Baobab Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Baobab. Here they are! All 49 of them:

It's a question of discipline,' the little prince told me later on. 'when you've finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. you must be sure you pull up the baobabs regularly, as soon as you can tell them apart from the rosebushes, which they closely resemble when they're very young. It's very tedious work, but very easy.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
Watch out for the Baobabs!
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
The size and height of the tree determines how heavily the ground will shake when it falls. The cassava tree falls and not even the pests in the forest are aware. The baobab tree falls and the whole forest looks empty! Such is human life!
Israelmore Ayivor (The Great Hand Book of Quotes)
You must see to it that you pull up regularly all the baobabs, at the very first moment when they can be distinguished from the rosebushes which they resemble so closely in their earliest youth
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When I made the drawing of the baobabs I was carried beyond myself by the inspiring force of urgent necessity.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
Before they grow so big, the baobabs start out by being little.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
Children,” I say plainly, “watch out for the baobabs!
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The native calls the baobab 'the devil tree' because he claims that the devil, getting tangled in its branches, punished by the tree by reversing it. To the native, the roots are branches now, and the branches are roots. To ensure that there would be no more baobabs, the devil destroyed all the young ones.
Jerzy Kosiński (The Devil Tree)
But don't worry, they'll be sorry you're gone; a good woman is always missed.
Ken Bugul (Le Baobab Fou)
The only language all human beings understand is the language of humanity.
Ken Bugul (Le Baobab Fou)
Baobabs, before they grow big, start off small.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
Mais il remarqua avec sagesse: -Les baobabs, avant de grandir, ça commence par être petit.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Le Petit Prince)
kissed him in the shade of the baobab tree, with its upside-down roots in the air, with its bark that could be cut a hundred times and still heal itself.
Jodi Picoult (Leaving Time)
Grown-ups of course will never believe you. They think that they take up a lot of space. They consider themselves as important as baobabs.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
To see the light of the world is to be the baobab trees, to watch our own leaves seasoned in quarters of a million years only to become gold to the unknown soil, a threat to the sky
Goitsemang Mvula
To live at all is to share a world with cagey magic, skeptical magic, asshole magic. But, honestly, the trees must belong to something; the blossoms that tongue each groove between buildings, the water and the stone and the serious man-made steel railings all must belong. This major artery where blood and starlight pump along the tracks, where banks and malls and office towers shudder and gestate in the concrete like baobab trees.
Jes Battis (Bleeding Out (OSI, #5))
This would be the worst birthday of his life. Vladimir's best friend Baobab was down in Florida covering his rent, doing unspeakable things with unmentionable people. Mother, roused by the meager achievements of Vladimir's first quarter-century, was officially on the warpath. And, in possibly the worst development yet, 1993 was the Year of the Girlfriend. A downcast, heavyset American girlfriend whose bright orange hair was strewn across his Alphabet City hovel as if cadre of Angora rabbits had visited. A girlfriend whose sickly-sweet incense and musky perfume coated Vladimir's unwashed skin, perhaps to remind him of what he could expect on this, the night of his birthday: Sex. Every week, once a week, they had to have sex, as both he and this large pale woman, this Challah, perceived that without weekly sex their relationship would fold up according to some unspecified law of relationships.
Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook)
All humanity could be piled up on a small Pacific islet. The grown-ups, to be sure, will not believe you when you tell them that. They imagine that they fill a great deal of space. They fancy themselves as important as the baobabs.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
I don't much like assuming the tone of a moralist. But the danger of baobabs is so little recognized, and the risks run by anyone who might get lost on an asteroid are so considerable, that for once I am making an exception to my habitual reserve.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
When one wishes to play the wit, he sometimes wanders a little from the truth. I have not been altogether honest in what I have told you about the lamplighters. And I realize that I run the risk of giving a false idea of our planet to those who do not know it. Men occupy a very small place upon the Earth. If the two billion inhabitants who people its surface were all to stand upright and somewhat crowded together, as they do for some big public assembly, they could easily be put into one public square twenty miles long and twenty miles wide. All humanity could be piled up on a small Pacific islet. The grown-ups, to be sure, will not believe you when you tell them that. They imagine that they fill a great deal of space. They fancy themselves as important as the baobabs. You should advise them, then, to make their own calculations. They adore figures, and that will please them. But do not waste your time on this extra task. It is unnecessary. You have, I know, confidence in me.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
And because I did not want to let go, because I didn’t know how, I wrapped my arms around Thomas Metcalf. I kissed him in the shade of the baobab tree, with its upside-down roots in the air, with its bark that could be cut a hundred times and still heal itself.
Jodi Picoult (Leaving Time)
Orang-orang dwasa pasti tidak akan memercayai kalian. Mereka membayangkan dirinya menduduki tempat yang amat luas. Mereka melihat dirinya sendiri sepenting pohon-pohon Baobab. Maka cobalah suruh mereka menghitung. Mereka akan senang saja: mereka gila angka-angka.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
Cuando por la mañana uno termina de arreglarse, hay que hacer cuidadosamente la limpieza del planeta. Hay que dedicarse regularmente a arrancar los baobabs, cuando se los distingue de los rosales, a los que se parecen mucho cuando son pequeñitos. Es un trabajo muy fastidioso pero muy fácil”.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (El Principito: Con las acuarelas originales del autor (Spanish Edition))
It's a question of discipline. When you finish washing and dressing each morning, you must carefully wash and dress your planet. You must force yourself to pull up the baobabs regularly, as soon as they can be distinguished from the rose trees -- which they resemble so closely in early youth. It is very tedious work, but it is very easy.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)
With bitterness, then. But that I have forbidden myself. With ridicule, then, which is more affable, which keeps itself transparent and could not care less; and like a bird into a nest I can slip back into a treetrunk and laugh to myself. And keep quiet too, perhaps just to keep quiet so as to dream outward, for the seventh sense is sleep.
Wilma Stockenström (The Expedition to the Baobab Tree)
My dreams fill me and help me eat time.
Wilma Stockenström (The Expedition to the Baobab Tree)
Avevo di fronte un'altra vita, paragonabile a un impetuoso bacio d'inverno restituito a chi è nato libero; una parvenza femminile, che attendeva solo me e i miei desideri per essere vissuta.
Giacomo Pozzi (Un Baobab toccò il cielo dell’Africa)
Adesso mi rendo conto che se quel giorno mi fossi tolta la vita, sono sicura oggi più che mai, avrei rovinato tutto. Avrei sprecato un'opportunità che in pochi sanno vedere, e quasi nessuno ha il coraggio di cogliere.
Giacomo Pozzi (Un Baobab toccò il cielo dell’Africa)
A botanist would have been stumped, coming across a tree like this one. Yet, if we are to judge a tree by its fruit, it was clearly an avocado. I picked the fruit, sliced it open, and tasted it to make sure. There was no doubt in my mind. If it looks like an avocado and tastes like an avocado, it has got to be an avocado. However, the tree itself had a white bark like that of a birch and its sap tasted like birch juice. Its leaves were delicate like that of a cypress, while its trunk and the root system reminded me of a baobab. Could it be that someone had grafted an avocado on to a baobab tree? And if so, why the bark so white and the leaves so, well, feathery, and delicate yet bold like a dragonfly’s wing? Why is there not another tree like it nearby? Where had the seed of this tree come from? I had no answer. So, I put the seed of the fruit in my pocket and took it home with me to see if I could make it grow.
Uguïsse Packard
Elbette bir insanın ne kadar uzun bir süre devam edebileceğini sık sık merak ediyorum. Bir yerlerde senin için giderek daha belirginleşen bir sınır çizgisi olmalı ve sen tıpkı uykunun gri tonlarına yaklaşır gibi o çizgiye uzanıyor olmalısın. Sonra da gri bir rüyaya. Öyle bir rüya ki tıpkı daha küçük bir ölümde olduğu gibi orada iyi ve kötüyle karşılaşırsın. O ayrılmaz ikili. Ölüme meydan okuyan ikizler.
