Category: tree
Quotes of Category: tree
Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched-by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever." {p.33} book-quotejourneyprayergodIt was English, and the wych-elm that she saw from the window was an English tree. No report had prepared her for its peculiar glory. It was neither warrior, nor lover, nor god; in none of these roles do the English excel. It was a comrade, bending over the house, strength and adventure in its roots, but in its utmost fingers tenderness, and the girth, that a dozen men could not have spanned, became in the end evanescent, till pale bud clusters seemed to float in the air. book-quotetreeenglishI Am VerticalBut I would rather be horizontal.I am not a tree with my root in the soilSucking up minerals and motherly loveSo that each March I may gleam into leaf,Nor am I the beauty of a garden bedAttracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,Unknowing I must soon unpetal.Compared with me, a tree is immortalAnd a flower-head not tall, but more startling,And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.Sometimes I think that when I am sleepingI must most perfectly resemble them--Thoughts gone dim.It is more natural to me, lying down.Then the sky and I are in open conversation,And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me."I Am Vertical", 28 March 1961 book-quotetree
