Birch Quotes

That white birch you caught me kissing is a sister of mine. The only difference is, she's a tree and I'm a girl, but that's no real difference. ~ L.M. Montgomery

Birch fallacy is the assumption that you can infer subjective intention from objective consequence: we lost China to the Communists, therefore the President of the United States and the Secretary of State wished China to go to the Communists. ~ William F. Buckley, Jr.

I am not a birch. ~ Santino Hassell

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults. ~ Gore Vidal

I always tell people, I can't teach you yoga. Nobody can teach you yoga. I can't teach you to teach yoga. All I can do is teach you a set of instructions and if you follow these instructions, hopefully it will lead you to the experience of yoga. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

It's one of the things I love about the sea, the way you can see weather afar. It's like looking at the future. ~ Carol Birch

I'm not a rock star, I'm not Seane Corne or Shiva Rea or Rodney Yee or Baron (Baptiste) or John Friend, and thank God, because there's just too much risk of getting hit by flying tomatoes if you stick out that much. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

My heart weighs heavy from all of the books I have not yet written ~ Stephen Birch

On the first day of November last year, sacred to many religious calendars but especially the Celtic, I went for a walk among bare oaks and birch. Nothing much was going on. Scarlet sumac had passed and the bees were dead. The pond had slicked overnight into that shiny and deceptive glaze of delusion, first ice. It made me remember sakes and conjure a vision of myself skimming backward on one foot, the other extended; the arms become wings. Minnesota girls know that this is not a difficult maneuver if one's limber and practices even a little after school before the boys claim the rink for hockey. I think I can still do it - one thinks many foolish things when November's bright sun skips over the entrancing first freeze.

A flock of sparrows reels through the air looking more like a flying net than seventy conscious birds, a black veil thrown on the wind. When one sparrow dodges, the whole net swerves, dips: one mind. Am I part of anything like that?

Maybe not. The last few years of my life have been characterized by stripping away, one by one, loves and communities that sustain the soul. A young colleague, new to my English department, recently asked me who I hang around with at school. "Nobody," I had to say, feeling briefly ashamed. This solitude is one of the surprises of middle age, especially if one's youth has been rich in love and friendship and children. If you do your job right, children leave home; few communities can stand an individual's most ~ Mary Rose O'Reilley

Balderdash, I say, let the sword turn into an adder and the adder a salmon and the salmon a birch twig and birch twig a sword and the sword a tongue ... Let it all run together so swiftly that it cannot be separated again ... ~ Sjon

When serpents bargain for the right to squirm
and the sun strikes to gain a living wage -
when thorns regard their roses with alarm
and rainbows are insured against old age
when every thrush may sing no new moon in
if all screech-owls have not okayed his voice
- and any wave signs on the dotted line
or else an ocean is compelled to close
when the oak begs permission of the birch
to make an acorn - valleys accuse their
mountains of having altitude - and march
denounces april as a saboteur
then we'll believe in that incredible
unanimal mankind (and not until) ~ E. E. Cummings

People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts. ~ Joyce Cary

People can live without a Facebook account: my 13-year-old daughter has cancelled her account because it's not cool anymore. ~ Michael Birch

We're both made of stars, Jory Birch. Everybody is. ~ Kirsten Hubbard

The limbs of a stand of birch tree hold up the forest's form like women's bones. This grove has a magnetic pull, beckoning toward a carpet of blue-green mosses where I long to lie on my back and sing into the leaves. But it is a place where bodies were stacked, and I don't want to make friends with trees that once hid the dead. ~ Vesper Stamper

Much can they praise the trees so straight and high, The sailing pine,the cedar proud and tall, The vine-prop elm, the poplar never dry, The builder oak, sole king of forests all, The aspin good for staves, the cypress funeral, The laurel, meed of mighty conquerors And poets sage, the fir that weepest still, The yew obedient to the bender's will, The birch for shafts, the sallow for the mill, The myrrh sweet-bleeding in the bitter wound, The warlike beech, the ash for nothing ill, The fruitful olive, and the platane round, The carver holm, the maple seldom inward sound. ~ Edmund Spenser

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.