Wilma Stockenström (The Expedition to the Baobab Tree)
Like the wild animals I make my paths. This conclusion came later. Like the redbuck, no, not like the redbuck and the zebra, not like the buffalo or herd animals of whatever kind that supplement each other's senses and confront crises together and survive what alone they would be too weak for, and that yet fall prey as individuals, and yet die alone, each in his time. I tread my own track, so clearly purposeful that I know I have already dwelt a long time in these pars, or rather there has never been any question of dwelling. Rather I should say: I too survive here, but I rely on myself, and even on the days when it feels as if everywhere under the earth there are snake-eggs lying, even then I have to fend for myself and try not to tread on them.
Wilma Stockenström (The Expedition to the Baobab Tree)
I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where the gift of getting my husband back was as accidental as my almost losing him, where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers’ hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint—I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth, and I am turning around to tell Jay once again, “Yes, here.” I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of m y might.
Elizabeth Berg (Range of Motion)
Possession and loving are concepts that damn each other.
Wilma Stockenström (The Expedition to the Baobab Tree)
Aphex Twin acheva une chanson et commença la suivante : Zigomatic 17, dont les sonorités court-circuitées esquissaient un électroencéphalogramme en forme de baobab phonique, et soudain je sus qui était Aliénor Malèze, et je prononçai ces paroles ailées, Aliénor, tu es un baobab, c’est pour ça que tu ne bouges pas, les premiers hommes d’Afrique ont essayé tous les arbres et chacun avait son utilité : tel brûlait bien, tel faisait de bons arcs et de bons outils, tel gagnait à être mâchouillé pendant des heures, tel poussait si vite qu’on déguisait un paysage en un an, tel, si on le râpait, parfumait la viande, tel lavait les cheveux, tel rendait sa virilité à celui qui l’avait perdue à la chasse, il n’y avait que le baobab qui décidément ne servait à rien, ce n’était pas faute d’avoir expérimenté son bois, que fait-on d’un arbre bon à rien, que fait-on par ailleurs de ce qui n’est bon à rien, arbre ou homme, on décrète qu’il est sacré, voilà son utilité, il sert à être sacré, pas touche au baobab, il est sacré, on a besoin de sacré, tu sais c’est ce truc auquel on ne comprend rien mais qui aide on ne sait pas à quoi, ça aide, si ton cœur est oppressé, va t’asseoir à l’ombre du baobab, prends exemple sur lui, sois grand et inutile que celui qui ne sert à rien, voilà, tu as compris, le grand est inutile, on a besoin de grandeur parce que c’est absolu, c’est une question de taille et non de structure, si le baobab rapetisse prodigieusement, il devient un brocoli, le brocoli peut être mangé, le baobab est le brocoli cosmique dont parlait Salvador Dalí, Aliénor, elle, c’est la version humaine du phénomène, ses dimensions sont à mi-chemin entre le baobab et le brocoli, c’est pour ça que ses écrits fascinent.
Amélie Nothomb (Le Voyage d'hiver)
The small town of Kasane stands on the high veld plains of the northern horn of Botswana, a tourist haven shouldering the economy of the small but rich country. The town is located some one thousand kilometers north-east of the Capital City, Gaborone, with its hard blue skies and river-clear air, Kasane is a piece of paradise in this desert region; a shit-hole for the natives apparently as I was to learn, but still the place is a slice of heaven for tourists coming from outside. At the center of the small town resides an underrated true wonder of nature. A place called Plateau from which one can observe a pack of lions stalking a herd of Zebras; wildebeests crowded together like bees; a fish eagle splashing against the slow moving river and come out bearing a fighting catfish; herds of elephants and Buffaloes grazing and browsing the green mass of flora that escorts what seems like a coiling dark green phantom. The entire place below Plateau to the north is a wide array of interconnected channels, caressed on the sides by tall evergreen grass. The true wonder that is the exemplar of the Chobe District. The gravel to the height of ‘Plateau’ snakes through tall, fat baobab trees rising and falling, offering breathtaking views of the dense ridges, then dipping into creeks filled with clusters of dilapidated shacks and mobile homes with junk cars and abandoned road construction machinery scattered about. It clings to more defined creeks with shallow rapids and water clear enough to drink.
