Sky Tree Quotes & Sayings

Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go ... — Rainer Maria Rilke

No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps, and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts ... That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people. — Betty Smith

You can take for granted that people know more or less what a street, a shop, a beach, a sky, an oak tree look like. Tell them what makes this one different. — Neil Gaiman

Who's this - alone with stone and sky? It's only my old dog and I - It's only him; it's only me; Alone with stone and grass and tree. What share we most - we two together? Smells, and awareness of the weather. What is it makes us more than dust? My trust in him; in me his trust. — Siegfried Sassoon

Before the sparrow arrived, you had almost stopped thinking about flight. Then, last winter, it soared through the sky and landed in front of you, or more precisely on the windowsill of the covered balcony adjoining your bedroom. You knew the grimy window panes were caked with dead ants and dust, and smelt as sour as the curtains. But the sparrow wasn't put off. It jumped inside the covered balcony and ruffled its feathers, releasing a sweet smell of tree bark into the air. Then it flew into your bedroom, landed on your chest and stayed there like a cold egg. — Ma Jian

With all of the visual distraction constantly inundating us in the form of our devices and screens, I really derive a great deal of pleasure from watching the sun rise and set, admiring clouds as they change shape across the sky, watching tree leaves and blossoms undulate in the breeze ... these treats foment an ocular-cleansing refreshment to my way of thinking. — Nick Offerman

The tabby rogue bounded alongside the river until he reached the fallen tree that Sky had used to cross a few days before. Leading Firestar over to the far bank, Scratch started to climb another trail that led up the cliff face on the opposite side. Firestar panted after him, wishing he had the rogue's powerful haunches. Scratch was a true SkyClan cat! — Erin Hunter

Few of us now have seen the stars as folk saw them then - our cities and towns cast too much light into the night - but, from the village of Wall, the stars were laid out like worlds or like ideas, uncountable as the trees in a forest or the leaves on a tree. Tristan would stare into the darkness of the sky until he thought of nothing at all, and then he would go back to his bed and sleep like a dead man. — Neil Gaiman

If we're open to it, God can use even the smallest thing to change our lives ... to change us. It might be a laughing child, car brakes that need fixing, a sale on pot roast, a cloudless sky, a trip to the woods to cut down a Christmas tree, a school teacher, a Dunhill Billiard pipe ... or even a pair of shoes.
Some people will never believe. They may feel that such things are too trivial, too simple, or too insignificant to forever change a life. But I believe.
And I always will. — Donna VanLiere

There was an extravagant winter storm outside. The tinfoil sky flashed beyond the window, rattling in the frame, and once or twice a white fork like a vein. Through the opposite window, which looked out onto the other side of the house, the light was pale, picking out where the wall was still broken from the last big storm, with the scorched telegraph pole and the burnt tree. — Olivia Sudjic

Franz Kafka is dead. He died in a tree from which he wouldn't come down. "Come down!" they cried to him. "Come down! Come down!" Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. "I can't," he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. "Why?" they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. "Because then you'll stop asking for me." — Nicole Krauss

Through the white snow-gate of our ampitheatre, as through a frame we looked eastward upon the summit group; not a tree, not a vestige of vegetation in sight,-sky, snow and granite the only elements in this wild picture. — Clarence King

I'm kind of a walking photographer, i love exploring new places. One day I was taking a break during an excursion in the Broceliande forest, looking for the best place to settle, when I discovered a small clearing with a tree without leaves. I stayed for hours looking around, taking some pictures and I found Le Coq lying down under the tree. The tree's branches were rising as if to touch the sky. — Jacques Lecoq

There are many ways to inspire healing of the earth, all relating to the tree truth that everything is interconnected. We ourselves are trees. Each time we see a tree, outside us or within us, we can remember that they reflect the truth. Something deeply rooted, something with a strong trunk, something that sweeps the sky. — Nalini Nadkarni

