Bonsai Tree Quotes

Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.

To me, the poor are like Bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a six-inch deep flower pot, you get a perfect replica of the tallest tree, but it is only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted; only the soil-base you provided was inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong with their seeds. Only society never gave them a base to grow on.

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

The Japanese think it strange we paint our old wooden houses when it takes so long to find the wabi in them. They prefer the bonsai tree after the valiant blossoming is over, the leaves fallen. When bareness reveals a merit born in the vegetable struggling.

I told her the clitoris is like a Bonsai tree that needs constant tending and the g-spot is an unexplored island waiting to have a flag pinned on its peak. She laughed and said I should be a poet. Then we went to bed and crossed the sheets as if it were a new continent we had just discovered.

The forest is blanketed by the greenest ferns and moss and bonsai-like trees, a wild majesty that beckons hobbits and pixies and elves and dreamers.

There is one tree in Gainesville I call "Grandfather" because it looks like a giant Bonsai tree. Well, that and I actually thought it was my mother's father for the longest time.

I've always enjoyed a challenge," Niko remarked, shifting through the powder to lift something out. "I think perhaps there are other things I could enjoy instead. Bonsai trees, painting, forging my own weapons. The opportunities are endless." He opened his hand to show me the small braid of several yellowed hairs. "Voodoo." "Think it would work?" I perked up. Killing from a distance wasn't usually my thing, but in this case, I'd make an exception.

Sitting there most of the night," she said, "I had a crazy kind of image. Do you think two sick twisted 'trees ever made bonsai out of one another?

Alex had stopped giving her bonsai trees and exotic orchids some time ago. He said it made him too sad to send all those innocent lives to their doom.

Bonnie had arranged for the whole family to volunteer at a homeless shelter on Christmas morning. “I just hate all that crass commercialism of Christmas, don’t you?” she’d told Madeline last week, when they’d run into each other in the shops. Madeline had been doing Christmas shopping, and her wrists were looped with dozens of plastic shopping bags. Fred and Chloe were both eating lollipops, their lips a garish red. Meanwhile Bonnie was carrying a tiny bonsai tree in a pot, and Skye was walking along next to her eating a pear. (“A fucking pear,” Madeline had told Celeste later. For some reason she couldn’t get over the pear.)

Mother’s estate—our estate—a thousand acres centered in a million more. Lawns the size of small prairies with grass so perfect it beckoned a body to lie on it, to nap on its soft perfection. Noble shade trees making sundials of the Earth, their shadows circling in stately procession; now mingling, now contracting to midday, finally stretching eastward with the dying of the day. Royal oak. Giant elms. Cottonwood and cypress and redwood and bonsai. Banyan trees lowering new trunks like smooth-sided columns in a temple roofed by sky. Willows lining carefully laid canals and haphazard streams, their hanging branches singing ancient dirges to the wind.

ASSOCIATE WITH WINNERS Four groups of people will dramatically influence how your business evolves: » Customers » Employees » Vendors » Peers Line yourself up with the wrong people in each category and, like a poorly created bonsai tree, your business will grow up twisted and misshapen.

He removed his hat, something a wizard doesn't ordinarily do unless he's about to pull something out of it, and handed it to the Bursar. Then he tore a thin strip off the bottom of his robe, held it dramatically in both hands, and tied it around his forehead. "It's part of the ethos," he said, in answer to their penetratingly unspoken question. "That's what the warriors on the Counterweight Continent do before they go into battle. And you have to shout --" He tried to remember some far-off reading. "-er, bonsai. Yes. Bonsai!" "I thought that meant chopping bits off trees to make them small," said the Senior Wrangler. The Dean hesitated. He wasn't too sure himself, if it came to it. But a good wizard never let uncertainty stand in his way. "No, it's definitely got to be bonsai," he said. He considered it some more then brightened up. "On account of it all being part of bushido. Like...small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it." "But you can't shout 'bonsai' here." said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "We've got a totally different cultural background. It'd be useless. No one will know what you mean. "I'll work on it, " said the Dean.*

There are people like Senhor José everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers [...], they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos.

