Prune Quotes

God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings - not dummies! Be personal - be prejudiced - be catty - be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards! ~ Agatha Christie

You must prune to bloom. If the dead weight is not pruned and removed, it compromises the quality, performance, and output of the vine. When you prune what's not working in your life, you make the space and place for renewal to happen and for new growth to spring forth. ~ Susan C. Young

Each year before the first rain after the harvest in Spring, I would look at the dry peach tree that I know so well at our backyard and anticipating that in summer it will be covered in an overgrown hedge unless my father who was a committed gardner of note take a weekend off from Jo'burg during the pruning season to prune it. Even now, I still remember with crystal clarity my childhood mood - warm days in Schoonoord with rich nostalgia of green scenery and flowers flowering everywhere.

One evening I was sitting at the veranda of our firehut looking at the orange tree between the plat (flat - roofed) house and the big L - shaped house - the tree served as a shelter from the sun for the drinking water pot next to the plat house - suddenly the weather changed, the wind howled, the tree swayed, the loose corrugated iron sheets on roof of he house clattered and clanged, the open windows shuts with a bang and the sky made night a day, and I was overwhelmed with that feeling of childhood joy at the approaching rain. All of a sudden, the deafening of steady pouring rain. The raging storm beat the orange tree leaves while I sat there remembering that where the orange tree stood used to be our first house, a small triangular shaped mokhukhu ((tin house) made of red painted corrugated iron sheets salvaged from demolishing site in Witbank, also remembering that my aunt's mokhukhu was also made of the same type and colour of corrugated iron sheets. The ashen ground drunk m ~ Pekwa Nicholas Mohlala

Do not economize on the hymeneal rites; do not prune them of their splendor, nor split farthings on the day when you are radiant. A wedding is not house-keeping. ~ Victor Hugo

The exchange between plants and people has shaped the evolutionary history of both. Farms, orchards, and vineyards are stocked with species we have domesticated. Our appetite for their fruits leads us to till, prune, irrigate, fertilize, and weed on their behalf. Perhaps they have domesticated us. Wild plants have changed to stand in well-behaved rows and wild humans have changed to settle alongside the fields and care for the plants - a kind of mutual taming. ~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I have these brownies that I make that are just a home run with my family. I make them with almond butter, prune puree, walnuts, cocoa powder and whole-wheat flour, and I like them because they're delicious, but they're also guilt-free. ~ Tia Mowry

Culture is a vulture but there's also vulture culture and cultured vultures and cultured yougurt (cherry, peach, pear, pineapple, grape, vanilla, plain, cherry vanilla, pineapple orage, cranberry, orange, mandarin orange, coffee, apricot, raspberry, blueberry, boysenberry, prune). And speaking of vulture culture there's counter-culture and under-the-counter culture, too. But whether you call it kulchur with a k and a ch and without the e it's still the same thing and you can't disguise it with pretty frills and a gallon of dog sweat. It still has two syllables and TWO-SYLLABLE WORDS SUCK so you can just forgetit, man. It's no fun at all and even fun wouldn't be fun if it was called funjure or funion or funching. But somehow fucking is still loads of fun even though there's that extra 3-letter cluster of vowels and consonants. Proof positive that there are exceptions everywhere you look. But don't look too hard, you might get eyestrain. ~ Richard Meltzer

Little by little I began to listen better: to the sap moving in the plants, to the blood in my veins. I learned to understand my own intention, to prune and to add, to feel where the power gathered and speak the right words to draw it to its height. That was the moment I lived for, when it all came clear at last and the spell could sing with its pure note, for me and me alone. ~ Madeline Miller

They climbed their ladders to wheedle and prune the trees into holiness ~ Catherynne M Valente

The heart will turn to a prune if love is always by the numbers. How will you know if someone really loves you if they only meet your expectations and not your needs? ~ Robert Fulghum

Prune these alleged friends ruthlessly from your life. You need all the positive reinforcement you can get. You need friends who think you're fabulous, an angel in human shape, and a breath of springtime. ~ Cynthia Heimel

we pass the fields of Perry and Madrone and where they make wine, and it's all there, all sweet the furrows of brown, with blossoms and one time we took a siding to wait for 98 and I ran out there like the hound of the Baskervilles and got me a few old prunes not longer fitten to eat - the propietor seeing me, trainman running guiltily back to engine with a stolen prune, always I was running, always was running, running to throw switches, running in my sleep and running now - happy. ~ Jack Kerouac

