Fins Quotes

• Organic life beneath the shoreless waves
  Was born and rais’d in Ocean’s pearly caves
  First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
  Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
  These, as successive generations bloom,
  New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
  Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
  And breathing realms of fin, and feet and wing.

  Erasmus Darwin

  Spring, Ocean, Moving

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• Xenophobia looks like becoming the mass ideology of the 20th-century fin-de-siecle.

  Eric Hobsbawm

  Xenophobia, Looks, Becoming

  "Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict". Book edited by Tim Allen and John Eade (p. 41), June 30, 1999.

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• The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal.

  William H. Gass

  Book, Tails, Gone

  "Habitations of the Word: Essays". Book by William H. Gass, www.nytimes.com. 1984.

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• My set comes with a smaller fin in the back, i find this helps me release off the top a lot easier

  Julian Wilson

  Helping, Help Me, Easier

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• There's a great metaphor that one of my doctors uses: If a fish is swimming in a dirty tank and it gets sick, do you take it to the vet and amputate the fin? No, you clean the water. So, I cleaned up my system. By eating organic raw greens, nuts and healthy fats, I am flooding my body with enzymes, vitamins and oxygen.

  Kris Carr

  Dirty, Swimming, Doctors

  "Crazy, sexy...cancer?". Glamour Interview, www.glamour.com. July 31, 2007.

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• I am really a sea creature. Just a mammal that lost its fins.

  Kathleen Quinlan

  Sea, Mammals, Lost

  Biography/Personal Quotes, www.imdb.com.

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• The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn't have eyeballs or fins.

  Dave Barry

  Trust, Food, Lakes

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• Our plenteous streams a various race supply, The bright-eyed perch with fins of Tyrian dye, The silver eel, in shining volumes roll'd, The yellow carp, in scales bedropp'd with gold, Swift trouts, diversified with crimson stains, And pikes, the tyrants of the wat'ry plains.

  Alexander Pope

  Yellow, Lakes, Race

  Alexander Pope (2008). “The Poetical Works of Alexander Pope Volume I: Easyread Super Large 18pt Edition”, p.128, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water... If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirit.

  Constantin Brancusi

  Art, Eye, Thinking

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• We must keep these waters for wild rice, these trees for maple syrup, our lakes for fish, and our land and aquifers for all of our relatives - whether they have fins, roots, wings, or paws.

  Winona LaDuke

  Lakes, Aquifers, Land

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• Sharks are being driven to extinction because people want to eat their fins and their flesh.

  Barbara Block

  Sharks, People, Flesh

  "Barbara Block: Use apps to save the great white shark". Interview with Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. November 17, 2012.

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• This self now as I leant over the gate looking down over fields rolling in waves of colour beneath me made no answer. He threw up no opposition. He attempted no phrase. His fist did not form. I waited. I listened. Nothing came, nothing. I cried then with a sudden conviction of complete desertion. Now there is nothing. No fin breaks the waste of this immeasurable sea. Life has destroyed me. No echo comes when I speak, no varied words. This is more truly death than the death of friends, than the death of youth.

  Virginia Woolf

  Echoes, Self, Sea

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1446, Delphi Classics

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• We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a ‘higher answer’– but none exists

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Atheist, Years, Ice

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• We've fallen into a fin-de-siecle period of crisis in which people believe only the things they see right in front of them

  Mariko Mori

  Believe, People, Periods

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• I had spent the whole of my savings ... on a suit for the wedding - a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn't see my legs move.

  Bill Bryson

  Fashion, Moving, Pieces

  Bill Bryson (1991). “Neither here nor there: travels in Europe”, Harvill Secker

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• Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between.

  Carl Sandburg

  Rocks, Wings, Fossils

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.318, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments - negative affections. In this nihilist fin de siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed, he is laughing, he is here. It's your sadness, idiot, he'd say.

  Jean-Francois Lyotard

  Disappointment, Sadness, Past

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• When a trout rises to a fly, it does not swim as much as tilt its fins and jet skyward.

  Joseph Monninger

  Swim, Trout, Doe

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• Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

  John Lahr

  Dream, Car, Age

  "Turf Wars". www.newyorker.com. March 30, 2009.

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• The best thing about Ikea - I'm going to do a quiz here - the names. Do you know what a Floria Fin (ph) is? It's a candle. A Pogestra (ph) - table. A Bar Grick (ph) is a plate, an Eterleeg (ph) is a wine glass and a Scuggle (ph) is the name of my third nipple.

  Greg Gutfeld

  Wine, Names, Ikea

  Source: www.foxnews.com

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• Toda idea, al fin y al cabo, es una idea demencial.

  Thomas Bernhard

  Ideas, Cabo, Als

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• I'm trying to paint an underwater ocean scene. It's just not working. My queen angelfish is supposed to have these bright yellow eyes and electric-blue stripes along the edge of her fin. Instead, it looks like I'm trying to paint a fried egg with some blue bacon. Maybe I can pass it off as postmodern.

  Susane Colasanti

  Queens, Ocean, Eye

  Susane Colasanti (2010). “Something Like Fate”, p.54, Penguin

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• The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.

  Robert Hughes

  Strong, Ego, Mind

  Robert Hughes (2015). “The Spectacle of Skill: New and Selected Writings of Robert Hughes”, p.84, Vintage

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• Professor Galbraith is horrified by the number of Americans who have bought cars with tail fins on them, and I am horrified by the number of Americans who take seriously the proposals of Mr. Galbraith.

  William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Money, Numbers, Car

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• It is the beginning of the end.
  [Fr., C'est le commencement de al fin.]

  Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

  Als, Ends, Commencement

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