Quotes About Roots

Fei Xiaoton, the University of Chicago - trained Chinese sociologist, once observed, this nation is "a land without ghosts," a place where people are so busy with promises of progress that they have forgotten where they come from and who their ancestors were...

home was where her mother lived.

This planet isn't my new home, it's the only home I've ever had.

We can't help putting down roots. The best we can do is lie to ourselves about it.

The state with the prettiest name, the state that floats in brackish water, held together by mangrove roots.

Should we have stayed at home,wherever that may be?

A man's first loyalty is to the soil he stands on.

Given his own amorality, he could quite easily have come to terms with her criminal tendencies, but he could never, being the snob that he was, ever have overlooked her roots.

If I had my wilderness, nature could be my lover. What can I do in the paved streets for my thirsty roots? I waste time. I encourage fools. I slip the vital hours into penny slot machines -- to pass time, to start my stuck wheels only love can oil.

I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts.

This is Lucy." She added, almost playfully, "Lucy comes from nothing." I took no offense, and really, I take none now. But I think: No one in this world comes from nothing.

I could not stop feeling panic, as if the Barton family, the five of us--off-kilter as we had been--was a structure over me I had not even known about until it ended...I saw how our roots were so tenaciously around one another's hearts. My husband said, "But you didn't even like them." And I felt especially frightened after that.

The Cynics, too, had Socratic roots. Their founder, Antisthenes, had known both Socrates and Plato personally

Si nos pusiéramos a enumerar las series de las grandes ideas originales que el hombre ha alumbrado a lo largo de su historia, nos encontraríamos que son relativamente pocas y casi nunca enteramente originales. Las más cautivantes ideologías que ha producido Occidente son hijas de mil padres y siempre es posible hallar sus más remotas raíces en algún fragmento de un filósofo griego.

But the places we come from don't leave us as easily as we leave them.

I'm from Iowa, we don't know what cool is!

There is that sense of belonging one never has except in one's own country. Anywhere else, no matter how long you stay, they never let you forget you are alien. Indeed, it is a good thing, because it is on foreign soil that you are made more conscious of your own roots and consequently become more knowledgable. And that is why, in my writings, I talk of my country, present my people to others.

Coming home.

At this spot, for some reason known only to itself, the Folly brook turned at a right angle. Beneath the oak the water had washed away the sandy bank, and many winter floods had laid bare some of the massive hawser roots which projected in a twisted tangle from the soil of the bank. The sun, shining full on the steep bluff, threw shadows from the overhanging roots, so that underneath all was darkness.

Masses of red dogwood, guelder-roses, and privet hemmed them in, whilst overhead the dark tassels of the firs almost shut out the greying dawn. Not far from the stream, sprawled down the bank, was a giant Scots pine. It had torn up much of the bank in its fall, and the roots appeared in the half-darkness like the limbs of some long-dead monster.

The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what is is - the source.

To my father, Bellur Krishnamachar, my mother, Seshamma, and my birthplace, Bellur

We will never lose sight of our heritage, for if we forget where we came from we will lose our way forward.

I don't compose rap songs or party numbers. I only compose folk.