Roots Quotes

“You yearn to stay in this in-between place, where the beauty of the times you have freshly bade farewell to is still alive and vivid in your mind – almost real – and the reality of your new circumstances has yet to fully sink in. You listen to the familiar melodies that had accompanied you on your journey, and allow the music to evoke landscapes and scenes in your mind. The songs caress your sub-consciousness and fill your being with an airy joy. You are both here and elsewhere. Or perhaps you are everywhere and nowhere.”
― Agnes Chew, The Desire for Elsewhere

“Habits, places and faces grew into you over time, like tree roots burrowing into stone work.”
― Frances Hardinge, A Skinful of Shadows

“He came cripping slowly back up the driveway - when an African remembrance flashed into his mind, and near the front of the house he bent down and started peering around. Determining the clearest prints that Kizzy's bare feet had left in the dust, scooping up the double handful containing those footprints, he went rushing toward the cabin: The ancient forefathers said that precious dust kept in some safe place would insure Kizzy's return to where she made the footprints. He burst through the cabin's open door, his eyes sweeping the room and falling upon his gourd on a shelf containing his pebbles. Springing over there, in the instant before opening his cupped hands to drop in the dirt, suddenly he knew the truth: His Kizzy was gone; she would not return. He would never see his Kizzy again. His face contorting, Kunta flung his dust toward the cabin's roof. Tears bursting, from his eyes, snatching his heavy gourd up high over his head, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, he hurled the gourd down with all his strength, and it shattered against the packed-Earth floor, his 662 pebbles representing each month of his 55 rains flying out, ricocheting wildly in all directions.”
― Alex Haley, Roots

“And though our roots belong to the same tree, our branches have grown in different directions.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“In the vessel of your body, you yourself are the world tree, deep roots in the Earth and a crown of stars. Your essence bridges dimensions.”
― Elizabeth Eiler, Swift and Brave: Sacred Souls of Animals

“If I want to grow and blossom as any tree would, I have to start by knowing my roots and understand how I came to be the tree I am. Learn your ancestry.”
― Jeffrey G. Duarte

“Give them the wings to fly and the roots to stay. Never put them in a golden cage, taking away their wings with their desire to fly and call it love.”
― Akshay Vasu, The Abandoned Paradise: Unraveling the beauty of untouched thoughts and dreams

“Roots, he wrote, symbolize more than underground strong-arms. Roots are also origins, the tendrils of a sprouting seed that give rise to life.”
― Rivera Sun, The Roots of Resistance: - Love and Revolution -

“Once the roots of love have grown deep and firm,
the flowers will keep on blooming!”
― Avijeet Das

“Earth stays in joy
When we plant a tree
Beneath the ground, oh, boy!
Roots feel free”
― Munia Khan

“I’m not sure which matters more—where the seed comes from, or where it takes root and grows.”
― Zetta Elliott, A Wish After Midnight

“Moments later, I was climbing nervously into the back of the car. The driver wore the archetypal expression of an antagonist. No words were exchanged beyond the brief lines uttered to this nameless stranger, whose inclinations remained unclear. The car sped along empty roads and traversed dingy alleyways. Music blared from its speakers. I did not remember exhaling throughout the entire journey.”
― Agnes Chew, The Desire for Elsewhere

“...on n'est pas forcément du pays où l'on est né. Il y a des grains que le vent aime semer ailleurs.”
― Dany Laferrière, L'Énigme du retour

“Maybe Americans have found it easier to latch on to new traditions because we are uprooted people, and have few deep roots.”
― Pete Seeger, Where Have All the Flowers Gone?: A Singer's Stories, Songs, Seeds, Robberies

“We are the true roots of resistance, they declared, and the scraggly leaves, golden flowers, and windborne seeds.”
― Rivera Sun, The Roots of Resistance: - Love and Revolution -

“As long as we refuse to accept that our pride is the source of our unrest, we will continue to wither on the vine. "Humility, that low, sweet root / From which all heavenly virtues shoot." —Thomas Moore”
― Hannah Anderson, Humble Roots: How Humility Grounds and Nourishes Your Soul

“Better a crust of black bread than a mountain of paper confections,
Better a daisy in earth than a dahlia cut and gathered,
Better a cowslip with root than a prize carnation without it”
― Arthur Hugh Clough, The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough

