Topmost Quotes

“I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: "Go down again - I dwell among the people.”

“I sought to hear the voice of God and climbed the topmost steeple, but God declared: "Go down again - I dwell among the people.”

“When trees fall on trees, the topmost tree must first be removed before others. Don't be too concerned about the problems of the past. What matters most is the challenge at hand now!”

“The one red leaf, the last of its clan,That dances as often as dance it can,Hanging so light, and hanging so high,On the topmost twig that looks up at the sky.”

“Yes, Harry Potter!” said Dobby at once, his great eyes shining with excitement. “And if Dobby does it wrong, Dobby will throw himself off the topmost tower, Harry Potter!”“There won’t be any need for that,” said Harry hastily.”

“Two TreesA portion of your soul has beenentwined with mineA gentle kind of togetherness, whileseparately we stand.As two trees deeply rooted inseparate plots of ground,While their topmost branchescome together,Forming a miracle of laceagainst the heavens.”

“One can’t be on the topmost rung of a ladder from before, it takes time to reach it, to climb it, one at a time. We struggle so that in this process of climbing we can learn, so that we can limit our impatience and grow stronger than we ever imagined to be.We struggle so that once we learn, we can preach about it to others who consider this act of struggling, spiteful.”

“Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.”

“One afternoon as I just gazed at the topmost branches of those immensely tall trees I began to notice that the uppermost twigs and leaves were lyrical happy dancers glad that they had been apportioned the top, with all that rumbling experience of the whole tree swaying beneath them making their dance, their every jiggle, a huge and communal and mysterious necessity dance, and so just floating up there in the void dancing the meaning of the tree.”

“A full moon, although less splendid than that earlier on,lit everything around. Before I reached the point where I would have to leave the road and set off across country, the narrow path I was following seemed suddenly to end and disappear behind a large hedge, and there before me, as if blocking my way, stood a single, tall tree, very dark at first against the transparently clear night sky. Out of nowhere, a breeze got up. It set the tender stems of the grasses shivering, made the green blades of the reeds shudder and sent a ripple across the brown waters of a puddle. Like a wave, it lifted up the spreading branches of the tree and, murmuring, climbed the trunk, and then, suddenly, the leaves turned their undersides to the moon and the whole beech tree (because it was a beech) was covered in white as far as the topmost branch.It was only a moment, no more than that, but the memory of it will last as long as my life lasts.”

“The part of thinking that’s easy to handle is the part that works by analogy with speech. Thinking in words, speaking our thoughts internally, projects an auditorium inside our skulls. Dark or bright, a shadow theater or a stage scorched by klieg lights, here we try out voices, including the voice we have settled on as the familiar sound of our identity, although it may not be what other people hear when we speak aloud. But that is the topmost of the linguistic processes going on in the mind. Beneath the auditorium runs a continuous river of thought that not only is soundless but is not ordered so it can be spoken. For obvious reasons, describing it is difficult. If I dip experimentally into the wordless flow, and then try to recall the sensations of it, I have the impression of a state in which grammar is present – for when I think like this I am certainly construing lucid relationships between different kinds of meaning, and making sense of the world by distinguishing between (for a start) objects and actions – but thought there are so to speak nounlike and verblike concentrations in the flow, I do not solidify them, I do not break them off into word-sized units. Are there pictures? Yes, but I am not watching a slide show, the images do not come in units either. Sometimes there’s a visual turbulence – rapid, tumbling, propelled – that doesn’t resolve into anything like the outlines of separate images. Sometimes one image, like a key, will hold steady while a whole train of wordless thoughts flows from its start to its finish. A mountain. A closed box. A rusty hinge.”