A murmuring, fateful, giant voice, out of the earth and sky, Voice of a mighty dying tree in the Redwood forest dense ... [T]he wood-spirits came from their haunts of a thousand years, to join the refrain; But in my soul I plainly heard. Murmuring out of its myriad leaves, Down from its lofty top, rising two hundred feet high, Out of its stalwart trunk and limbs - out of its foot-thick bark, That chant of the seasons and time - chant, not of the past only, but of the future ... — Walt Whitman

Bed in Summer
In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people's feet
Still going past me in the street.
And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day? — Robert Louis Stevenson

How was the light today?"
"Big. Hot. Yellow-white. The sky's blue was like a drumbeat. I watched the black tree shadows revolve. When the sun went down it was like someone's hand was pulling it, very gently. It was soft-edged and orange. The land went purple, then dark blue and grey, then black. Then you opened your eyes. — Glen Duncan

Every spring
I hear the thrush singing
in the glowing woods
he is only passing through.
His voice is deep,
then he lifts it until it seems
to fall from the sky.
I am thrilled.
I am grateful.
Then, by the end of morning,
he's gone, nothing but silence
out of the tree
where he rested for a night.
And this I find acceptable.
Not enough is a poor life.
But too much is, well, too much.
Imagine Verdi or Mahler
every day, all day.
It would exhaust anyone. — Mary Oliver

What was wrong with the past?" asked Mama Ramotswe. She intended the question seriously. There were too many people who took the view that the past was bad, that we should rid ourselves of all traces of it as soon as possible. But the past was not bad; some of it may have been less than perfect-- there had been cruelties then that we had done well to get rid of-- but there had also been plenty of good things. There had been the old Botswana ways, the courtesy and the kindness; there had been the attitude that you should find time for other people and not always be in a desperate rush; there had been the belief that you should listen to other people, should talk to them, rather than spend all your time fiddling with your electronic gadgets; there had been the view that it was a good thing to sit under a tree sometimes and look up at the sky and think about cattle or pumpkins or non-electric things like that. — Alexander McCall Smith

If everything I possessed, vanished, suddenly,
I'd be sorry.
But I value things unpossessed.
The wind, and trees, and sky and kind thoughts, much more. — Dorothy Hartley

The pain is stronger than ever. I've seen bit of lost Paradises and I know I'll be hopelessly tryng tu return even if it hurts. The deeper I swing into the regions of nothingness the further I'm thrown back into myself, each time more and more frightening depths below me, until my very being becomes dizzy. There are brief glimpses of clear sky, like falling out of a tree, so I have some idea where I'm going, but there is still too much clarity and straight order of things, I am getting always the same number somehow. So I vomit out broken bits of words and sintaxes of the countries I've passed through, broken limbs, slaughtered houses, geographies. My heart is poisoned, my brain left in shreds of horror and sadness. I've never let you down, world, but you did lousy things to me.
(from "As I was moving ahead occasionally I saw brief glimpses of beauty", 2000) — Jonas Mekas

Now that I know that each star has its path, each bird is finally feathered and grown in the unbroken shell, each tree in the seed, each song in the life laid down - is the night sky any less strange; should my glance less follow the flight; should the pen shake less in my hand. — Judith Wright

You haven't seen a tree until you've seen its shadow from the sky. — Amelia Earhart

When I was four, I was a kind of sky worshipper. I would look at the sky, and I wanted to evaporate into the sky - I loved the sky. I loved looking at the trees, just because they touched the sky. — Laurie Anderson

A disagreement about what?" The voice belonged to Frost, Doyle's second in command. Other than the fact that they were both tall, physically they were almost opposites. The hair that fell in a glimmering curtain to Frost's ankles was silver, a shimmering metallic silver like Christmas tree tinsel. The skin was as white as my own. The eyes were a soft grey like a winter sky before a storm. His face was angular and arrogantly handsome. His shoulders were a touch broader than Doyle's, but other than that they were both very alike and very unalike. He — Laurell K. Hamilton

