“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)”

“Love is like encountering a forest and having to chop down every tree but one. Oh, and you have to chop down each tree by hugging it until it falls.
”

“Even if one tree falls down it wouldn't affect the entire forest.”

“Lik the tree falling in the forest," says Ira."Huh?""You know, the old question - if a tree falls in a forest and no one's there to hear it, does it really make a sound?" Howie considers this. "Is it a pine forest, or oak?""What's the difference?""Oak is a much denser wood; it's more likely to be heard by someone on the freeway next to the forest where no one is.”

“Who would have ever thought that the best way to save lives was to take one? But then that was what Joe had preached to her from the first day on her job. He even had a name for it. Political pruning. In order to make the tree grow, the dead, diseased, and contaminated limbs had to be removed. If they didn’t fall off on their own, then you had to get the chain saw out and cut them loose. At first she’d been naïve enough to think that she could never be so jaded. But time and missions had finally succeeded in bringing her around to Joe’s way of thinking. (Syd)”

“A person should be buried only half a meter, or two feet, below the surface. Then a tree should be planted there. He should be buried in a coffin that decays so that when you plant a tree on top the tree will take something out of his substance and change it into tree-substance. When you visit the grave you don’t visit a dead man, you visit a living being who was just transformed into a tree. You say, “This is my grandfather, the tree is growing well, fantastic.” You can develop a beautiful forest that will be more beautiful than a normal forest because the trees will have their roots in graves. It will be a park, a place for pleasure, a place to live, even a place to hunt.”