Writing is like gardening. Planting, watering, and weeding are not enough. You have to prune if you want growth. ~ Ron Brackin

You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back. ~ Hugh Howey

I'm adventurous and I'll eat anything. I eat a fair amount of junk food, but not junky junk food. Nothin' colorful. I mean, there's junk food, then there's colorful junk food. Stuff in cheap little packages. I never eat nothin' pink. I'll do the occasional jelly sandwich, but when I eat junk food I'll balance it out with prune juice so it don't stay around long. I drink a quart of prune juice every other day. Some chicks can't stand the sight of it, but I'd rather lose a little pussy than be stuffed with shit. ~ George Clinton

Ant Prune was holding one of the squirrels in her hand. 'And once a day, we have ta clean their little private parts with a Q-tip, so they'll learn ta clean themselves.'
That was a visual I didn't need ~ Margaret Stohl

The more you prune a plant, the more it grows. So too the more you seek to annihilate the ego, the more it will increase. You should seek the root of the ego and destroy it. ~ Ramana Maharshi

With a country of rare picturesqueness for a background, a people of rare beauty for actors, everybody more or less permeated with the artistic instinct and everybody more or less writing poetry - California has a pageant for breakfast, a fiesta for luncheon and a carnival for dinner. They are always electing queens. In fact any girl in California who hasn't been a queen of something before she's twenty-one is a poor prune. ~ Inez Haynes Irwin

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress...

Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! ~ Nick Hornby

Great projects, like great careers and relationships that last, are gardens. They are tended, they shift, they grow. They endure over time, gaining a personality and reflecting their environment. When something dies or fades away, we prune, replant and grow again. ~ Seth Godin

One tree isn't more important than the entire forest, Joe. You taught me that. Remember? Political pruning. (Syd)
Yeah, but every forest is always destroyed one tree at a time. You take care of those individual trees because each one that falls brings you closer to deforestation. You only prune what's rotten. You don't cut down a good tree for no reason. (Joe) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

If a thing can be said in ten words, I may be relied upon to take a hundred to say it. I ought to apologize for that. I ought to prune, pare and extirpate excess growth, but I will not. I like words - strike that, I love words - and while I am fond of the condensed and economical use of them in poetry, in song lyrics, in Twitter, in good journalism and smart advertising, I love the luxuriant profusion and mad scatter of them too. ~ Stephen Fry

The apples stewed with prunes are excellent, except for the prunes, I won't eat prunes myself. Well, there was one time when Hobb chopped them up with chesnuts and carrots and hid them in a hen. Never trust a cook, my lord. They'll prune you when you least expect it. ~ George R R Martin

What was the use of her being alive? Her heart was some desiccated thing: a prune, a fossil, a piece of clinker. Her mouth might as well be filled with ashes. It was all utterly hopeless and futile ... ~ Sarah Waters

That's the hard part of overdosing on cherries-you have all the pits to tell you exactly how many you ate. Not more or less. Exactly. One-seed fruits really bother me for that reason. That's why I'd always rather eat raisins than prunes. Prune pits are even more imposing than cherry pits. ~ Andy Warhol

Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on the slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die. ~ Jenny Offill

Wine, women and song have been replaced by prune juice, a heating pad and the Gong Show. ~ Bob Hope

Our Father and our God, purge my heart and mind with the truth of Your Word. Find the unfruitful parts and eliminate them from my life. Prune my attitudes and my actions, Lord, until they are healthy and wholly in service to You. Give me the heart of my Savior Jesus Christ, through whom I pray. Amen. ~ Billy Graham

There's no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune. ~ William Shakespeare

Give me all of you!!! I don't want so much of your time, so much of your talents and money, and so much of your work. I want YOU!!! ALL OF YOU!! I have not come to torment or frustrate the natural man or woman, but to KILL IT! No half measures will do. I don't want to only prune a branch here and a branch there; rather I want the whole tree out! Hand it over to me, the whole outfit, all of your desires, all of your wants and wishes and dreams. Turn them ALL over to me, give yourself to me and I will make of you a new self
in my image. Give me yourself and in exchange I will give you Myself. My will, shall become your will. My heart, shall become your heart. ~ C.S. Lewis

