Quotes & Sayings About Branching Out

There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door. — Larry Niven

Our lives, I've learned, don't simply proceed nicely and directly from "birth" to "death." Instead, I see each one of us as traveling a most curious and branching-out or circuitous route, one that is creative in ways that are both known and, I'm sure now, unknown. Ah, — Jane Roberts

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost. — Dean Koontz

I listened to Bill Bennett and tons of other talk show hosts who talked about that and other policies and started branching out and caring about other issues in regards to politics. — Jonathan Krohn

Perhaps he had been looking for that branching point in his life where he had stepped down the wrong path. He — Brandon Sanderson

Hugh Everett's work has been described by many people in terms of many worlds, the idea being that every one of the various alternative histories, branching histories, is assigned some sort of reality. — Murray Gell-Mann

I'm fighting a losing battle. I can't tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I'm barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality. — Laurent Binet

Why are you reading that?" Wren had asked when she noticed.
"What?"
"Something without a dragon or an elf on the cover."
"I'm branching out. — Rainbow Rowell

The moose will perhaps one day become extinct; but how naturally then, when it exists only as a fossil relic, and unseen as that, may the poet or sculptor invent a fabulous animal with similar branching and leafy horns, - a sort of fucus or lichen in bone, - to be the inhabitant of such a forest as this! — Henry David Thoreau

After all,'I've been thinking' meant she had previously identified the parameters and analyzed all the branching considerations. — G.S. Jennsen

Not till your thoughts cease all their branching here and there, not till you abandon all thoughts of seeking for something, not till your mind is motionless as wood or stone, will you be on the right road to the Gate. — Huang Po

They forked up in the air for him, like trees branching in the night, and rained down sparks. They roared and whispered with their crackling voices, they had danced when he said the word. The flames here were both tame and mutinous, strange, silent beasts that sometimes bit the hand that fed them. Only occasionally, on cold nights when there was nothing but the flames to stave off his loneliness, did he think he heard them calling to him, but they whispered words he didn't understand. — Cornelia Funke

At last he found the branching stream that flowed down from Blue Valley, and now he was guided by the little stone beaver that climbed the cliff. — James A. Michener

A human being is a life branching out from God — Masahisa Goi

I think, as far as branching out with acting, it would take something really right on the mark to distract me from music, because music is everything to me. — Taylor Swift

Sooner or later the mind grasps at a thought and follows it into the labyrinth, one thought branching into another. Then the labyrinth caves in on itself and you find yourself outside. You were never inside
it was a dream. — Denis Johnson

Well. There was noting to be done for it. Things had happened as they did, time's arrow had yet to be reversed by humans, done was done. If a man spent his life looking over his shoulder at every possible branching of his path he could have taken, he would never accomplish anything. One must learn from history so as not to repeat it, but one must not waste one's energy or time worrying about what might have been. Sorry ... but people die every day and the galaxy continues on quite well without them. Consider yourself lucky you are one of those as yet unselected by the Fates. — Steve Perry

Dr. Margaret Naeser and colleagues from Harvard, MIT, and Boston University, including Harvard professor Michael Hamblin, a world leader in understanding how light therapy works at the cellular level. Hamblin, at Massachusetts General Hospital's Wellman Center for Photomedicine, specializes in the use of light to activate the immune system in treating cancer and cardiac disease; he was now branching out into its use for brain injuries. Building on lab work that applied laser therapy to the top of the head (transcranial laser therapy), the Boston group had studied its use in traumatic brain injury and found laser treatment helpful. Naeser, a research professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, had done studies using lasers for stroke and paralysis and was one of several pioneers using "laser acupuncture" by placing light on acupuncture points. — Norman Doidge

For each of us has a perch on the tree. After we are gone, that perch is marked by a notch, permanent, yes, but with its edges muting over time, assuming the tree is ever growing. Years from now someone can see that you were here, or there, and although you had little conception or care for the wider branching, in the next life there might be a sigh of wonder at how quietly flourishing it all was, if never majestic. — Chang-rae Lee

The skin was warm, blue veins branching like rivers beneath his pale translucent skin. Outside the greater rivers flowed, the Red Fork and the Tumblestone, and they would flow forever, but not so the rivers in her father's hand. Too soon that current would grow still. — George R R Martin

She wanted to leave, she wanted to lie alone face down on her bed and savor the vile piquancy of the moment, and go back down the lines of branching consequences to the point before the destruction began. She needed to contemplate with eyes closed the full richness of what she had lost, what she had given away, and to anticipate the new regime. — Ian McEwan

