The Tree: Quotes by novelist John Fowles

In the back yard of my childhood home, a giant chestnut tree spread its limbs.
From far above me, its chestnuts fell and landed with a solid clonk. These gems were colored a deep brown. I gathered and polished them, leaving them in piles inside our family home on Council Crest, a hill known as "Portland's rooftop garden." This heavenly Oregonian chestnut tree inspired me to climb its relatives, photograph its kin and talk to many others. This year, I read Trees, a book by photographer Frank Horvat with an essay by John Fowles (1926-2005). The beauty of the book inspired this selection of quotes by Fowles, the famous novelist. . .

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​"I confess my own love is far more of trees, more exactly of the complex internal landscapes they form when left to themselves."   

​   "There is a spiritual corollary to the way we are currently de-foresting and de-naturing our planet. In the end what we must most defoliate and deprive is ourselves.
​   We might as soon start collecting up the world’s poetry, ever line and every copy, to burn it in a final pyre; and think we should lead richer and happier lives thereafter."

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"That two branches grow in different directions and ways does not mean they do not share a same mechanism of need, a deeper set of rules."  

"Evolution did not intend trees to grow singly. Far more than ourselves they are social creatures, and no more natural as isolated specimens than man is as a marooned sailor." 

​               All quotes by John Fowles

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