Daisy Rose’s Reviews > North Woods > Status Update

“‘Witness trees’, she’d tell them. An old term of trade for trees that marked invisible boundaries. Now also used for those that were present at important moments in our history. In other words: the ones that witnessed us.” ~ pg. 349

“words which froze in winter” ~ pg. 288

“Harriet listened to the story with tears in her eyes. ‘You must have prayed,’ she said when Lillian finished, and Lillian, recalling the feeling of the soil against her lips, said she had, though she didn’t say to whom.” ~ pg. 256

“Calls these pilgrimages his ‘Stitchings,’ as if his footsteps are literally the needle that repairs the earth.” ~ pg. 217

“What she hadn’t expected was that, as time went on, there came the sense that her gift was sharpening, approximating that at which it pretended. The magic that amazed…” ~ pg. 182

“But the sun doesn’t slow for the painter of sunsets, so why should my woods? …Such is my predicament—it is all happening too fast. Yes, it will come around again, next year, and after that again…I propose a new calendar: not one autumn but twelve, a hundred. The autumn when the birches are yellow but still have their leaves..And so on: I’ve missed a few. But to call it all just ‘autumn!’” ~ pg. 153

“…Alice watched the old man and felt a kinship with someone who had learned to untether part of himself and let it roam, while the rest of him was bound by circumstance.” ~ pg. 64

“If like was a song, theirs was more refrain than verse. And yet to have claimed that a warm spring morning walking over earth carpeted with apple blossoms was somehow the same, substantively, spiritually, as a cold winter noon spent pruning, or a harvest evening…—this would have betrayed an ignorance not only of country life, but of the thousand seasons—that hid within the canonical Four.” ~ pg. 53

“Placing a stone in the forks of a tree branch is a child’s charm; it should not be practiced systematically. Like all charms, it will lose its Magic when it becomes a Method.” ~ pg. 42

This book isn’t just written in different english dialects and formats reflecting the changing time periods, but its literary style changes too~ so much research must have gone into its writing!