Someone once told me that children are like kites. You struggle just to get them in the air; they crash; you add a longer tail. Then they get caught in a tree; you climb up and bring them down, and untangle the string; you run to get them aloft again. Finally, the kite is airborne, and it flies higher and higher, as you let out more string, until it's so high in the sky, it looks like a bird. And if the string snaps, and you've done your job right, the kite will continue to soar in the wind, all by itself. — Charmian Carr

This tree was a vast cylinder of wood. It filled the sky. The limbs reached out above me, a great canopy sheltering the rest of the trees, as if they were its children. — Ned Hayes

Like a wind, like a storm, like a fire, like an earthquake, like a mud slide, like a deluge, like a tree falling, a torrent roaring, an ice floe breaking, like a tidal wave, like a shipwreak, like an explosion, like a lid blown off, like a consuming fire, like spreading blight, like a sky darkening, a bridge collapsing, a hole opening. Like a volcano erupting.

Surely more than just the actions of people: choosing, yielding, braving, lying, understanding, being right, being deceived, being consistent, being visionary, being reckless, being cruel, being mistaken, being original, being afraid . . . — Susan Sontag

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love

(all the merry little birds are
flying in the floating in the
very spirits singing in
are winging in the blossoming)

lovers go and lovers come
awandering awondering
but any two are perfectly
alone there's nobody else alive

(such a sky and such a sun
i never knew and neither did you
and everybody never breathed
quite so many kinds of yes)

not a tree can count his leaves
each herself by opening
but shining who by thousands mean
only one amazing thing

(secretly adoring shyly
tiny winging darting floating
merry in the blossoming
always joyful selves are singing)

sweet spring is your
time is my time is our
time for springtime is lovetime
and viva sweet love — E. E. Cummings

A full harvest moon lit the sky. In its glow, there appeared an old woman dressed in black lace. A shimmering veil covered her head. With her back to the old oak tree, she keened wildly. Her cry was carried by the autumn winds and lost on the wings of the nightingales. — AnneMarie Dapp

There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too - unexpected - when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don't know how others are. So much of life seems speculation. — Elizabeth Strout

The Gods on the death of his wife Yang Kai-hui I lost my proud poplar and you your willow As poplar and willow they soar straight up into the ninth heaven and ask the prisoner of the moon, Wu Kang' what is there. He offers them wine from the cassia tree. The lonely lady on the moon, Chang 0, spreads her vast sleeves and dances for these good souls in the unending sky. Down on earth a sudden report of the tiger's defeat. Tears fly down from a great upturned bowl of rain. — Mao Zedong

The soil in return for her service keeps the tree tied to her, the sky asks nothing and leaves it free. — Rabindranath Tagore

Leave Ueno Station through the park entrance, go past the concert hall and museums, skirt around the fountain, and you come to a sort of tree garden. Homeless people live here, in tents made of sky-blue plastic sheeting and wooden poles. The best tents even have doors. — David Mitchell

Mr Jenkins. Unique, as every star in the sky is unique, every leaf on every tree, every snowflake, every farandola, every cherubim, unique: Named. — Madeleine L'Engle

All at once the hard, cold earth seemed to explode. The brown surface of the world dissolved and in its place was an impossible, an inconceivable, an unbelievable profusion of color: green grass and purple and red flowers; sprays of lily; white baby's breath that covered the hills; nodding fields of bright yellow daffodils; rich purple moss. The trees burst forth with new leaves. The weeping willow tree was a mass of tiny pale green leaves, thousands of them, which whispered and sighed together as the wind moved through its branches. There were fat heads of lettuce in the fields, and cucumbers lying like jewels among them, and enormous red tomatoes surrounded by thick, knotted vines.

And for the first time in 1,728 days, the clouds broke apart and there was dazzling blue sky, and light beyond what anyone could remember.

