Quotes About Roots

What's your heritage, anyway?" I said irritably, backing away, putting more space between us. He regarded me blankly, looking startled by the personal question, and as if he lacked a frame of reference for one.

Everything else falls away except for the family you're born into, choose, or make; the circle of love you'll die to protect and keep near you. The only thing that keeps us rooted in the past is our refusal to embrace the present.

Of course not. I just want you to feel more at home. Not like a visitor." "But that's what I am," Larkin protested. Bitty stood, her knees cracking, and laughed. "You tell yourself that over and over again, sweetie, but it'll never drain the salt water running through your veins. The outgoing tide might suck all the water from the creeks and marshes here, but eventually the ocean pushes it all back where it belongs.

To be radical is to grasp things by the root.

My life is a tree, Yoke-fellow of the earth; Pledged, By roots too deep for remembrance, To stand hard against the storm, To fill by Place. (But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing: Wind-free are the wings of my bird: she hath built no mortal nest.)

We are bound to our ancestors and to those who made us, whether we want to be or not. What matters is what we make of what we are.

A broken off chip of England resting on the surface of this place.

I want my family to resemble the family I came from.

I love coming back to Neath - this is home and always will be.

I really see myself as a homegirl. Wales is my first home. London is my second home - I've been there 14 years now.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

My mom is painfully sweet she's from Nebraska.

We can't run away from what defines our fates. Who we are and what we believe in grow from the roots of our past, no matter how much we might try to deny it.

You've lived in the city for a long time and need to feel that you have a hometown.

If the roots are deep, have no fear that the wind will uproot the tree. CHINESE PROVERB

You cannot know where you are going unless you know where you are coming from.

You can take the man out of the woods, but you can't take the woods out of the man.

As just one example of spiritualizing objects, you romanticize the South American rainforest by thinking it's one of the holiest spots on earth. If you could observe in accelerated motion what goes on underneath the ground there, you would see that the roots of the trees actually compete with each other for the water, just as all the creatures of the rainforest fight for survival.

Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.

both a cluster of taro roots and a family group.

To be an African is not a choice, it is a condition… To be an African is not through lack of being integrated in Europe… neither is it from regret of the crimes perpetrated by "my people"… No, it is simply the only opening I have for making use of all my sense and capabilities… The African earth was the first to speak. I have been pronounced once and for all.

He kept a piece of algae behind his ear to remind him of his roots. A million years ago every place was a little place by the sea, he would say & my mind would go blank & I would swim through the day without a care in the world & it all seemed so familiar that I knew I would go back someday to my own little place by the sea.

Voices in the forest tell of dark and twisted enchantments - as dark and twisted as the roots and grasping branches of the trees themselves. Even the most gnarled tree is eloquent in the telling of its own tale.

As the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould once memorably remarked, we humans are all descendants from the same African twig.