Trunk Quotes

It was becoming more and more evident that Salem was a town that celebrated individuality, a real live-and-let-live kind of place. Melody felt a gut punch of regret. Her old nose would have fit in here.
"Look!" She pointed at the multicolored car whizzing by. Its black door were from a Mercedes coupe, the white hood from a BMW; the silver trunk was Jaguar, the red convertible top was Lexus, the whitewall tires were Bentley, the sound system was Bose, and the music was classical. A hood ornament from each model dangled from the rear view mirror. Its license plate appropriately read MUTT.
"That car looks like a moving Benton ad."
"Or a pileup on Rodeo drive." Candace snapped a picture with her iPhone and e-mailed to her friends back home. They responded instantly with a shot of what they were doing. It must have involved the mall because Candace picked up her pace and began asking anyone under the age of fifty where the cool people hung out. ~ Lisi Harrison

Betsy was so full of joy that she had to be alone. She went upstairs to her bedroom and sat down on Uncle Keith's trunk. Behind Tacy's house the sun had set. A wind had sprung up and the trees, their color dimmed, moved under a brooding sky. All the stories she had told Tacy and Tib seemed to be dancing in those trees, along with all the stories she planned to write some day and all the stories she would read at the library. Good stories. Great stories. The classics. Not Rena's novels. ~ Maud Hart Lovelace

In a way, Jersey really supports rock, maybe more than New York City and Long Island. I know plenty of bands that tour and do much better at Starland or other clubs in New Jersey than others in the tri-state area. ~ Eddie Trunk

Religions are branches from a common trunk - Divine Wisdom. ~ Annie Besant

I was about 12 when I first encountered 'The Moonstone' - or a Classics Illustrated version of it - digging through an old trunk in my grandfather's house on a rainy Bengali afternoon. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I am so appreciative of all the attention I've gotten, especially since I don't ever consider myself anything more than a fan. ~ Eddie Trunk

She heard Rowan awake with a start before he reconciled himself to his surroundings. His back scraped across the trunk of the tree as he slid sideways
trying to see around the branch she was sitting on to get a look at her.
"Are you awake?" he asked, his voice still rough from sleep.
"Yeah."
"Did you sleep at all?"
"No." She heard him mumble something to himself and decided to cut him off before he could scold her again. "My butt did, though. Slept like a log all night."
"Well, obviously, your butt has more sense than you do."
"You're a funny man, Rowan whatever your last name is."
"Fall."
"I'd rather not."
She managed to get a tiny chuckle out of him, which she considered a huge achievement. Rowan stood up on his branch, bringing his head level with Lily's, and started to untie her. His lips were still pursed in a near smile.
"My name is Rowan Fall. ~ Josephine Angelini

At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver ~ Gustave Flaubert

You take I-55 south, and you'll run into I-20. Or you could take ... "
I was about to be overloaded with information. "Oh that sounds just perfect. Let me do just that, or I'll lose track."
Sure, glad I could help."
Oh, you surely did."
We beamed at each other, just two nice women. I had to fight an impulse to say "I have a tortured vampire in my trunk," out of sheer giddiness. ~ Charlaine Harris

It is curious to look back over life, over all the varying incidents and scenes - such a multitude of odds and ends. Out of them all what has mattered? What lies behind the selection that memory has made? What makes us choose the things that we have remembered? It is as though one went to a great trunk full of junk in an attic and plunged one's hands into it and said, 'I will have this - and this - and this. ~ Agatha Christie

Then he led her to sit by him on a fallen gum trunk, smooth and white, and he leaned to whisper in her ear. Transferred the secret he and her mother had kept for seventeen years. Waited for the flicker of recognition, the minute shift in expression as she registered what he was telling her. Watched as the bottom fell out of her world and the person she had been vanished in an instant. ~ Kate Morton

But what the long walk had not done was reveal the cause of the inherent distaste that had sprung out of nowhere overtaking her there under the tree. On the cold, damp grass, or up against the rough tree trunk. He had done it many times without a second thought, and in more challenging situations. It would have been nothing at all to wrap her long legs around his waist, brace one hand against the tree trunk, hold her tight with his other arm, and give the lady exactly what she wanted.

