Leafs Quotes

A withered maple leaf has left its branch and is falling to the ground; its movements resemble those of a butterfly in flight. Isn't it strange? The saddest and deadest of things is yet so like the gayest and most vital of creatures? ~ Ivan Turgenev

We will all, someday, experience death, and become obsolete as a dead leaf falling from a tree, crushed by passersby to ashes underlying the earth. ~ Kim Elizabeth

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. ~ Andy Goldsworthy

Once you change the technology - from a film camera to a video camera, or from an 8-mm camera to 16 mm - you change completely the content. With 8 mm, a leaf on a tree will be made up of maybe four grains. So it's very impressionistic, almost like Seurat. If you switch to 16 mm, the technology gives you hundreds of grains on that leaf. ~ Jonas Mekas

This fastest of all games [hockey] has become almost as much of a national svmbol as the maple leaf. ~ Lester B. Pearson

In all things that live there are certain irregularities, and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. ~ John Ruskin

My dream of happiness: a quiet spot by the Jamaican seashore ... hearing the wind sob with the beauty and the tragedy of everything. Sitting under an almond tree, with the leaf spread over me like an umbrella. ~ Errol Flynn

Every particular in nature, a leaf, a drop, a crystal, a moment of time is related to the whole, and partakes of the perfection of the whole. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

A leaf that is destined to grow large is full of grooves and wrinkles at the start. Now if one has no patience and wants it smooth offhand like a willow leaf, there is trouble ahead. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

If a man who can't count finds a four leaf clover, is he lucky? ~ Stanislaw Lem

Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface. ~ James Russell Lowell

The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too. Their yearly trick of looking new Is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In fullgrown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. ~ Philip Larkin

As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone. ~ Andy Goldsworthy

I found ways to seal off the powdery surface of pastel so that gold leaf can adhere to it. Similarly, I found ways to roughen the texture of the gold leaf so pastel can be applied over it. ~ Doug Dawson

Every ripple on the ocean, every leaf on every tree, every sand dune in the desert, every power we never see. ~ Sting

If your life is a leaf that the seasons tear off and condemn
they will bind you with love that is graceful and green as a stem. ~ Leonard Cohen

I used to not be really honest with girls and then I dropped a song called 'Starry Room' and then I started turning over a new leaf. ~ Jaden Smith

When you look at a tree, se it for its leafs, its branches, its trunk and the roots, then and only then will you see the tree ~ Takuan Soho

The practice of Zen is to eat, breathe, cook, carry water, and scrub the toilet - to infuse every act of body, speech, and mind - with mindfulness, to illuminate every leaf and pebble, every heap of garbage, every path that leads to our mind's return home. ~ Nhat Hanh

My way of life
Is fall'n into the sear and yellow leaf. ~ William Shakespeare

Leaf! you are so big!
How can you change your
color, then just fall!
As if there were no
such thing as integrity! ~ Frank O'Hara

Janie saw her life like a great tree in leaf with the things suffered, things enjoyed, things done and undone. Dawn and doom was in the branches ~ Zora Neale Hurston

In the meantime the strike is over, with a remarkably low loss of life. All is quiet, they report, all is quiet.
In the deserted harbour there is yet water that laps against the quays. In the dark and silent forest there is a leaf that falls. Behind the polished panelling the white ant eats away the wood. Nothing is ever quiet, except for fools. ~ Alan Paton

Heart-aches are forgotten, tears lose their bitterness, and like a leaf of lavendar in a store of linen, so does Memory make life sweet. ~ Myrtle Reed

Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable to so much as conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best. Leaf through a dictionary or try to make one, and you will find that every word covers and masks a well so bottomless that the questions you toss into it arouse no more than an echo. ~ Paul Valery

Every leaf is a spacious plain; every line a flowing brook; every period a lofty mountain. ~ James Hervey

Swinging on delicate hinges the autumn leaf almost off the stem. ~ Jack Kerouac

Once something has outlived its usefulness in one area of life, its purpose for being in existence is no longer the same. The leaf that captures a stream of sunlight, and then transfers its energy to the tree, serves one purpose in the spring and summer, and another completely different one through the fall and winter. ~ Guy Finley

The power of God is present at all places, even in the tiniest tree leaf. ~ Martin Luther

That headlong ivy! not a leaf will grow But thinking of a wreath, ... I like such ivy; bold to leap a height 'Twas strong to climb! as good to grow on graves As twist about a thyrsus; pretty too (And that's not ill) when twisted round a comb. ~ Elizabeth Barrett Browning