How can you come to understand your life when even the beginning is so complicated: a single cell imprinted with the color of your eyes and the shape of your face the pattern on your palm and the moods that will shadow you through your life. How can you be alive when every choice you make breaks the world into a thousand filaments each careless step branching into long tributaries of alternate lives shuddering outward and outward like sheet lightning. — Dan Chaon

Yes, our tree has an interesting shape. The center branches reflect the shape of the zero curve. When extreme parts of the tree are reached the branching pattern changes to accommodate the mean reversion. — John Hull

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first ... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars. — Louise Erdrich

While we think of the boundary between what is legal and what is not as a clear dividing line, it is far from being so. Rather, the boundary becomes further and further indented and folded over time, yielding a jagged and complicated border, rather than a clear straight line. In the end, the law turns out to look like a fractal: no matter how much you zoom in on such a shape, there is always more unevenness, more detail to observe. Any general rule must end up dealing with exceptions, which in turn split into further exceptions and rules, yielding an increasingly complicated, branching structure. — Samuel Arbesman

Who you get, and how it works out- there's so much luck involved, as well as the million branching consequences of your conscious choice of a mate, that no one and no amount of talking can untangle it if it turns out unhappily. — Ian McEwan

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I'm starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life's sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it's my own choices that'll lock me in, it seems unavoidable
if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them. — David Foster Wallace

What if heredity, instead of linear, is branching? What if it's not arousal that's so finitely circumscribed? What if in fact there were only like two really distinct individual people walking back there in history's mist? That all difference descends from this difference? The whole and the partial. The damaged and the intact. The deformed and the paralyzingly beautiful. The insane and the attendant. The hidden and the blindingly open. The performer and the audience. No Zen-type one, always rather two, one upside down in a convex lens. — David Foster Wallace

A tree there towere Tall and branching That house upholding The hall's wonder Its leaves their hangings Its limbs rafters Its mighty bole In the midst standing. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I think right now, you've seen these artists pop up over the last decade who've flirted with branching together a lot of different kinds of music. Some of them have been huge, and sold millions of records. And I think over time it's become a little bit of what the industry can be. — Eric Church

Branching is easy. Merging is hard. — Eric Sink

A big heavy phrase is easier to handle if it comes at the end, when your work assembling the overarching phrase is done and nothing else is on you mind. (It's another version of the advice to prefer right-branching trees over left-branching and center-embedded ones.) Light-before-heavy is one of the oldest principles in linguistics, having been discovered in the fourth century BCE by the Sanskrit grammarian Panini. It often guides the intuitions of writers when they have to choose an order for items in a list, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; The Wild, The Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle; and Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound! — Steven Pinker

When we graduate from childhood into adulthood, we're thrown into this confusing, Cthulhu-like miasma of life, filled with social and career problems, all with branching choices and no correct answers. — Felicia Day

I'm thinking of slowing down on modeling and branching out to other things. I want to pursue some new and old dreams and start making them happen. — Chanel Iman

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, Saga University in Japan, and the University of California, Davis, proposed creating an artificial inorganic leaf modeled on the real thing. They took a leaf of Anemone vitifolia, a plant native to China, and injected its veins with titanium dioxide-a well-known industrial photocatalyst. By taking on the precise branching shape and structure of the leaf's veins, the titanium dioxide produced much higher light-harvesting ability than if ti was used in a traditional configuration. The researchers found an astounding 800 percent increase in hydrogen production as well. The total performance was 300 percent more active than the world's best commercial photocatalysts. When they added platinum nanoparticles to the mix, it increased activity by a further 1,000 percent. — Jay Harman

Evolution is a process of constant branching and expansion. — Stephen Jay Gould

We're used to picturing the genealogy of a text like a family tree: one original at the base ascending like a single trunk, with copies branching off it, and copies of copies branching off them. And so on throughout the generations. We imagine an original from which all the generations of diversity spring as scribes make revisions and introduce copying errors. But the reverse seems to be the case when it comes to the origins of the Bible: the further you go back in its literary history, the less uniformity there is. Scriptural traditions are rooted, quite literally, in diversity. — Timothy Beal

Branching paths. The turning of days and seasons and years. Life offered you love sometimes, sorrow often. If you were very fortunate, true friendship. Sometimes war came.
You did what you could to shape your own peace, before you crossed over to the night and left the world behind, as all men did, to be forgotten or remembered, as time or love allowed. — Guy Gavriel Kay