“- Lei non è di quella zona? - gli chiese il fotografo che viaggiava con lui.
- Sì, - rispose.
Tuttavia non telefonò ai suoi. Junpei prese l'aereo e ritornò a Tokyo e alla sua solita routine. Non accendeva la televisione e non apriva i giornali. Quando si parlava di terremoto, taceva. Era un'eco da un passato morto e lontano. Dopo la laurea non aveva mai più messo piede in quella città. Ma ciononostante le immagini di quel paesaggio in rovina avevano riaperto in lui ferite nascoste. Sembrava che quel disastro immane, fatale, stesse modificando impercettibilmente ma inesorabilmente diversi aspetti della sua vita. Provava un profondo senso di solitudine, mai avvertito prima.
Non ho nessuna radice, pensava, non sono legato a nulla.”
― Haruki Murakami, After the Quake

“Blessed be that which gives your children wings and roots’ says an Arabic proverb.
He needed his roots. There is a place in the world where we are born, where we learn our mother tongue and discover how our ancestors overcame the problems they had to face.
He needed wings too. They reveal to us the endless horizons of the imagination, they carry us to our dreams and to distant places. It is our wings that allow us to know the roots of our fellow men and learn from them.”
― Paulo Coelho, The Winner Stands Alone

“We leave, we run away and don't realize how much we'll need to go back home one day. The South is like that. It's the worst mama in the world and it's the best mama in the world.”
― Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar's Children: Stories

“On a quiet day, when the wind was still, the creek could be heard all the way up to where the old beech stood. Under its branches, cats would come to dream and be dreamed. Black cats and calicos, white cats and marmalade ones, too. But they hadn't yet gathered on the day the orphan girl fell asleep among its roots, nestling in the weeds and long grass like the gangly, tousle-haired girl she was.

Her name was Lillian.”
― Charles de Lint, A Circle of Cats

“The stems of the tree trembled for long
Before they gave up to the winds strong
They would have continued to sing their song
But the roots were weak, they crumbled along...”
― Neelam Saxena Chandra

“One of the main roots of ungodliness is being a lover of pleasure more than a lover of God.”
― Sunday Adelaja, The Mountain of Ignorance

“XXIV.
Wurzeln zu schlagen ist nicht immer ein probates Mittel gegen Einsamkeit.”
― Ilija Trojanow, Nach der Flucht

“A wise person knows that he should not allow his roots to grow too deep in this world, for the deeper they grow here, the shallower they become in spirituality.”
― Charbel Tadros

“that means that to be Africentric I need to remember my ancestors, which is the way to resurrect myself.”
― Minster Faust

“Something in the water near to him caught his interest, he followed and thought it to be wooden debris, but as soon as he turned his attention elsewhere, the severed head surfaced facing his former direction. (Hope River Story)”
― M.Emerald

“Sometimes it seems like he just wants to punish someone, anyone, for a long list of grievances that he has never made clear, which you can never ask about because he keeps his emotions so guarded that any question would be interpreted as assault. I wonder if dragging us to this village and the nearby town wear he spent his childhood is a way of sinking us all into his own personal hell so that we can see how this strange combination of poverty and opportunity, these broken and muddy roads, these crumbling houses, these overburdened men and women walking slowly in these streets singing praise songs to keep themselves going, created the strange combination of love and anger and pride and fear that is my father. He always sat in the passenger seat while we drove around the village so he could fully view what he sometimes called a world of wasted opportunity. With OJ or my mother in the car, he pointed out all the things he would make right if only he had the power. With me now, he says nothing. Occasionally he turns to look at me with the same expression that occupies his face when he has to solve a problem at the office. I sink down in my seat and wish that my mother had come.”
― Uzodinma Iweala, Speak No Evil

“The flower blooming in a tree is not only the child of the roots or the branches or the leaves of that tree, but also the common child of the soil, the rain, the sun and the bees! The father and the mother of every living being is never one father or never one mother but actually the whole universe!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“If you do not earn what you say you deserve, it is because you have not watered your roots. If you win $1, that's all you can get. The universe will only give you what you can carry, if you program your files (learned from childhood) you will work miracles.”
― Alan Maiccon