Richard Oakes Quotes

A wise old owl lived in an oak; The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard: Why can't we all be like that bird?

The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer. . . .

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you.

A wise old owl sat on an oak; The more he saw the less he spoke; The less he spoke the more he heard; Why aren't we like that wise old bird?

Thick, clotted, craggy, but solid on the earth, and covered in other living things. Three hundred years growing, three hundred years holding, three hundred years dying. Oak.

And one morning while in the woods I stumbled suddenly upon the thing, Stumbled upon it in a grassy clearing guarded by scaly oaks and elms And the sooty details of the scene rose, thrusting themselves between the world and me....

The oaks stand - quite still - so still that the lichen loves them...such solace and solitude seventy-nine miles thick cannot be painted...it is necessary to stay in it like oaks to know it. (1884)

I am the fierce one who threatens death to scoundrels, Darcy." Fitzwilliam scolded. "You are the one who keeps a cool head and prevents it. That is the order of things.

Summer shows us Matter changing into life, sap rising from the earth through a million tubes, the alchemic power of light entering the solid oak; and see! it bursts forth in countless leaves.

After conversion we need bruising so that we might remember that we are reeds and not oaks. Even reeds need bruising because of the remaining pride in our nature and to show us that we live by mercy. Such bruising may help weaker Christians not to be too much discouraged when they see stronger ones shaken and bruised. Thus Peter was bruised when he wept bitterly (Matt. 26:75). This reed, until he met with this bruise, had more wind in him than heart when he said, "Though all forsake you, I will not" (Matt. 26:33). The people of God cannot be without these examples. The heroic deeds of great saints do not comfort the church as much as their falls and bruises do.

Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us—from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator—molecules called DNA— but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways.

That’s what they’re very good at—making decisions. I thought it was very remarkable how a problem of whether or not information as to how the bomb works should be in the Oak Ridge plant had to be decided and could be decided in five minutes. So I have a great deal of respect for these military guys, because I never can decide anything very important in any length of time at all. In five minutes he said, “All right, Mr. Feynman, go ahead.

Pump seals therefore had to be devised that were both gastight and greaseless, a puzzle no one had ever solved before that required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)

Nay, [2] after conversion we need bruising, that (1) reeds may know themselves to be reeds, and not oaks; even reeds need bruising, by reason of the remainder of pride in our nature, and to let us see that we live by mercy. And (2) that weaker Christians may not be too much discouraged when they see the stronger shaken and bruised.

... because I never can decide anything very important in any length of time at all. Feynman showing respect to the military men at Oak Ridge concerning their speeding taking a decision.

But there is something about Richard’s steadiness, his complete reliability, that—coupled with his height, his very size—makes him think of him as some sort of massive tree-god, an oak come into human form, something solid and ancient and indestructible.

Faith, no matter how strong it is, cannot produce a result contrary to the will of him whose power it is. The exercise of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is always subject to the order of heaven, to the goodness and will and wisdom and timing of the Lord.”12

Beautiful were the days that are gone, and O, for them to be back. The mountain was green, and proud with a good covering of oak and ash, and washing his feet in a streaming river clear as the eyes of God. The winds came down with the scents of the grass and wild flowers, putting a sweetness to our noses, and taking away so that nobody could tell what beauty had been stolen, only that the winds were old robbers who took something from each grass and flower and gave it back again, and gave a little to each of us, and took it away again.

Oak follows oak, and elm ranks with elm, however many times reduplicated, their beauty only increases. So, too, the summer days; the sun rises on the same grasses and green hedges, there is the same blue sky, but did we ever have enough of them? No, not in a hundred years!

I went for a walk outside. Maybe I was fooling myself, but I was surprised how I didn’t feel what I thought people would expect to feel under the circumstances. I wasn’t delighted, but I didn’t feel terribly upset, perhaps because I had known for seven years that something like this was going to happen. I didn’t know how I was going to face all my friends up at Los Alamos. I didn’t want people with long faces talking to me about it. When I got back (yet another tire went flat on the way), they asked me what happened. “She’s dead. And how’s the program going?” They caught on right away that I didn’t want to moon over it. (I had obviously done something to myself psychologically: Reality was so important—I had to understand what really happened to Arlene, physiologically—that I didn’t cry until a number of months later, when I was in Oak Ridge. I was walking past a department store with dresses in the window, and I thought Arlene would like one of them. That was too much for me.)