I took a step inside to get a better look and realized the man was actually Christ, the way he appeared in Sunday-school classrooms: milky complexion, starched blue dressing gown, a beard trimmed as painstakingly as a bonsai tree. He was doing what he was always doing: cupping blinding light in his hands like he was trying to warm up after a long day of downhill skiing.

In my years as a detective and particularly with Searchlight, I’ve learned so much about cycles of violence in family systems. But cycles of silence can be just as dangerous—and they repeat through generations with startling consistency. A mother’s dieting becomes her daughter’s obsessive control over bonsai trees. Secret glaring infidelity becomes wordless assent and then emptiness. Cameron was exposed to all of this. Silver spoon or no, Emily had fed her powerlessness.

It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy. Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday.

The young man was sort of ... well ... peering at this shovel, and Lisey knew not by his face but by the whole awkward this-way-n-that jut of his lanky body that he didn't have any idea what he was seeing. It could have been an artillery shell, a bonsai tree, a radiation detector, or a china pig with a slot in its back for spare silver; it could have been a whang-dang-doodle, a phylactery testifying to the pompetus of love, or a cloche hat made out of coyote skin. It could have been the penis of the poet Pindar. This guy was too far gone to know.

Nevertheless, there was something extraordinary about it when a man so young, with so little experience in flight test, was selected to go to Muroc Field in California for the XS–1 project. Muroc was up in the high elevations of the Mojave Desert. It looked like some fossil landscape that had long since been left behind by the rest of terrestrial evolution. It was full of huge dry lake beds, the biggest being Rogers Lake. Other than sagebrush the only vegetation was Joshua trees, twisted freaks of the plant world that looked like a cross between cactus and Japanese bonsai. They had a dark petrified green color and horribly crippled branches. At dusk the Joshua trees stood out in silhouette on the fossil wasteland like some arthritic nightmare. In the summer the temperature went up to 110 degrees as a matter of course, and the dry lake beds were covered in sand, and there would be windstorms and sandstorms right out of a Foreign Legion movie. At night it would drop to near freezing, and in December it would start raining, and the dry lakes would fill up with a few inches of water, and some sort of putrid prehistoric shrimps would work their way up from out of the ooze, and sea gulls would come flying in a hundred miles or more from the ocean, over the mountains, to gobble up these squirming little throwbacks. A person had to see it to believe it: flocks of sea gulls wheeling around in the air out in the middle of the high desert in the dead of winter and grazing on antediluvian crustaceans in the primordial ooze. When

What’s the kindest thing you almost did? Is your fear of insomnia stronger than your fear of what awoke you? Are bonsai cruel? Do you love what you love, or just the feeling? Your earliest memories: do you look though your young eyes, or look at your young self? Which feels worse: to know that there are people who do more with less talent, or that there are people with more talent? Do you walk on moving walkways? Should it make any difference that you knew it was wrong as you were doing it? Would you trade actual intelligence for the perception of being smarter? Why does it bother you when someone at the next table is having a conversation on a cell phone? How many years of your life would you trade for the greatest month of your life? What would you tell your father, if it were possible? Which is changing faster, your body, or your mind? Is it cruel to tell an old person his prognosis? Are you in any way angry at your phone? When you pass a storefront, do you look at what’s inside, look at your reflection, or neither? Is there anything you would die for if no one could ever know you died for it? If you could be assured that money wouldn’t make you any small bit happier, would you still want more money? What has been irrevocably spoiled for you? If your deepest secret became public, would you be forgiven? Is your best friend your kindest friend? Is it any way cruel to give a dog a name? Is there anything you feel a need to confess? You know it’s a “murder of crows” and a “wake of buzzards” but it’s a what of ravens, again? What is it about death that you’re afraid of? How does it make you feel to know that it’s an “unkindness of ravens”?