Thabo Katlholo
C'est une vie magnifique que d'être un baobab sur une plage.
Nathacha Appanah (Tropique de la violence)
Where the baobab tree was the soul of the village, the palace was its heart, the inner machinations of what we were. Anarchic, mystical, complete. It was a hut the size of three houses and just as spacious inside. There were sleeping and cooking and bathing spaces, all separated by piles of strategically grouped books. It was the chaos of Nimm organized into one large space. You could walk through the open entranceway and see across the huge palace. My way was blocked by a great stack of vertically organized books.
Nnedi Okorafor (Akata Woman (The Nsibidi Scripts, #3))
Think, again, of the sheer amount of human organization required for the American Society for Testing and Materials to produce directive D3462-87 (“Asphalt Shingles Made from Glass Felt and Surfaced with Mineral Granules”) and then to enforce its mandates. We could, clearly, repeat this exercise for everything you see around you, and everything you hear, and everything you smell—all the infinitely more interesting activities always under way beneath all those roofs. As I write, for instance, I’m listening to Orchestra Baobab on Spotify. It was the house band at a Dakar nightclub in the 1970s, where its music reflected the Cuban beats that came with sailors to West Africa in the 1940s; eventually the group recorded its best album at a Paris studio, and now it somehow resides on a computer server where 196,847 people from across the planet listen to it each month.
Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
baobab. Away in the distance I could see the cloud-softened
Paula McLain (Circling the Sun)
El cordero que quiero es uno sano, lo suficientemente fuerte como para arrancar los baobabs de mi planeta, pero no tan grande como para que se quede con hambre y se coma mi flor. Lo suficientemente activo como para jugar todo tiempo con él, pero lo suficientemente listo para que no pise mi flor mientras jugamos. Que exprese cariño para yo también quererlo, pero que no sienta envidia del cariño que le tengo a mi flor, que no sería menor, solo distinto. Que no tenga una neblina frente a sus ojos que no le permita ver con el corazón, y que cuando yo me descuide y lo deje solo frente a mi rosa sepa que no debe hacerle daño, porque me estaría haciendo daño a mí y a la belleza de un jardín de rosas... si ese es el cordero que está dentro de la caja que me dibujaste, entonces mi flor está viva y esperándome.
Daniel Yépez Brito (El Principito y el zorro de los Andes)
I was crucified on a pain extraction machine, one of billions that milk the world’s suffering and screams, all connected by swollen, organic cables, snaking under the foundations of reality. And there had to be a place where all the conduits of pulsing flesh, like the roots of old trees, converged into a single enormous pipe, where all the screams of fear from humanity mixed together, the despair and hopelessness of a madrepore with thousands and millions of living creatures with red mouths hanging wide open, screaming with clenched eyes, for eternity, in the hands of blind and deaf and impersonal executioners, the instruments of our terrifying destiny. Where did it go, the vertical conduit of human suffering? Who fed on our crying and unhappiness and helplessness and annihilation and mortality? Who enjoyed the crack of our bones, the pain of unrequited love, of the ravages of cancer and the death of the people we love, of burned skin, of torn-out eyes, of exploding veins? Who needed our ill-fated substance as clear as tears, like we needed air and water? I imagined a vertical pipe, like the needle of a syringe but with the diameter of the oldest baobab tree, descending to the center of the earth and feeding there, in the empty, spherical hypogeum, a people of necromancers and telepaths related to bedbugs, ticks, and mites. Hedonists of pain, visionaries of terror, archangels of being crushed alive, kings of destruction and hate …
Mircea Cărtărescu (Solenoid)
to wood-clad, the same as the villas, so the
Kate Frost (The Baobab Beach Retreat (A Romantic Escape Book 1))
Lo mismo que no hay ningún "incendio pequeño" (todo depende de la naturaleza del combustible que encuentre a su paso), tampoco hay ningún esfuerzo pequeño. Todo esfuerzo cuenta y nunca se sabe a partir de qué acción aparentemente modesta surgirá el acontecimiento que cambie el rumbo de las cosas. No olvidéis que el rey de los árboles de la sabana, el poderoso y majestuoso baobab, sale de una simple semilla que, al principio, no es más gruesa que un pequeño grano de café.
