Change Like A Tree Quotes

Change like a tree
When it is winter
Don't complain or fear
Just wait for the spring
To bloom and sing ~ Debasish Mridha

So what have I learned that is helpful? Well, if you are white, like I am, you can't get rid of the privilege you have, but you can use it for good. Don't say I don't even notice race! like it's a positive thing. Instead, recognize that differences between people make it harder for some to cross a finish line, and create fair paths to success for everyone that accommodate those differences. Educate yourself. If you think someone's voice is being ignored, tell others to listen. If your friend makes a racist joke, call him out on it, instead of just going along with it. If the two former skinheads I met can have such a complete change of heart, I feel confident that ordinary people can, too. ~ Jodi Picoult

Suddenly energized, she jumped to her feet and bounced up and down on the couch. Clean clothes went flying off the pile. Maybe she should feel bad because she'd just seen what a huge flaw she'd uncovered in herself. But she didn't.

She felt free and alive. Up to now, she hadn't really been living. Not fully and completely. That had to change. Immediately.

"What are you doing? I'm hearing weird sounds."

"I'm pulling a Tom Cruise. And I;m also waving a bra around. HUnter, this is amazing? YOu've changed everything. We should have talked like this long ago."

"You're freaking me out, sis. Do I need to call someone? ~ Jennifer Bernard

I think that if I ever have kids, and they are upset, I won't tell them that people are starving in China or anything like that because it wouldn't change the fact that they were upset. And even if somebody else has it much worse, that doesn't really change the fact that you have what you have. ~ Stephen Chbosky

God famously doesn't afflict Job because of anything Job has done, but because he wants to prove a point to Satan. Twenty years later, I am sympathetic with my first assessment; to me, in spite of the soft radiant beauty of many of its passages, the Bible still has a mechanical quality, a refusal to brook complexity that feels brutal and violent. There has been a change, however. When I look at Revelation now, it still seems frightening and impenetrable, and it still suggests an inexorable, ridiculous order that is unknowable by us, in which our earthly concerns matter very little. However, it not longer reads to me like a chronicle of arbitrarily inflicted cruelty. It reads like a terrible abstract of how we violate ourselves and others and thus bring down endless suffering on earth. When I read And they blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pain and their sores, and did not repent of their deeds, I think of myself and others I've known or know who blaspheme life itself by failing to have the courage to be honest and kind - and how then we rage around and lash out because we hurt. When I read the word fornication, I don't read it as a description of sex outside legal marriage: I read it as sex done in a state of psychic disintegration, with no awareness of one's self or one's partner, let alone any sense of honor or even real playfulness. I still don't know what to make of much of it, but I'm inclined to read it as a writer's primitive attempt to give form to his mor ~ Mary Gaitskill

Great meals rarely start at points that all look like beginnings. They usually pick up where something else leaves off. This is how most of the best things are made - imagine if the world had to begin from scratch each dawn: a tree would never grow, nor would we ever get to see the etchings of gentle rings on a clamshell ... Meals' ingredients must be allowed to topple into one another like dominos. Broccoli stems, their florets perfectly boiled in salty water, must be simmered with olive oil and eaten with shaved Parmesan on toast; their leftover cooking liquid kept for the base for soup, studded with other vegetables, drizzled with good olive oil, with the rind of the Parmesan added for heartiness. This continuity is the heart and soul of cooking. ~ Tamar Adler

Was I the rebel kid? The lost college student who just wanted to be accepted? The legalistic man who battled self-righteousness? Was I a husband or a father or a hip-hop artist? Like a tree trunk, all those people were a part of me. They are a part of me. But more than anything, Lecrae is a child who is unconditionally loved by God. I'm a sinner who has been rescued by God from my brokenness and called to glorify the One who has never left my side. That's who Lecrae is, and that's who I'll always be. ~ Lecrae Moore