Now, the linden, it turns out, is a radical tree, as different from an oak as a woman is from a man. It's the bee tree, the tree of peace, whose tonics and teas can cure every kind of tension and anxiety - a tree that cannot mistaken for any other, for alone in all the catalog of a hundred thousand earthly species, its flowers and tiny hard fruit hand down from surfboard bracts whose sole perserve purpose seems to be to state its own singularity. The lindens will come for her, starting with this ambush. But the full adoption will take years.

A week after testifying, Rabi ran into Ernest Lawrence at Oak Ridge and asked him what he was going to say about Oppenheimer. Lawrence had agreed to testify against him. He was truly fed up with his old friend. Oppie had opposed him on the hydrogen bomb and opposed the building of a second weapons lab at Livermore. And more recently, Ernest had come home from a cocktail party outraged upon being told that Oppie had years before had an affair with Ruth Tolman, the wife of his good friend Richard. He was angry enough to accede to Strauss’ request to testify against Oppenheimer in Washington. But the night before his scheduled appearance, Lawrence fell ill with an attack of colitis. The next morning, he called Strauss to tell him he could not make it. Sure that Lawrence was making excuses, Strauss argued with the scientist and called him a coward. Lawrence did not appear to testify against Oppenheimer. But Robb had interviewed him earlier and now made sure that the Gray Board

Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal cabling link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information. . . .  There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer. . . .  In the great forests of the East, oaks and hickories synchronize their nut production to baffle the animals that feed on them. Word goes out, and the trees of a given species—whether they stand in sun or shade, wet or dry—bear heavily or not at all, together, as a community. . . .  Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

Gansey felt the feeling of time slipping--one last time. The sense of having done this before. He gently laid the backs of his hands on her cheeks. He whispered, "It'll be okay. I'm ready. Blue, kiss me." The rain splatted about them, kicking up splashes of red-black, making the petals around them twitch. Dream things from Ronan's newly healed imagination piled around their feet. In the rain, everything smelled of these mountains in fall: oak leaves and hay fields, ozone and dirt turned over. It was beautiful here, and Gansey loved it. It had taken a long time, but he'd ended up where he wanted after all. Blue kissed him. He had dreamt of it often enough, and here it was, willed into life. In another world, it would just be this: a girl softly pressing her lips to a boy's. But in this one, Gansey felt the effects of it at once. Blue, a mirror, an amplifier, a strange half-tree soul with ley line magic running through her. And Gansey, restored once by the ley line's power, given a ley line heart, another kind of mirror. And when they were pointed at each other, the weaker one gave. Gansey's ley line heart had been gifted, not grown. He pulled back from her. Out loud, with intention, with the voice that left no room for doubt, he said, "Let it be to kill the demon." Right after he spoke, Blue threw her arms tightly around his neck. Right after he spoke, she pressed her face into the side of his. Right after he spoke, she held him like a shouted word. Love, love, love. He fell quietly from her arms. He was a king.

The Story of the Moon Once, night, unchallenged, extended its dark grace across the sky. To the credit of the town, the stars at night had been enough, though sometimes the townspeople went about bumping their heads in sleep. Eventually, three brothers, traveling through a foreign town, found an evening that did not disappear behind the mountains, for a shining globe sat in an oak tree. The brothers stopped. That one is the moon, said a man from the foreign town. The brothers conferred. They could make a certain use of it. The brothers stole the moon down and put it in their wagon. Seized it. Thieved its silver. Altogether greedy. The wagon shining brights. At home: the moon delivered. Then, celebration: dancing in red coats on the meadow. Number four brother smiling wide. The moon installed--it extended its silver calculations. Time and more time. The brothers aged, took sick, petitioned the town that each quarter of the moon, as it was their property, be portioned out to share their graves. Done, and the light of the moon diminished in fractions. They had extinguished it, part for part, and night, unimpeded, fell. Altogether lanternless. The people were silent. The dark rang loud. Underground: cold blazing. The dead woke, shivering in the light. Some went out to play and dance, others hastened to the taverns to drink, quarrel, and brawl. Noise and more noise. Noise up to heaven. Saint Peter took his red horse through the gates and came down. The moon, for the third time, taken. The dead bidden back into their graves. One wonders why a story like this exists.

