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Quotes - It was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home
“For
the two of us, home isn't a place. It is a person. And we are finally home.”
―
Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss
“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 ancient law of life.
A
tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal
life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique,
unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my
branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the
eternal in my smallest special detail.
A
tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know
nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live
out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust
that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When
we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something
to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not
difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your
thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from
mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the
mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere
at all.
A
longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at
evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals
its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's
suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory
of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads
homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So
the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish
thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they
have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not
listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the
brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve
an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants
to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is
happiness.”
―
Herman Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
“Is
it possible for home to be a person and not a place?”
―
Stephanie Perkins, Anna and the French Kiss
“Winter
is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly
hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home.”
―
Edith Sitwell
“I
live in my own little world. But its ok, they know me here.”
―
Lauren Myracle
“I
have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved
and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow
way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that
an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem
safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from
a distance.”
―
Beryl Markham, West with the Night
“Perhaps
home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”
―
James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
“After
all," Anne had said to Marilla once, "I believe the nicest and
sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or
exciting happens but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following
one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.”
―
L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea
“Home
is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
―
Robert Frost
“Home's
where you go when you run out of homes.”
―
John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy
“At
the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m
going and never have been before.”
―
Warsan Shire
“We
leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even
though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by
going back there.”
―
Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon
“Home
is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then
all you can see is what is not there any more.”
―
Robin Hobb, Fool's Fate
“Home
isn't where you're from, it's where you find light when all grows dark.”
―
Pierce Brown, Golden Son
“It
was good to walk into a library again; it smelled like home.”
―
Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
