Greenwood Michael Christie Quotes

There aren't any normal lives, son. That's the lie that hurts us most.

What if a family isn't a tree at all? What if it's more like a forest? A collection of individuals, pooling their resources by intertwined roots, sheltering each other from wind and weather and drought... what are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason. And like all stories, families are not born, they're invented. Pieced together from love and lies and nothing else.

Take heart, she seems to say. The world has been on the brink of ending before. The dust has always been waiting to swallow us. People have always struggled and suffered. Your poverty is not shameful. It is not a failure of your character. Life, by its very nature, is precarious. And your struggles are never for nothing.

...why is it, she wonders...that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and species extinction and to rescue our planet tomorrow, when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today?

How intimately a book is related to the tree and it’s rings, she thinks. The layers of time, preserved, for all to examine.

Why is it that people are engineered to live just long enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes, but not long enough to fix them? If only we were like trees...If only we had centuries. Maybe then there'd be time enough for us to mend all the harm we have done.

A person seldom knows they're starved for something until they get a taste of it.

This is the carpenter's painful truth: nothing is true. ...We think we live in boxes until we look closer and find we're in fact living in irregular shapes, in big, misshapen accidents.

Still, Temple has no illusions concerning her library's impact. Her books won't lift anyone from their low station. They won't right wrongs or save wandering souls from perdition or fill grumbling stomachs. But they might let a few scraps of sunlight fall into some lean, desolate lives. And that's something. 'The Greatest Library of Estevan, Saskatchewan

Because there’s nothing like poverty to teach you just how much of a luxury integrity truly is.

So know this: your father loved you with everything he had. He just didn't have much left.

Maybe trees do have souls. Which makes wood a kind of flesh. And perhaps instruments of wooden construction sound so pleasing to our ears for this reason: the choral shimmer of a guitar; the heartbeat thump of drums; the mournful wail of violins--we love them because they sound like us.

Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light, then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure. His own life, he can admit now, will never be clear, will never be unblemished, will never be reclaimed. Because it is impossible to ungrow what has already grown, to undo what is already done. Still, people trust the things he’s built, and there is something to that. It’s not enough, but it’s what he’ll take with him.

If it's true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary justice...then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world. We who rip our the Earth's most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheaply to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again--that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.

I do not want you because you are mine. I want you because I am yours.

Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors...Jake has gained a new awareness of how her own life is being held up by unseen layers, girded by lives that come before her own. And by a series of crimes and miracles, accidents and choices, sacrifices and mistakes, all of which have landed her in this particular body and delivered her to this day.

The old saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But in Willow's experience, the opposite is more likely true. An apple is nothing but a seed's escape vehicle, just one of the ingenious ways they hitch rides -- in the bellies of animals, or by taking to the wind -- all to get as far away from their parents as they possibly can. So is it any wonder the daughters of dentists open candy stores, the sons of accountants become gambling addicts, the children of couch potatoes run marathons? She's always believed that most people's lives are lived as one great refutation of the ones that came before them.

Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last.

...Liam Greenwood has often thought that people like clear wood best because they need to see time stacked together. Years pressed against years, all orderly and clean. Free from obstruction or blemish. The way our own lives never are.

Lomax reminds me of a tree that's been sawn right through and still won't fall. And while I'm more a sailor than a lumberman, I did my time in your camps, and one thing I learned there is that a tree that's been cut through and still won't drop is one of the most dangerous things there is.

Whenever she tells the story of the cyclone...she will puzzle over how to properly describe the sound it made as it ate through her library. She'll grapple with how one could possibly capture precisely the sound of ten thousand books drawn up into the air and scattered for hundreds of miles. And it won't be until years later--long after the Depression ends and poor people stop riding the rails...and long after she's able to again venture into that section of her field where they planted the windbreak of maples together, trees that have only thrived ever since. And long after the void he left in her life entirely heals over--only then will she arrive at a suitable answer: they sounded like birds.

Preachers and politicians often contend that hardship knits us together. That some great calamity like the Crash brings out the best and most noble in us. Yet in his long, tortured, and grasping life, Harvey Bennett Lomax will have witnessed only the opposite. In his experience, the harder things get, the worse we treat one another. And the worst things we’ll ever do, we save for our families.

People can save you, Liam,” she says with startling clarity. “Always remember that. They do it all the time. Except it’s usually in ways we’ll never understand. But that doesn’t change what they did.