When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we us ~ Robert Macfarlane

Miss Sedley was almost as flurried at the act of defiance as Miss Jemima had been; for, consider, it was but one minute that she had left school, and the impressions of six years are not got over in that space of time. Nay, with some persons those awes and terrors of youth last for ever and ever. I know, for instance, an old gentleman of sixty-eight, who said to me one morning at breakfast, with a very agitated countenance, 'I dreamed last night that I was flogged by Dr Raine.' Fancy had carried him back five-and-fifty years in the course of that evening. Dr Raine and his rod were just as awful to him in his heart then, at sixty-eight, as they had been at thirteen. If the Doctor, with a large birch, had appeared bodily to him, even at the age of threescore and eight, and had said in awful voice, 'Boy, take down your pants ... ' Well, well ... ~ William Makepeace Thackeray

The silver-leaved birch retains in its old age a soft bark; there are some such men. ~ Berthold Auerbach

I had the good fortune to be able to right an injustice that I thought was being heaped on young people by lowering the voting age, where you had young people that were old enough to die in Vietnam but not old enough to vote for their members of Congress that sent them there. ~ Birch Bayh

Joseph McCarthy and the John Birch Society launched an anti-Communist crusade that won the support of millions of Americans in the 1950s. ~ Robert Dallek

Our table was a large piece of freshly peeled birch bark, laid wrong side up, and our breakfast consisted of hard-bread, fried pork, and strong coffee well sweetened, in which we did not miss the milk. ~ Henry David Thoreau

In a true you-and-I relationship, we are present mindfully, nonintrusively, the way we are present with things in nature.We do not tell a birch tree it should be more like an elm. We face it with no agenda, only an appreciation that becomes participation: 'I love looking at this birch' becomes 'I am this birch' and then 'I and this birch are opening to a mystery that transcends and holds us both. ~ David Richo

Put all the pervs in jail, bring back the birch and cat-o-nine tails. ~ Ray Davies

Nothing smelled so good or danced so well as a birch fire. ~ Katherine Paterson

What is it about ignorance that breeds fear? Or is it the other way around? ~ CJ Birch

Maybe freedom wasn't a state of being. Maybe it was an act of courage. Maybe freedom was defiance and sacrifice and pain, something that couldn't be won without giving away something else in return. ~ Kate Jarvik Birch

Powerful men tire of their toys easily. And the novelty of a pet doesn't last forever. After a while even the prettiest things become ordinary. ~ Kate Jarvik Birch

These women accept their beatings with a simplicity worthy of all praise, and far from considering themselves insulted, admire the strength and energy of the man who can administer such eloquent rebukes. In Russia, not only may a man beat his wife, but it is laid down in the catechism and taught all boys at the time of confirmation as necessary at least once a week, whether she has done anything or not, for the sake of her general health and happiness."

I thought I observed a tendency in the Man of Wrath rather to gloat over these castigations.

"Pray, my dear man," I said, pointing with my whip, "look at that baby moon so innocently peeping at us over the edge of the mist just behind that silver birch; and don't talk so much about women and things you don't understand. What is the use of your bothering about fists and whips and muscles and all the dreadful things invented for the confusion of obstreperous wives? You know you are a civilised husband, and a civilised husband is a creature who has ceased to be a man.

"And a civilised wife?" he asked, bringing his horse close up beside me and putting his arm round my waist, "has she ceased to be a woman?"

"I should think so indeed,--she is a goddess, and can never be worshipped and adored enough. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

My sangha, what I seem to attract, are people who have been practicing a long time, they're teaching, they're more serious about their spiritual journey. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

Once, I took the penny whistle
you gave me and discovered a spot
by the roaring falls where I could play
as loud as I wanted.
I lay in the bifurcated trunk
of a low-slung birch tree. The sun peeked
through applauding leaves, high overhead. ~ Kristen Henderson

We're number one in domestic violence homicides. We also have a high rate of alcohol abuse and drug abuse and there's a high lethality rate when you get those factors involved, so the shelter has 52 beds, certainly it is never empty. ~ Diane Birch

I put quite a few trees in last autumn. A lot of silver birch and a couple of native trees - just generally doing gardening, putting plants in and hedges in. It takes quite a lot of time and I love it. ~ Sean Bean

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch. ~ Ken Follett

One of the big challenges for our party is to demonstrate to people that we have an agenda for economic prosperity and that we can be trusted with their money. ~ Birch Bayh

Would this feeling follow me for the rest of my life: happiness and sorrow intertwined so tightly inside me they could never exist without each other? Maybe it would. Maybe this was what it meant to truly be alive, to own a life, not just to exist inside it" -Ella ~ Kate Jarvik Birch

Young people are being elected for School Boards all over the country. ~ Birch Bayh

