A Quote by John Knowles

Nothing endures. Not a tree. Not love. Not even death by violence.

John Knowles

Quote Topics

Death Even Love Nothing Tree Violence

Quote Author

John Knowles
American - Novelist
September 16, 1926 - November 29, 2001

So the more things remained the same, the more they changed after all. Nothing endures. Not love, not a tree, not even a death by violence.

John Knowles

Love endures everything, love is stronger than death, love fears nothing.

Mary Faustina Kowalska

So even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end, love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly.

Shane Claiborne

Violence harms the one who does it as much as the one who receives it. You could cut down a tree with an axe. The axe does violence to the tree, and escapes unharmed. Is that how you see it? Wood is soft compared to steel, but the sharp steel is dulled as it chops, and the sap of the tree will rust and pit it. The mighty axe does violence to the helpless tree, and is harmed by it. So it is with men, though the harm is in the spirit.

Robert Jordan

Non-violence confronts systematic injustice with active love, but refuses to retaliate with further violence under any circumstances. In order to halt the vicious cycles of violence, it requires a willing acceptance of suffering and death rather than inflicting suffering or death on anyone else.

John Dear

What is this love that endures decades, passes on sleep, and resists death to give one kiss? Call it agape love, a love that bears a semblance of God's.

Max Lucado

Life and death, union and separation, follow hard upon one another. Nothing is steadfast but the will, nothing endures but one's achievements. These alone count in life.

Yoshida Shoin

Nothing endures except change; nothing is constant except death. Every heartbeat wounds us, and life would be an eternal bleeding to death, were it not for literature. It grants us what nature does not: a golden time that doesn't rust, a springtime that never wilts, cloudless happiness and eternal youth. [my translation]

Ludwig Borne

Do you say that tree isn't pretty cause it doesn't look like that tree? We're all trees. You're a tree. I'm a tree. You've got to love your body, Eve. You've got to love your tree. Love your tree. (Leah)

Eve Ensler

How dreadful it is that because of our wills we can never love anything without messing it around! We couldn’t even love a tree, a stone even; for sooner or later we should be pruning the tree or chipping a bit off the stone.

Sylvia Townsend Warner

The same authorities who insist upon beginnings, middles, and ends, declare that Great Literature (by which they mean the stories they have been taught to admire) is about love and death, while mere popular fiction like this is about sex and violence. One reader's sex, alas, is another's love; and one's violence, another's death.

Gene Wolfe

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

Andy Goldsworthy

Take care, you who wish / to deal with names / for love. Behind their sweetness / and wrath, nothing endures. / Nothing but wounds and kisses.

Hadewijch

The tightrope of love swings back and forth, forever tied between the tree of anxiety and the tree of fear. Like life, it holds a constant reminder that death must be overcome.

Goliarda Sapienza

Do you know that even when you look at a tree and say, `That is an oak tree', or `that is a banyan tree', the naming of the tree, which is botanical knowledge, has so conditioned your mind that the word comes between you and actually seeing the tree? To come in contact with the tree you have to put your hand on it and the word will not help you to touch it.