But for some reason he had not been able to do it. For the first time in his life, his body had been willing but his mind had not. Labeling the experience unpleasant would be a severe understatement. ~ Evangeline Collins

One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside - just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it. Years ~ Ayn Rand

Then, on December 14, 1999, an alert United States Customs agent in Port Angeles, Washington, stopped a nervous twenty-three-year-old Algerian named Ahmed Ressam who was crossing over from Canada on the last ferry of the evening. He had explosives in his trunk and plans to blow them up at the Los Angeles International Airport. The case galvanized the government into an all-out millennium alert. Watson and the White House counterterrorism group met around the clock. They sought an extraordinary number of FISA wiretaps; Janet Reno authorized at least one warrantless search on her own authority. Clarke ~ Tim Weiner

Abel was arrested. So was the guy with me. Help me get Delia out of the trunk."
His expression borders on horror.
"Well, you knew you'd have to let her out eventually when you put her in there, didn't you? ~ Rysa Walker

The boughs, without becoming detached from the trunk grow away from it. ~ Victor Hugo

A sly smirk curled at the corner of his mouth as he peered into the trunk. "Why do you have Robin Hood's toy chest?"
- Brendan Daniels ~ Elizabeth Morgan

That night, I met some old college friends at Soho House, a private club in the meatpacking district of Manhattan. I hadn't seen them since I'd joined the community, and they hardly recognized me. They spent a half hour discussing how awkward and introverted I used to be. Then their conversation turned to work and movies. I tried to contribute, but I had trouble focusing on the words. They just floated into my ear and accumulated there like wax. I felt like I didn't fit in with them anymore. Fortunately, an Amazonian woman with tree-trunk thighs and a lethal boob-job soon stumbled past the table. She was a foot taller than me and somewhat drunk. "Have ~ Neil Strauss

Phoebe stared into his blue eyes. "What would you do if you ran away from a wedding in a car that didn't belong to you and discovered a body in the trunk about the time a sheriff's deputy rolled up behind you?" She flung her hand in the air, and assumed a high-pitched, sarcastic tone. "Hi, I'm a rich man's daughter with a dead man in my trunk. Could you help me get him out so I can be on my merry way? ~ Elle James

Letter 84


An elephant with his trunk raised is a ladder to the stars.

A breaching whale is a ladder to the bottom of the sea.

My photographs are a ladder to my dreams.

These letters are ladders to you. ~ Gregory Colbert

The deep, salty, black sea rolls toward us, cold and indifferent, lacking all empathy. Detached, merely itself. This is what the ocean does every day. It doesn't need us for anything. It doesn't care about our hopes and fears, not does it give a damn about our descriptions. The dark weight of the sea is a superior power. Many have been in this situation every since some of our overconfident ancestors set a hollowed out tree trunk in the water and paddled off on languid waves, only to venture out too far where the currents were stronger than their arms or paddles. Or maybe like us, they were surprised by a storm. All of them must have felt the same cold shiver when they realized the sea is truly without sentimentality or memory. Whatever it swallows is gone, becoming food for the fish, crabs and annelid worms. For the lamprey, hag fish, flat worms, ring worms, and all the parasites of the deep. To be drowned and embraced by the eternal, indeterminate all. ~ Morten A. Strøksnes

Turn off your computer and go out of doors. Dig a large enough hole to transplant a mature apple tree. Nurture the tree, feed it, coddle it so that its fruit will be ample, bright and firm. Practice open-hand strikes against the rough bark of the trunk until it's time to harvest. Choose the champion of your apple crop, pluck it from the tree, and beat yourself about the face and tits with it until your mettle will suffice. ~ Nick Offerman

Coming to the ball, Mr. Plumleigh-Teignmott?"
"Ball? If you insist." Pillover slid off his trunk, and Roger jumped down to help him load it into the cart.
"Ball?" said one of the Pistons with interest. "We like balls."
Dimity gave them her best, most haughty look. "Yes, but are you certain they like you? ~ Gail Carriger

Mom! Look. This one is my favorite," Devin said, pulling out a faded pink dress with a red plaid sash. The crinoline petticoat underneath was so old and stiff it made snapping sounds, like beads or fire embers. She dropped the dress over her head, over her clothes. It brushed the floor. "When I'm old enough for it to fit me, I'm going to wear it with purple shoes," she said.
"A bold choice," Kate said as Devin dove back into the trunk. The attic in Kate's mother's house had always fascinated Devin with its promise of hidden treasures. When Kate's mother had been alive, she had let Devin eat Baby Ruth candy bars and drink grape soda and play in this old trunk full of dresses that generations of Morris women had worn to try entice rich men to marry them. Most of the clothes had belonged to Kate's grandmother Marilee, a renowned beauty who, like all the rest, had fallen in love with a poor man instead. ~ Sarah Addison Allen

