The Overstory Quotes
"Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering."
"A good answer must be reinvented many times, from scratch."
"Every piece of earth needs a new way to grip it."
"If your mind were only a slightly greener thing, we’d drown you in meaning."
"Old trees are our parents, and our parents’ parents, perchance."
"If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity."
"Stand cool and composed before a million universes."
"You ask: how does a man rise or fall in this life?"
"Even the mighty Ironwood was once a nut, like you."
"Nobody’s in charge of the mass mobilization, that much seems clear. Yet they port the sticky food back to the nest in the most coordinated way."
"Plans in the absence of any planner. Paths in the absence of a surveyor."
"Flexible behavior in the face of changing conditions: What else can you call it but wicked smart?"
"They think he stole. They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something."
"Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble. Skill at herding each other? Utterly, endlessly brilliant."
"People are an idiot. There’s a big old OUT OF ORDER sign hanging from his species’ pride-and-joy organ."
"What seem like erratic, irrational choices are, in fact, strategies created long ago for solving other kinds of problems."
"The secret museum treasures hidden from his mother’s vacuum cleaner he now gladly trashes. Childish things."
"He’s not without friends or fun. In fact, there’s a surplus of both."
"The universe is a banyan, its roots above and branches below."
"You go home now? Not yet, my man. War’s not over!"
"He sits in the armchair, explaining to himself why he has just done what almost every other human being also does."
"We just have to figure out how to get our plans into its memory."
"Don’t you like to read? I thought you liked A Separate Peace."
"Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe in the future he shall be."
"The trees are like a few dozen movie extras hired to fill a tight shot and pretend to be New York."
"The forest is pure prop, a piece of clever artistry."
"Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible."
"Time stops. He lies on his shattered back, looking upward."
"His eyes close in shock and Neelay shuts down."
"The itching is insane. Every spot above his waist is unreachable fire."
"The thought of countless good things passing out of his life doesn’t quite occur to him."
"He has lived for years in a place of his own devising."
"A single trunk could fill a large logging truck."
"The air around her resounds with the noise of life getting on with it."
"She sees the source of that forestry doctrine she so resisted in school."
"The world's outlands are everywhere, and trees like to toy with human thought."
"There are a hundred thousand species of love, separately invented, each more ingenious than the last."
"It can only be her ex checking in, hoping to mark the occasion with one last loving brawl."
"Life was whispering instructions to her, and she failed to write them down."
"Every apple with a name goes back to the same tree."
"Nothing can move you off a first impression."
"Beliefs should not be considered delusional if they are in keeping with societal norms."
"It's amazing how crazy things become, once you start looking at them."
"The only thing they really wanted from the merger was him."
"Everything scattering on the air. We live, we get out a little, and then no more, forever."
"We’re all operating in a dense fog of mutual reinforcement."
"The psyche’s job is to keep us blissfully ignorant of who we are, what we think, and how we’ll behave in any situation."
"Learning psychology is, indeed, pretty much useless."
"I don’t think it had much of an influence on me."
"I’ve been lots of things. I’ve lived all over."
"The world will be a game, with on-screen scores."
"It’s no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak."
"What is it within us that gives us this need not just to satisfy basic biological wants, but to extend our wills over things, to objectify them, to make them ours, to manipulate them, to keep them at a psychic distance?"
"Disgust breaks over her as she drives home. But even disgust feels like freedom."
"If a person can find total honesty, complete knowledge of what she really is..."
"By the time she turns onto their street’s leafy canyon, she’s calm again."
"She’s a smart woman, but she has never had much patience with the obvious."
"What is needed is a myth... I do not think it too remote that we may come to regard the Earth, as some have suggested, as one organism, of which mankind is a functional part—the mind, perhaps."
"Aren’t you freezing? - She answered no. And he believed her."
"She smiled, as at a little kid who just asked whether the Chinese could reach them through a tunnel in the earth."
"It’s a onetime jackpot. A thousand years before the systems are back in place."
"We have to learn to love this place. We need to become natives."
"He hungers worse than ever—for one more breakthrough, the next one, something simple and elegant that will change everything again."
"Your presence here is in violation of the penal code, section numbers..."
"You have five trees in Paradise which do not change, either in summer or winter, and their leaves do not fall. He who knows them shall not taste of death."
"We don’t put trees above people. People and trees are in this together."
"If people knew what went into making trees, they would be so, so thankful for the sacrifice. And thankful people don’t need as much."
"I wouldn’t need to be so very different for sun to seem to be about sun, for green to be about green, for joy and boredom and anguish and terror and death to all be themselves, beyond the need for any killing clarity, and then this—this, the growing rings of light and water and stone—would take up all of me, and be all the words I need."
"We’re all doomed. We have always all been doomed."
"No one saw anything," Adam tells the others, too many times.
"It's over," Nick says. "She's dead. We're finished."
"Say nothing, no matter what. Time is with us."
"But people have no idea what time is... time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died."
"Love is a tree with branches in forever with roots in eternity and a trunk nowhere at all."
"You can tap a rubber tree for generations. But you can only poach a tree once."
"We're cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling."
"To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs."
"Grief for a thing too big to see. Grief for a great, spoked, wild, woven-together place beyond replacing. One you didn’t even know was yours to lose."
"The rage of its horn Dopplers downward for another block."
"Everything she has just won begins to fade again into the irresistible force of other people."
"The sight takes root in her, ramifying, and for a moment longer she remembers: her life has been as wild as a plum in spring."
"The math stuns him—how few years he has been away."
"He sees the leaves, the straight-veined, toothed lances of his childhood that always meant leaf to him."
"He’s like one of those ascetic Indian statues, a skin-wrapped skeleton seated under a holy fig or neem."
"No one sees trees. We see fruit, we see nuts, we see wood, we see shade."
"Life is so generous, and we are so inconsolable."
"When you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down."
"It’s sometimes hard to say whether a tree is a single thing or whether it’s a million."
"My whole life, I’ve been an outsider. But many others have been out there with me."
"A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground."
"We’ve shaped and been shaped by forests for longer than we’ve been Homo sapiens."
"Men and trees are closer cousins than you think."
"Trees stand at the heart of ecology, and they must come to stand at the heart of human politics."
"If we could see green, we’d see a thing that keeps getting more interesting the closer we get."
"Life is speculation, and speculation is life."
"What is the single best thing a person can do for tomorrow’s world?"
"Trees are doing science. Running a billion field tests."
"The ‘environment’ is alive—a fluid, changing web of purposeful lives dependent on each other."