To this day, I remain awestruck by the fact that human beings are capable of this type of metamorphosis. We don't have to stay stuck displaying the same personality traits over the course of our lifetime but are free to transform into higher expressions of ourselves. Today I can honestly say that I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that human beings are capable of making radical and lasting change. After a decade of coaching individuals and leading groups, I have discovered that if I don't buy into people's perceptions of who they are and what they are capable of, I can bypass their public personas and see who they are in their highest expression. With a little effort, I can see their magnificence and their potential no matter what they look like or what condition their emotional, spiritual, or financial world is in. I can see through their acts, their personas, their fears and insecurities. I can see who they are apart from the baggage they carry around. The undeniable fact is that underneath all of our public personas, we already are that which we desire to be. Our only job is to see past our own limitations so that we can return to that which we already are. ~ Debbie Ford

And there he stood looking like... RON WEASLEY to be precise….and that's where it all started.
People found him "boring" , "dumb" but did I really see what others couldn't ? Or was I blinded with that deep Infatuation.
Well he din't have the perfect body , his hair was always messy like a frizzy bear, stammered when he spoke but his flaws had swept me off by my feet like a Supernova. From the time we knew about each others existence on planet earth we din't really like each other reason being we had fought on a whole new level in a page on Facebook [ lame, but we were young].
Then as we reached high school… things became different, there was a drastic change.
"WE BECAME FRIENDS"
First it was really scary but as time passed we became inseparable. But I din't realize that amidst all that small inside jokes , teasing , recalling our embarassing past …I fell for him. And that too for the first time and believe me I fell hard. In a blink of an eye he who was a complete "moron" turned out to be the person who mattered the most to me. . . ~ Biipso

To The Lilies among Thistles, Just like a lily, a beautiful life does not just happen overnight. It is built daily through informed choices, commitment, faith and prayer. The journey towards becoming A Proverbs 31 Lady cannot therefore be taken lightly. It is a difficult, challenging journey filled with both laughter and tears, but a fulfilling one as you will soon find out. If you commit to becoming this woman just one day at a time, it will change not just your relationships but also your whole life.Consider it as a challenge, from one virtuous woman to the other. ~ Mary Maina

Saints are like trees. They do not call to anyone, neither do they send anyone away. They give shelter to whoever cares to come, be it a man, woman, child, or an animal. If you sit under a tree it will protect you from the weather, from the scorching sun as well as from the pouring rain, and it will give you flowers and fruit. Whether a human being enjoys them or a bird tastes of them matters little to the tree; its produce is there for anyone who comes and takes it. ~ Anandamayi Ma

Let the trees be consulted before you take any action
every time you breathe in thank a tree
let tree roots crack parking lots at the world bank headquarters
let loggers be druids specially trained and rewarded
to sacrifice trees at auspicious times
let carpenters be master artisans
let lumber be treasured like gold
let chain saws be played like saxophones
let soldiers on maneuvers plant trees give police and criminals a shovel
and a thousand seedlings
let businessmen carry pocketfuls of acorns
let newlyweds honeymoon in the woods
walk don't drive
stop reading newspapers
stop writing poetry
squat under a tree and tell stories. ~ John Wright

A wise man once said that human beings were programmed to like boundary conditions - places like tree houses, mountain cabins, or transgressive gay bars. Boundary conditions exist in places where you can stay in one element and look at another different and fascinating element for as long as you wanted. That's why people like beach towns like Cape May; you can sit and look at the ocean, or go in the ocean and look back at the land, whatever's more fun. If that's true, then maybe that's why people go to funerals. Funerals are the boundary condition between life and afterlife. Sheldon Berkman had crossed the boundary between ~ Curtis Edmonds

The poetry of the new year is problematically punctual. An impeccable guest who arrives on time when you are running frantically behind schedule. Catching you precisely at that awkward stage of housecleaning when the contents of closet and cupboard are strewn across the room and there is no sensible place left to sit down. No, you haven't had a chance to change the guest room towels, your clothes or your habits. It is at this stage that you begin to stammer out apologies and resolutions. The visitor fixes you with a gaze that breaks like dawn over your clutter and chagrin. 'What a beautiful life,' murmurs your guest, pressing an oddly shaped package into your hands. Gladness rises in the heart like a cloud of hummingbirds. Always the same, unpredictable, utterly original gift. You consider the paradox of that as you hold it between your palms. Like freshly kneaded dough: this brand new day. ~ Pavithra K. Mehta