In the center of a garden reared a tree, glinting golden in the darkness, peppered with flowers that smelled of blood. The great yawning hollows of the trunk invited her in, promising a snug sanctuary. "They will suffocate you like a pillow of sand and you will never emerge alive," a chittering voice cried out. The patterns engraved on the tree's bark dizzied her eyes. "If your finger brushes against them, you'll know true madness." She glanced away from the bark, her eyes caught by a movement in the branches. A squirrel scurried down the trunk towards her. It didn't seem to be bothered that its tail was swathed in flames, or that something had eaten away at half of its rot-black face and torso. Death's pet project bared its teeth at her. "Do you really want to be here? ~ Angela Panayotopulos

A single slim trunk
Branches that bow in a storm
Green, leathery leaves with a soft centre
Glittering against blue sky
White bark scarred, bleeding
Heart wide-open
Bandaged, but upright she stands... (225) ~ Fadia Faqir

Winslow hurled stones at the little tree. Wrung its trunk as if it were a throat. He flailed and throttled the sapling to the ground. Winslow hugged its limbs and tried to weep, but was, at last, dry of tears. Under a pale moon, Winslow knew he no longer belonged to the world of men and would forever roam the woods as a lost son of the civil. ~ Alan Heathcock

Years ago, I carved out an identity, and it has always been about having a voice to tell people about stuff I love. ~ Eddie Trunk

I want you to keep this. I want you to keep this in your trunk in your awful grubby room in the nunnery, and to take it out every night when I'm gone and look at it and say, Harry loves me, Harry's coming back in June to take me away to Europe, Harry's going to make up for all this work and misery and make me as happy as a man ever made a woman. ~ Beatriz Williams

right knee knuckling inward as his backswing began, trunk twisting to its limit as his left shoulder turned under his chin. 'Every muscle ~ Kevin Cook

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of a chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centere, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken for each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; through communtiy of vitality was destroyed -- the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree -- a ruin, but and entire ruin.

'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said: as if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear me. 'I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more -- never more see birds making nests and singing idylls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.' As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disc was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. T ~ Charlotte Bronte

He's the opposite of cute. He's like a cross between an Orc and Ent. He has the big, brutish body of an Orc but he got some Ent genes, probably from his mother's side. Basically a tree-trunk with good hair."

Peyton's nose twitched. Lord of the Ring references were not her jam. "You've given this a lot of thought. ~ Kate Meader

An Additional Poem

Where then shall hope and fear their objects find?
The harbor cold to the mating ships,
And you have lost as you stand by the balcony
With the forest of the sea calm and gray beneath.
A strong impression torn from the descending light
But night is guilty. You knew the shadow
In the trunk was raving
But as you keep growing hungry you forget.
The distant box is open. A sound of grain
Poured over the floor in some eagerness--we
Rise with the night let out of the box of wind. ~ John Ashbery

or the trunk, taken somewhere and stripped naked, ~ Vince Flynn

For mile after mile the strangler fines choked the sal trees, one grey trunk encircling another, until the whole jungle resembled some terrible tangled knot in which it was impossible to tell murderer from victim. ~ M.J. Carter

There's a lot to be said for quitters. Those people who are extremely good at one thing got that way by quitting almost everything else. ~ Penelope Trunk

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it's robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It's like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I've even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I'm chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It's so extremely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it's impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I'm asleep. ... Outside that, nothing, nobody exists. ~ Emile Zola

An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree. ~ Richard Preston

In the beginning, when Twaslitri (the Divine Artificer) came to the creation of woman he found that he had exhausted his materials in the making of man and that no solid elements were left. In this dilemma, after pro-found meditation, he did as follows: he took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of the creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sun-beams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot's bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldnesss of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kokila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakravaka; and compounding all these together, he made woman and gave her to man.
(Written by scholars of the Vedic Age) ~ F.W. Bain