From the book he carefully tears out several maps, and in this light Afghanistan's mountains and hills and restlessly branching corridors of rock appear as though the pages are crumpled up, and there is a momentary wish in him to smooth them down. Laser-guided bombs are falling onto the pages in his hands, missiles summoned from the Arabian Sea, from American warships that are as long as the Empire State Building is tall. — Nadeem Aslam

Terrified at Non Existence, for such they deemd the death of the body, Los his vegetable hands outstretch'd; his right hand branching out in fibrous Strength siez'd the Sun; his left hand like dark roots cover'd the Moon, and tore them down, cracking the heavens across from immense to immense. — William Blake

12. Each symbol, moreover, admits of interpretation upon the different planes, and through its astrological associations can be related to the gods of any pantheon, thus opening up vast new fields of implication in which the mind ranges endlessly, symbol leading on to symbol in an unbroken chain of associations; symbol confirming symbol as the many-branching threads gather themselves together into a synthetic glyph once more, and each symbol capable of interpretation in terms of whatever plane the mind may be functioning upon. 13. This mighty, all-embracing glyph of the soul of man and of the universe, by virtue of its logical association of symbols, evokes images in the mind; but these images are not randomly evolved, but follow along well-defined association-tracks in the Universal Mind. The symbol of the Tree is to the Universal Mind what the dream is to the individual ego; it is a glyph synthesized from subconsciousness to represent the hidden forces. — Dion Fortune

There are two great systems in the body of man: the tree of life, which is the arterial with its roots in the heart; and, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, i.e. the nervous system, which has its roots in the brain. These two "trees" are physical manifestations of a complicated network of branching energy currents in the aura or superphysical bodies. — Manly Hall

A large, branching, aged oak is perhaps the most venerable of all inanimate objects. — William Shenstone

His eyes trace the droplets branching down my chest.
They stop at my waistband.
"Brandon. Cutie."
"Yeah."
"You're still wearing your boxers."
"I am."
"Is there something you need to tell me?"
"No."
"Are you actually a Ken doll?"
"Nope."
"Is your dad a secret superhero and you have a bionic penis and you make up this big religious-paranoia back story because it shoots laser beams and has the strength of a bulldozer?"
"Yes."
"I knew it. — J.C. Lillis

These examples, and those that surround us every day, are why creational thinking, not critical thinking, should be our ultimate goal in education. Critical thinking is a skill that allows us to steer a valuable course through a known problem. It engages a problem-solving skill set but stops short of what is possible. If problem solving and critical thinking are the goals of education, the bar is too low. Creational thinking, the use of content while branching into the unknown, leads to the possibility of truly elegant solutions. That is where the bar needs to be, particularly in light of the challenges that lie ahead for us. — Grant Lichtman

as if a round apple presented itself to my hand, a ripe, golden apple with a soft, cool, velvety skin - thus the world presented itself to me -
as if a tree nodded to me, a wide-branching, strong-willed tree, bent for reclining and as a footstool for the way-weary: thus the world stood upon my headland -
as if tender hands brought me a casket - a casket open for the delight of modest, adoring eyes: thus the world presented himself before me today -
not so enigmatic as to frighten away human love, not so explicit as to put to sleep human wisdom - a good, human thing was the world to me today, this world of which so many evil things are said! — Friedrich Nietzsche

Time and chance. The twin offspring of destiny. That wondrous branching of our fates. — Carol Shields

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress. — Stephen Jay Gould

Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed - chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones. — John Muir

We talk about this and that. There's no rest except on these branching moments. — Rumi

...the Indian boy is the result of a curious convolution of branches in an old chestnut; there are two perfectly formed legs, a long slim body, a small knotted head, and two branching arms... The only drawback is that in order to [see him] you have to be lying in the bath. Unless you are in a prone position, gazing out of one particular window, he refuses to materialize.... Very few other people have seen him. You cannot ask people to come up to the bathroom and lie flat on their backs in order to see the little Indian boy. It would make them gloomy and suspicious, particularly if they were females. 'If you come up and lie down in the bathroom I will show you my little Indian boy....' No. Definitely not. Out. — Beverley Nichols

Your road is everything that a road ought to be ... and yet you will not stay in it half a mile, for the reason that little, seductive, mysterious roads are always branching out from it on either hand, and as these curve sharply also and hide what is beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your own chosen path and explore them. — Mark Twain

According to quantum mechanics, at the Planck scale length, instead of a gradually undulating geometry, there should be wild fluctuations and loops and handles of spacetime branching off, the sort of topography that the futuristic Ike encountered. General relativity cannot be used in such untamed territory. — Lisa Randall