The sun had come out at last. — Lauren Oliver

I allow myself to be right here, in the moment, savouring the peace. All the millions and millions of stars remind me, too, how small and fragile I am. And unimportant, really. If this branch were to creak and moan and break under my weight, and I were to plummet to the ground, the stars in the sky would continue to decorate the world. And even if the last tree disappears from our planet, the stars will still be up there. — Sarah Crossan

Automn ill and adored
You die when the hurricane blows in the roseries
When it has snowed
In the orchard trees

Poor automn
Dead in whiteness and riches
Of snow and ripe fruits
Deep in the sky
The sparrow hawks cry
Over the sprites with green hair dwarfs
Who've never been loved

Inthe far tree-lines
The stags are groaning

And how I love O season how I love your rumbling
The falling fruits that no one gathers
The wind in the forest that are tumbling
All their tears in automn leaf by leaf
The leaves
You press
A crowd
That flows
The life
That goes — Guillaume Apollinaire

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified
a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands
or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river. — Margaret Laurence

... it charms
mere eyesight to believe
The nearest thing not trees
Is the sky, into which
The trees reach, opening
their luminous new leaves ...
and thought finds rest
beneath a brightened tree
In which, unseen, a warbler
feeds and sings. His song's
Small shapely melody
Comes down irregularly,
as all light's givings come.
Sabbaths 1999 III — Wendell Berry

And now above and beyond the birds' song, Andy hears a more distant singing, whether of voices or instruments, sounds or words, he cannot tell. It is at first faint, and then stronger, filling the sky and touching the ground, and the birds answer it. He understands presently that he is hearing the light; he is hearing the sun, which now has risen, though from the valley it is not yet visible. The light's music resounds and shines in the air and over the countryside, drawing everything into the infinite, sensed but mysterious pattern of its harmony. From every tree and leaf, grass blade, stone, bird, and beast, it is answered and again answers. The creatures sing back their names. But more than their names. They sing their being. The world sings. The sky sings back. It is one song, the song of the many members of one love, the whole song sung and to be sung, resounding, in each of its moments. And it is light. — Wendell Berry

She walks barefoot into the humid night, moonlight on her freckled shoulders. Near a huge, live oak tree on the edge of her father's cotton fields, Sidda looks up into the sky. In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.
Sidda stands in the moonlight and lets the Blessed Mother love every hair on her six-year-old head. Tenderness flows down from the moon and up from the earth. For one fleeting, luminous moment, Sidda Walker knows there has never been a time when she has not been loved. — Rebecca Wells

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in her breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be. — Robert Frost

I have learned over a period of time to be almost unconsciously grateful
as a child is
for a sunny day, blue water, flowers in a vase, a tree turning red. I have learned to be glad at dawn and when the sky is dark. Only children and a few spiritually evolved people are born to feel gratitude as naturally as they breathe, without even thinking. Most of us come to it step by painful step, to discover that gratitude is a form of acceptance. — Faith Baldwin

Her ashes are scattered under the oak tree in the southernmost farm fields.
Louise remembered that tree from the tour with Laurent - firmly planted, ancient, maybe even wise, reaching for the sky. It seemed a tree that would share the secrets of the universe if one sat underneath its branches long enough, like the stories of the Buddha she'd heard in Sunday school as a kid. — Jessica Rosevear Fox

And then there is that day when all around,
all around you hear the dropping of the apples, one
by one, from the trees. At first it is one here and one there,
and then it is three and then it is four and then nine and
twenty, until the apples plummet like rain, fall like horse hoofs
in the soft, darkening grass, and you are the last apple on the
tree; and you wait for the wind to work you slowly free from
your hold upon the sky, and drop you down and down. Long
before you hit the grass you will have forgotten there ever
was a tree, or other apples, or a summer, or green grass below,
You will fall in darkness ... — Ray Bradbury

