Trees Tweedledum Tweedledee Quotes

I don't suppose there'll be a tree left standing, for ever so far around, by the time we're finished.' Tweedledum to tweedledee [They are fighting over a rattle]. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, p. 156 ~ Lewis Carroll

Barack Obama and Jimmy Hoffa are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, Lady Gaga and hype, the 'Jersey Shore' cast and hairspray: inseparable. The president can no more disown the Teamsters Union's leader than he can disown his own id. ~ Michelle Malkin

Conscience, resolve, loyalty, the kind of far sight that Mia wanted, the fearlessness to cross strange borders, whatever it was that gave Alice the guts to stick up for herself when Tweedledum and Tweedledee informed her she wasn't real. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

Are there any lions or tigers about here?' she asked timidly.
'It's only the Red King snoring,' said Tweedledee.
'Come and look at him!' the brothers cried, and they each took one of Alice's hands, and led her up to where the King was sleeping.
'Isn't he a LOVELY sight?' said Tweedledum. ~ Lewis Carroll

At any rate I'd better be getting out of the wood, for really its coming on very dark. Do you think it's going to rain?'
Tweedledum spread a large umbrella over himself and his brother, and looked up into it.
'No, I don't think it is,' he said: 'at least - not under here. Nohow.'
'But it may rain outside?'
'It may - if it chooses,' said Tweedledee: 'we've got no objection. Contrariwise. ~ Lewis Carroll

We, the people, are not free. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between Tweedledee and Tweedledum. We elect expensive masters to do our work for us, and then blame them because they work for themselves and for their class. ~ Helen Keller

It is a truism, of course, that in "democratic" states the populace must be encouraged to imagine that it makes important decisions by voting, and must therefore be controlled by suitable propaganda, which implants ideas to which the voters respond as automatically as trained animals respond to words of command in a circus, thus leaving to the masses only a factitious choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the basis of their preference for a certain kind of oratory, a hair-style, or a particular facial expression. ~ Revilo P. Oliver

Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee ... ~ Howard Zinn

His hands grasped her waist and lifted her until she could have sworn that his feet had come off the ground, too; that they were floating up above the creek, above the trees, above the burning hillside, into the dense tangle of stars, about to kiss the moon. ~ Lauren Kate

And that we call enos ermarf."

"What?" I didn't see what he was pointing at.

"That. The way the lake curves forward into t grass, framed by derrishoul trees."

"You have a word for something like that?" I asked.

-Animorphs #4, The Visitor page 63 ~ K.A. Applegate

All action is prayer. All trees are desire-fulfilli ng. All water is the Ganga. All land is Varanasi. Love everything. ~ Neem Karoli Baba

I bit my lip. "I, well, we were high? Really,really high. And it was this weird cloud and lightning and faerie thing. I didn't know where it was taking me or why,and I was so scared I did the only thing I could think of."
"Which was?" Lend prodded, worry shadowing his face.
I shrugged, a small, guilty gesture. "I took some." Hating the concern in his eyes,I rushed on. "Only a little bit-not enough to hurt it,really, just enough to surprise it, and then we fell, and it tried to drop me, but I grabbed on and some trees broke my fall. And afterward the Cloud Freak was okay,really,it was. Just kind of pissed. And then it flew off."
I didn't mention the erratic flight pattern. It was probably woozy. ~ Kiersten White

The more potential dangerous thing than not being able to see forest because of the trees is not being to see the trees because of the forest ~ Anonymous

Trees are anthropomorphic.
They stand still and enjoy the absence of movement.
But their power and strength deeply rooted
Inside the earth.
They inspire me to meditate. ~ Mehak Vijay

You learn calmness from the lake; you learn power from the ocean waves; you learn goodness from the trees! Look around you! You are surrounded by the most excellent teachers of nature! If you can be an excellent student, then you will rise to be an excellent teacher! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

A Palestinian village whose feudal owner sold it for a kiss through a pane of glass..."

Nothing remained of Sireen after the auction apart from you, little prayer rug, because a mother slyly stole you and wrapped up her son who'd been sentenced to cold and weaning - and later to sorrow and longing.

It's said there was a village, a very small village, on the border between sun's gate and earth. It's said that the village was twice sold - once for a measure of oil and once for a kiss through a pane of glass.

The buyers and sellers rejoiced at its sale, the year the submarine was sunk, in our twentieth century.