The world is so complicated, tangled, and overloaded that to see into it with any clarity you must prune and prune. In ~ Italo Calvino

A love of neighbor manifests itself in the tolerance not only of opinions of others but, what is more important, of the essence and uniqueness of others, when we subscribe to that religious philosophy of life that insists that God has made each man and woman an individual sacred personality endowed with a specific temperament, created with differing needs, hungers, dreams. This is a variegated, pluralistic world where no two stars are the same and every snowflake has its own distinctive pattern. God apparently did not want a regimented world of sameness. That is why creation is so manifold. So it is with us human beings. Some are born dynamic and restless; others placid and contemplative…One man's temperament is full throated with laughter; another's tinkles with the sad chimes of gentle melancholy. Our physiques are different, and that simple difference oftentimes drives us into conflicting fulfillment of our natures, to action or to thought, to passion or to denial, to conquest or to submission. There is here no fatalism of endowment. We can change and prune and shape the hedges of our being, but we must rebel against the sharp shears being wielded by other hands, cutting off the living branches of our spirits in order to make our personalities adornments for their dwellings. ~ Joshua Loth Liebman

What's the big idea?" Sabrina demanded.
"I declared war on you, remember?" Puck said.
Sabrina rolled her eyes. "Is this another one of your stupid pranks?"
Puck sniffed. "You have contaminated me with your puberty virus and you called my villainy into question."
"First of all, puberty isn't a virus," Sabrina said as she fought a tug of was with the Pegasus for her now rather damp pillow."Secondly, I'm sorry if I gave you the itty-bitty baby and boo-boo face. Do you wasnt me to give you a hug?"
Puck curled his lip in anger.
"Oh, now is the baby cranky. Perhaps we should put him down for a nap?"
"We'll see who's laughing soon enough," Puck said. "You see these flying horses?"
"Duh!"
"These horses have a very special diet," Puck said. "For the last two days they have eaten nothing but chili dogs and prune juice."
Sabrina heard a rumble coming from Puck's horse. It was so loud it drowned out the sound of its beating wings. Sabrina couldn't tell if the churn of the sound was worse for the Pegasus but it whined a bit and its eyes bulged nervously.
Puck continued. "Now, chili dogs and prune juice are a hard combination on a person's belly. It can keep a human being on the toilet for a week. Imagine what would happen if I fed chili dogs and prune juice to an eight-hundred-and-fifty-pound flying horse. Oh, wait a minute! You don't have to imagine it. I did feed chili dogs and prune juice to an eight-hundred-and-fifty-po ~ Michael Buckley

This method is: first, to create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among the public; second, to combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved. Just ~ Adolf Hitler

Like this book, the dictionary shows you that the word "nervous" means "worried about something"
you might feel nervous, for instance, if you were served prune ice cream for dessert, because you would be worried that it would taste awful
whereas the word "anxious" means "troubled by disturbing suspense," which you might feel if you were served a live alligator for dessert, because you would be troubled by the disturbing suspense about whether you would eat your dessert or it would eat you. ~ Lemony Snicket

Grace had called Ellen a dry little prune who'd be lucky to give it away for free disguised as a hat, let alone sell it or marry it off. ~ Lyndsay Faye

I'm taking Viagra and drinking prune juice - I don't know if I'm coming or going. ~ Rodney Dangerfield

We are always people that are in the making, constantly adapting to accommodate the roads we walk. As we learn, it changes us. As we go about our course, we grow, and prune everything around us; friends, beliefs, desires. Our past experiences plant the seeds needed for our future roads, with all its turns, speed, and treachery. ~ Kat Lahr

Ineffective or weak brain connections are pruned in much the same way a gardener would prune a tree or bush, giving the plant a desired shape, ~ Alison Gopnik

We know great Nature's pow'r, Mother of things, whose vast unbounded sway From the deep centre all around extends Wide to the flaming barriers of the world. We feel her power; we strive not to repress (Vainly repress'd, or to deformity) Her lawful growth: ours be the task alone To check her rude excrescencies, to prune Her wanton overgrowth, and where she strays In uncouth shapes, to lead her gently back, With prudent hand, to form and better use. ~ John Armstrong

