Weekend Words: Tree
This week, The New York Times cheerfully reported on "the leafing of New York": the cityscape transformed by hundreds of thousands of trees planted over the past few decades.
This week, The New York Times cheerfully reported on “the leafing of New York”: the cityscape transformed by hundreds of thousands of trees planted over the past few decades.
“I shall be like that tree, I shall die at the top.”
—Jonathan Swift
“When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”
—Marc Chagall
“Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.”
—Rabindranath Tagore
“I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.”
—Ogden Nash, “Song of the Open Road”
“No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”
—William Wordsworth, “A slumber did my spirit seal”
“I never see that prettiest thing
A cherry bough gone white with Spring,
But what I think, ‘How gay ‘twoud be
To hang me from a flowering tree.”
—Dorothy Parker, “Cherry White”
“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than others things do.”
—Willa Cather, O Pioneers!
“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence,
we could rise up rooted like trees.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
“I don’t have to look up my family tree, because I know that I’m the sap.”
—Fred A. Allen
“I could be content that we might procreate like trees, without conjunction, or that there were any way to perpetuate the world without this trivial and vulgar way of coition.”
—Sir Thomas Browne