Practice means making an effort to keep your mind steady. Yoga is about learning to pay attention. That's what drives transformation. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

What's that?"
"It looks like something from Linus ... It is! He sent me a little birch-bark canoe from camp! He said he made it himself ... Sometimes I think I don't deserve a nice brother like Linus ... "
"I have often thought the same thing."
"Dear Linus, please send me another canoe. The first one broke when I threw it at Charlie Brown. ~ Charles M. Schulz

If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know. ~ Sam Hamill

I don't have any great ambition to go out and make money. But I am still fascinated in starting up businesses and starting it in a way and running in a way that I want to do it. ~ Michael Birch

I, who cannot see, find hundreds of things to interest me through mere touch. I feel the delicate symmetry of a leaf. I pass my hands lovingly about the smooth skin of a silver birch, or the rough shaggy bark of a pine ... Yet, those who have eyes apparently see little. The panorama of color and action which fills the world is taken for granted ... It is a great pity that, in the world of light, the gift of sight is used only as a mere convenience rather than as a means of adding fullness to life. ~ Helen Keller

A botanist would have been stumped, coming across a tree like this one. Yet, if we are to judge a tree by its fruit, it was clearly an avocado. I picked the fruit, sliced it open, and tasted it to make sure. There was no doubt in my mind. If it looks like an avocado and tastes like an avocado, it has got to be an avocado. However, the tree itself had a white bark like that of a birch and its sap tasted like birch juice. Its leaves were delicate like that of a cypress, while its trunk and the root system reminded me of a baobab. Could it be that someone had grafted an avocado on to a baobab tree? And if so, why the bark so white and the leaves so, well, feathery, and delicate yet bold like a dragonfly's wing? Why is there not another tree like it nearby? Where had the seed of this tree come from? I had no answer. So, I put the seed of the fruit in my pocket and took it home with me to see if I could make it grow. ~ Uguisse Packard

Selfishness is self-absorption, self-seeking behaviour that either disregards the rights and needs of others or tramples them deliberately in favour of personal gain. ~ Adelyn Birch

And I thought my loss my loss was not, certainly, the end of the world, but to lessen the enthusiasm of those young people who were signed up, I thought that was tragic. ~ Birch Bayh

I really do believe that the bottom line that creates transformation in the individual is the ability to focus your attention in an ever greater and more subtle way, and that follows the whole path of the limbs. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

If the seasons bleed into each other like a watercolor painting, it means not enough fish and berries to last the winter, not enough wood chopped for the stove, not enough meat in the freezer. One year winter came so fast and so hard, the leaves on the birch trees didn't even have time to turn yellow and fall off; they froze solid green on the branches. They clung there for months on skinny skeleton arms, the color so blindingly wrong it was creepy. Every year it's a race between the seasons, and that year fall lost. ~ Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

She smelled like water that had been warmed by the sun, and she also had the sharp, enticing aroma of birch leaves. ~ Tadeusz Konwicki

I think we have a number of young people - like yourself - who want to make a difference. I'm not sure the numbers are as large because I think the burden of getting elected to public office at the national level has become astronomically expensive. ~ Birch Bayh

Once she had thrown a square of birch bark into the fire when her father came in the door. He might then have asked her why her quill pen had shaped a row of straight and crooked question marks and after each one an exclamation point
in rows of ten, perhaps forty running along
?! ?! ?! ?!
arranged in pairs or couples. If he had asked her what is this folderol and what can this nonsense mean she would have said the same she said when shaping them with her pen, one pair, one couple after another. Each question mark stands for my ignorance and asks if I may learn and know the answer. And each exclamation point stands for my surprise at how little I know, my amazement at my vast ignorance, my utter astonishment at how much there is for me to learn. ~ Carl Sandburg

He dismounted and helped Amelia to the ground. At his direction, she sat on a fallen birch log while he set up a makeshift camp. She waited with her hands folded neatly in her lap, watching his every movement as he pulled a bundle of blankets from the packsaddle. In a few minutes he had made a fire in the stone-circled pit and laid out a pallet beside it.
Amelia hurried to the pile of blankets and burrowed beneath the layers of wool and quilted cotton. "Is it safe out here?" she asked, her voice muffled.
"You're safe from everything but me." Smiling, Cam lowered himself beside her. ~ Lisa Kleypas