Bonsai is a way of life, and the joy derived from it should always be for today, and for anyone at any age, whether already involved with it or whether considering the prospect. Planting the seed of a tree in a pot or contemplating the majesty of a mature Bonsai is immaterial; both evoke a sense of joy at any given moment in time. That moment, when it is experienced, will be in the present, and that is, today!

There is something in this Lametrie, a nice slip of our anthropocentrism. Why should Man be at the hub of all analogies? How would plants describe us, I wonder, what classification would they impose upon us? 'Described by a Plant' sounds like a good title to be used later. I feel we're being watched: by rubber plants, sparrow-grass, bonsai, small date palms, Chinese roses, geraniums and lemon trees. They keep an eye on us.

Can you go over to the feed and seed? I'm worried about my bonsai. They're probably thirsty, maybe scared, maybe loney, especially The Old Man. I moved him up there a few weeks ago. . . . I take him up there when he needs some warm, moist air and sometimes, well, to be with his old friends." "Yes, he's talking about midget trees. He gives me a list with each bonsai's name. I told you how nuts-and-bolts he is about them. He tells me how to touch the soil and feel if they're thirsty. And talk to them! I must be sure to talk to them.

Depression is a cruel bitch. She starts by planting little seeds all over your mind, knowing that life’s troubles will water it daily until it grows into a massive bonsai tree that crowds your thoughts and feelings, not leaving any room for leaves of hope to spur from it.

years, but so far that’s all it’s been—talk. “We could sell it,” Jade said. “Sell what?” Mom asked. “The Weirdland. I mean, if it’s not making enough money, what’s the point? It’s a stupid place to live, anyway. If we sell it, we can live somewhere normal,” Jade answered. “It’s not called the Weirdland,” I reminded her again. “I’ll call it whatever I want to call it!” Jade informed me in her snippy way. Mom spoke up. “We are not selling the Wonderland. It’s your daddy’s life.” Jade kept yapping, “I’m just saying . . .” Mom frowned. “Not another word, Miss.” Miss was code for “if you have good sense, you’ll shut up now.” And Jade did. When we got home, I found Daddy trimming his bonsai trees and plants. He was whistling a tune the way he sometimes does when he’s happily working. The sound of his whistling always makes me smile. Over and over, from the time I was little, I’d tried to learn how, putting my lips together and blowing. But no matter what, I’d only been able to produce the sound of plain old air, and after I’d failed for what felt like the hundredth time, I’d finally given up. “Howdeedoo, Zoe,” he said when he saw me. There were no customers around that I could see and I wondered if any had come in. “Any

In this greenhouse I see how much he loves this collection of bonsai trees. Each one has a name, age and a place of birth engraved on brass plaques. Most of them come from places I've ever heard of before. Mr. Kaye says each bonsai has its own life story and he knows every one of them. When I was a kid, he used to tell me some of the stories, but he was probably just making it all up. He always told me bonsai were balanced, but in a lopsided way.

Talk kindly. No gossip or gibberish, Never talk down to them-they're not children.

The Old Man's all gnarled and sort of crippled looking. Well, who wouldn't be when you're that old [600 +years]? The pine needles are so teeny-tiny and the greens are vivid like the ocean in the summer. Even the moss shines up at me. Mr. Kaye told me the moss and The Old Man are inseparable friends and one would die without the other.

If you decide to keep your bonsai tree compliant with standards for yourself, you’ll need to follow specific guidelines that will help determine that. Some of the most common guidelines include: The tree is in a small, formal container The only other living vegetation in your container is moss, which is optional. Nothing but rocks (optional), soil, and moss should appear beside your bonsai in the pot The tree should have a front and back. The tree should be tapered from the bottom to the top Roots should be exposed around the base and spread out as the tree enters the soil The tree should not have any visible root crossing Branches shouldn’t appear before the first third of the trunk, at which point they should continue to the tip Branches should become smaller as they move up toward the top of the tree No major branches should cross in the front Ramification should increase toward the tips of branches