Hampâté Bâ
and
Kate Frost (The Baobab Beach Retreat (A Romantic Escape Book 1))
All Hadza women dig, but grandmothers dig more than mothers in part because they don’t have to nurse or spend as much time taking care of little ones. According to measurements by Kristen Hawkes and colleagues, a typical Hadza mother forages about four hours a day, but grandmothers forage on average five to six hours a day.18 On some days they dig less and spend more time collecting berries, but overall they work longer hours than mothers do. And just as grandmothers spend about seven hours every day foraging and preparing food, grandfathers continue to hunt and to collect honey and baobab fruits, traveling just as far on most days as younger men do. According to the anthropologist Frank Marlowe, “Old men are the most likely to fall out of tall baobab trees to their deaths, since they continue to try to collect honey into old age.”19 How many elderly Americans dig several hours a day, let alone climb trees and hunt animals on foot? We can, however, compare how much Americans and Hadza walk. A study of thousands found that the average twenty-first-century woman in the United States aged eighteen to forty walks 5,756 steps a day (about two to three miles), but this number declines precipitously with age, and by the time they are in their seventies, American women take roughly half as many steps. While Americans are half as active in their seventies as in their forties, Hadza women walk twice as much per day as Americans, with only modest declines as they age.20 In addition, heart rate monitors showed that elderly Hadza women actually spent more of their day engaged in moderate to vigorous activity than younger women who were still having children.21 Imagine if elderly American women had to walk five miles a day to shop for their children and grandchildren, and instead of pulling items off the shelves, they had to dig for several hours in hard, rocky soil for boxes of cereal, frozen peas, and Fruit Roll-Ups. Not surprisingly, hard work keeps elderly hunter-gatherers fit. One of the most reliable measures of age-related fitness is walking speed—a measure that correlates strongly with life expectancy.22 The average American woman under fifty walks about three feet per second (0.92 meter per second) but slows down considerably to two feet per second (0.67 meter per second) by her sixties.23 Thanks to an active lifestyle without retirement, there is no significant age-related decline in walking speed among Hadza women, whose average pace remains a brisk 3.6 feet per second (1.1 meters per second) well into their seventies.24 Having struggled to keep up with elderly Hadza grandmas, I can attest they maintain a steady clip even when it is blisteringly hot. Older Hadza men also walk briskly.
Daniel E. Lieberman (Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding)
O să-i trimit un mail domnului James Kennedy, acel extraordinar chimist australian care a făcut postere publice cu compoziția chimică a fructelor, umplând de silă toți chemofobii planetei, poate mă lămurește el. Vreau să-l întreb și despre batonul raw bio cu scoarță de baobab, că am o prietenă care a moștenit un teren plin de tufișuri și mă gândesc să le transformăm în batoane energizante când l-o defrișa, nu cumva să se risipească atâta sănătate din natură!