Should I take anything?" I asked, as Shamus slammed the trunk shut.
"A healthy sense of self-preservation would be good," he said. ~ Devon Monk

Like a stripped and lifeless trunk the Oriental church produces no theologians, thinkers, or savants. ~ Emilia Pardo Bazan

Metal never goes away. It drifts in and out, but the true fans are always there for it. ~ Eddie Trunk

The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail.
Call no man happy till he dies, there's
no milk at the bottom of the pail.
God builds a church and the devil builds a chapel, like the thistles that are growing 'round the trunk of a tree.
All the good in the world you could put inside a thimble, and still have room for you and me.
If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man.
You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always coming roaring back again.
Misery's the river of the world, misery's the river of the world.
Everybody row, everybody row;
misery's the river of the world. ~ Tom Waits

The trunk of the car looked like a mobile police narcotics lab. We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers ... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls ... Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk. You have the limb, freshly sliced, dripping sap, and smelling of springtime, and then you have the mother tree stripped of her protective bark, gouged and ready to receive this new addition. Some years ago, my father performed this surgery on a dogwood tree in the side yard. He tried a pink-blooming limb stolen from the woods to my mother's white-blooming tree from a nursery lot. It took yards of burlap and twine and two years for the plants to join. Even now, all these years later, there's something not quite natural about the tree, even in its amazing two-tone glory. ~ Tayari Jones

I have a GoPro in the trunk of my streetcar. ~ Nick Woodman

Trunk steady knocking/ Floating through the sky, Mary Poppins. ~ Riff Raff

To have survived in radio for 30 years is pretty remarkable. Even more remarkable is to have been able to do it in the same market I've lived in my whole life. ~ Eddie Trunk

I guess I should be thankful. Full of thank. But what is thank? I can't eat thank, so I know my stomach isn't full of thank. I can't smell or breathe thank, so I know my lungs aren't full of thank. I'm not even sure how much thank I could fit in the trunk of my car. But I do know one thing. It's much easier to give thanks than something that actually costs money to give. ~ Jarod Kintz

It's all about attitude and feeling good about yourself and not looking like everybody on TV. You do not have to be small; you can have some junk in your trunk. ~ Beyonce Knowles

St. Louis Blues (1929)

I hate to see de evenin' sun go down,
Hate to see de evenin' sun go down
'Cause ma baby, he done lef' dis town.
Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today,
Feel tomorrow like I feel today,
I'll pack my trunk, make ma git away.

Saint Louis woman wid her diamon' rings
Pulls dat man 'roun' by her apron strings.
'Twant for powder an' for store-bought hair,
De man ah love would not gone nowhere, nowhere.
Got de Saint Louis Blues jes as blue as ah can be.
That man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea.

Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me. Doggone it!
I loves day man lak a schoolboy loves his pie,
Lak a Kentucky Col'nel loves his mint an' rye.
I'll love ma baby till the day ah die.

Been to de gypsy to get ma fortune tole,
To de gypsy, done got ma fortune tole,
Cause I'm most wile 'bout ma Jelly Roll.
Gypsy done tole me, "Don't you wear no black."
Yes, she done told me, "Don't you wear no black.

Go to Saint Louis, you can win him back."
Help me to Cairo, make Saint Louis by maself,
Git to Cairo, find ma old friend Jeff,
Gwine to pin maself close to his side;
If ah flag his train, I sho' can ride.
Got de Saint Louis Blues jes as blue as ah can be.
That man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea.

Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me. Doggone it!
I loves day man lak a sch ~ Bessie Smith

I've been urged by people forever to try and start a real Rock Hall of Fame. I've had some very, very preliminary discussions about doing it. Obviously, I can't do it myself, but there are a lot of people interested in that. ~ Eddie Trunk

As the wind swelled, my tree started to sway. Almost like a human body it swung back and around, gently at first, then more and more wildly. While the swaying intensified, so did my fears that the trunk might snap and hurl me to the ground. But in time my confidence returned. Amazed at how the tree could be at once so flexible and so sturdy, I held on tight as it bent and waved, twisted and swirled, slicing curves and arcs through the air. With each graceful swing, I felt less a creature of the land and more a part of the wind itself.
"The rain began falling, it's sound merging with the splashing river and the singing trees. Branches streamed like waterfalls of green. Tiny rivers cascaded down every trunk, twisting through moss meadows and bark canyons. All the while, I rode out the gale. I could not have felt wetter. I could not have felt freer.
"When, at last, the storm subsided, the entire world seemed newly born. Sunbeams danced on rain-washed leaves. Curling columns of mist rose from every glade. The forest's colors shown more vivid, its smells struck more fresh. And I understood, for the first time in my life, that the Earth was always being remade, that life was always being renewed. That it may have been the afternoon of this particular day, but it was still the very morning of Creation. ~ T.A. Barron