I write abundantly. And then my next step is to struggle to reduce the ornament, to reduce the abundance-to prune the book, in other words, the way one prunes a tree-so it can grow. This is my idea of a book. ~ James Wright

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Reexamine each sentence you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? ~ William Zinsser

Working for a federal agency was like trying to dislodge a prune skin from the roof of the mouth. More enterprise went into the job than could be justified by the results. ~ Caskie Stinnett

God has created you and me with a heart that only God's love can satisfy. And every other love will be partial, will be real, but limited, will be painful. And if we are willing to let the pain prune us, to give us a deeper sense of our belovedness, then we can be as free as Jesus and walk on this world and proclaim God's first love, wherever we go.2 ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Writers are like gardeners - they have to prune to get to the beauty of their creation. ~ Lee Rene

The baby, as I had reason from experience to expect and had in fact prepared my bag for, suffers from dehydration. He's dried up like a prune. The treatment is simple and the results spectacular. Slip a needle in his scalp vein and hang a bottle of glucose ~ Walker Percy

Can we really conquer chaos so easily? If that were so, I should be able to prune the pandemonium of my own soul into something neat and tidy rather than this maze of wants and needs and misgivings that has me forever feeling as if I cannot fit into the landscape of things. ~ Libba Bray

Man is like a tree. If you stand in front of a tree and watch it incessantly, to see how it grows, and to see how much it has grown, you will see nothing at all. But tend it at all times, prune the runners and keep it free of beetles and worms, and all in good time-it will come into its growth. It is the same with man: all that is necessary is for him to overcome his obstacles, and he will thrive and grow. But it is not right to examine him hour after hour to see how much has already been added to his stature. ~ Martin Buber

We simplify, not just to be less busy, even though we may be right to pursue that. Rather, wesimplify to remove distractions from our pursuit of Christ. We prune activities from our lives, not only to get organized, but also that our devotion to Christ and service for His kingdom will be more fruitful. We simplify, not merely to save time, but to eliminate hindrances to the time we devote to knowing Christ. All the reasons we simplify should eventually lead us to Jesus Christ.'
DONALD S. WHITNEY ~ Cynthia Heald

Happiness is discovering the prune juice your doctor ordered you to drink has fermented. ~ Johnny Carson

Love is like a white geranium.
It grows like a weed
overpowering the ground–
if you don't take care of it
prune it
shape it
it climbs walls
and hides
insects
that slowly eat at it
making it die.
Easily grown
and easily withered. ~ Isabel Quintero

Time travel would give humanity the ability to alter the past and prune the tree of all possible futures of those branches that had been infected by evil; with enough revisions humans would eventually bring about the one version of history that was fully good. ~ Dexter Palmer

Evil? What is that? ... You said you were death itself. Are you evil, then, or are you simply stronger and more awake than others? Who gives more shape to sentient history: the good, who adhere to the tried and true, or those who seek to rouse beings from their stupor and lead them to glory? A storm you are, but a much needed one, to wash away the old and complacent and prune the galaxy of deadweight.
-Plagueis ~ James Luceno

It is the branch that bears the fruit, That feels the knife, To prune it for a larger growth, A fuller life. Though every budding twig be trimmed, And every grace Of swaying tendril, springing leaf, May lose its place. O you whose life of joy seems left, With beauty shorn; Whose aspirations lie in dust, All bruised and torn, Rejoice, though each desire, each dream, Each hope of thine Will fall and fade; it is the hand Of Love Divine That holds the knife, that cuts and breaks With tenderest touch, That you, whose life has borne some fruit, Might now bear much. Annie Johnson Flint ~ Lettie B. Cowman

Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities. Prune his extravagance, sober him, and you undo him. ~ William James

I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers, If I belittle dogs and mothers. ~ Ogden Nash

Rather than turning over a new leaf, prune your tree so that new leaves continue to blossom. ~ Feroz Bham

Inside John, she thinks, is another John, who is much nicer. This other John will emerge like a butterfly from a cocoon, a Jack from a box, a pit from a prune, if the first John is only squeezed enough. ~ Margaret Atwood