Chaga is one of the weirdest mushrooms you may ever see. A fungal parasite found on birch trees, Chaga is a hardened, blackened, crusty formation that looks like a bursting tumor. ~ Paul Stamets

What I want to do and what I do are two separate things. If we all went around doing what we wanted all the time, there'd be chaos. ~ Simon Birch

It's a crime to be that hot and yet, that evil. ~ E.C. Newman

Years can go by in a blink of an eye and then you meet somebody and one day feels like eternity. ~ Kate Jarvik Birch

A shaft of moonlight illuminated a row of sentinel silver birch in a phosphorescent glow, appearing almost ethereal in the relative surrounding gloom. Boris had stopped again, his silhouette a stark black juxtaposition against the background of illuminated branches. ~ R.D. Ronald

Its composure thoroughly disrupted, the little treelet, the picture of arboreal distress, let its branches droop a little, and its green birch leaves fluttered anxiously. ~ Lev Grossman

The loveliness of the day was enough to knock you down. Swallows rioted above the calm green lid of the lake. Birch trees gleamed like filaments among the dark evergreens. No planes disturbed the sky. I felt dead to it, though I did take a kind of comfort that all of this beauty was out here, persisting like mad, whether you hearkened to it or not. ~ Wells Tower

Lots of media people ask me what do you think of yoga in the gyms, and what do you think about this article and what do you think about that, and how about it's so commercial now. I say, look, whatever gets people turned on to it. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

I rode Sea Pigeon in all his work - that's why my arms are so long. ~ Mark Birch

For me, romance isn't an over-the-top act. It's someone offering to help and to support me. Or if that person thinks I'm making the wrong decision, he'll tell me. I want him to be honest, because being that honest takes a lot of guts. ~ Thora Birch

Trust the Oak," said she; "trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech. Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable. But shun the Ash and the Alder; for the Ash is an ogre, - you will know him by his thick fingers; and the Alder will smother you with her web of hair, if you let her near you at night. ~ George MacDonald

Time passes, and as the hot midday sun and cool mountain nights alternately bake and freeze the blackened landscape of Vesuvius, something remarkable happens.
Gradually, the streams of cold lava are colonized by a lichen, stereocaulon vesuvianim. This lichen is so tiny that it is almost invisible to the naked eye, but as it grows, it turns the lava from black to silvery gray. Where the lichen has gone, other plants can follow- first mugwort, valerian, and Mediterranean scrub, but later ilex and birch trees, along with dozens of species of apricot.
Meanwhile, the clinkers and ash that covered the landscape like so much grubby gray snow are slowly, inexorably, working their way into the fields and the vineyards, crumbling as they do so, adding their richness to the thick black soil, and an incomparable flavor to tomatoes, zucchini, eggplants, fruit and all the other produce which grows there. ~ Anthony Capella

You do realize this means you're leaving Birch and Scoff in charge of the Catacombs.... And you aren't worried that half of the caverns will be blown apart while we're gone? Or that we'll return to find the children have purple skin and hair that looks and smells like berries? - Charlotte ~ Andrea Cremer

Many of us find it hard to set boundaries and defend them because we fear doing so will cause rejection or abandonment. We may avoid confrontations to make things easier. We may feel guilt if we say no or if we think we might hurt someone's feelings. We fear boundaries will keep us from being loved. ~ Adelyn Birch

I'm really fascinated by the parallels between quantum theory and the teachings of some of these ancient texts. So many of the things that quantum physicists are talking about today, like nonlocality and the observer effect, are things the yogis have been saying for thousands of years. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

Rude poets of the tavern hearth,
squandering your unquoted mirth,
which keeps the ground, and never soars,
while jake retorts, and reuben roars;
tough and screaming, as birch-bark,
goes like bullet to its mark;
while the solid curse and jeer
never balk the waiting ear. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I should point out that I was intimately involved with a group of women here a year and a half ago when there was an effort made by a right wing element in the President's party to get him to turn back the clock. ~ Birch Bayh

He calmed himself, shut his eyes, and fell asleep. The rear light of consciousness, like the last express train of the night, began to fade into the distance, gradually speeding up, growing smaller until it was, finally, sucked into the depths of night, where it disappeared. All that remained was the sound of the wind slipping through a stand of white birch trees. ~ Haruki Murakami

2014 Resolution: Remember the past with truth, look to the future with passon, but live for the now. ~ B.K. Birch

She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah!
she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood. ~ C.S. Lewis

