"I think it's fair rude to make him a tree and not know what kind he is."
— Tamora Pierce

"I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And 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 sleeping
I 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."
— Sylvia Plath (Collected Poems)

"Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy. "
— Shel Silverstein (The Giving Tree)

"And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1)

""Those two are carved from the same tree." the queen said.
"By the same blade." The high king answered and offered her his arm in splendid dignity"
"
— Victoria Hanley (The Seer and the Sword)

"This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values...."
— Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak)

"Those were the Rommely women: Mary, the mother, Evy, Sissy, and Katie, her daughters, and Francie, who would grow up to be a Rommely woman even though her name was Nolan. They were all slender, frail creatures with wondering eyes and soft fluttery voices. But they were made out of thin invisible steel."
— Betty Smith

"Solitued is the profoundest fact of the human condition. man is the only being who knows he is alone."
— One Tree Hill

"You know I've got this theory, there are two kinds of people in this world. There are lyric people and music people. You know, the lyric people tend to be analytical. You know, all about the meaning of the song. They're the ones you see with the CD insert out like 5 minutes after buying it, pouring over the lyrics, interpreting the hell out of everything. Um, then there's the music people, like Brooke. Who could care less for the lyrics as long as its just got like a good beat and you could dance to it. I don't know, sometimes it might be easier to be a music girl and not a lyric girl. But since I'm not, let me just say this. Sometimes things find you when you need them to find you, I believe that. And for me its usually song lyrics."
— One Tree Hill

"To dwellers in a wood, almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature."
— Thomas Hardy (Under the Greenwood Tree)

"Whoever said nothing is impossible obviously hasn't tried nailing Jell-O to a tree."
— John Candy

"And the tree was happy"
— Shel Silverstein (The Giving Tree)

"Every song ends.is that any reason not to enjoy the reason?"
— Peyton Sawyer

"She will be loved"
— One Tree Hill

"Every good story needs a villain"
— Paul Johansson

"You know, it's been said that we just don't recognize the significant moments of our lives while they are happening. We grow complacent with ideas, or things, or people and we take them for granted. And it's usually not until that thing is about to be taken away from you that you've realized how wrong you've been, that you realized how much you need it, how much you love it."
— Nathan Scott One Tree Hill

"I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree."
— Joyce Kilmer

"Stranded in this mill town railroad yard while the whole world was converging elsewhere, we seemed to be nothing but children playing among heroic men."
— John Knowles (A Separate Peace)

"the scornful force of his tone turned the word into a curse"
— John Knowles (A Separate Peace)

"There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly . . . survives without sun, water, and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.
"
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"She had had the pain; it had been like being boiled alive in scalding oil and not being able to die to get free of it"
— Katie Nolan/Betty Smith

"Pierwszy z rodu jest przywiazany do drzewa, a ostatniego zjadaja mrowki."
— Gabriel García Márquez (Cien años de soledad y un homenaje: Discursos de Gabriel Garcia Marquez y Carlos Fuentes)

"The tree in the field is to be treated with respect. It is not to be romanticized as the old lady romanticizes her cat (that is, she reads human reactions into it). . . . But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize that God made it and it deserves respect because he made it as a tree. Christians who do not believe in the complete evolutionary scale have reason to respect nature as the total evolutionist never can, because we believe that God made these things specifically in their own areas. So if we are going to argue against evolutionists intellectually, we should show the results of our beliefs in our attitudes. The Christian is a man who has a reason for dealing with each created thing on a high level of respect."
— Francis A. Schaeffer (Pollution and the Death of Man)

""This darkness is for sleeping, for escape; it's where I go when the other places ache with light; this is where I curl up and close my eyes and darkness flows like lava, and I dissapear into what, into nothing, into pure dark, into what there is before there is anything else." "
— Leslie Pietrzyk

""Someday you'll remember what I said and you'll thank me for it."

Francie wished adults would stop telling her that. Already the load of thanks in the future was weighing her down. She figured she'd have to spend the best years of her womanhood hunting up people to tell them that they were right and to thank them."
— Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn)

"The old trees surrounding it all were intensely meaningful, with a message that was very pressing and entirely indecipherable. Here the road turned to the left and became dirt. It proceeded along the lower end of the playing fields, and under the pale night glow the playing fields swept away from me in slight frosty undulations which bespoke meanings upon meanings, levels of reality I had never suspected before, a kind of thronging and epic grandeur which my superficial eyes and cluttered mind had been blind to before. They unrolled away impervious to me as though I were a roaming ghost, not only tonight but always, as though I had never played on them a hundred times, as though my feet had never touched them, as though my whole life at Devon had been a dream, or rather that everything at Devon, the playing fields, the gym, the water hole, and all the other buildings and all the people there were intensely real, wildly alive and totally meaningful, and I alone was a dream, a figment which had never really touched anything. I felt that I was not, never had been and never would be a living part of this overpoweringly solid and deeply meaningful world around me.

I reached the bridge which arches over the little Devon River and beyond it the dirt track which curves toward the stadium. The stadium itself, two white concrete bands of seats, was as powerful and alien to me as an Aztec ruin, filled with the traces of vanished people and vanished rites, of supreme emotions and supreme tragedies. The old phrase about "If there walls could only speak" occurred to me and I felt it more deeply than anyone has ever felt it, I felt that the stadium could not only speak but that its words could hold me spellbound. In fact the stadium did speak powerfully and at all times, including this moment. But I could not hear, and that was because I did not exist."
— John Knowles

"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

"I saw on the pad not an operator's number from my home town, but one which seemed to interrupt the beating of my heart."
— John Knowles

""As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on." "
— Woody Allen

"I know in my mind
I would leave you now
If I had the strength to
I would leave you up
To your own devices
Will you not talk
Can you take pity
I don't ask much
But won't you speak
Please."
— Dave Matthews Band (Best of Dave Matthews Band for Easy Guitar)

"Must like the rest of us on the surface, he had an underlying obliging and considerate strain which barred him from being a really important member of the class. You had to be rude at least sometimes and edgy often to be credited with "personality," and without that accolade no one at Devon could be anyone. No one, with the exception of course of Phineas."
— John Knowles

"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 (White Oleander)

"As I walked briskly out the road the wind knifed at my face, but this sun caressed the back of my neck."
— John Knowles

"The old trees surrounding it all were intensely meaningful, with a message that was very pressing and entirely indecipherable."
— John Knowles