“They took all the trees
And put them in a tree museum
And they charged all the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em.”
"Big Yellow Taxi"
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Joni Mitchell 44
Canadian musician 1943Related quotes

"Song of the Open Road" — this poem is a parody of "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer
Many Long Years Ago (1945)

“I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy them then.”

Source: No One Belongs Here More Than You

Source: 1900s, Our National Parks (1901), chapter 10: The American Forests

Emperor Has No Clothes Award acceptance speech (2003)
Context: Schizophrenics have a whole lot of trouble telling the level of abstraction of a story. They're always biased in the direction of interpreting things more concretely than is actually the case. You would take a schizopohrenic and say, "Okay, what do apples, bananas and oranges have in common?" and they would say, "They all are multi-syllabic words."
You say "Well, that's true. Do they have anything else in common?" and they say, "Yes, they actually all contain letters that form closed loops."
This is not seeing the trees instead of the forest, this is seeing the bark on the trees, this very concreteness.

“These I see,
Blazing through all eternity,
A fire-winged sign, a glorious tree!”
Young Adventure (1918), The Quality of Courage
Context: It is not given me to trace
The lovely laughter of that face,
Like a clear brook most full of light,
Or olives swaying on a height,
So silver they have wings, almost;
Like a great word once known and lost
And meaning all things. Nor her voice
A happy sound where larks rejoice,
Her body, that great loveliness,
The tender fashion of her dress,
I may not paint them.
These I see,
Blazing through all eternity,
A fire-winged sign, a glorious tree!

Source: The Good Body