If you fear that defending your boundaries is being controlling, don't worry. There is a difference between being controlling and having boundaries. Controlling people is about telling them what to do. Setting boundaries is about saying what you do or do not want to happen to you. ~ Adelyn Birch

Criticism is properly the rod of divination: a hazel switch for the discovery of buried treasure, not a birch twig for the castigation of offenders. ~ Arthur Symons

I wanted to build something that was a system - that was mechanical and would propagate itself like a virus. I needed a way for it spread from person to person, and the best way to do that was trying to get someone to get their friends to sign up. ~ Michael Birch

True, duels were fought by convention at dawn in isolated locations to ensure the privacy of the gentlemen involved. But were they fought behind ash heaps or in scrapyards? Of course not! They were fought in a clearing among the birch trees with a dusting of snow. Or on the banks of a winding rivulet. Or at the edge of a family estate where the breezes shake the blossoms from the trees. . . . That is, they were fought in settings that one might have expected to see in the second act of an opera. ~ Amor Towles

Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning's life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the beach. I have taken the events of her life and condensed them to fit into a narrative that is not stretched beyond the reader's patience. Hence events, while in order, do not always coincide exactly with actual dates and time spans. Plus, of course, I made up plenty. For instance, while there was gossip about Mary and Buckland and Mary and Birch, there was no proof. That is where only a novelist can step in. ~ Tracy Chevalier

I'm really lucky! I'm just cognisant that I wanna move forward, and people will let me or not; who knows. ~ Thora Birch

The fox came to pay the birch tree a vist, bringing with him a book of poetry. He was wearing a dark blue suit fresh from the tailor's, and his light brown leather shoes squeaked slightly as he walked. ~ Kenji Miyazawa

But people that are worried about unborn babies are the same ones that vote against kindergarten programs in Indiana or school lunch funds out of the federal government. ~ Birch Bayh

All the trees of the world appeared to be rushing towards Aslan. But as they drew nearer they looked less like trees, and when the whole crowd, bowing and curtsying and waving thin long arms to Aslan, were all around Lucy, she saw that it was a crowd of human shapes. Pale birch-girls were tossing their heads, willow-women pushed back their hair from their brooding faces to gaze on Aslan, the queenly beeches stood still and adored him, shaggy oak-men, lean and melancholy elms, shock-headed hollies (dark themselves, but their wives all bright with berries) and gay rowans, all bowed and rose again, shouting, "Aslan, Aslan!" in their various husky or creaking or wave-like voices. ~ C.S. Lewis

Certainly I think the election of John Kennedy and all he stood for was one that really was an inspiration. ~ Birch Bayh

I think it's really important to create spiritual revolutionaries. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

Like the small flame of a match to a cigarette, Rudolf's fury lit the crumpled edge of his German soul. ~ Geraldine Birch

What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from the ocean siege or October breeze. ~ Paul Harding

It was the first smile of my life. Of course, that is a ridiculous thing to say; I had been smiled at often, the big man had smiled at me not a minute since. And yet I say: it was the first smile, because it was the first that ever went straight into me like a needle too thin to be seen. ~ Carol Birch

Well, I don't know too many governors who are flaming ideologues. ~ Birch Bayh

What I really like doing is storytelling, finding the body language that is necessary for the story. And when I'm doing it and it's working, I'm thrilled. ~ Patricia Birch

What if I took the picture books that my grandmother made and snapped open the rings in every binder, let the plastic pages spill out onto the floor, and then attacked them with my scissors?

Those books, pasted together by my grandmother, year after year, replaced the cognitive exercise of memory for me. Sitting on a section of wall-to-wall carpeting, drinking the bubbling red birch beer from a tinted brown glass, I reestablished my relationships with the members of my family. This is where I put it all together and perpetuated the lies. Not malicious lies, but lies with so many years to develop that we forgot the truth because nobody rehearsed it. When Mark was sentence to sixty days in a twelve-step rehab program in 1991, he wrote an inventory of his experiences with drugs and alcohol that filled a whole notebook, and then he gave it to us to read, It was in those pages that I learned he had once tapped the powder out of horse tranquilizer capsules, melted it down, and shot it into his veins for a high that lasted fourteen days. My God, I thought, Oh my God. This is Mark's story? Okay, now put the cooked-down shot-up horse tranquilizer against the pictures in the album. What do you get? Collage. Dry made wet and introduced into the body. Cut cut cut. It's not so radical. ~ Jill Christman

