Treeless Quotes & Sayings

In the middle of the cemetery is a grassy plane, strangely vacant. There are no granite tombs or crumbling concrete, just a sun-washed treeless patch of green known as "No Man's Land." Here 1,500 unidentified bodies are buried. At one time, their skin burned with yellow fever; now they lie in a cool, dark place where long ago their arms and legs, hands and feet, were intertwined for eternity. — Molly Caldwell Crosby

She noticed immediately that they were now in an altogether paler country. The sun had disappeared above a film of vapour. The air was becoming cooler every minute. The land was flat and treeless and there seemed to be no colour in it at all. Every minute, the mist became thicker. The air became colder still and everything became paler and paler until soon there was nothing but grey and white all around them. They were in a country of swirling mists and ghostly vapours. There was some sort of grass underfoot but it was not green. It was ashy grey. — Roald Dahl

Earthly love is a brief and penurious stream, which only flows in spring, with a long summer drought. The change from a burning desert, treeless, springless, drear, to green fields and blooming orchards in June, is slight in comparison with that from the desert of this world's affection to the garden of God, where there is perpetual, tropical luxuriance of blessed love. — Henry Ward Beecher

He buried her beside her husband. After the services were over and the few mourners had gone, he stood alone in a cold November wind and looked at the two graves, one open to its burden and the other mounded and covered by a thin fuzz of grass. He turned on the bare, treeless little plot that held others like his mother and father and looked across the flat land in the direction of the farm where he had been born, where his mother and father had spent their years. He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been - a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase. Nothing had changed. — John Edward Williams

When I told my mom I was going to audition for 'The Hobbit,' she said, 'Well, you've always loved Tolkien.' And she was right. — Richard C. Armitage

You can never really escape. It goes with you, wherever you go. Somehow, the prairie dust gets in your blood, and it flows through your veins until it becomes a part of you. The vast stretches of empty fields, the flat horizons of treeless plains. The simplicity of the people - good, earnest people. The way they talk and the way they live. The lack of occurrence, lack of attention, lack of everything. All that - it's etched into your soul and it colors the way you see everything and it becomes a part of you. Eventually, Ms. Harper, when you leave, everything you experience outside of Kansas will be measured against all you know here. And none of it will make any sense. — P.S. Baber

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. — James Joyce

She told me about rolling hills covered with cornfields and treeless miles of land without water. I dreamt of cornfields dotted with yellow rosebushes — A. LaFaye

There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. — Andrew Carnegie

God gave me the gift of faith. I don't mean that in any miraculous sense, I mean through the parents who educated me, through the brothers and sisters I grew up with, the schools I went to, there was this influence upon me which was the faith, in the concrete. I accepted it, I questioned it, I grew up with it, and in the end, as a mature adult, I continue to accept it. — George Coyne

You were never in Texas," she says.He remembers the house on that strange treeless residential street, the green night growing up from the prairie, the flowers in the window, and says, "Absolutely I was.""Doing what?""Serving Uncle.""Oh, in the Army; well that doesn't count. Everybody's been to Texas with the Army.""You order whatever you think is good," Rabbit tells Tothero. — John Updike

Adolescence can be a time of turmoil and turbulence, of stress and storm. Rebellion against authority and against convention is to be expected and tolerated for the sake of learning and growth. — Haim Ginott

Even miracles take a little time. — Walt Disney

The mountains of the Great Divide are not, as everyone knows, born treeless, though we always think of them as above timberline with the eternal snows on their heads. They wade up through ancient forests and plunge into canyons tangled up with water-courses and pause in little gem-like valleys and march attended by loud winds across the high plateaus, but all such incidents of the lower world they leave behind them when they begin to strip for the skies: like the Holy Ones of old, they go up alone and barren of all circumstance to meet their transfiguration. — Wallace Stegner

If a player leaves Marquette and doesn't have some of my blood in him, then I don't think I've done a good job. — Al McGuire

I must return to my old comrades of the Great War - to the brown, the treeless, the flat and grave-set plain of Flanders - to the rolling, heat-miraged downlands of the Somme - for I am dead with them, and they live in me again. — Henry Williamson