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life. ~ James Wright

The undiscriminating vulture is not our real danger: open scandal would simply drive him into profitless exile again, and would be no possible advantage to us. Neither should we fear our sturdy patriots who, like your father, are busy with their loyalties in queer and crooked ways. Our danger lies with the men who want to take this country by trunk and limb and wreak it into such a shape that it will fit them and their children for hose and jerkin in their old age."

"Some of them are sincere," said Lymond.

"I know: and such men will wreck us yet. Preserve us above all from the honest clod and the ambitious fanatic. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

The divisions of science are not like different lines that meet in one angle, but rather like the branches of trees that join in one trunk. ~ Francis Bacon

(...) pick up your axe, start at the roots

don't miss the trunk, never forget:

to end life truly and finally

start at the roots or end there. ~ Moonshine Noire

Inside that tiny seed, lives the roots, branches, bark, trunk, leaves, twigs and apple fruit of that apple tree. You can't see, feel, hear, taste or smell any of that yet; nevertheless, it is all inside that seed. The moment the seed is in your hand - all of that is in your hand, too, from the root to the bark to the fruit! All you have to do is to push the seed into the soil. And what makes anyone plant any apple seed? It is the belief that in the seed, there is the tree. So, believe. To have a seed, is to have everything. ~ C. JoyBell C.

You were in the trunk while they - "
This time, Gentry closed his eyes.
"Please. I'm going to have flashbacks. I don't want flashbacks."
Sophie couldn't contain their amusement any longer and broke out into laughter.
"Odette, you naughty girl!"
"I didn't know he was back there!" She didn't turn around. Odette didn't want to see the look on Sophie's face.
"If I did, I wouldn't have climbed into Keahi's lap in the first place!"
"Okay!," Gentry said. "I don't need visuals, either. ~ Tovaley B. Kysel

At that time, I often thought that if I had had to live in the trunk of a dead tree, with nothing to do but look up at the sky flowing overhead, little by little I would have gotten used to it. ~ Albert Camus

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

A possessive part of me wants to hoard this story. I want to chipmunk or squirrel away the memory of this event, place it in a tree trunk with the memories of all the other rapes, attempted rapes, and gropes, memories that will never be released or consumed. When a man asks, "What did he do to you?" he's asking to eat one of these traumatic acorns. Girls never ask for these seeds. They know what it's like to be degraded and fucked by this world, to be made a big-time bottom by life. They don't need the details of my particular shame to construct empathy. ~ Myriam Gurba

I've always felt that the best place to hide a body is in the trunk of a cop car, with a note affixed to the body that reads, "I'm sorry. ~ Jarod Kintz

Friends aren't jumper cables. You don't throw them into the trunk and pull them out for emergencies. ~ Charlie Krueger

Cut this tree I'm living in down. Hollow its trunk out.
Make me all over again, with what you scooped out of its insides.
Slide the new me back inside the old trunk.
Burn me. Burn the tree. Spread the ashes, for luck, where you want next year's crops to grow.
Birth me and the tree
Next summer's sun
Midwinter guarantee ~ Ali Smith

For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfil themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the anci ~ Hermann Hesse

Empire planted that killing tree on Kyprananoke, where the rebels dashed children dead against the trunk.
The only answer to empire is to move the tree.
It is not justice. But there is no such thing as justice. Only the measureless and asymbolic truth. Who prospers. Who suffers. Who lives in glory. Who dies in chains. ~ Seth Dickinson

Rape victims were the people who evoked the most sadness in Bosch. He knew he wouldn't be able to last a month on a rape squad. Every victim he had ever seen had that stare. It was a sign that all things in their lives were different now and forever. They would never get back to what they had had before.

