheek grazes the rough trunk of the apple tree next to me. How protectively it spreads its good branches over me. Without ceasing the sap rises from its roots, nuturing even the smallest of leaves. Do I hear, perhaps, a secret heartbeat? I press my face against its dark, warm bark and think to myself: homeland, and am so indescribably happy in this instant. — Sophie Scholl

I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don't like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground. — Louise Erdrich

I want to show how strong I am from my roots. — Edward James Olmos

All novelists I speak to about how they started usually say it was by pulling up their roots and going to live somewhere else. You see the shape of your life at a distance. — Deborah Moggach

Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships. — Winona LaDuke

When you have two people who love each other, are happy and gay and really good work is being done by one or both of them, people are drawn to them as surely as migrating birds are drawn at night to a powerful beacon. If the two people were as solidly constructed as the beacon there would be little damage except to the birds. Those who attract people by their happiness and their performance are usually inexperienced. They do not know how not to be overrun and how to go away. They do not always learn about the good, the attractive, the charming, the soon-beloved, the generous, the understanding rich who have no bad qualities and who give each day the quality of a festival and who, when they have passed and taken the nourishment they needed, leave everything deader than the roots of any grass Attila's horses' hooves have ever scoured. — Ernest Hemingway,

How dominating is appetite, how enveloping immediate experience! Even the philosophically minded among us capitulate, ultimately, to the narrowest sense of personal need. Political time moves at a snail's pace because it is only with nearly insurmountable difficulty that moral discomfort takes root in the best of people, forcing an imperative out of a complaint; so viscerally repugnant is it for a critical mass to find the prevailing system unbearable, much less prepare to take up arms against it. — Vivian Gornick

The roots of a tree stretch deeper than you think...No matter how far away you are when you bloom, you are always tied to your roots. — Lindsay Eagar

Patience is ... clearly not fatalistic, shoulder-shrugging resignation. It is the acceptance of a divine rhythm to life; it is obedience prolonged. Patience stoutly resists pulling up the daisies to see how the roots are doing. — Neal A. Maxwell

Without roots a tree, no matter how tall, cannot stand. — Matshona Dhliwayo

To keep up the purity of the race and its culture, Germany shocked the world by purging the country of the Semitic races - the Jews. Germany has also shown how well nigh impossible it is for races and cultures, having differences going to the root, to be assimilated into one united whole, a good lesson for us in Hindustan to learn and profit by. — M. S. Golwalkar

The unawakened mind tends to make war against the way things are. To follow a path with heart, we must understand the whole process of making war within ourselves and without, how it begins and how it ends. War's roots are in ignorance. Without understanding we can easily become frightened by life's fleeting changes, the inevitable losses, disappointments, the insecurity of our aging and death. Misunderstanding leads us to fight against life, running from pain or grasping at security and pleasures that by their nature can never be satisfying. — Jack Kornfield

And the good writer chooses his words for their 'meaning', but that meaning is not a a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, with associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably. — Ezra Pound

Touch ultimate emptiness,
Hold steady and still.

All things work together:
I have watched them reverting,
And have seen how they flourish
And return again, each to his roots.

This, I say, is the stillness:
A retreat to one's roots;
Or better yet, return
To the will of God,
Which is, I say, to constancy.
The knowledge of constancy
I call enlightenment and say
That not to know it
Is blindness that works evil.

But when you know
What eternally is so,
You have stature
And stature means righteousness
And righteousness is kingly
And kingliness divine
And divinity is the Way
Which is final.

Then, though you die,
You shall not perish. — Lao-Tzu

Why We Tell Stories
I
Because we used to have leaves
and on damp days
our muscles feel a tug,
painful now, from when roots
pulled us into the ground
and because our children believe
they can fly, an instinct retained
from when the bones in our arms
were shaped like zithers and broke
neatly under their feathers
and because before we had lungs
we knew how far it was to the bottom
as we floated open-eyed
like painted scarves through the scenery
of dreams, and because we awakened
and learned to speak — Lisel Mueller

Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made. — Camilla Gibb

What we men share is the experience of having been raised by women in a culture that stopped our fathers from being close enough to teach us how to be men, in a world in which men were discouraged from talking about our masculinity and questioning its roots and its mystique, in a world that glorified masculinity and gave us impossibly unachievable myths of masculine heroics, but no domestic models to teach us how to do it. — Frank Pittman

Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup. The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that. — Robert Fulghum

And how long would the life in me stay alive if it did not find new roots?
I behaved like a starving man who knows there is foot somewhere if he can only find it. I did not reason anything out. I did not reason that part of the food I needed was to become a member of a community richer and more various, humanly speaking, than the academic world of Cambridge could provide: the hunger of the novelist. I did not reason that part of the nourishment I craved was all the natural world can give - a garden, woods, fields, brooks, birds: the hunger of the poet. I did not reason that the time had come when I needed a house of my own, a nest of my own making: the hunger of the woman. — May Sarton

She braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep
roots buried in the earth
she told me the old stories
how time never mattered
when she died
they gave me her clock — Sherman Alexie

One day I shall write a little book of conduct myself, and I shall call it Social Problems of the Unsociable. And the root problem, beneath a hundred varying manifestions, is How to Escape. How to escape, that is, at those times, be they few or frequent, when you want to keep yourself to yourself. — Rose Macaulay

Asking himself how this had happened and what could be done about it, Peter came to understand that the roots of Western technological achievement lay in the freeing of men's minds. He grasped that it had been the Renaissance and the Reformation, neither of which had ever come to Russia, which had broken the bonds of the medieval church and created an environment where independent philosophical and scientific inquiry as well as wide-ranging commercial enterprise could flourish. He knew that these bonds of religious orthodoxy still existed in Russia, reinforced by peasant folkways and traditions which had endured for centuries. Grimly, Peter resolved to break these bonds on his return. — Robert K. Massie

Encountering gender apartheid and waged slavery shook me to my roots more than half a century ago in Afghanistan. Oh, the women of Afghanistan, the women of the Muslim world. I was no feminist
but now, thinking back, I see how much I learned there, how clearly their condition taught me to see gender discrimination anywhere and, above all, taught me to see how cruel oppressed women could be to each other. They taught me about women everywhere. — Phyllis Chesler