Julian Street in his book, Abroad At Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures, painted a grim picture of Western Kansas as he traveled across the area in 1914. Street saw only a drab, treeless wasteland of brown and gray---"nothing, nothing, nothing"--images of incessant wind, violent cyclones, dust storms, and tragic desolation. As the train he was riding approached the small town of Monotony, which he felt was appropriately named, he listened sympathetically to the remarks of a fellow passenger: "God! How can they stand living out here? I'd rather be dead! — Daniel Fitzgerald

The secular utopians basically said the exact same thing, they just took the Bible out of the equation. The religious and the secular groups recognized each other as fellow travellers. They exchanged newsletters and asked each other questions like, "What's a good soup pot to use if you're making dinner for 800 people?" They had these practical connections. — Christine Jennings

I just hope and pray I can die with my boots on. — Johnny Cash

What have I become, my sweetest friend. Everyone I know goes away, in the end. — Johnny Cash

Giving up is conceding that things will never get better, and that is just not true. Ups and downs are a constant in life, and I've been belted into that roller coaster a thousand times. — Aimee Mullins

A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to the common mold. — Lewis Mumford

I was blessed to work with The Jazz Messengers when the two piano players were Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea. — Chuck Mangione

began to feel that queasy guilt that you can only know if you have lived among the English - a terrible suspicion that any pleasure involving more than a cup of milky tea and a chocolate digestive biscuit is somehow irreligiously excessive. — Bill Bryson

Anthropological theory assumes that exposure in a treeless situation where all escape upwards was cut off led to the invention of myths. Kafka's ape, dragged into human society, expresses very similar ideas in his 'Report for an Academy'. It is the absence of any way of escape that has forced him to become human himself. — W.G. Sebald

There is a place where the mountains tumble one upon the other off into the far distance, peak after treeless peak. Steep ridges connect them and deep canyons slash them apart. The grassy summits are wreathed with black sage. No roads intrude upon this jumble of oak-filled canyons and steep-sided hills, only the ambling trails made by deer, coyotes, and bears. The local Indians believe the spirits of the ancients still travel these roads. — R. Lawson Gamble

It circled back to her looks, as most snide comments did. Surely a pretty blond girl had to be shallow and dim-witted. — Kristin Hannah

She reflected on her time in Paris and thought how it seemed as if she'd spent half her life drinking wine in bed and covered with contusions. This, it occurred to her, was how it must feel to be Melanie Griffith. — Chuck Palahniuk

In any case, if the reader would have a correct idea of the mood of these exiles, we must conjure up once more those dreary evenings, sifting down through a haze of dust and golden light upon the treeless streets filled with teeming crowds of men and women. For, characteristically, the sound that rose towards the terraces still bathed in the last glow of daylight, now that the noises of vehicles and motors
the sole voice of cities in ordinary times
had ceased, was but one vast rumour of low voices and incessant footfalls, the drumming of innumerable soles timed to the eerie whistling of the plague in the sultry air above, the sound of a huge concourse of people marking time, a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, and evening after evening gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance which had ousted love from all our hearts. — Albert Camus

How many times his (Port's) friends, envying him his life, had said to him: "Your life is so simple." "Your life seems always to go in a straight line." Whenever they had said the words he heard in them an implicit reproach: it is not difficult to build a straight road on a treeless plain. He felt that what they really meant to say was: "You have chosen the easiest terrain." But if they elected to place obstacles in their own way-which they clearly did, encumbering themselves with every sort of unnecessary allegiance-that was no reason why they should object to his having simplified his life. So it was with a certain annoyance that he would say: "Everyone makes the life he wants. Right?" as though there were nothing further to be said. — Paul Bowles

But Nebraska was not always a bed of roses. When the first settlers arrived, they found a harsh, unforgiving place, a vast treeless expanse of barren, drought-parched soil. And so, summoning up the dynamic pioneer spirit of hope and steely determination, they left. But a few of them remained and built sod houses, which are actually made of dirt. Think about that. You can't clean a sod house, because it would be gone. The early settlers had a hell of a time getting this through to their children. "You kids stop tracking dirt out of the house!" they'd yell. — Dave Barry