But the truth, he knows, is otherwise. His pleasure in living has been snuffed out. Like a leaf on a stream, like a puffball on a breeze, he has begun to float towards his end. He sees it quite clearly, and it fills him with (the word will not go away) despair. The blood of life is leaving his body and despair is taking its place, despair that is like a gas, odourless, tasteless, without nourishment. You breathe it in, your limbs relax, you cease to care, even at the moment when the steel touches your throat. ~ J.M. Coetzee

The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it, But in another country, as he said, Bore a bright golden flow'r, but not in this soil; Unknown, and like esteem'd, and the dull swain Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon. ~ John Milton

What a simple thing death is, just as simple as the falling of an autumn leaf. ~ Vincent Van Gogh

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly. ~ Laura Miller

When I first became really interested in building furniture, I went to Toys-R-Us, and spent $200 on Transformers toys. By taking the toys apart and studying how they moved, I was able to figure out how to hide a table leaf, what type of contraption I'd need to slide it under the table. I'm a really visual learner. ~ Jeremiah Brent

He began to search among the infinite series of impressions which time had laid down, leaf upon leaf, fold upon fold softly, incessantly upon his brain; among scents, sounds; voices, harsh, hollow, sweet; and lights passing, and brooms tapping; and the wash and hush of the sea. ~ Virginia Woolf

Turn over a new leaf. ~ Edmund Burke

Nothing is beautiful by itself; things are beautiful with other things. Water is beautiful with autumn leafs, with a bird or with a reflection of the clouds! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

If you are bitter, you are like a dry leaf that you can just squash, and you can get blown away by the wind. There is much more wisdom in forgiveness. ~ Vusi Mahlasela

Unchopping a Tree.

Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work.

It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the ~ W.S. Merwin

It's not that every leaf must finally fall, it's just that we can never catch them all. ~ Michael R. Burch

The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes. ~ Ray Bradbury

If we are all strong, stable, we can set our sail with any wind in the world that comes along. We make up our own direction. If we are not strong, we are like a leaf in the wind and the world's winds will take us where they wish, not where we wish. So we meditate, every day, regularly, and gain transcendental being in our everyday life and then we are strong. When we are all infused with Being, we need not think which course is right, we just take the one that is automatically. Being is the wind-resister and the sail-setter ... ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Secrecy is the original sin. The fig leaf in the Garden of Eden. The basic crime against love. ~ Timothy Leary

I've never turned over a fig leaf yet that didn't have a price tag on the other side. ~ Saul Bellow

Soft as Memnon's harp at morning, To the inward ear devout, Touched by light, with heavenly warning Your transporting chords ring out. Every leaf in every nook, Every wave in every brook, Chanting with a solemn voice Minds us of our better choice. ~ John Keble

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Saga University in Japan, and the University of California, Davis, proposed creating an artificial inorganic leaf modeled on the real thing. They took a leaf of Anemone vitifolia, a plant native to China, and injected its veins with titanium dioxide-a well-known industrial photocatalyst. By taking on the precise branching shape and structure of the leaf's veins, the titanium dioxide produced much higher light-harvesting ability than if ti was used in a traditional configuration. The researchers found an astounding 800 percent increase in hydrogen production as well. The total performance was 300 percent more active than the world's best commercial photocatalysts. When they added platinum nanoparticles to the mix, it increased activity by a further 1,000 percent. ~ Jay Harman

That is not a drug. It's a leaf. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger

Caught like a leaf in the wind
Lookin' for a friend
Where can you turn
Whisper the words of a prayer and you'll find Him there
Arms open wide, love in His eyes
Jesus - He meets you where you are
Jesus - He heals your secret scars
All the love you're looking for is Jesus
The friend of a wounded heart ~ Wayne Watson

No cop was ever born who wasn't a sucker for a finely-executed high-speed Controlled Drift all the way around one of those clover-leaf freeway interchanges. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

My end goal in the piano is to play Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag.' ~ Miranda Leek

So passeth, in the passing of a day,
Of mortall life the leafe, the bud, the flowre ~ Edmund Spenser

Anyone can love a rose, but it takes a lot to love a leaf. ~ Tom Flynn

I'm very proud to be wearing the "C" for the Maple Leafs. It puts a smile on my face everyday ~ Mats Sundin

My father moved through theys of we, singing each new leaf out of each tree, (and every child was sure that spring danced when she heard my father sing) ... ~ Mitch Albom

Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

We are small worms, Zorba, very small worms on the tiniest leaf of a gigantic tree. This tiny leaf is our earth; the other leaves are the stars you see moving at night. We drag ourselves along on our tiny leaf, eagerly ferreting around in it. We smell it: it has an odor. We taste it: it can be eaten. We strike it: it resounds, shouting like a living thing. Some of us human beings, the most fearless, reach the edge of the leaf. We bend over this edge with open eyes and ears, observing chaos below. We shudder. We divine the terrible drop beneath us, occasionally hear a sound made by the gigantic tree's other leaves, sense the sap rising from the roots, swelling our hearts. In this way, leaning over the abyss, we realize with all our body and soul that we are being overcome by terror. What begins at that moment is - " I stopped. I had wanted to say, "What begins at that moment is poetry," but Zorba would not have understood, so I kept silent. "What begins?" asked Zorba eagerly. "Why did you stop?" "At that moment, Zorba, begins the great danger," I replied. "Some become dazed and delirious; others, growing afraid, take great pains to discover an answer that will brace their heart. These say, 'God.' Still others, calmly, bravely, look down at the drop from the leaf's edge and say, 'I like it.' ~ Nikos Kazantzakis

When in still air and still in summertime
A leaf has had enough of this, it seems
To make up its mind to go; fine as a sage
Its drifting in detachment down the road. ~ Howard Nemerov

The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the God of day goes down upon the dreary scene, and in short you are for ever floored. ~ Charles Dickens

I still feel like a castaway, th elast of a once numerous species. It was as though Robinson Crusoe discovered the telltale footprint on the beach and then realized that it was his own. Myself, small as a leaf, thin as water, begins to cry. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I grew up trying to play for the Toronto Maple Leafs, not Team Canada. Didn't even know it existed. ~ Adam Oates

The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every ... minutest fiber. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

O never harm the dreaming world, the world of green, the world of leaves, but let its million palms unfold the adoration of the trees It is a love in darkness wrought obedient to the unseen sun, longer than memory, a thought deeper than the graves of time. The turning spindles of the cells weave a slow forest over space, the dance of love, creation, out of time moves not a leaf, and out of summer, not a shade. ~ Kathleen Raine

Blessed be the discipline which makes me reach out my soul's roots into closer union with Jesus! Blessed be the dews of the Spirit which keep my leaf ever green! Blessed be the trials which shake down the ripe, golden fruits from the branches. ~ Theodore L. Cuyler

Problems are not solved on the level of problems. Analyzing a problem to find its solution is like trying to restore freshness to a leaf by treating the leaf itself, whereas the solution lies in watering the root. ~ Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

Women are so gentle, so affectionate, so true in sorrow, so untired and untiring! but the leaf withers not sooner, and tropic light fades not more abruptly. ~ Bryan Procter

The faintest scraping-ticking arose as the knuckles of the hinge leafs turned against pivot pins in need of oil, and the door swung ever so slowly into the kitchen, ~ Dean Koontz

When you spend your life in a creative mode all the time mindless leaf blowing can be a welcome break. ~ Art Wolfe

Men are like trees: each one must put forth the leaf that is created in him. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation. ~ Maya Angelou

YOU are the big drop of dew under the lotus leaf,
I am the smaller one on its upper side,'
said the dewdrop to the lake. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

What we take to be our strongest tower of delight, only stands at the caprice of the minutest event the falling of a leaf, the hearing of a voice, or the receipt of one little bit of paper scratched over with a few small characters by a sharpened feather. ~ Herman Melville

The wind picks up. It sends leaves scurrying for cover until a softer breeze blows through, settling them down again as if to say, Shhh, there, there, it's all right. One leaf still dances in the air. It spins higher and higher, defying gravity and logic, stretching for something just out of reach. It shall have to fall, of course. Eventually. But for now, I hold my breath, willing it to keep going, taking comfort in its struggle. ~ Libba Bray

When soured by disappointment we must endeavor to pursue some fixed and pleasing course of study, that there may be no blank leaf in our book of life. Painful and disagreeable ideas vanish from the mind that can fix its attention upon any subject. ~ Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

You have no right to go before a public without an adequate technique, just because you feel. Anything feels - a leaf feels, a storm feels - what right have you to do that? You have to have speech, and it's a cultivated speech. ~ Martha Graham

A great tree develops over time and can tell stories not only those of happiness, but also those that contain pain from what it has seen over the years, and as a result is the wise ancient tree that it is today. As the seasons change, the tree naturally goes through changes as well: where the leaves turn yellow and orange in the fall, falling by the Winter, returning in the Spring, and with full set of new leafs by the Summer. Love is no different in that there will be times when we are fully naked in the Winter, and left to wonder about Spring when it seemed so easy to love, yet the wise tree knows that no winter will last forever no matter how cold it may be. ~ Forrest Curran