What a wonderful song, she thought-everything was wonderful tonight, most of all this romantic scene in the den with their hands clinging and the inevitable looming charmingly close. The future vista of her life seemed an unending succession of scenes like this: under moonlight and pale starlight, and in the backs of warm limousines and in low cosy roadsters stopped under sheltering trees-only the boy might change, and this one was so nice. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

White people need to let people know that they have made their way through hundreds or even thousands of books. After all, what's the point of reading a book if people don't know you've read it? It's like a tree falling in the forest. ~ Christian Lander

I couldn't help it. I tried to keep it down but it just flooded through all my quiet spaces. It was a message more than a feeling, a message that tolled like a bell: change, change, change. ~ Junot Diaz

My grandfather often felt frustrated or baffled by my grandmother's illness, but when it came to the origins of the Skinless Horse he thought he understood. The Skinless Horse was a creature sworn to pursue my grandmother no matter where she went on the face of the globe, whispering to her in the foulest terms of her crimes and the blackness of her soul. There was a voice like that in everyone's head, he figured; in my grandmother's case it was just a matter of degree. You could almost see the Skinless Horse as a clever adapation, a strategy for survival evolved by a proven survivor. If you kept the voice inside your head, the way most people did, there could really be only one way to silence it. He admired the defiance, the refusal to surrender, involuntary but implicit in the act of moving that reproachful whisperer to a shadowy corner of a room, an iron furnace in a cellar, the branches of a grand old tree. ~ Michael Chabon

Like the ability of all the musicians to end the song at the right time. Or when it's time for a chord change, but nobody knows what the chord should be, and you all, you know, it all just changes, magically, at the same time. It's when you pick up your phone to call someone and that person is calling you. ~ Larkin Grimm

For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put forth branches like a young plant. But man dies, and is laid low; man breathes his last, and where is he? ~ Job

So much hanging on just these things, tiny increments that together build a life. Like words build a story, and what had Ted said? One word can change the entire world ~ Sarah Dessen

You can obsess and obsess over how things ended - what you did wrong or could have done differently - but there's not much of a point. It's not like it'll change anything. So really, why worry? ~ Jess Rothenberg

It's kind of like you, Bonnie. You cut off your long hair too. Just like Rapunzel."
"That's right, Katy. That's because a mean old witch locked me up at Tower Records, and I had to wait for my boyfriend to get out of jail and come rescue me."
"What the fu - heck are you talking about?" Finn asked, amending his curse at the last minute for the sake of the little girl who was hanging on every word.
A little snort escaped out of my nose at the incredulous look on his face, and Katy giggled.
"Bonnie Rae," Finn choked out, finally laughing, "can we please change the subject? ~ Amy Harmon

dishonor is like a scar on a tree, which time, instead of effacing, only helps to enlarge." Mencius ~ Inazo Nitobe

Characters to me are like sonnets, they have limits that you obey which allow a force to enter in, an invention that makes the novel possible. Change the limits and the force leaves. The novel becomes impossible. ~ Alexander Chee

Content in the knowledge that no matter what happened with your parents, or your girlfriend, that your siblings will still be there, like a bookend that keeps you upright when you feel like toppling over. ~ Robin Benway

Dear Jessa, I've started this letter so many times and I've never been able to finish it. So here goes again . . . I'm sorry. I'm sorry that Riley is dead. I'm sorry for ignoring your emails and for not being there for you. I'm sorry I've hurt you. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish it had been me that died and not Riley. If I could go back in time and change everything I would. I'm sorry I left without a word. There's no excuse for my behaviour but please know that it had nothing to do with you. I was a mess. I haven't been able to talk to anyone for months. And I felt too guilty and didn't know how to tell you the truth about what happened. I couldn't bear the thought of you knowing. I got all your emails but I didn't read them until last week. I couldn't face it and I guess that makes me the biggest coward you'll ever meet. I'm sorry. I'm sorry I never replied. You needed me and I wasn't there for you. I don't even know how to ask your forgiveness because I don't deserve it. I'm just glad you're doing better. I'm better too. I've started seeing a therapist – twice a week – you'd like her. She reminds me of Didi. I never thought I'd be the kind of guy who needed therapy, but they made it a condition of me keeping my job. She's helped me a lot with getting the panic attacks under control. Working in a room the size of a janitor's closet helps too – there aren't too many surprises, only the occasional rogue paperclip. I asked for the posting. I have to thank you ~ Mila Gray

I'm about to haul my packs into a tree to make camp when a silver parachute floats down and lands in front of me. A gift form a sponsor. But why now? I've been in fairly good shape with supplies. Maybe Haymitch's noticed my despondency and is trying to cheer me up a bit. Or could it be something to help my ear?