Connelly, Michael. Trunk Music ~ Connelly, Michael

The money, as promised, was in the trunk of the general's official ~ Daniel Silva

He wondered if he would live to see the blossom on his apple trees and felt an answering pop inside himself. Ah, so it would not be long now. It began to snow lightly, the last flakes to fall before the spring. He put on his wedding finery, the clothes he had worn so long ago when he married his beloved Pamposh, and which he had kept all this time wrapped in tissue paper in a trunk. As a bridegroom he went outdoors and the snowflakes caressed his grizzled cheeks. His mind was alert, he was ambulatory and nobody was waiting for him with a club. He had his body and his mind and it seemed he was to be spared a brutal end. That at least was kind. He went into his apple orchard, seated himself cross-legged beneath a tree, closed his eyes, heard the verses of the Rig-Veda fill the world with beauty and ceased upon the midnight with no pain. ~ Salman Rushdie

They were dead; I could no longer deny it. What a thing to acknowledge in your heart! To lose a brother is to lose someone with whom you can share the experience of growing old, who is supposed to bring you a sister-in-law and nieces and nephews, creatures to people the tree of your life and give it new branches. To lose your father is to lose the one whose guidance and help you seek, who supports you like a tree trunk supports its branches. To lose your mother, well, that is like losing the sun above you. ~ Yann Martel

Growth is the surviving influence in all our lives. The tree will send up its trunk in thick profusion from land burned black by atom bombs. Children will grow from poverty and filth and oppression and develop honor, integrity, contribute to all mankind. ~ Chester Himes

There are little flags, marking the trunk rings.' He plucked one, and picked out the lettering. 'University of Krakow. Scientists did this. What's the point? ~ Terry Pratchett

What do you mean? What present? And why my trunk?" Anton sure had a lot of questions, but at least he drove a little faster.

"I needed to transport him back to Marin's house, and your car was unlocked."

"It most certainly was not, you Battle-Fae-Bastard. ~ Tracey Clark

grove," but its primary meaning for more than 1,000 years has remained the same. It is a small grouping of trees that bind themselves together over time, both above ground and below it. The trees' branches become intertwined with one another, providing stability to the grove in severe storms. The trees' roots also grow together, strengthening the stature of every individual trunk. ~ James Beran

There is a story of a hummingbird who lives in a beautiful forest. One day that forest goes up in flames. All the animals watch on in dismay as flames destroy their home. Only the tiny hummingbird tries to stop the fire. Backwards and forwards he flies, with drop after drop of precious water. Feeling helpless, the elephant with his big trunk and the giraffe with his long neck watch the flames in dismay. They stand and do nothing. The hummingbird continues in vain and the animals start to laugh. They laugh at how small he is and how hard he is trying to save the forest that he loves. "What are you doing?" they ask him, "You can't save the forest." He stops, just for a second, to look at all the hopeless animals. He knows that he cannot save the forest but it doesn't matter. "I'm doing the best that I can," he says. ~ Anonymous

I'd never been happier to feel Yggdrasil's bark beneath my fingers. I scurried up the trunk, scrambled through the branches, and finally found an opening to another world. I didn't know which one it was until I tumbled out onto floor nineteen, right at Halfborn's feet.
"Mallory!" he yelled. "I've been looking all over for you, woman! You are the most reckless, foolhardy einherji - "
I got to my feet and glared at him. Then I hurled myself into his arms. "Oh yeah?" I murmured against his bare chest. "Well . . . takes one to know one. ~ Rick Riordan

She's an old lady from times back. Her clothes have the smell of her sheep and that rusty smell of the ancient trunk in which she keeps her things. ~ Denys Johnson-Davies

From a small seed a mighty trunk may grow. ~ Aeschylus

Once, I took the penny whistle
you gave me and discovered a spot
by the roaring falls where I could play
as loud as I wanted.
I lay in the bifurcated trunk
of a low-slung birch tree. The sun peeked
through applauding leaves, high overhead. ~ Kristen Henderson