Branch shape should appear heavy and dip downward The trunk may be straight or contorted but should lean slightly toward the viewer Foliage should be proportionate with the tree

Ideally my penultimate day would be spent attending a giant beach party thrown in my honor. Everyone would gather around me at sunset, and the golden light would make my skin and hair beautiful as I told hilarious stories and gave away my extensive collection of moon art to my ex-lovers. I and all of my still-alive friends (which, let’s face it, will mostly be women) would sing and dance late into the night. My sons would be grown and happy. I would be frail but adorable. I would still have my own teeth, and I would be tended to by handsome and kind gay men who pruned me like a bonsai tree. Once the party ended, everyone would fall asleep except for me. I would spend the rest of the night watching the stars under a nice blanket my granddaughter made with her Knit-Bot 5000. As the sun began to rise, an unexpected guest would wake and put the coffee on. My last words would be something banal and beautiful. “Are you warm enough?” my guest would ask. “Just right,” I would answer. My funeral would be huge but incredibly intimate. I would instruct people to throw firecrackers on my funeral pyre and play Purple Rain on a loop.

In describing the causes of poverty, Muhammad Yunus has often compared a poor person to a bonsai tree. The seed of a bonsai has the potential to grow into a full-size tree, but, planted in a tiny pot, its growth is stunted. To Yunus, a person deprived of education or opportunity is like a bonsai. The constraint isn’t the seed, it’s the pot.

The finger-biter’s feelings for her ex-husband were a bonsai tree—they may have started in something real, but she’d tended them so closely and for so long they were now purely decorative.

Every bonsai dreams of being a tall tree - until the wind blows

Their personalities are like stunted bonsai trees, trained to grow in unnatural shapes. Because they had to bend to fit their families, they were unable to develop fluidly into the integrated, natural people they might have become.

Among the more degrading of his daily tasks is the watering of Cindy’s bonsai tree. Her fake bonsai tree. He assumed that she’d been joking when she had first instructed him in its care. But when no laughter followed the tutorial, he decided to just play along, believing that, if nothing else, it would show he was a team player. It hadn’t worked.

It turns out that maybe breeding bonsai-tree children to become résumé zombies isn’t so good for their mental health.

I stopped thinking of them [my children] as little bonsai trees that I could prune carefully, and I began treating them instead like wildflowers of unknown genus and species that would reveal their unique and glorious beauty as long as I gave them the proper nourishment and environment.

I want to express the tree’s inner beauty. So I am watching the way that the trunk and branches move,” said bonsai artist Kunio Kobayashi.

Many emotionally immature people were "overpruned" early in life, growing up within a very limited range of acceptability. Their personalities are like stunted bonsai trees, trained to grow in unnatural shapes. Because they had to bend to fit their families, they were unable to develop fluidly into the integrated, natural people they might have become.

I stopped expecting that Avery or her brother would become any particular thing (a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, an entrepreneur, and so on). I stopped thinking of them as little bonsai trees that I could prune carefully, and I began treating them instead like wildflowers of unknown genus and species that would reveal their unique and glorious beauty as long as I gave them the proper nourishment and environment

but what she thought was this: that there were trees, left to themselves, that might grow sixty feet tall, but instead had their roots punished to produce something small, cosseted, and ornamental. Something making up in charm what it had lost in dignity. Marriage was a psychological bonsai; maybe society was. Still encouraging women, after all these years, to be small, cosseted, and ornamental. Still hacking away at their roots to keep them from growing taller than anybody else. You couldn’t even call it deliberate. It had grown instinctive, a natural form of pruning. To a man like Gerard Inchon, it was a duty: barefoot and pregnant kept them quiet. You didn’t talk about The Enemy, but that was what you meant.

A bonsai tree has been left in place of the original iris flower arrangement. I study it. The branches are bent, disjointed. Like me. A bone wrenched from its socket may be set back in place, but it's never the same. That's what happens when Japanese Americans return to Japan. They bear the resemblance of the body they originated from, but they are different. Askew. Foreign. And that's the god-awful truth.