Somewhere there was a book of love, with all the symptoms written down in red ink: Dizziness and Desire. A tendency to stare at the night sky, searching for a message that might be found up above. A lurching in the pit of the stomach, as if something much too sweet had been eaten. The ability to hear the quietest sounds--snails munching the lettuce leaves, moths drinking nectar from the overripe pears on the tree by the fence, a rabbit trembling in ivy-just in case he might be there, which was what mattered all along. Real hunger, just to see him, as if this would ever be enough. — Alice Hoffman

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky. — Janet Fitch

You see the Earth as a bright blue and white Christmas tree ornament in the black sky. It's so small and so fragile - you realize that on that small spot is everything that means everything to you; all of history and art and death and birth and love. — Rusty Schweickart

As I had to do whenever I glimpsed this river, I thought of Phineas. Not of the tree and pain, but of one of his favorite tricks, Phineas in exaltation, balancing on one foot on the prow of a canoe like a river god, his raised arms invoking the air to support him, face transfigured, body a complex set of balances and compensations, each muscle aligned in perfection with all the others to maintain this supreme fantasy of achievement, his skin glowing from immersions, his whole body hanging between river and sky as though he had transcended gravity and might by gently pushing upward with his foot glide a little way higher and remain suspended in space, encompassing all the glory of the summer and offering it to the sky. — John Knowles

In the early days it was fun to fly. You could soar over rooftops and trees, or drop down to meet a passing train and wave at the engineer. The whole sky belonged to you. now there are so many regulations. The sky is crowded. All the fun is gone. — Katherine Stinson

According to ancient mythology, trees link the Earth to the sky. In this respect trees link humans to another world. — Richard Allen

In some ways, my mother was right; a tree does look the same from the top as it does from the bottom: same branches, starting as weighty limbs and narrowing to the tiniest twigs; same leaves, quivering in the slightest breeze or in the rush of the trains; same colors, same rustling, same gentle sway. But from earth, looking up, a tree is hopeful; it might be touching the sky. From above, looking down, you can see
it's stuck in the dust, just like us. — Elissa Janine Hoole

What does he plant who plants a tree?
He plants the friend of sun and sky;
He plants the flag of breezes free;
The shaft of beauty, towering high, he plants a home to heaven anigh.
For song and mother-croon of bird, in hushed and happy twilight heard -
The treble of heaven's harmony.
These things he plants who plants a tree. — Henry Cuyler Bunner

Speak not, move not, but listen, the sky is full of gold. No ripple on the river, no stir in field or fold, All gleams but naught doth glisten, but the far-off unseen sea. Forget days past, heart broken, put all memory by! No grief on the green hillside, no pity in the sky, Joy that may not be spoken fills mead and flower and tree. — William Morris

It was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down-stairs - where — Mark Twain

There are faerie lights in Faerie - not the tiny paper lanterns that you might see strung up high upon a tree, and not the fat neon fireflies that sprinkle the forests at night - no, these lights are actually the beings themselves, visible as just a pinpoint of light, like stars on the sky, the etheric beings grace our world with fleeting sparks of brilliant radiance. — Gabriel Brunsdon

The fig tree had dropped its fruit all over the ground. Ripe figs lay in the dust, exploded, bloody, as if the sky had rained organs. — Rupert Thomson

The creek at night under the moon was just enough like the creek in daylight to be reassuring. There was the deadfall spruce that sieved the current with skeleton branches, churning a line of pale foam. There was the long pool above, a dark mirror of tree shadows and beacon moon. There were the gravel bars, chalky, shaped to the banks and swept into low moraines that divided the water. There the sky, softened as if by a thin fog of moonlight, filling the canyon. For a moment I forgot my preoccupation with the dark and drove up the road with that awe I felt before certain paintings in certain museums, the awe in which I disappeared. — Peter Heller

One way is how he soars high above the clouds.
The second way is when the eagle sits on a tree branch
looking over the countryside.
The third way is when he grabs his prey on the prairie.
The fourth wya is when his protective eyes are keeping you safe at all times.
The fifth way is when the eagle lets us borrow his feathers,
The sixty way is when he talks to the rest of the sacred animals
so they can also keep you protected.
The seventh way his how the eagle sits waiting for your own flight to the sky.