There were two brothers and a sister. And they had heard from the sky, or from the winds, that Jesus Christ had been born and had grown to manhood. There were portents and dreams that told them about him. Finally the two brothers started for Jerusalem, leaving their sister at home in this place. And they arrived on the day of the crucifixion, so they only saw him dead. And these two brothers from this pass in the Georgian mountains were heartbroken, and they begged a piece of the body-cloth of Jesus, and they brought it home to their sister. She was grief-stricken by the crucifixion, and she clutched the cloth, and fell sick and died of sorrow, and her dead hand held the cloth against her heart. Then the brothers tried to release the cloth, but her hand held firm and they could not get it away from her. And so she was buried with the cloth still held in her hand. She was buried right in this place where the church now stands. And almost immediately a plant grew out of the grave and became a giant tree. After a number of years it was desired to build a church in this place to commemorate the event. And woodsmen came and tried to cut the tree, but their axes flew to pieces against its trunk. Everyone tried to cut the tree, and they couldn't make a dent in it. Finally two angels came and cut the tree, and the church was built over the spot. The dark woman pointed to a curious tent-like structure of clay
inside the church, and this is where the grave was, she said, and this ~ John Steinbeck

Our nation is like a tree of which the original trunk is swarajya and the branches are swadeshi and boycott. ~ Bal Gangadhar Tilak

The four of us were together at last--me, the angel, the devil, and my demon. I felt like the moment should have seemed more momentous, or at least more pleasant, like we should have made jokes as we meandered down to the beach, collected driftwood for a fire, and leisurely toasted marshmallows. Instead, I was struggling to keep my eyes open, the angel was looking at the ground, Oz was glaring at the trunk, and for some reason I just knew that Forneus, locked down and wrapped in a sheet, was glaring right back. ~ Katherine Pine

When we arrived, my sisters pulled the wheelchair out of the trunk and placed it next to the car door. They opened the door and Jennifer leaned down and with one swift motion lifted me up like a nearly weightless child and placed me in the chair. I laughed it off.
"My sister's strong. She's really strong," I boasted on her behalf.
Sara, Katherine, and Jennifer were laughing the whole time because I didn't realize how scrawny I was, how much weight I had lost. Jennifer could pick me up with no problem because I practically weighed nothing at all. ~ Noah Galloway

Around five-eight, slim, good shoulders, narrow hips, legs and trunk in proportion, short dark hair, side parting, dark eyes, probably blue, shadows under the eyes, fair skin, average nose, wide mouth, lower lip fuller than upper. ~ Val McDermid

My mother, unlike yours, never exchanged sexual favors for a piece of silver," he said, addressing the first insult by banging the boy's head against the trunk of the tree. "And," he said with another resounding thump, "although I'm very familiar with that part of the female body, I take offense at being labeled one. ~ Melina Marchetta

The engine of my car is so powerful I could wash dishes under the hood. But that'd be pretty absurd, since I keep the dishwasher in the trunk. ~ Jarod Kintz

On this side of the wall is our house; in our backyard there is nothing. Nothing but red dust and round-headed black ants streaming and one juicy banana trunk stabbed brown--jab jab jab--never dead. I am always looking over the wall for Tissa. ~ Romesh Gunesekera

I have the body of an 18-year-old, but it's in the trunk of my car and it's starting to smell. ~ Kimberly Cheryl

No matter what level of instruction Marlboro Man gave me, no matter how many pointers, a horse trot for me meant a repeated and violet Slap! Slap! Slap! on the seat of my saddle. My feet were fine--they'd stay securely in the stirrups. But I just couldn't figure out how to use the muscles in my legs correctly, and I hadn't yet learned how to post. It was so unpleasant, the whole riding-a-horse business: my bottom would slap, my torso would stiffen, and I'd be sore for days--not to mention that I looked like a complete freak while riding--kind of like a tree trunk with red, stringy hair. Short of taking the rectal temperatures of cows, I'd never felt more out of place doing anything in my life.
All of this rushed to the surface when I saw Marlboro Man walking toward me with two of his horses, one of which was clearly meant for me. Where's my Jeep? I thought. Where's my torch? I don't want a horse. My bottom can't take it. Where's my Jeep? I'd never wanted to drive a Jeep so much.
"Hey," I said, walking toward him and smiling, trying to appear not only calm but also totally unconcerned about the reality that faced me. "Uh…I thought we were going burning."
I clearly sounded out the g. It was a loud, clanging cymbal.
"Oh, we are," he said, smiling. "But we've got to get to some areas the Jeep can't reach."
My stomach lurched. For more than a couple of seconds, I actually considered feigning illness so I wouldn't have to go. What can I say? I wondered. Tha ~ Ree Drummond

