A Quote by Philip Roth

What I have in mind when I start to write could fit inside an acorn-an acorn, moreover, that rarely if ever grows into an oak. Write fiction and you relinquish reason. You start with an acorn and you end up with a mackerel.

Philip Roth

Quote Topics

Acorn Could End Ever Fiction Fit Grows Inside Mackerel Mind Moreover Oak Rarely Reason Relinquish Start Up Write

Quote Author

Philip Roth
American - Novelist
March 19, 1933 - May 22, 2018

We are, in a certain way, defined as much by our potential as by its expression. There is a great difference between an acorn and a little bit of wood carved into an acorn shape, a difference not always readily apparent to the naked eye. The difference is there even if the acorn never has the opportunity to plant itself and become an oak. Remembering its potential changes the way in which we think of the acorn and react to it. How we value it. If an acorn were conscious, knowing its potential would change the way that it might think and feel about itself.

Rachel Naomi Remen

It takes time for an acorn to turn into an oak, but the oak is already implied in the acorn.

Alan Watts

Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.

W. H. Auden

I think character never changes; the Acorn becomes an Oak, which is very little like an Acorn to be sure, but it never becomes an Ash.

Hester Lynch Piozzi

The mind has grown to its present state of consciousness as an acorn grows into an oak, or as saurians developed into mammals.

Carl Jung

I've been fighting with Acorn, alongside Acorn, on issues you care about, my entire career.

Barack Obama

Time is different for a tree than for a man. Sun and soil and water, these are the things a weirwood understands, not days and years and centuries. For men, time is a river. We are trapped in its flow, hurtling from past to present, always in the same direction. The lives of trees are different. They root and grow and die in one place, and that river does not move them. The oak is the acorn, the acorn is the oak.

George R. R. Martin

The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.

H. Rider Haggard

The boughs of the oak are roaring inside the acorn.

Charles Tomlinson

The tallest oak tree once was an acorn that any pig could have swallowed.

Arthur Schopenhauer

For their entire lives, even before they met you, your mother and father held their love for you inside their hearts like an acorn holds an oak tree.

Anthony Marra

The truth, I discovered, is a tree that grows as a man gains access to experience. A child sees the acorn of his daily life, but a man looks back on the oak.

Robin Hobb

Before the acorn can bring forth the oak, it must become itself a wreck. No plant ever came from any but a wrecked seed.

Hannah Whitall Smith

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and planted it, so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing, but it may spread into a prodigious timber.