Aurora hail, and all the thousand dies,
Which deck thy progress through the vaulted skies:
The morn awakes, and wide extends her rays,
On ev'ry leaf the gentle zephyr plays;
Harmonious lays the feather'd race resume,
Dart the bright eye, and shake the painted plume. ~ Phillis Wheatley

I'll turn over a new leaf. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

Angel and Muse approach from without; the Angel sheds light and the Muse gives form (Hesiod learned of them). Gold leaf or chiton-folds: the poet finds his models in his laurel coppice. But the Duende, on the other hand, must come to life in the nethermost recesses of the blood. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different. ~ John Steinbeck

Icons are also beautiful, with their luminous colors and gold leaf. On first glance, the subjects can seem flat, their poses artificial. But the wonder of the icons has to do with the relationship which develops between the panel and the viewer. Looking at an icon brings me a feeling of serenity; it's like a form of prayer. So I suppose in this sense, the icon is unsurpassed. ~ Mary Pope Osborne

If you put a real leaf and a silk leaf side by side, you'll see something of the difference between Homer's poetry and anyone else's. There seem to be real leaves still alive in the 'Iliad,' real animals, real people, real light attending everything. ~ Alice Oswald

At some point during almost every romantic comedy, the female lead suddenly trips and falls, stumbling helplessly over something ridiculous like a leaf, and then some Matthew McConaughey type either whips around the corner just in the nick of time to save her or is clumsily pulled down along with her. That event predictably leads to the magical moment of their first kiss. Please. I fall ALL the time. You know who comes and gets me? The bouncer. ~ Chelsea Handler

It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation ... My work requires it - but I myself have no need or use for it - Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative - I think all chrysalides do - all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion -resurrection - the establishment of the entity. But now I've come up tot the outside of my casements. ~ Marsden Hartley

Nothing Stay Forever"
"Nature's first green is gold,
"Her hardest hue to hold.
"Her early leaf's a flower;
"But only so an hour.
"Then leaf subsides to leaf.
"So Eden sank to grief,
"So dawn goes down today.
"Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost ~ S.E. Hinton

All that happens in the world of Nature or Man, - every war; every peace; every hour of prosperity; every hour of adversity; every election; every death ; every life; every success and every failure, - all change, - all permanence, - the perished leaf; the unutterable glory of stars, - all things speak truth to the thoughtful spirit. ~ Rufus Choate

Art is the flower ... life the green leaf. ~ Charles Rennie Mackintosh

I possess the greatest power ever bestowed upon mankind, the power of choice. ~ Andy Andrews

The one red leaf, the last of its clan,
That dances as often as dance it can,
Hanging so light, and hanging so high,
On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The leaf of every tree brings a message from the unseen world. Look, every falling leaf is a blessing. ~ Rumi

I found it."
"People find pennies," Gansey replied. "Or car keys. Or four-leaf clovers."
"And ravens," Ronan said. "You're just jealous 'cause" - at this point, he had to stop to regroup his beer-sluggish thoughts - "you didn't find one, too. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. ~ Annie Dillard

You could be
the leaf that never falls from the tree
you could be
the sun that never leaves the sky
this might be
the happy ending without the ending
this might be
a reason to try ~ David Levithan

The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf. ~ Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Life would be better if the Leafs would make the playoffs. Life would be perfect if they'd win the Stanley Cup. ~ Tom Earle

Inconvenience yourself: ditch the remote, the garage door opener, the leaf-blower; buy a bike, broom, rake, and snow shovel. ~ Dan Buettner

If you work, if you wait, you will find the place where the four-leaf clovers grow. ~ Ella Higginson

October arrives in a swirl of fragrant blue leaf smoke, the sweetness of slightly frosted MacIntosh apples, and little hard acorns falling. We are in the midst of cool crisp days, purple mists, and Nature recklessly tossing her whole palette of dazzling tones through fields and woodlands. ~ Jean Hersey

When I'm writing, I am concentrating almost wholly on concrete detail: the color a room is painted, the way a drop of water rolls off a wet leaf after a rain. ~ Donna Tartt

Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle, cracked ice crunching in pails, the night that numbs the leaf, the duel of two nightingales, the sweet pea that has run wild, Creation's tears in shoulder blades. ~ Boris Pasternak