Andy Goldsworthy Quotes

Any fine morning, a power saw can fell a tree that took a thousand years to grow.

The War will leave none of us as it found us.

War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.

I was there the night John Lennon was shot, three blocks away. It left a lasting impression on me.

The war begins to make itself felt very near to us.

And the general shot my sister. I could not look at her, but I remember the sound of when she hit the ground. I hear that sound when things hit the ground still. Anything.' If I could, I would make it so nothing ever hit the ground again.

The large white owl that with eye is blind, That hath sate for years in the old tree hollow, Is carried away in a gust of wind.

When a big tree falls, the ground shakes

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

It is progress when a centuries-old oak is cut down to give space for a road sign.

He never knew what hit him, and that would have comforted me, except . . . just for one second, he would have had to know, wouldn't he? There must have been a blur, a sense of the world exploding, a flashpoint of receiving more damage than a human body could endure.

Earth felt the wound; and Nature from her seat, Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe That all was lost.

Yes, I could see these enormous elephants, whose trunks were tearing down large boughs, and working in and out the trees like a legion of serpents. I could hear the sounds of the mighty tusks uprooting huge trees!

I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.

The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.

What happens to the rest of something when you smash its heart?

When the lightning strikes but one, not one only does it terrify.

I was woundering what he would say, what word could sum me up right then, when i saw the lights come across his face, blaringly yellow, and suddenly he was brighter, and brighter, and i asked him what was happening, what was wrong. I remember only that light, so strong it spilled across my shoulders, and lit up his face, and how scared he looked as something big and loud hit my door, sending glass shattering across me, little sparks catching the light like diamonds, as they fell, with me, into the dark.

Everyone goes to the forest; some go for a walk to be inspired, and others go to cut down the trees.

There was no other sound in the world like a car crash.

Up above, we will defend the life of the trees and the mountains from further devastation. Down below [in the towns], we will spread death and mercy.

(...) the tree forsakes not the flower: the flower falls from the tree.

… it was raining on Himmel Street when the world ended for Liesel Meminger. The sky was dripping. Like a tap that a child has tried its hardest to turn off but hasn’t quite managed.

The most conspicuous thing about suffering is, as W.H. Auden once observed, its banality. The day is green, the sun is shinging, someone is eating, or opening a window, the torturer's horse is scatching its innocent behind on a tree, and in a mere second someone we love is dead.