Quotations

«When a dead tree falls, the woodpeckers share in its death»

«The troubles of the young are soon over; they leave no external mark. If you wound the tree in its youth the bark will quickly cover the gash; but when the tree is very old, peeling the bark off, and looking carefully, you will see the scar there still. All that is buried is not dead.»

«These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; / Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.»

«And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree: / Him God raised up the third day, and shewed him openly; / Not to all the people, but unto witnesses chosen before God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead.»

«For even hereunto were ye called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps: / Who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth: / Who, when he was reviled, reviled not again; when he suffered, he threatened not; but committed himself to him that judgeth righteously: / Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.»

«EMBALM, v.i. To cheat vegetation by locking up the gases upon which it feeds. By embalming their dead and thereby deranging the natural balance between animal and vegetable life, the Egyptians made their once fertile and populous country barren and incapable of supporting more than a meagre crew. The modern metallic burial casket is a step in the same direction, and many a dead man who ought now to be ornamenting his neighbor's lawn as a tree, or enriching his table as a bunch of radishes, is doomed to a long inutility. We shall get him after awhile if we are spared, but in the meantime the violet and rose are languishing for a nibble at his _glutoeus maximus_.»

«SCARABEE, n. The same as scarabaeus.He fell by his own hand Beneath the great oak tree. He'd traveled in a foreign land. He tried to make her understand The dance that's called the Saraband, But he called it Scarabee. He had called it so through an afternoon, And she, the light of his harem if so might be, Had smiled and said naught. O the body was fair to see, All frosted there in the shine o' the moon -- Dead for a Scarabee And a recollection that came too late. O Fate! They buried him where he lay, He sleeps awaiting the Day, In state, And two Possible Puns, moon-eyed and wan, Gloom over the grave and then move on. Dead for a Scarabee! --Fernando Tapple»

«Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph -- green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree.»

«Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it.»

«The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit / not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.»