Cedar, and pine, and fir, and branching palm, A sylvan scene, and as the ranks ascend Shade above shade, a woody theatre Of stateliest view. — John Milton

As far as I understand it, and it's impossible not to understand it, you yourself, at the beginning and then again, very eloquently - albeit too theoretically - have been developing a picture of a Russia covered with an endless network of knots. For their part, each of the active groups, by proselytizing and branching out ad infinitum, has the task, through systematic denunciatory propaganda of constantly undermining the authority of the local authorities, creating confusion in the villages, fostering cynicism, scandals and an utter lack of belief in anything at all, a burning desire for something better, and finally, using fires as a measure that appeals primarily to the common people, to throw the country, at a designated moment, if necessary, even into a state of despair. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

And maybe I can let go of the sting and resentment of the path not taken, because the path not taken isn't just the inverse of who I am. It's an infinitely branching system that represents all the permutations of my life... — Blake Crouch

There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, 'What would have happened if...' and substituting one chance occurrence for another, , observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one's life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy even that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a 'thus' and an 'otherwise', with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past. — Vladimir Nabokov

Front-loaded modifiers can be useful in qualifying a sentence, in tying it to information mentioned earlier, or simply in avoiding the monotony of having one right-branching sentence after another. As long as the modifier is short, it poses no difficulty for the reader. But if it starts to get longer it can force a reader to entertain a complicated qualification before she has any idea what it is qualifying. — Steven Pinker

Death Row had a lot of artists. They had Snoop, the Dogg Pound, the Lady of Rage, and there was other artists that was also on the label, so it was a big list and a long wait. I didn't want to wait that long, so I started branching off and doing my own thing. — Warren G

I think branching out is cool, but I think that you have to branch out in a way that makes some sort of organic sense. I would love to put out a rock record eventually, but it would have to somehow philosophically make sense for me. — El-P

Video games as a storytelling medium are, from a mathematical standpoint, a branching narrative. You start at one place, you can go in multiple different directions, and there's a multitude of different endings. — Chris Milk

In the 'Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics,' the trajectory of your life is no longer just one straight path to an eventuality, but is instead one path of many, on an ever-branching tree of possibilities. — Kevin Michel

If someone were to have pressed a sheet of glass down over the top of Alliance, Nebraska, in winter, it would have resembled an ant farm. Everything was a tunnel eaten neatly, carefully into the snow. The tunnel of the streets branching into the narrower tunnels of driveways and carved-out sidewalks. The snow banked over cars, lawn furniture, porches, like frozen animal carcasses stored for future need. — Ann Patchett

The human story is one of continual branching movement, out of Africa to every corner of the globe. When people talk of blood and soil, as if their ancestors sprung fully formed from the earth of a particular place, it involves a kind of forgetting.
(Hari Kunzru) — Carolina De Robertis

Journey's end
In western lands beneath the Sun
The flowers may rise in Spring,
The trees may bud, the waters run,
The merry finches sing.
Or there maybe 'tis cloudless night,
And swaying branches bear
The Elven-stars as jewels white
Amid their branching hair.
Though here at journey's end I lie
In darkness buried deep,
Beyond all towers strong and high,
Beyond all mountains steep,
Above all shadows rides the Sun
And Stars for ever dwell:
I will not say the Day is done,
Nor bid the Stars farewell.J. — J.R.R. Tolkien

Coral is a very beautiful and unusual animal. Each coral head consists of thousand of individual polyps. These polyps are continually budding and branching into genetically identical neighbors. — Antony Garrett Lisi

The vigorous branching of life's tree, and not the accumulating valor of mythical marches to progress, lies behind the persistence and expansion of organic diversity in our tough and constantly stressful world. And if we do not grasp the fundamental nature of branching as the key to life's passage across the geological stage, we will never understand evolution aright. — Stephen Jay Gould

They said that President Bush's war in Iraq has cost the former Spanish Prime Minister his job. So President Bush isn't losing American jobs anymore, he's branching out to other countries. — Jay Leno

Above us, the wind blew and the branching shadows rearranged themselves on our skin. Gus squeezed my hand. It is a good life, Hazel Grace. — John Green

There was rarely an obvious branching point in a person's life. People changed slowly, over time. You didn't take on step, then find yourself in a completely new location. You first took a little step off a path to avoid some rocks. For a while, you walked alongside the path, but then you wandered out a little way to step on softer soil. Then you stopped paying attention as you drifted farther and farther away. Finally, you found yourself in the wrong city, wondering why the signs on the roadway hadn't led you better. — Brandon Sanderson