Introduction, paragraph 1 Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.

Introduction, paragraphs 3-4 Even the book as a natural reality is a taproot, with its pivotal spine and surrounding leaves. But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One that becomes two, then of the two that become four.

Introduction, paragraph 5 A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.

Introduction, paragraph 5b A method of the rhizome type, on the contrary, can analyze language only by decentering it onto other dimensions and other registers.

Introduction, paragraph 7 And they fall through the gray matter, the grid, into the undifferentiated... The interplay approximates the pure activity of weavers attributed in myth to the Fates or Norns."3 An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.

Introduction, paragraph 7b There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.

Introduction, paragraph 7c Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialized, organized, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialization down which it constantly flees.

Introduction, paragraph 7d

Evolutionary schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent going from the least to the most differentiated, but instead a rhizome operating immediately in the heterogeneous and jumping from one already differentiated line to another.

You start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions.

Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil's weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later... you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way.

The tree articulates and hierarchizes tracings; tracings are like the leaves of a tree. The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome.

Strike the pose or follow the axis, genetic stage or structural destiny—one way or the other, your rhizome will be broken. You will be allowed to live and speak, but only after every outlet has been obstructed. Once a rhizome has been obstructed, arborified, it's all over, no desire stirs; for it is always by rhizome that desire moves and produces.

Thus, there are very diverse map-tracing, rhizome-root assemblages, with variable coefficients of deterritorialization. There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon into a rhizome.

Neurologists and psychophysiologists distinguish between long-term memory and short-term memory (on the order of a minute). The difference between them is not simply quantitative: short-term memory is of the rhizome or diagram type, and long-term memory is arborescent and centralized (imprint, engram, tracing, or photograph).

In a hierarchical system, an individual has only one active neighbor, his or her hierarchical superior.... The channels of transmission are preestablished: the arborescent system preexists the individual, who is integrated into it at an allotted place.

It is a question of a model that is perpetually in construction or collapsing, and of a process that is perpetually prolonging itself, breaking off and starting up again. No, this is not a new or different dualism... We invoke one dualism only in order to challenge another. We employ a dualism of models only in order to arrive at a process that challenges all models.