Simona Tivadar (Medicină, nutriție si bună dispoziţie)
Oyster-shell reefs have formed islands on which humans have built their homes. In Senegal, on the coast south of Dakar, for instance, there is an island called Fadiouth joined to the mainland by a bridge; this is actually an archipelago formed over millions of years by the shells of mangrove oysters, oysters that grow on the extensive tree roots of mangrove trees. The people travel from one island to another and fish for oysters by canoe, paddling across a lagoon paved with oysters, and lined by baobab trees which feed on calcium. The streets are lined with oyster-shells, and in the cemetery, Muslims and Catholics are buried under startlingly white oyster-shell mounds in the shade of the mangrove trees.
Rebecca Stott (Oyster (Animal))
I'm not going to Wichita,' Vladimir said, the word 'Wichita' rendered by his accent as the most foreign word imaginable in the English language. 'I’m going to live with Fran and it’s going to be all right. You’re going to make it all right.' But even as he was laying down the law, his hands were shaking to the point where it was hard to keep the shabby pay-phone receiver properly positioned between his mouth and ear. Teardrops were blurring the corners of his eyes and he felt the need to have Baobab hear him burst out in a series of long, convulsive sobs, Roberta-style. All he had wanted was twenty thousand lousy dollars. It wasn’t a million. It was how much Dr. Girshkin made on average from two of his nervous gold-toothed patients. 'Okay,' Baobab said. 'Here’s how we’re going to do it. These are the new rules. Memorize them or write them down. Do you have a pen? Hello? Okay, Rule One: you can’t visit anyone—friends, relatives, work, nothing. You can only call me from a pay phone and we can’t talk for more than three minutes.' He paused. Vladimir imagined him reading this from a little scrap of paper. Suddenly Baobab said, under his breath: 'Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' 'The two of us can never meet in person,' he was saying loudly now. 'We will keep in touch only by phone. If you check into a hotel, make sure you pay cash. Never pay by credit card. Once more: Tree, nine-thirty, tomorrow.' Tree. Their Tree? The Tree? And nine-thirty? Did he mean in the morning? It was hard to imagine Baobab up at that unholy hour. 'Rule Five: I want you to keep moving at all times, or at least try to keep moving. Which brings us to…' But just as Rule Six was about to come over the transom, there was a tussle for the phone and Roberta came on the line in her favorite Bowery harlot voice, the kind that smelled like gin nine hundred miles away. 'Vladimir, dear, hi!' Well, at least someone was enjoying Vladimir’s downfall. 'Say, I was thinking, do you have any ties with the Russian underworld, honey?' Vladimir thought of hanging up, but the way things were going even Roberta’s voice was a distinctly human one. He thought of Mr. Rybakov’s son, the Groundhog. 'Prava,' he muttered, unable to articulate any further. An uptown train rumbled beneath him to underscore the underlying shakiness of his life. Two blocks downtown, a screaming professional was being tossed back and forth between two joyful muggers. 'Prava, how very now!' Roberta said. 'Laszlo’s thinking of opening up an Academy of Acting and the Plastic Arts there. Did you know that there are thirty thousand Americans in Prava? At least a half dozen certified Hemingways among them, wouldn’t you agree?' 'Thank you for your concern, Roberta. It’s touching. But right now I have other… There are problems. Besides, getting to Prava… What can I do?… There’s an old Russian sailor… An old lunatic… He needs to be naturalized.' There was a long pause at this point and Vladimir realized that in his haste he wasn’t making much sense. 'It’s a long story…' he began, 'but essentially… I need to… Oh God, what’s wrong with me?' 'Talk to me, you big bear!' Roberta encouraged him. 'Essentially, if I get this old lunatic his citizenship, he’ll set me up with his son in Prava.' 'Okay, then,' Roberta said. 'I definitely can’t get him his citizenship.' 'No,' Vladimir concurred. 'No, you can’t.' What was he doing talking to a sixteen-year-old? 'But,' Roberta said, 'I can get him the next best thing…
Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook)
Before they grow to such a size, baobabs start out by being small
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)