I open the parachute and find a small loaf of bread. It's not the fine white of the Capitol stuff. It's made of dark ration grain and shaped in a crescent. Sprinkled with seeds. I flashback to Peeta's lesson on the various district breads in the Training Center. This bread came from District 11. I cautiously lift the still warm loaf. What must it have cost the people of District 11 who can't even feed themselves? How many would've had to do without to scrape up a coin to put in the collection for this one loaf? It had been meant for Rue, surely. But instead of pulling the gift when she died, they'd authorized Haymitch to give it to me. As a thank-you? Or because, like me, they don't like to let debts go unpaid? For whatever reason, this is a first. A district gift to a tribute who's not your own.

I lift my face and step into the last falling rays of sunlight. "My thanks to the people of District Eleven," I say. I want them to know I know where it came from. That the full value of the gift has been recognized. ~ Suzanne Collins

She was still obliged to leave the house every day, on her usual hunt for food; and especially on days of bad weather she had no other solution but to leave Useppe alone, his own guard, locking him in the room. It was then that Useppe learned to pass time thinking. He would press both fists to his brow and begin to think. What he thought about is not given to us to know; and probably his thoughts were imponderable futilities. But it's a fact that, while he was thinking in this way, the ordinary time of other people was reduced for him almost to zero. In Asia there exists a little creature known as the lesser panda, which looks like something between a squirrel and a teddy bear and lives on the trees in inaccessible mountain forests; and every now and then it comes down to the ground, looking for buds to eat. Of one of these panda it was told that he spent millennia thinking on his own tree, from which he climbed down to the ground every three hundred years. But in reality, the calculation of such periods was relative: in fact, while three hundred years had gone by on earth, on that panda's tree barely ten minutes had passed. ~ Elsa Morante

Galen and Rayna are close."
I gasp. "How do you know that? I can't feel them." My heart turns traitor, beating like I just ran five miles uphill. It has nothing to do with sensing and everything to do with the mention of Galen's name.
"I'm a Tracker, Emma. I can sense them from almost across the world. Especially Rayna. And from the feel of things, Galen is flittering that cute little fin of his like crazy to get back to you. Rayna must be riding on his back."
"You can tell what she's doing?"
"I can tell how fast she's moving. No one can swim as fast as Galen, Rayna included. He must be pretty impatient to see you."
"Yeah. Impatient for me to change so he can have another royal subject to order around."
Toraf's laughter startles me, not because it's loud, but because his mood seems to swing around on an axis. "Is that what you think?" he says. ~ Anna Banks

I understand that actors lose their looks, they change over time, but people don't lose their talent. I think that, as people get older and the people who make the decisions get older, they don't like hiring people much older than them because it reminds them of their fathers, and they don't like telling people older than them what to do. It makes them uncomfortable. I think that happens a lot. ~ Kurt Fuller

You can't change your life. This mode in literature goes against the more middle-brown mode, which is about shaping your destiny, changing it. You can't change it, you just become passive in front of it. Even if we live in a godless universe, there are paths set, there are trajectories, like bumper cars just pulling those trajectories, colliding. ~ Tommy McCarthy

If you do not help me," Tessa said to Jem, "I swear, I will change into you, and I will lift him myself. And then everyone here will see what you look like in a dress." She fixed him with a look. "Do you understand? ~ Cassandra Clare

So often, parents want to play Edward Scissorhands and start pruning their child like a tree, but the reality is that your tree has just begun to grow, and you don't even know what kind of tree it is. Maybe it's not a sports tree. ~ William Stixrud

There's an honesty to Clark, Kal-El - Kal-El's the better way of saying it because he is both Superman and Clark - there's an honesty to him which crosses over on both - I don't like to use the word 'identities,' but I will because I can't think of a better one. So, it is not that tough to make that swap and change. ~ Henry Cavill

