Jane Hirshfield Quotes

I have about 1,700 species of trees, almost everything that can grow in our climate.

Jock, when ye hae naething else to do, ye may be aye sticking in a tree; it will be growing, Jock, when ye 're sleeping.

Our tree was so puny we used orthopedic bulbs.

Anybody can dig a hole and plant a tree. But make sure it survives. You have to nurture it, you have to water it, you have to keep at it until it becomes rooted so it can take care or itself. There are so many enemies of trees.

A little kid asks my dad why that man is chopping down the tree. Dad: He's not chopping it down. He's saving it. Those branches were long dead from disease. All plants are like that. By cutting off the damage you make it possible for the tree to grow again. You watch - by the end of summer, this tree will be the strongest on the block.

A tree may look as beautiful as ever; but when you notice the insects infesting it, and the tips of the branches that are brown from disease, even the trunk seems to lose some of its magnificence.

A tree without roots will fall over, whereas a tree with roots eventually becomes part of a forest.

A tree without roots is just a piece of wood.

Let the grass die. I let almost all of my indoor plants die from neglect while I was writing the book. There are all kinds of ways to live. You can take your choice. You can keep a tidy house, and when St. Peter asks you what you did with your life, you can say, I kept a tidy house, I made my own cheese balls.

I never before knew the full value of trees....What would I not give that the trees planted nearest round the house at Monticello were full grown.

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

As time has gone on and we're at the end of the 20th century and major publishing is a big business, yes, of course we're going to get a lot of plain, mediocre trash. There are a lot of writers who get huge advances for books that don't go anywhere and they have to burn them somewhere or throw them away. I always think about all the poor trees that have been sacrificed.

Thirty or forty years ago, in one those grey towns along the Burlington railroad which are so much greyer to-day than they were then, there was a house well know from Omaha to Denver for its hospitality and for a certain charm of atmosphere.

There is something nobly simple and pure in a taste for the cultivation of forest trees.

It was a very difficult time. I was working on [umble-Ardy] when my partner and friend was dying of cancer. We set up a room in the house to be like a hospital room. Eugene died, and then I had bypass surgery. I was doing the book to stay sane while all this was going on.

All I really want is enough to live on, a little house in the country... and a tree in the garden with seven of my enemies hanging in it.

Trees don't grow even, they don't grow straight just however it makes them happy.

I don't know, maybe I made it up. Anyway, it's an arbo-tree-ist, somebody who knows about trees.

... even in houses commonly held to be 'booky' one finds, nine times out of ten, not a library but a book-dump.

Books showed me that there were other ways to live a life.

You have to find your own style, and it's difficult to define what style is. It's not what you're wearing; it's how you wear it. It's something very personal, and it reflects the way you live and your house, the books you read, the art you have.

Train up a fig tree in the way it should go, and when you are old sit under the shade of it.

The Brangwens had lived for generations on the Marsh Farm, in the meadows where the Erewash twisted sluggishly through alder trees, separating Derbyshire from Nottinghamshire.

What is this obsession people have with books? They put them in their houses like they're trophies. What do you need it for after you read it?

Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree, What the glory of thy boughs shall be?