Sophia shielded her eyes with her hand and peered up at the Irishman's face. His hard eyes wandered form her hand, to her face, to the sketch in her lap. He made a gruff noise in his throat-the sort of noise men make when they're working up to saying something and don't quite know how to get it out, but want to keep up the aura of brute masculinity in the midst of their indecision.
He was making Sophia nervous. He meant to ask her something, and she was afraid to learn just what.
"Yes?" she prompted.
"The crew…We had it out between ourselves, Miss Turner. There were a bit o' scuffling, but I came out on top." He suddenly crouched before her, transforming his silhouette from tree-trunk to boulder in an instant. His craggy face split in a devilish grin. "I get to be first. ~ Tessa Dare

In felling a tree we should cut into the trunk of it to the very heart, and then leave it standing so that the sap may drain out drop by drop throughout the whole of it ... Then and not till then, the tree being drained dry and the sap no longer dripping, let it be felled and it will be in the highest state of usefulness. ~ Marcus Vitruvius Pollio

What I mean is,' continued Amit, 'it sprouts, and grows, and spreads, and drops down branches that become trunks or intertwine with other branches. Sometimes branches die. Sometimes the main trunk dies, and the structure is held up by the supporting trunks. When you go to the Botanical Garden you'll see what I mean. It has its own life - but so do the snakes and birds and bees and lizards and termites that live in it and on it and off it. But then it's also like the Ganges in its upper, middle and lower courses - including its delta - of course. ~ Vikram Seth

In the trunk of her car, my mother used to keep a collapsible easel, a clutch of brushes, a little wooden case stocked with tubes of paint, and, tucked into the spare-tire well, one of my father's old, tobacco-stained shirts, for a smock. ~ Jill Lepore

I knew he wouldn't die, because his life was like the roots of a tree that went miles into the soil and miles around its trunk and came up in my cousins, in their faces and their voices and their character. I didn't think you could kill a tree that big. Not even God could kill a tree that big. ~ Donald Miller

Now I know this is going to seem counter to every instinct that you have, but I'm going to ask you to sit still, or I'll put you in the trunk. ~ Anna White

like the small votives they lit in church.) Sometimes the houses were deserted, even partially destroyed. Sometimes it seemed the families must still be upstairs. There were old bicycles in some, or baby carriages. A steamer trunk, once, filled with broken dishes. A jar of pickled cauliflower. ~ Alice McDermott

My eyelids are heavy as stone. But when I sleep, I'll have that dream again. I haven't wanted to tell you about it, until now.
I'll be in the Separates, and I'll be digging with my bare hands. When I've made a hole deep enough to plant a tree, I'll place my fingers inside. I'll slip off the ring you gave me. It will catch the light and glint a rainbow of colors over my skin, but I will take my hands away, leaving it there. I'll sprinkle the earth back over it, and I will bury it. Back where it belongs.
I'll rest against a tree's rough trunk. The sun will be setting, it's dazzling color threading through the sky, making my cheeks warm.
Then I will wake up.
Good-bye, Ty,
Gemma ~ Lucy Christopher

Buddha rode in the trunk, which had to be roped shut. I thought this was going to be the first in a long line of hassles. But, as it turned out, Tsung Tsai was right: Buddha was a breeze. He flowed through the porters, ticket checkers, and security at JFK, gliding on a benevolent cloud. His strange gray Buddha shadow floated on the x-ray monitor.

'Jesus!' said the x-ray operator to the guard.
'Similar', Tsung Tsai said. ~ George Crane

Who taught you to shoot?" he asked when she was standing beside him.
"Our coachman."
"Better the coachman than your brother," Ian mocked, handing her the loaded gun. "The target's that bare twig over there - the one with the leaf hanging off the middle of it."
Elizabeth flinched at his sarcastic reference to his duel with Robert. "I'm truly sorry about that duel," she said, then she concentrated all her attention for the moment on the small twig.
Propping his shoulder against the tree trunk, Ian watched with amusement as she grasped the heavy gun in both her hands and raised it, biting her lip in concentration. "Your brother was a very poor shot," he remarked.
She fired, nicking the leaf at its stem.
"I'm not," she said with a jaunty sidewise smile. And then, because the duel was finally out in the open and he seemed to want to joke about it, she tried to follow suit: "If I'd been there, I daresay I would have - "
His brows lifted. "Waited for the call to fire, I hope? ~ Judith McNaught