And in Sireen - the buyers went over the contract - were white-washed houses, lovers, and trees, folk poets, peasants, and children. (But there was no school - and neither tanks nor prisons.) The threshing floors, the colour of golden wine, and the graveyard were a vault meant for life and death, and the vault was sold!

People say that there was a village, but Sireen became an earthquake, imprisoned by an amulet as it turned into a banquet - in which the virgins' infants were cooked in their mothers' milk so soldiers and ministers might eat along with civilisation!

"And the axe is laid at the root of the tree..." And once again at the root of the tree, as one dear brother denies another and existence. Officer of the orbits... attend, O knight of death, but don't give in - death is behind us and also before ~ Samih Al-Qasim

When do they turn the streetlights on?
Does each streetlight have a separate switch?
Where did all the choo-choo trains go?
Why don't people just draw their own money?
Who decided that red means stop and green means go?
Is there only one moon?
Are all car honks the same?
How do the police stop trees from growing in the middle of the street?
Do people paint their own cars?
What is a fire hydrant?
Why don't people whistle when they walk?
Where do airplanes live when they are not flying? ~ Matthew Dicks

When my grandfather went to war against Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait, he wrote a heartfelt letter to my dad about his worries and his fears. I remember the yellow ribbons tied around the trees throughout our suburban Texas neighborhood, and my dad remembers the gravity of the words his father penned: "I guess what I want you to know as a father is this: Every Human life is precious. When the question is asked 'How many lives are you willing to sacrifice' - it tears at my heart. The answer, of course, is none - none at all."
When my dad was weighing whether to go to war against Iraq, when intelligence reports were telling him that Iraq had chemical weapons and when Saddam Hussein refused to allow weapons inspectors into his country, he wrote his own heartfelt letter to Barbara and me: "Yesterday I made the hardest decision a president has to make. I ordered young Americans into combat. It was an emotional moment for me because I fully understand the risks of war. More than once, I have hugged and wept with the loved ones of a soldier lost in combat in Afghanistan." His words spoke of how much he didn't want to go to war, how he had hoped the battle could be averted. ~ Jenna Bush Hager

Hinduism comes closest to being a nature religion. Rivers, rocks, trees, plants, animals, and birds all play their part, both in mythology and everyday worship. This harmony is most evident in remote places like this, and I hope it does not loose its unique character in the ruthless urban advance. ~ Ruskin Bond

Willy: Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swings between them?
Linda: Yeah, like being a million miles from the city. ~ Arthur Miller

Adam tried to hide behind the trees in the garden. There is only one tree that can hide us from Him and that is the tree of the cross. ~ Vance Havner

There's a group of 12 oak trees on my property in California that I call 'my disciples.' Their branches form a canopy over the ground, and I sit underneath them for inspiration. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Still,he noticed that though the house was in poor shape, the gardens were perfect. The paths were well lined, the flower beds filled with roses and lilacs, the trees well trimmed.
He smiled darkly.His beautiful little angel of trouble must have run out of time. ~ Karen Hawkins

Keeping your body healthy is an expression of gratitude to the whole cosmos - the trees, the clouds, everything. ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

The world rests in the night. Trees, mountains, fields, and faces are released from the prison of shape and the burden of exposure. Each thing creeps back into its own nature within the shelter of the dark. Darkness is the ancient womb. Nighttime is womb- time. Our souls come out to play. The darkness absolves everything; the struggle for identity and impression falls away. We rest in the night. ~ John O'Donohue

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks. ~ John Burnham Schwartz

Just as the leaves know they belong to the trees, so do I to you. ~ Gin Love Thompson

Now mind is clear
as a cloudless sky.
Time then to make a
home in wilderness.

What have I done but
wander with my eyes
in the trees? So I
will build: wife,
family, and seek
for neighbors.

Or I
perish of lonesomeness
or want of food or
lightning or the bear
(must tame the hart
and wear the bear).