(Tonia Scabby Face, student) — Timothy P. McLaughlin

You know, a landscape painter's day is delightful. You get up early, at three o'clock in the morning, before sunrise; you go and sit under a tree; you watch and wait. At first there is nothing much to be seen. Nature looks like a whitish canvas with a few broad outlines faintly sketched in; all is misty, everything quivers in the cool dawn breeze. The sky lights up. The sun has not yet burst through the gauze veil that hides the meadow, the little valley, the hill on the horizon ... Ah, a first ray of sunshine! — Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot

An oak tree and a rosebush grew,
Young and green together,
Talking the talk of growing things-
Wind and water and weather.
And while the rosebush sweetly bloomed
The oak tree grew so high
That now it spoke of newer things-
Eagles, mountain peaks and sky.
"I guess you think you're pretty great,"
The rose was heard to cry,
Screaming as loud as it possibly could
To the treetop in the sky.
"And now you have no time for flower talk,
Now that you've grown so tall."
"It's not so much that I've grown," said the tree,
"It's just that you've stayed so small. — Shel Silverstein

Without imagination, things were only as they appeared - and that was blindness. Things were more than they appeared, so much more. When he considered an oak tree, it was not just a tree. To someone small, like an ant, it was a whole landscape of rugged barky cliffs and big green leaf-plains that quaked when the sky was restless, a place of many strange creatures where fearsome winged beasts could pluck and devour someone in a blink. — Jonathan Renshaw

Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky. How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them. Once, twice. Perhaps never again. The albums on my mother's shelves are full of family photographs. But also other things. A starling with a crooked beak. A day of hoarfrost and smoke. A cherry tree thick with blossom. Thunderclouds, lightning strikes, comets and eclipses: celestial events terrifying in their blind distances but reassuring you, too, that the world is for ever, though you are only a blink in its course. — Helen Macdonald

The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if they had never been. There one might have sat the clock round lost in thought. Thought
to call it by a prouder name than it deserved
had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it until
you know the little tug
the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one's line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out? Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. — Virginia Woolf

Every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures. — Ellen Glasgow

The tree that never had to fight
for sun and sky and air and light
but stood out in the open plain
and always got it share of rain,
never became a forest king
but lived and died a scrubby thing.
Good timber does not grow with ease.
The stronger wind, the stronger trees. — Douglas Malloch

The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course Walt Whitman. "His favorite occupation," writes his disciple, Dr. Bucke "seemed to be strolling or sauntering about outdoors by himself, looking at the grass, the trees, the flowers, the vistas of light, the varying aspects of the sky, and listening to the birds, the crickets, the tree frogs, and all the hundreds of natural sounds. — William James

On moonlight nights the long, straight street and dirty white walls, nowhere darkened by the shadow of a tree, their peace untroubled by footsteps or a dog's bark, glimmered in the pale recession. The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. In lifeless squares and avenues these tawdry idols lorded it under the lowering sky; stolid monsters that might have personified the rule of immobility imposed on us, or, anyhow, its final aspect, that of a defunct city in which plague, stone, and darkness had effectively silenced every voice. — Albert Camus

Bound for your distant home"

Bound for your distant home
you were leaving alien lands.
In an hour as sad as I've known
I wept over your hands.
My hands were numb and cold,
still trying to restrain
you, whom my hurt told
never to end this pain.

But you snatched your lips away
from our bitterest kiss.
You invoked another place
than the dismal exile of this.
You said, 'When we meet again,
in the shadow of olive-trees,
we shall kiss, in a love without pain,
under cloudless infinities.'