It's all just so fraught when you're writing and then going through the editorial process. It feels like this shape-shifting thing. When it's done, and you can't change a single word, it's a totally different thing. I was surprised by what that thing was. ~ Danielle Dutton

It's okay to look different, Lilith. Beauty is only a matter of opinion. If you believe you are beautiful, then that's all that matters. These are really tough years you're approaching now. Your decisions now as a teenager can change your entire life. Just make sure you talk to me or comeone if you're ever feeling like life is too much to handle. And never let anyone convince you that you're not worthy, only to take advantage of you. ~ Penelope Ward

Slowly, but steadily, my feelings did start to change- feelings about myself as a woman and feelings about what sexuality really is and what it really isn't. I -like most everyone who identified as gay or lesbian -felt very comfortable, very at home in mu body in my lesbianism. One doesn't repent for a sin of identity in one session. Sins of identity have multiple dimensions, and throughout this journey, I have come to my pastor and his wife, friends in the Lord, and always to the Lord himself with different facets of my sin. I don't mean different incidents or examples of the same sin, but different facets of sin -how pride, for example, informed my decision-making, or how my unwillingness to forgive others had landlocked my heart in bitterness. I have walked this journey with help. There is no other way to do it I still walk this journey with help. ~ Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

Stoans want to be lissent to. Them big brown stoans in the formers feal they want to stan up and talk like men. Some times youwl see them lying on the groun with ther humps and hollers theywl say to you, Sit a wyl and res easy why dont you. Then when youre sitting on them theywl talk and theywl tel if you lissen. Theywl tel whats in them but you wont hear nothing what theyre saying without you go as fas as the stoan. You myt think a stoan is slow thats becaws you wont see it moving. Wont see it walking a roun. That dont mean its slow tho. There are the many cools of Addom which they are the party cools of stoan. Moving in ther millyings which is the girt dants of the every thing its the fastes thing there is it keaps the stilness going. Reason you wont see it move its so far a way in to the stoan. If you cud fly way way up like a saddelite bird over the sea and you lookit down you wunt see the waves moving youwd see them change 1 way to a nother only you wunt see them moving youwd be too far a way. You wunt see nothing only a changing stilness. Its the same with a stoan. ~ Russell Hoban

One Sunday evening when it was very hot and breathlessly still we sere sitting here in this room in the dusk. He switched on the record player. Liszt. We sat. As I say, here. In this very room. We listened to the piece. Neither of us said a word. That's when he took my hand and we went out into the garden. In a quiet voice he said that I wasn't like any other person in the world and that some people wouldn't understand that. They wouldn't want me to be the way I was. They'd want to change me. They'd try to order me about and make me into the kind of person they wanted me to be. Since I was still a child there would be little I could do except stay alone, stay out of trouble, and make myself very small in the world. ~ Laird Koenig

T is sweet to win, no matter how, one's laurels,
By blood or ink; 't is sweet to put an end
To strife; 't is sometimes sweet to have our quarrels,
Particularly with a tiresome friend:
Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels;
Dear is the helpless creature we defend
Against the world; and dear the schoolboy spot
We ne'er forget, though there we are forgot.
But sweeter still than this, than these, than all,
Is first and passionate Love - it stands alone,
Like Adam's recollection of his fall;
The Tree of Knowledge has been plucked - all 's known
And Life yields nothing further to recall
Worthy of this ambrosial sin, so shown,
No doubt in fable, as the unforgiven
Fire which Prometheus filched for us from Heaven. ~ George Gordon Byron

We would do well, as Orwell counselled, to see the traces of the dystopian around us, to find the ends of those threads and how far along we are; the most accurate prophecy being that people, and the allure of domination, never really change. We can Copenhagenise our future cities, make them as green and smart as we can, but provided we are still embedded in systems that reward cronyism, exploitation and short-term profiteering, that require poverty and degradation, it will be mere camouflage. Dystopias will have cycle lanes and host World Cups. What may save us is, in Orwell's words, a dedication to 'common decency' and the perpetual knowledge that it need not be like this. ~ Darran Anderson

People dance because dance can change things. One move, can bring people together. One move, can make you believe like there's something more. One move, can set a whole generation free. ~ Adam G. Sevani