Birch Tree Short Quotes

In short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and was ready to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could always put down when he liked. Sir James had no idea that he should ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose cleverness he delighted. Why not? A man's mind–what there is of it–has always the advantage of being masculine,–as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,–and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate, but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

this is real, and it is happening now, just as it happened before: We are under the big tree in my backyard, on that patch of dirt where we used to build fairy houses from moss and sticks and scraps of birch. It is late afternoon. All around us is golden light. We have been together all day, in our cutoff shorts and bare feet. It is the start of fifth grade, the start of being the oldest in the school. Next year, we will be the youngest all over again. But not yet. We are playing that hand-slapping game, the one we like to play at recess. You hold your hands out, palms up, and I place mine lightly on top. You pull yours out and try to slap mine. You hit air three times. On the fourth try, your

On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss’s wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss’s wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest’s far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn’t need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty.

All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life’s work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years: how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. How they build immune systems as wide as a forest. She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species. Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees. She describes the drupes and racemes, panicles and involucres that a person could walk past for a lifetime and never notice. She tells how the woody-coned alders harvest gold. How an inch-high pecan might have six feet of root. How the inner bark of birches can feed the starving. How one hop hornbeam catkin holds several million grains of pollen. How indigenous fishermen use crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish. How poplars clean soils of chlorinated solvents and willows remove heavy metals. She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them. How the wired-up fungi feed the tree minerals. How the tree pays for these nutrients with sugars, which the fungi can’t make.

I enquired of Keskarrah concerning the food of the beaver and was told it was the bark of trees such as birch and fir. I wonder that no naturalist has classed this animal with the mouse tribe, as its broad depressed form at first sight suggested to me that it was of that family. I confirmed this opinion having examined them further with my lens: the broad naked tail, the short obtuse ears, and the two pair of parallel front teeth, so well formed for cutting.

...it's too bad bad you're not like the Suriel, spouting any information I want if I'm clever enough to snare you.' For a moment, he blinked at me. Then his mouth twisted to the side and that metal eye whizzed and narrowed on me. 'I suppose you won't tell me what you want to know.' 'You have your secrets, and I have mine,' I said carefully. I couldn't tell whether he would try to convince me otherwise if I told him the truth. 'But if you were a Suriel,' I added with deliberate slowness, in case he hadn't caught my meaning, 'how, exactly, would I trap you?' Lucien set down the knife and picked at his nails. For a moment, I wondered if he would tell me anything at all. Wondered if he would go right to Tamlin and tattle. But then he said. 'I'd probably have a weakness for groves of young birch trees in the western woods, and freshly slaughtered chickens, and would probably be so greedy that I wouldn't notice the double-loop snare rigged around the grove to pin my legs in place.' 'Hmm,' I didn't dare ask why he had decided to be so accommodating. There was still a good chance he wouldn't mind seeing me dead, but I would risk it. 'I somehow prefer you as a High Fae.' He smirked, but the amusement was short-lived. 'If I were insane and stupid enough to go after a Suriel, I'd also take a bow and quiver, and maybe a knife just like this one.' He sheathed the knife he'd cleaned and set it down on the edge of the table- an offering. 'And I'd be prepared to run like hell when I freed it- to the nearest running water, which they hate crossing.' 'But you're not insane, so you'll be here, safe and sound?' 'I'll be conveniently hunting on the grounds, and with my superior hearing, I might be feeling generous enough to listen if someone screams from the western woods. But it's a good thing I had no role in telling you to go out today, since Tam would eviscerate anyone who told you how to trap a Suriel; and it's a good thing I had planned to hunt anyway, because if anyone caught me helping you, there would be trouble of a whole other hell awaiting us. I hope your secrets are worth it.' He said it with his usual grin, but there was an edge to it- a warning I didn't miss. Another riddle- and another bit of information. I said, 'It's a good thing that while you have superior hearing, I possess superior abilities to keep my mouth shut.' He snorted as I took the knife from the table and turned to procure the bow from my room. 'I think I'm starting to like you- for a murdering human.

Nothing sprang up at him in his youth that declared the presence of God, but when he studied mathematics in high school and college, one principle arrested his attention: central tendency, the great force drawing natural phenomena toward moderation and away from extremes. Some birch trees are tall at maturity and some are short, but most are a middle height. A cat can give birth to any number of kittens from one to eight in a typical litter, but more kittens are born to litters of four than any other litter size. The differences fall quite smoothly along a bell curve. Scientific consensus was that all genetic traits, except of course those that had been intentionally altered, including human height, weight, intelligence, etc. were so distributed. It was like nature did what Brodt had one day in the breakroom heard Sanayah call "choosing the middle path." Was central tendency a law of nature or a law of God, or were they the same thing?

I spotted Poe immediately. He was raking the leaves around his tree home, a lovely aspen. The whiteness of its bark seemed brighter than the other trees, the knotholes darker; the moss creeping up the south side was luxurious with fat purple flowers, and the leaves were a riot of green in every shade with veins of pure gold. It was, in short, the prettiest tree in the Kyrrðarskogur, which was Wendell's doing, but Poe was clearly taking his responsibilities as the owner of such a fine specimen seriously. He had built a trellis against the tree, up which climbed a vine of wild roses, and he had made little furrows in the ground to irrigate the tree's roots.