But there, alas, where the sky
shines with blue radiance,
where olive-tree shadows lie
on the waters glittering dance,
your beauty, your suffering,
are lost in eternity.
But the sweet kiss of our meeting ......
I wait for it: you owe it me ....... — Alexander Pushkin

He threw up the conkers into the air in his great happiness. In the tree above him they disturbed a roosting crow, which erupted from the branches with an explosive bang of its wings, then rose up above him towards the sky, its harsh, ambiguous call coming back in long, grating waves towards the earth, to be heard by those still living. — Sebastian Faulks

Telling a story is like sowing a seed - you always hope to see it become a beautiful tree, with firm roots and branches that soar up in the sky. But it is a peculiar sowing, for you will never know whether your seed sprouts or dies. — Laila Lalami

What did the earth teach the trees?
How to speak to the sky. — Pablo Neruda

thunder should have rumbled in a Robert Mitchum sky that promised far worse before long. I should have seen tree branches whipping. Heard the plash of drops on stone, sprung shutters whapbapbapping. But the gods had decided to turn on the sun and set it in a Spielberg sky with a thumbs-up sign from Disney. Hello to San Francisco, where the party never stops. — Reb MacRath

First time since I come to Am'rica, I not with husband or Rekha or in restaurant or store or car or apartment. I's all alone and I loves it. First time I feel everything not borrow. What I mean by that? When I with the husband, I seeing everything through his eyes - moon, sun, sky, tree, parking lot, store, everything. If he feeling sun too hot, I feeling upset. If he cursing the cold, I angry with snow. My brains not thinking my own thoughts. — Thrity Umrigar

Birds that cannot fly high into the sky rejoice exceedingly and sing sweet melodies when they get to the top of the tallest tree on the highest mountain! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Bonnie saw ropes hanging loose, poles falling away, tree-tops sinking beneath her. As they rose, the sun rose with them. Its warmth turned the dark skin of the fiery balloon midnight blue. They flew straight up. Above them, the sweet, clear music of the lonely pipe called to them. Then the smooth sky puckered into cloth-of-blue and drew aside. They passed straight through ... — Pauline Fisk

The acrobat practices: He steps on the edge of a chair and leaps to the floor, feeling the rush as the air flares up his face as he falls. Then he sets himself on something higher, like a table then jumps. He scales a ladder to the ceiling, climbs a tree, pole, watchtower. He keeps increasing the height until no one sees him and the fear to jump leaves him completely, layer by layer [. . .] The acrobat imagines there is a highest possible point in the sky where if he were to fall from it the fall would never end. — Wataru Tsurumi

The expression 'a bold from the blue' describes something so surprising that i makes you head spin, your legs wobble, and your body buzz with astonishment - as if a bold of lightening suddenly came down from a clear blue sky and struck you at full force. Unless you are a lightbulb, an electrical appliance, or a tree that is tired of standing upright, encountering a bold from the blue is not a pleasant experience. — Lemony Snicket

Song

This is the love I bring,
Absolute and nothing:
A tree but with no roots,
A cloud heavy with fruit,
A wide stone stair
That leads nowhere
But to empty sky,
Ambiguous majesty.

This is the love I bear:
It is light as air,
Yet weighs like an earth;
It is water flowing,
Yet adamant as fire.
It is coming from going.
It is dying and growing.

A love so rare and hard
It cuts a diamond word
Upon the windowpane,
"Never, never again,
Never upon my breast,"
Having no time to bring,
Having no place to rest,
Absolute and nothing. — May Sarton

Wherever the tree of beneficence takes root, it sends forth branches beyond the sky! — Saadi

I remember, as a kid, when I first understood that only half of every tree is visible, that the roots in the soil are equal to the branches in the sky, that a whole other half is underground. It took me a lot longer, well into adulthood, to realize people are like that too. — Elan Mastai

Branch by branch, Rowdy and I climbed toward the top of the tree, to the bottom of the sky. — Sherman Alexie

Waves, sky, trees, Essrog - I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. — Jonathan Lethem

On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September
Beneath a young plum tree, quietly
I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved
In my arms just like a graceful dream.
And over us in the beautiful summer sky
There was a cloud on which my gaze rested
It was very white and so immensely high
And when I looked up, it had disappeared. — Bertolt Brecht

Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. — C.S. Lewis

What did the tree learn from the earth to be able to talk with the sky? — Pablo Neruda

I walk in the direction she tells me. I feel my pores opening, sweat and heat radiating out of my body. A firefly dances in the distance, leaving tracers, and if I turn my head from side to side, I see long yellow-green streaks that cut through my vision and burn in front of my retinas even after the light that sparked them has gone.
I emerge from the mango grove into a field. In the distance unseen trucks pass with a sound like the ocean licking the sand. A tracery of darkness curls into a starry sky, a solitary pipal tree making itself known by an absence of light, like a flame caught in a photographer's negative, frozen, calling me. — Mohsin Hamid

Someone has said, 'To be a saint is to have loved many things' - many things
the tree, the dog, the sky, the flowers, even the color of someone's clothing.
You see, when you love, you love, and love extends to everything all the time and everywhere. — Richard Rohr

We ought to view ourselves with the same curiosity and openness with which we study a tree, the sky or a thought, because we too are linked to the entire universe.
— Henri Matisse

Imagination is a tree. It has the integrative virtues of a tree. It is root and boughs. It lives between earth and sky. It lives in the earth and the wind. The imagined tree imperceptibly becomes a cosmological tree, the tree which epitomises a universe, which makes a universe. — Gaston Bachelard

I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)I am never without it (anywhere
I go you go,my dear; and whatever is done by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear no fate (for you are my fate,my sweet)I want no world (for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
I carry your heart (I carry it in my heart) — E. E. Cummings

Sink not in spirit; who aimeth at the sky
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree. — George Herbert

When the pages are in the typewriter, I can't see his face.
In that way i am choosing you over him.
I don't need to see him.
I don't need to know if he is looking up at me.
It's not even that I trust him not to leave.
I know this won't last.
I'd rather be me than him.
The words are coming so easily.
The pages are coming easily.
At the end of my dream, Eve put the apple back on the branch. The tree went back into the ground. It became a sapling, which became a seed.
God brought together the land and the water, the sky and the water, the water and the water, evening and morning, something and nothing.
He said, Let there be light.
And there was darkness. — Jonathan Safran Foer

We'll act as if all this were a bad dream.
A bad dream.
To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream.
A bad dream.
I remembered everything.
I remembered the cadavers and Doreen and the story of the fig tree and Marco's diamond and the sailor on the Common and Doctor Gordon's wall-eyed nurse and the broken thermometers and the Negro with his two kinds of beans and the twenty pounds I gained on insulin and the rock that bulged between sky and sea like a gray skull.
Maybe forgetfulness, like a kind snow, would numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape. — Sylvia Plath

White Sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone. My hands dangled from the cuffs of my jacket as if they weren't my own. I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomplete dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew -the outline of a single tree standing in for a grove, lamp-posts and chimneys floating up out of context before the surrounding canvas was filled in-an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were recognizable but spaced too far apart, and disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them. — Donna Tartt

While they read and talked together, there was opened before them the great book wherein God has written, in the language of mountain, and tree, and sky, and flower, and brook, the things that make truly wise those who pause to read. — Harold Bell Wright

You mustn't give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get, until they're strong enough to run into the woods or fly into a tree. And then to a higher tree and then to the sky. — Holly Golightly

May these nuptials be blessed for us, may this marriage be blessed for us,
May it be ever like milk and sugar, this marriage like wine and halvah.
May this marriage be blessed with leaves and fruits like the date tree;
May this marriage be laughing forever, today,tomorrow, like the houris of paradise.
May this marriage be the sign of compassion and the approval of happiness here and hereafter;
May this marriage be fair of fame, fair of face and fair of omen as the moon in the azure sky.
I have fallen silent for words cannot describe how the spirit has mingled with this marriage — Jalaluddin Rumi

Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour ... A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove's plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens. — Gilbert K. Chesterton