What if a family isn’t a tree at all? Jake thinks as they walk in silence. What if it’s more like a forest? A collection of individuals pooling their resources through intertwined roots, sheltering one another from wind and weather and drought

How, Willow wondered, could anyone possibly believe in old-fashioned political change in an era like this?An era when the president of the United States is a lying ghoul, the rain melts your skin, the food is laced with poison, wars are eternal, and the world's oldest living beings are being felled to make Popsicle sticks. "This whole sick system is in its death throes, Harris. And in my opinion, those holding the levers of power ought to be the first to get dragged down with it." P82

Those who claim that rage is counter-productive need only consider all the wonderous things that Liam Greenwood has built in his thirty-four years of life to understand that the opposite can always be true: that rage is perhaps the most productive fuel there is.

Never once, however, did he mention his health or suggest a visit...they may even have managed to say some things they needed to say. Instead he chose secrecy. Instead he chose solitude and stoicism. Instead he died alone, in the trees. And she hates how much sense it makes.

When we depend less on industrially produced food and live in the world’s quiet spaces,” she says, quoting something she read in the Whole Earth Catalog, her mouth still turbo-charged by the pills, “our bodies become vigorous. We discover the serenity of living in sync with the rhythms of the Earth. We cease oppressing one another.

places he’s known that a person can enter and then emerge from into a different time altogether. A boxcar is one of them. So is a forest. So is a single tree. So is a library. So is a battlefield. And so is—though Everett will only realize this later, after occupying one for so long—a prison cell. And so is this supply box, he says, with his throat clenching like a fist. He brushes his lips against Willow’s sweet head and lifts the latch.

Though why is it, she wonders casually as she stacks the boxes in her van, that we expect our children to be the ones to halt deforestation and species extinction and to rescue our planet tomorrow, when we are the ones overseeing its destruction today. There’s a Chinese proverb Willow has always loved: The best time to plant a tree is always twenty years ago. And the second-best time is always now. And the same goes for saving the ecosystem.

Jake leaves unmentioned the fact that she'd long ago filed motherhood away in the locked cupboard that contains everything that the Withering has made impossible for people like her: her own home, a steady relationship, a research lab, a tenured teaching position. And even if she did have the money, why would anyone willingly bring a child into such a fallen, desolate world? Children require hope and prosperity as trees require light and water, and Jake Greenwood is all tapped out of both.

This is the carpenter's painful truth: that nothing is true. By true, he means level, plumb, perfect. Every room you've ever entered has been off by at least a sixteenth of an inch -- more probably an eighth. Guaranteed. We think we live in boxes until we look closer and find we're in fact living in irregular shapes, in big, misshapen accidents. Which makes carpenters the high priests of living with mistakes. And while sloppiness is the most grievous insult you could throw at another carpenter, true perfection is maddeningly unattainable, which is why it's never spoken of. Because even after you cut a piece of wood and lay it straight, it lives on after you've finished, soaking up moisture, twisting, bowing, and warping into unintended forms. Our lives are no different.

There is drama in the opening of a log—to uncover for the first time the beauty in the bole, or trunk, of a tree hidden for centuries, waiting to be given this second life. GEORGE NAKASHIMA,

Harris inventories all that was required to birth such a forest: whole oceans of rain and centuries of sunlight. The same sunlight that glinted upon the helmets of the Romans. The same winds that carried the first explorers to this continent. Here are trees taller than twenty-story buildings; trees that had already obtained immensity when the first printing press rolled. Baudelaire called them ‘living pillars of eternity’ and Harris agrees. Yet ask anyone who’s spent a life among them, and they’ll tell you that while trees are unimpeachably impressive, they’re also just weeds on poles.

I never had a knack for living before she came to me.

To smell their needles. To caress their bark. To be regenerated in the humbling loom of their shadows. To stand mutely in their leafy churches and pray to their thousand-year-old souls.

If history were itself a book, this era would surely be the last chapter, wouldn't it? Or have all ages believed this? That life can't possible go on and that these are the end times? At the height of the Great Depression, Euphemia wrote about a society that couldn't possibly continue. Still, things did go on. And on. And on. Years piling on years. Layers upon layers. Light and dark. Sapwood over heartwood.

The old saying goes that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. But in Willow's experience, the opposite is more likely true. An apple is nothing but a seed's escape vehicle, just one of the ingenious ways they hitch rides - in the bellies of animals, or by taking to the wind - all to get as far away from their parents as they possibly can. So is it any wonder the daughters of dentists open candy stores, the sons of accountants become gambling addicts, the children of couch potatoes run marathons? She's always believed that most people's lives are lived as one great refutation of the ones that came before them.

