1. "So what are we supposed to use for soil - ground up $100 bills?" [From some old soil thread on BNut]
2. "I've killed more world class bonsai than you'll probably ever see." [Some Westerner having trained in Japan]
3. "Show me a great trunk, and I'll show you a great bonsai." [Dan Robinson]
4. " The most important thing to know about deadwood is that nothing else matters." [Dan Robinson]
5. "In some ways, the really high level Japanese trees are pretty monotonous, just the same little stuff over and over and over again. But when you get to the areas where Dan has been and where we've hiked together, and you see these wild trees on ridges where they've struggled to live for hundreds of years, and you see what they look like there, that's what you want to make your bonsai look like. And it's hard to convince people of that if all they ever do is learn their bonsai out of books, and have never walked anywhere other than on a flat plain somewhere." [Larry Jackel, quoted in Gnarly Branches, Ancient Trees]
6. "You know, George, I just love this look - It's tortured, like it's on the verge of death, and yet there's this vibrance that's resurgent here. You get down under the moss, and here's the remnants of ancient wood that these trees are growing on top of. Which means that the previous ancient trees died, moss collected, a seed fell. And now five hundred years later you've got this wonderful ancient tree on top of an even older one. It's so wet here the wood never rots. Covered with moss, it's kept wet, so it's anaerobic. Without oxygen, the submerged old wood doesn't rot. So it's just this primeval, primordial forest, dominated with the demise of things, and yet there's this continual regeneration. And everything is stunted. It's just fabulous, just a great area. And the mosses and the hanging lichen and stuff just speaks of that antiquity, that look that I treasure so in my trees. I don't want any juvenile growth. I want suffering, but with the tree still making it." [My favorite Dan Robinson reverie, which I recorded on a collecting trip together with George Heffelfinger to an Alpine bog on Vancouver Island. The quote is featured in Gnarly Branches, Ancient Trees]