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other. ~ George Eliot

THE FIREBOLT This state-of-the-art racing broom sports a streamlined, superfine handle of ash, treated with a diamond-hard polish and hand-numbered with its own registration number. Each individually selected birch twig in the broomtail has been honed to aerodynamic perfection, giving the Firebolt unsurpassable balance and pinpoint precision. The Firebolt has an acceleration of 150 miles an hour in ten seconds and incorporates an unbreakable Braking Charm. Price on request. Price ~ J.K. Rowling

I started teaching yoga in 1974 in Colorado, I was living in Winter Park, and I started teaching skiers. At that point I was teaching more of the Sivananda system and just pushing it up a little bit to make it a little more rajasic a little more active, a little more physical. People would come, and feel great, and by the time I left Colorado in 1980 I'd taught pretty much everyone in town - the ski patrol, ski instructors, the bar owners. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

Separation of mind and body, that's been around since the Greeks. ~ Beryl Bender Birch

Whether

Whether anger quickens a lagging stride,

and periodic burn-offs in the forest

revitalize exhausted soil and flora - .

Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat


jubilation of a lightning bolt

that whips its silver vein of genesis

through the night sky, flash-photo of a white

birch upended, the root-system buckled


to swollen thunderheads - . And whether naming

an offense amounts to sour grapes and common

bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense

of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping


insult to civilized behavior - . Whether

a July rainstorm, even when it drenches

the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles

traffic, might be extravagant, a joy,


like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos

of Gillespie's upraised horn, cascading pitches

a countersong to meteoric chalk marks

Perseids burn across the House of Leo - .


And whether peaceful ecstasy might float

up from a fifteen-second avalanche

reflected in the skier's goggles, his jacket

a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope,


waiting for the homeward track to clear. ~ Alfred Corn

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 ~ Ali Benjamin

Abuse can take many forms. It always involves a boundary violation, although every boundary violation is not necessarily abuse. ~ Adelyn Birch

In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success. I went to Petrograd from Vladivostok, .One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs. A blind soldier was sitting on a bench. Other soldiers sat beside him and more stood behind. There were from twenty to thirty.Their uniforms were torn and stained. The blind soldier, a big vigorous fellow, was quite young. On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a beard that has never been shaved. I daresay he wasn't eighteen. He had a broad face, with flat, wide features, and on his forehead was a great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight. His closed eyes gave him a strangely vacant look. He began to sing. His voice was strong and sweet. He accompanied himself on an accordion. The train waited and he sang song after song. I could not understand his words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of the wild corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long months of dark winter; and then the dancing of the women in the villages and the youths bathi ~ W. Somerset Maugham

One goes, or we all die ~ Carol Birch

Most often they speak according to their kind – the deep rumble of oak, the whisper of the birch, or the singsong chant of the alder.
The evergreen stands of pine have voices sharp as needles.
But the forest can speak as one, when it must. When the trees so choose, they think with one mind. When there is danger, especially, they speak in one voice of a thousand echoes.
I hate it when they do this. For the forest mind is always right, and will hear no argument. ~ Maryrose Wood

Koschei smiled. His pale lips sought hers, crushing her into a kiss like dying. She tasted sweetness there, as though he still kissed her with honey and sugar on his tongue. When he pulled away, his eyes shone.

"I don't care, Marya Morevna. Kiss him. Take him to your bed, and the vila, too, for all it matters to me. Do you understand me, wife? There need never be any rules between us. Let us be greedy together; let us hoard. Let us hit each other with birch branches and lock each other in dungeons; let us drink each other's blood in the night and betray each other in the sun. Let us lie and lust and take hundreds of lovers; let us dance until snow melts beneath us. Let us steal and eat until we grow fat and roll in the pleasures of life, clutching each other for purchase. Only leave me my death - let me hold this one thing sacred and unmolested and secret - and I will serve you a meal myself, served on a platter of all the world's bounty. Only do not leave me, swear that you will never leave me, and no empress will stand higher. Forget the girls in the factory. Be selfish and cruel and think nothing of them. I am selfish. I am cruel. My mate cannot be less than I. I will have you in my hoard, Marya Morevna, my black mirror. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

I felt overstuffed and dull and disappointed, the way I always do the day after Christmas, as if whatever it was the pine boughs and the candles and the silver and gilt-ribboned presents and the birch-log fires and the Christmas turkey and the carols at the piano promised never came to pass. ~ Sylvia Plath