Branch Warren Quotes

Those were the ones which would turn loose their grip on the branch before long-- not in any breeze, the fibers would just relax, in the middle of the day maybe with the sunshine bright and the air so still it aches like the place where the tooth was on the morning after you've been to the dentist or aches like your heart in the bosom when you stand on the street corner waiting for the light to change and happen to recollect how things once were and how they might have been yet if what happened had not happened.

The term rabbit hole makes us think of Alice plummeting straight down, but what I mean is an actual rabbit warren, the kind with endless looping tunnels, branching paths, all the accompanying claustrophobia.

And then there was the expansive garden that ran the length of the rear of the house- lush with color and fragrances that seemed to burst from every branch and bloom. Whoever had designed it possessed a keen eye for beauty, each plant chosen with obvious care and an affinity for nature. She'd even acquired a new cat from its depths, a stray orange tom she found wandering among the hydrangea bushes one morning. An offered dish of milk and he'd been her bosom beau ever since. She'd decided to call him Ranunculus because Buttercup was far too feminine a name for such a large and impressive male. She gazed at him now where he slept in the sunshine, basking like a small potentate in the heat of the day.

I am for that thing in your genome that demands it. I am for that thing which keeps you animals alive. I am, at most, a slice of monkey suspended within the stuff of universal intelligence. You are a monkey in nice clothes. In the harsh environment you refer to as a habitable planet, group behaviors are required to survive long enough to procreate. Since you are stupid monkeys, you have no natural affinity for group altruism. And so you have evolved a genetic pump that delivers pleasant chemicals to your monkey brains. One that is triggered by awe and fear of an anthropomorphism of your environment. Earth mothers. Sky gods. Bits of bush that catch fire. Interesting-looking rocks. An oddly-shaped branch. You’re not fussy. When your brain does this idiot work, you stop in front of that bump or stick and consider it fiercely. Other monkeys will, like as not, stop next to you and emulate you. Your genetic pump delivers morphine for your souls. You have your fellow monkeys join in. Perhaps so they can feel it too. Perhaps because you feel it might please the stick god to have more monkeys gaze at it in narcotic awe. The group must be defended. Because as many monkeys as possible must please the stick god, and you can continue to get your fix off praying to it. You draw up rules to organize and protect the group. Two hundred thousand years later, you put Adolf Hitler into power. Because you are, after all, just monkeys. I am your stash.

Branch is stuck all right. He has abandoned his life to understanding that moment in Dallas, the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century. [...] There is also the Warren Report, of course, with its twenty-six accompanying volumes of testimony and exhibits, its millions of words. Branch thinks this is the megaton novel James Joyce would have written if he'd moved to Iowa City and lived to be a hundred.

I am the vine, and you are the branches. JOHN 15:5 (CEV)

Mike Warren sat next to Timmy Bates on the delicate antique chairs at the round parlor table where afternoon sodas and floats had once been part of the pharmacy fare. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop and thought about the breakfast he should be having at The Quaker Café. Being called out at six in the morning to fight a fire was a hard way to start the day.

As a Christian, I'm not a physical unit in a religious organization. I'm a living part of a miraculous spiritual unity in Christ-a member of one body (1 Cor. 12:12-14), a stone in one temple (Eph. 2:19-22; 1 Peter 2:4-7), a branch in one vine (John 15:1-9), to name but a few of the New Testament images of the church. All Christians are different, and yet we are all united in Christ. Regardless of race, color, gender, political or economic status, believers are "all one in Christ Jesus" (Gal. 3:26-29). Unity without diversity is uniformity, and diversity without unity is anarchy; but unity and diversity combined by the Holy Spirit in the church will produce a dynamic life of sacrifice and service that can change the world.

What have you to trade for my silence?" ... He opened his mouth to beckon the men, but Eleri moved like lightning. With her right arm restrained, she couldn't cut him. However, her weapon of choice caught him completely off-guard. Her lips sealed to his, cutting off his voice in a hard kiss... Bracing his back against the gnarled tree branches, he relaxed for more, but the kiss ended as briskly as it had begun.... Blood surging through his body, Warren grinned and lowered his face over hers. "Not the price I had in mind, but...um, shall we see what else you have to offer?

William never let me down. Tonight’s dinner was as much theater as food. Each course was presented in such an unusual way that I wanted to hang the plates on the walls, as they seemed too pretty to eat. From tiny, perfect pastry parcels of an indescribably delicious duck filling, served on tiny bare tree branches, to a salad of local greens to lamb chops with a fig glaze and swirls of green mousse and tiny, perfect vegetables, I was kept in rapture.

remote associations—“like when we think of ‘table’ and the idea of ‘under the table’”—require more of a neural reach. The brain’s right hemisphere, made up of cells with longer branches, is better suited for this task.

We arrive at originality because the dendrites have reached out and made contact with the branches of faraway “trees,” thereby enabling us to combine thoughts, bits of knowledge, and influences that normally do not mix.

Just asking Why and What If will not necessarily cause these neural connections to occur—but questioning can help nourish the trees and extend the reach of those branches.

We also had the flip side of the expansion of powers: the warping of rights. In 1938, the infamous Footnote Four in the Carolene Products case bifurcated our rights such that certain rights are more equal than others in a kind of Animal Farm approach to the Constitution. So it’s the New Deal Court that politicized the Constitution, and thus also the confirmation process, by laying the foundation for judicial mischief of every stripe-- but particularly letting laws sail through that should be invalidated. The Warren Court picked up that baton by rewriting laws in areas that are best left to the political branches, micro-managing cultural disputes in a way that made the justices into philosopher kings, elevating and sharpening society’s ideological tensions.

To get a picture of what’s going on, Heilman says, start by thinking of the brain as a forest full of trees. “Think of a neuron, or a nerve cell, as one of those trees,” he says. In this analogy, the cell body forms the tree trunk; there are major branches, known as axons, and smaller branches, dendrites, that extend out to the farthest reaches. “In the brain, some of those trees are closer together than others, and the branches communicate with each other.” As this happens, “neural connections” are formed, which can produce new thoughts, ideas, and insights.

TREVATHAN RARELY REWROTE his short stories. At a nickel a word he could not afford to. Furthermore, he had acquired a facility over the years which enabled him to turn out acceptable copy in first draft. Now, however, he was trying something altogether new and different, and so he felt the need to take his time getting it precisely right. Time and again he yanked false starts from the typewriter, crumpled them, hurled them at the wastebasket. Until finally he had something he liked. He read it through for the fourth or fifth time, then took it from the typewriter and read it again. It did the job, he decided. It was concise and clear and very much to the point. He reached for the phone. When he’d gotten through to Jukes he said, “Warren? I’ve decided to take your advice.” “Wrote another story for us? Glad to hear it.” “No,” he said, “another piece of advice you gave me. I’m branching out in a new direction.” “Well, I think that’s terrific,” Jukes said. “I really mean it. Getting to work on something big? A novel?” “No, a short piece.