And maybe make an image
of my wandering, a little
image - shrine by the
roadside to signify
to traveler that I live
here in the wilderness
awake and at home. ~ Allen Ginsberg

Bird memories are therefore a tree's dream of the future. ~ David George Haskell

Glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. ~ Khaled Hosseini

Then for a moment they faded into the sweet darkness so deep that they were darker than the darkness, so that for awhile they were darker than the black trees- then so dark that when she tried to look up at him she could but look at the wild waves of the universe over his shoulder and say, 'Yes, I guess I love you too. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I knew by the signs it would be a hard winter. The hollies bore a heavy crop of berries and birds stripped them bare. Crows quarreled in reaped fields and owls cried in the mountains, mournful as widows. Fur and moss grew thicker than usual. Cold rains came, driven sideways through the trees by north winds, and snows followed. ~ Sarah Micklem

FOR MOST OF MY LIFE I couldn't have found Idaho on a map. I had no picture of the place in my mind, nothing like a California beach or a Texas oil field. Potato trees, is what I thought on the drive out. Rows ~ Shawn Vestal

The nature of atheism merits clarification on two further points which involve less common ideas about theism. The first involves the idea of 'God' which is metaphorical - for example, a theist who believes in 'God' as a principle of conscience or morality. This 'God' exists in a person's mind and it is not something which atheists will dispute. Atheists agree that gods exist as ideas in people's minds; the disagreement lies over whether any gods actually exist independently of human beliefs. Those are the gods which atheists disbelieve in or deny.

The second type of theism involves gods that exist as physical objects: stones, trees, rivers, or even the universe itself. Believers treat these objects are their gods, but do atheists reject their existence? Of course not - but how do they then remain atheists? The point of disagreement here is whether the label 'god' communicates any information beyond the more common label of 'stone,' 'tree,' or 'universe.' If not, then as far as atheists are concerned, those objects don't merit the extra label 'god' and they remain atheists. ~ Austin Cline

The groves and thickets of smaller trees are full of blooming evergreen vines. These vines are not arranged in separate groups, or in delicate wreaths, but in bossy walls and heavy, mound-like heaps and banks. Am made to feel that I am now in a strange land. I know hardly any of the plants, but few of the birds, and I am unable to see the country for the solemn, dark, mysterious cypress woods which cover everything. ~ John Muir

The cherry trees are disconsolate lovers;
they can't hold their pink smiles
after the unkindness of that night.
The wind here is straight from Chicago -
it will snap you unless you bend.
The news from far-off money towns
is the clamor of falling towers.

Yet my woolly dog is happy chasing
a well-chewed stick and a wet spaniel,
a green-headed duck is talking quarks
with a brown-headed duck on the lake shore,
and my friend is reading poems of spring
in a language she knows only in dreams.
The wild cherries will bloom again. ~ Robert Moss

The similarities between who Pocahontas was and who I saw myself as were uncanny. She wore dresses. I wanted to wear dresses. She loved running around in the woods and singing. I loved running around in the woods and singing. She talked to trees. I also talked to trees. ~ Jacob Tobia

They have an army. You, as far as I can tell, have trees... ~ A.J. Smith

Trees are much like human beings and enjoy each other's company. Only a few love to be alone. ~ Jens Jensen

Heaven and God are not high above us, far away; they are deep within us. Heaven is not a distant country where there are trees and houses and other objects; it is a plane of consciousness within us. Seekers of the eternal Truth will realise their eternal Heaven within their aspiring hearts. ~ Sri Chinmoy

I know a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found he was planting trees in his garden. ~ Bertrand Russell

Because earth, grass, trees, walls, tiles, and pebbles in the world of phenomena in the ten directions all engage in buddha activity, those who receive the benefits of the wind and water are inconceivably helped by the buddha's transformation, splendid and unthinkable, and intimately manifest enlightenment.Those who receive these benefits of water and fire widely engage in circulating the buddha's transformation based on original realization. ~ Dogen

She died."
I had to prompt him.
"Soon after?"
"In the early hours of February the nineteenth, 1916." I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark. "There was a typhoid epidemic. She was working in a hospital."
"Poor girl."
"All past. All under the sea."
"You make it seem present."
"I do not wish to make you sad."
"The scent of lilac."
"Old man's sentiment. Forgive me."
There was a silence between us. He was staring into the night. The bat flitted so low that I saw its silhouette for a brief moment against the Milky Way.
"Is this why you never married?"
"The dead live."
The blackness of the trees. I listened for footsteps, but none came. A suspension.
"How do they live?"
And yet again he let the silence come, as if the silence would answer my questions better than he could himself; but just when I had decided he would not answer, he spoke.
"By love. ~ John Fowles

In the trees this afternoon, he was a giver of bread and teddy bears. ~ Markus Zusak

Native trees are so important to our ecosystem. ~ Felix Dennis

Farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins. ~ Malcolm Gladwell