Tamarisk Quotes & Sayings

Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others' homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but "naturalized." This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Eradication of this unquenchable shrub [tamarisk] will save water, lower salinity levels and create a more congenial habitat for the Southwest Willow Flycatcher and a number of other riparian species. — Wayne Allard

Jews show so near an affinity to you ... Where is your Christianity if you do not believe in their Judaism? — Benjamin Disraeli

In this state, drugged by the rainy dusk, she almost always returned with sensual closeness to seaside childhood; once more she felt her heels in the pudding-softness of the hot tarred esplanade or her bare arm up to the elbow in rain-wet tamarisk. She smelt the shingle and heard it being sucked by the sea. — Elizabeth Bowen

I know gay parents, and I support them and their families. They are good parents and loving families. — Juan Pablo Galavis

Real improvement in our schools is not simply a matter of spending more, it is a matter of expecting more. — George H. W. Bush

But artists aren't the only marginalized folks controlling real estate. Think about the colonizing role that wealthy white gay men have played in communities of color; they're often the first group to gentrify poor and working-class neighborhoods. Harlem is a good example. Gays have moved in and driven up rents, as have renegade young white students, who want to be cool and hip. This is colonization, post-colonial-style. After all, the people who are "sent back" to recover the territory are always those who don't mind associating with the colored people! And it's a double bind, because some of these people could be allies. Some gay white men are proactive about racism, even while being entrepreneurial. But in the end, they take spaces, redo them, sell them for a certain amount of money, while the people who have been there are displaced. And in some cases, the people of color who are there are perceived as enemies by white newcomers. — Bell Hooks

I heard a computer scientist the other day refer to playing with the Kinect as 'storytelling.' At first I thought that sounded a little high-minded, but after trying a few games I could see what she meant. — Susan Orlean

You will be what you will to be; Let failure find its false content In that poor word "environment," But spirit scorns it, and is free. It masters time, it conquers space; It cows that boastful trickster, Chance, And bids the tyrant Circumstance, Uncrown, and fill a servant's place. The human Will, that force unseen, The offspring of a deathless Soul, Can hew a way to any goal, Though walls of granite intervene. Be not impatient in delay, But wait as one who understands; When spirit rises and commands, The gods are ready to obey. — Robert T. Kiyosaki

I call it people-to-people politics and that's what politics should be about, reaching out and helping one another and touching one another about what we're going to do. — Sonny Perdue

Health is when it hurts in a new place every day. — Faina Ranevskaya