A house in the country to find out what’s true / a few linen shirts, some good art / and you.” This is intimacy: the trading of stories in the dark. Marriage has a bonsai energy: It’s a tree in a pot with trimmed roots and clipped limbs. Mind you, bonsai can live for centuries, and their unearthly beauty is a direct result of such constriction, but nobody would ever mistake a bonsai for a free-climbing vine. Marriage as an institution has always been terrifically beneficial for men. The really clever trick is this: Can you accept the flaws? Can you look at your partner’s faults honestly and say, ‘I can work around that. I can make something out of that.’? Because the good stuff is always going to be there, and it’s always going to be pretty and sparkly, but the crap underneath can ruin you.” When you become infatuated with somebody, you’re not really looking at that person; you’re just captivated by your own reflection, intoxicated by a dream of completion that you have projected on a virtual stranger. People are far more susceptible to infatuation when they are going through delicate or vulnerable times in their lives. The more unsettled and unbalanced we feel, the more quickly and recklessly we are likely fall in love. Infatuation alters your brain chemistry, as though you were dousing yourself with opiates and stimulants. And infatuation is the most perilous aspect of human desire. Infatuation leads to what psychologists call “intrusive thinking”—that famously distracted state in which you cannot concentrate on anything other than the object of your obsession. An old Polish adage warns: “Before going to war, say one prayer. Before going to sea, say two prayers. Before getting married, say three.” “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” We derail our life’s journey again and again, backing up to try the doors we neglected on the first round, desperate to get it right this time.

Only the untended bonsai tree in the corner of the room didn't try to control Zaria.

In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden" Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart Six hard red apples broke through the greenhouse glass and Landed in the middle of those ever-so-slightly green leaves That seem no mix of seeds and soil but of pastels and light and Chalk x’s mark our oaks that are supposed to be cut down I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street without It has always puzzled me that people coo over bonsai trees when You can squint your eyes and shrink anything without much of A struggle ensued with some starlings and the strawberry nets So after untangling the two I took the nets off and watched birds With red beaks fly by all morning at the window I reread your letter About how the castles you flew over made crenellated shadows on The water in the rainbarrel has overflowed and made a small swamp I think the potatoes might turn out slightly damp don’t worry If there is no fog on the day you come home I will build a bonfire So the smoke will make the cedars look the way you like them To close I’m sorry there won’t be any salad and I love you

I continue my search for the place of origin of the bonsaied white pine. The forest’s plants evoke in me a feeling that reality has slipped. All is familiar wind in Japanese oaks and maples sounds as it does in the Americas: coarse grained and deep voiced in oaks, sandy and light in the thin-leaved maples. Yet when I attend to a visual detail- the contour of a leaf, the runnels in bark, the hue of a fruit, I am unmoored by strangeness. My mind is foundering in the geographic manifestation of plant evolution’s deep history. The plants of east Asia, seemingly so far from eastern North America, are in fact close kin to the plants of the mountain slopes of Appalachia, closer kin by far than the plants of the northwestern US, or of Florida, or the arid lands of the Southwest. On Miyajima, I walk with sumac, maple, ash, juniper, fir, oak, persimmon, and rhododendron. A few Asian specialties spice this thoroughly Appalachian community, curiosities like Japanese cedar, snake vines, and umbrella pines. The cedars intermingle their soft, extended sighs with the more familiar sounds of oak and maple.

He could never reconcile the strange fact of Kimiko's attraction with what he saw in the mirror. At best, it was related to her natural stoicism, as if Jashua were a kind of bonsai tree she trimmed and watered lovingly. "I enjoy being with you" was her preferred mode of expressing her affection. At worst, she kept him around so he could make her feel better when she needed it, a winner combination of a pet and a dildo. Somewhere along the range between the best and the worst, there was the possibility of her deep love.