By the time a tree is full-grown, the underground root system is enormous; a mature oak tree, for example, has literally hundreds of miles of roots to tap the soil’s resources in an endless quest for water. Each drop is collected by the root hairs and passed along, from one cell to the next, up the trunk and to the leaves, and in such a way that none of the precious moisture and minerals collected by the roots leaks back into the soil.

In their urge for survival, the seed-bearing trees hit upon countless different devices for carrying pollen from one flower to another, but essentially the methods fall into two main categories. The first is wind-pollination, which requires the presence of light, small, dry pollen grains, easily shaken from the stamens, or male flowers. To receive the tiny bits of pollen that are blown about by the wind, the stigmata of flowers must be long, or feathery, or sticky, or so constructed as to trap the fine dust. All conifers are pollinated this way, as are the poplar, ash, birch, oak, beech, and certain other species. But since this method is so haphazard, a disproportionately high percentage of pollen is wasted and these trees must produce immense quantities of pollen in order that even a tiny amount will be effective. Scientists have estimated that a single stamen of a beech tree, for example, may yield 2,000 grains, while the branch system of a vigorous young birch can produce 100 million grains a year. One pine or spruce cone alone releases between 1 and 2 million grains of pollen into the air: In Sweden, which is covered with spruce forests, an estimated 75,000 tons of pollen are blown from the trees each year.

During the Second World War a giant puffball was found under an oak tree in Kent, and was suspected of being a new kind of bomb (later it was labelled ‘Hitler’s Secret Weapon’ and put on exhibition to raise funds for the war effort).

About 98% of the atoms in the human body are renewed each year. This surprising fact is discussed by Dr. Paul C. Aebersold of Oak Ridge in the latest Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Aebersold based his conclusion on experiments with radioisotopes, which trace the movements of chemical elements in and out of the body.

4B, Sofia announced. Who lived here? Mrs. Sanchez, she was a very nice lady. She was nice? Yes. 4C. Who lived here. The Kleins. Were they nice? They were old. The apartment doors, once oak, were now all single slabs of siege-mentality sheet metal, their numbers, in his time screwed-in brass, nothing more than hardware-store decals. But he couldn’t care less about these particular outrages against memory, because in the end the information they provided was the same information as twenty years ago, and any way you cut it the doors and their numbers would always tell the same story. 4D. Who lived here?

The Greeks had a word, xenia—guest friendship—a command to take care of traveling strangers, to open your door to whoever is out there, because anyone passing by, far from home, might be God. Ovid tells the story of two immortals who came to Earth in disguise to cleanse the sickened world. No one would let them in but one old couple, Baucis and Philemon. And their reward for opening their door to strangers was to live on after death as trees—an oak and a linden—huge and gracious and intertwined. What we care for, we will grow to resemble. And what we resemble will hold us, when we are us no longer.

When the few leaves left on this young oak were brown, and rustled in the frosty night, the massy shoulder of Orion came heaving up through it - first one bright star, then another; then the gleaming girdle, and the less definite scabbard; then the great constellation stretched across the east. At the first sight of Orion's shoulder Bevis always felt suddenly stronger, as if a breath of the mighty hunter had come down and entered into him.

teaching doctrine and building faith; (2) rebalancing the balanced effort;3 and (3) establishing programs of activity for youth.

required the development of new kinds of plastics. (The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)

Early in 1945 Oak Ridge began shipping bomb-grade U235 to Los Alamos.

The air-cooled, pilot-scale reactor at Oak Ridge had gone critical at five o’clock in the morning on November 4, 1943; the loading crews, realizing during the night that they were nearing criticality sooner than expected, had enjoyed rousting Arthur Compton and Enrico Fermi out of bed at the Oak Ridge guest house to witness the event.

