Human evolution, at first, seems extraordinary. How could the process that gave rise to slugs and oak trees and fish produce a creature that can fly to the moon and invent the Internet and cross the ocean in boats?
Wear scarlet! Tear the green lemons off the tree! I don't want to forget who I am, what has burned in me, and hang limp and clean, an empty dress -
A mathematician who can only generalise is like a monkey who can only climb up a tree, and a mathematician who can only specialise is like a monkey who can only climb down a tree. In fact neither the up monkey nor the down monkey is a viable creature. A real monkey must find food and escape his enemies and so must be able to incessantly climb up and down. A real mathematician must be able to generalise and specialise.
I like the way that the history of the tree shapes the tree. There's no distinction between the tree and its history. You can lose yourself in that thought.
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?
We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die.
The forest is not a resource for us, it is life itself. It is the only place for us to live.
We are beasts, you know, beasts risen from the savannas and jungles and forests. We have come down from the trees and up out of the water, but you can never, ever fully remove the feral nature from our psyches.
What I want for Christmas is to be a Japanese pop star. [Laughs] Santa can't exactly put that under the tree, but I'm hoping that some magic will happen overseas.
The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.
One killer exercise that's really great is pull-ups with your legs out level. That's my favourite. It's such functional core strength, and that's why I can climb up trees and down vines.
If I stand here, I can see the Little Red Haired girl when she comes out of her house. . . Of course, if she sees me peeking around this tree, she'll think I'm the dumbest person in the world. . . But if I don't peek around the tree, I'll never see her. . . Which means I probably AM the dumbest person in the world. . . which explains why I'm standing in a batch of poison oak.
I doubt trees are ever told to 'be the screwed-up ninth-grader. '
Many savage nations worship trees, and I really think my first feeling would be one of delight and interest rather than of surprise, if some day when I am alone in the woods one of the trees were to speak to me.
The nut of this tree is hung high aloft, wrapped in a silk wrapper, which is enclosed in a case of sole leather, which again is packed in a mass of shock absorbing, vermin proof pulp, sealed up in a waterproof, ironwood case, and finally cased in a vegetable porcupine of spines, almost impregnable. There is no nut so protected; there is no nut in our woods to compare with it as food. What is a Chesnut?
A tree with strong roots can withstand the most violent storm, but the tree can't grow roots just as the storm appears on the horizon.
I'm trying to manufacture a sleepover feel; like a tree house or a clubhouse. I want people to be silly and play and feel safe and some people, you have to coax them into that space and some people bring me further into that space, even past the point that I wanted to go.
People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.
Social media's currency is the single photograph. Whereas, every time I look at a photograph, I look at twenty or thirty photographs. I'm looking for a narrative. And that's a different kind of construct. If you're a poet and you put a line from your poem online, "The trees bending over gracefully," or something, you can get a tick. But that has nothing to do with your longer poem.
is there not an Arabick Proverb which goes, 'No one throws Stones at a Barren Tree'?