Know what you know. Most people oversimplify Occam's razor to mean the simplest answer is usually correct. But the real meaning, what the Franciscan friar William of Ockham really wanted to emphasize, is that you shouldn't complicate, that you shouldn't "stack" a theory if a simpler explanation was at the ready. Pare it down. Prune the excess. Andrew ~ Harlan Coben

Why would one ever be so insane as to ditch a perfectly beautiful metaphor? Cut back, of course, prune if you like, so that the best metaphors are clear and sparkling. But I will throw out unread the book that promises me no metaphors inside. ~ Marie Rutkoski

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous. I want to be a writer who reminds others that these moments exist; I want to prove that there is infinite space, infinite meaning, infinite dimension. But I am not always in what I call a state of grace. I have days of illuminations and fevers. I have days when the music in my head stops. Then I mend socks, prune trees, can fruits, polish furniture. But while I am doing this I feel I am not living. ~ Anais Nin

If your life consistently bears no fruit, God will intervene to discipline you. If your life bears some fruit, God will intervene to prune you. If your life bears a lot of fruit, God will invite you to abide more deeply with Him. ~ Bruce Wilkinson

Tomorrow I'm going to mow the lawn and prune the trees, and after that I'll cook some stew and casseroles to put in the freezer. We'll be glad of them when we're busy gaining dominion over the world, and can't find time to cook. ~ Alex Gabriel

You can't prune toward anything if you don't know what you want. You have to figure out what you are trying to be or build and then define what the pruning standards are going to be. That definition and those standards will bring you to the pruning moments, wherein you either own the vision or you don't. ~ Henry Cloud

If you want your life to have impact, focus it! Stop dabbling. Stop trying to do it all. Do less. Prune away even good activities and do only that which matters most. Never confuse activity with productivity. You can be busy without a purpose, but what's the point? ~ Rick Warren

God made a beauteous garden
With lovely flowers strown,
But one straight, narrow pathway
That was not overgrown.
And to this beauteous garden
He brought mankind to live,
And said "To you, my children,
These lovely flowers I give.
Prune ye my vines and fig trees,
With care my flowers tend,
But keep the pathway open
Your home is at the end."
God's Garden ~ Robert Frost

The moment you step into a garden and begin to cultivate and prune, you become a killer. ~ Andrew J. Robinson

What's that there Slivovitz like?" Helmholtz asked the bartender, squinting at a dusty bottle on the bottom row. He had just finished a sloe gin rickey. "I didn't even know we had it," said the bartender. He put the bottle on the bar, tilting it away from himself so he could read the label. "Prune brandy," he said. "Believe I'll try that next," said Helmholtz. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don't get it, prune. ~ Tom Peters

All in November's soaking mist We stand and prune the naked tree, While all our love and interest Seem quenched in the blue-nosed misery. ~ Ruth Pitter

It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns ... It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it ... If you want to see the difference between [the garden's] contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy, and fecundity beside dead, steril things. Just so, our 'decency and common sense' show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love. ~ C.S. Lewis

Dionysus invented wine, which so impressed his father Zeus that he promoted Dionysus to god. The guy who invented prune juice, by contrast, got sentenced to the Fields of Punishment. ~ Rick Riordan

A month passed in silence and then came an email asking if Qayennat would care to further amend, fortify or prune various sections of her proposal; Like all communication for them so far, this was well written and polite but abhorrent in its covert attempt to stamp out anything like love, to turn passion into hot air. She wanted to tell them as much, inviting them to take their stuffy foundation and stuff it up their backside ~ Anjum Hasan

Lettuce harvests in Salinas, melons in Brawley, grapes in Parlier, oranges in Ontario, cotton in Firebaugh -- and, finally, Santa Clara, the prune country. And because this place was pleasing to the eye, or because they were tired of their endless migration, Juan Rubio and his wife settled here to raise their children. And, remembering his country, Juan thought that his distant cousin, the great General Zapata, had been right when, in speaking of Juan, he once said to Villa, 'He will go far, that relative of mine.'

Now this man who had lived by the gun all his adult life would sit on his haunches under the prune trees, rubbing his sore knees, and think, Next year we will have enough money and we will return to our country. But deep within he knew he was one of the lost ones. And as the years passed him by and his children multiplied and grew, the chant increased in volume and rate until it became a staccato NEXT YEAR! NEXT YEAR!

And the chains were incrementally heavier on his heart. ~ José Antonio Villareal