Let us always be out of doors among trees and grass, and rain and wind and sun. There the breeze comes and strikes the cheek and sets it aglow: the gale increases and the trees creak and roar, but it is only a ruder music. A calm follows, the sun shines in the sky, and it is the time to sit under an oak, leaning against the bark, while the birds sing and the air is soft and sweet. By night the stars shine, and there is no fathoming the dark spaces between these brilliant points, nor the thoughts that come as it were between the fixed stars and landmarks of the mind. Or it is morning on the hills, when hope is as wide as the world; or it is the evening on the shore. A red sun sinks, and the foam-tipped waves are crested with crimson; the booming surge breaks, and the spray flies afar, sprinkling the face watching under the pale cliffs. Let us get out of these indoor narrow modern days, whose twelve hours somehow have become shortened, into the sunlight and the pure wind. A something that the ancients call divine can be found and felt there still.

Some people loved the cities, with their culture, art, and endless opportunities for interesting social interaction. Some like the country, its simplicity and wide open spaces. But Alyssa Aronson only truly felt at peace when she was surrounded by the mightiest of earth’s living things. And with the possible exception of the Sequoia Forest in Northern California, teeming with trees that made the tallest, thickest specimens anywhere else look like adorable little babies, no place was more majestic than the Hoosier National Forest, two hundred thousand acres of soaring central hardwood trees, primarily oak and hickory.

Down the river from the struggling village, a tiny house sat at the edge of a massive forest, shrouded in the shadows of oak, pine, and flowering dogwood. There wasn’t much on this farm, the land hard and difficult to till, but it’s all they had. They grew potatoes, the tubers somehow able to survive, the father a scowling presence in all of his height and bluster; the mother always in another room, busy with anything else; the boy forever expanding the hole that grew inside his chest. (Hiraeth)

When the red sea of rage washes over me, I picture a house on a hill, far away from the rest of the world, a band of oak trees around it, full of greenery, a singular whisper of smoke drifting up into the sky—a place where nobody will get hurt. It’s where I like to go, my safe place, that house on the hill, my skull vibrating with dark thoughts. (Battle Not With Monsters)

Let not the eyes grow dim, look not back but forward; the soul must uphold itself like the sun. Let us labour to make the heart grow larger as we become older, as the spreading oak gives more shelter. That we could but take to the soul some of the greatness and the beauty of the summer!

The white dust heated by sunshine, the green hedges, and the heavily masses trees, and the silence. Such solace and solitude cannot be painted; the trees cannot be placed far away enough in perspective. It is necessary to stand in it like the oaks to know it. And the silence is the silence of fields. If a breeze rustled the boughs, if a greenfinch called, if a mare in the meadow shook herself, these were not sounds, but the silence itself. So sensitive to it as I was, in its turn it held me firmly, like the fabled spells of old time. The mere touch of a leaf was a talisman to bring me under the enchantment, so that I seemd to feel and know all that was proceeding among the grass-blades and in the bushes.

The hills cast a shadow on themselves, bruise-blue turning to forgetful black. High up, [...] rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks [...] gather on the crags. And down in cool ripatian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize [...]

High up, beyond his sight, rocky outcrops crawl with manzanita, shedding their curling, crimson barks. Bay laurels rim the logger-made meadows. Canyons thicken with orange madrone peeling to creamy, clammy green. Coast live oaks like the one that crippled him gather on the crags. And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize.

Talk runs far afield tonight. The bends in the alders speak of long-ago disasters. Spikes of pale chinquapin flowers shake down their pollen; soon they will turn into spiny fruits. Poplars repeat the wind’s gossip. Persimmons and walnuts set out their bribes and rowans their blood-red clusters. Ancient oaks wave prophecies of future weather. The several hundred kinds of hawthorn laugh at the single name they’re forced to share. Laurels insist that even death is nothing to lose sleep over.

Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her—a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight—but alive like a tree. A tree that quietly exists, never moving except to sway in the wind, yet endlessly conversing with the sunlight and the soil. Using sunlight and water and nutrient minerals to grow and change. But all done so imperceptibly, that to me the old oak tree on the green is the same as it was when I was a child. —JAMES LOVELOCK