The fatty layers of the salmon’s ruby flesh are striking and closely resemble wood grain, she realizes, Douglas fir particularly. The biologist in her loves these parallels of growth. How tenaciously organisms build tissue, layer by layer, year by year.

What is nature exactly, Willow?...Is one of my reclaimed wood tables Nature? How about me, am I Nature? How come you never looked upon me with any reverence? How comes trees are the only part of Nature that you ever cared about?

There’s a Chinese proverb Willow has always loved: The best time to plant a tree is always twenty years ago. And the second-best time is always now.

possibly mean so much to him? This was how it had been

If life has taught him anything, it’s that you must be more secretive, more protective, and more pitiless than the next man. Either that or everything you are, everything you’ve built, and everyone you love, can be trampled in an instant.

It’s strange, isn’t it, Liam,” he says as they continue to gaze upward, Harris doing his best to imagine the latticework of high branches, “how one only needs to purchase the land on which such a thing is rooted, before one is permitted to destroy it forever? And, strangest of all, there exists no power to stop you.

...perhaps his mother had been right: maybe trees do have souls. Which makes wood a kind of flesh. And perhaps instruments of wooden construction sound so pleasing to our ears for this reason: the choral shimmer of a guitar; the heartbeat thump of drums; the mournful wail of violins—we love them because they sound like us.

There aren’t any normal lives, son. That’s the lie that hurts us most.

Time, Liam has learned, is not an arrow. Neither is it a road. It goes in no particular direction. It simply accumulates—in the body, in the world—like wood does. Layer upon layer. Light then dark. Each one dependent upon the last. Each year impossible without the one preceding it. Each triumph and each disaster written forever in its structure.

There is nothing more quieting than an ancient tree

But of course there are layers of life that came before her own, the way trees are held up by the concentric bands of their former selves, rings built up over rings, year by year.

Little did those old fools know: green things are all that keeps the land and sky from trading places.

What are families other than fictions? Stories told about a particular cluster of people for a particular reason? And like all stories, families are not born, they’re invented, pieced together from love and lies and nothing else.

Why is it that people are engineered to live just long enough to pile up a lifetime of mistakes, but not long enough to fix them?

If only we had centuries. Maybe then there’d be time enough for us to mend all the harm we have done.

An apple is nothing but a seed’s escape vehicle, just one of the ingenious ways they hitch rides—in the bellies of animals, or by taking to the wind—all to get as far away from their parents as they possibly can.

If it’s true that the United States was born of slavery and revolutionary violence, she muses while watching them work, then surely her own country was born of a cruel, grasping indifference to its indigenous peoples and the natural world.

We who rip out the Earth’s most irreplaceable resources, sell them cheap to anyone with a nickel in their pocket, then wake up and do it all over again—that could well serve as the Greenwood motto, and perhaps even for her nation itself.

So know this: your father loved you with everything he had. He just didn’t have much left.

The future ain't made of no wood," he once heard a pole-jack from one of his lumber gangs declare, words that have wormed into him ever since.

Do you know what becomes of men like us without the armour of wealth...?

Harris prefers poetry above all else, for how it sets like concrete in his mind, as opposed to the short-acting fireworks of the novel,

Well, come on,” Blank says, cuffing Everett’s shoulder and pulling him inside. “In the old days you’d come knocking for one of two reasons: to bum money for whiskey or to bum whiskey. So which is it?” “Neither,” Everett says, before sitting in a ramshackle chair worn shiny in places like a mangy deer. “Good, because I only stock seltzer these days. So if you’ve a problem with that you get out right now.” “I’m all done with drinking too,” Everett says, impressed that Blank has likewise managed to correct his doomed trajectory.

Her mother’s death teaches Jake, too early in life, that the human body is fragile, and that our brief lives can be halted at any moment, as unexpectedly as a breeze blowing a door shut.

There is nothing more quieting than an ancient tree.

With an embarrassing (for him, anyway) jungle in her armpits and a restless fever to pack her Westfalia and go, she’s a Rorschach test of a mother, a shape-shifting cloud drifting across his boyhood horizon.

Even when a tree is at its most vital, only ten percent of its tissue—the outermost rings, its sapwood—can be called alive. All the rings of inner heartwood are essentially dead, just lignin-reinforced cellulose built up year after year, stacked layer upon layer, through droughts and storms, diseases and stresses, everything that the tree has lived through preserved and recorded within its own body. Every tree is held up by its own history, the very bones of its ancestors.