Insects Quotes - Page 8

• And that, my friend, is how the world ends. On the edge of a precipice, with one foot over the edge, it stops, turns and goes back, leaving an empty earth of birds and insects, wind, rain and rusting weapons.

  Jack Finney

  Rain, Wind, Feet

  Jack Finney (2013). “About Time: 12 Short Stories”, p.54, Simon and Schuster

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• For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadow grasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue.

  Edith Wharton

  Sweet, Lying, Blue

  Edith Wharton (2001). “Early Short Fiction”, p.50, Electric Book Company

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• First, I emptied the closets of your clothes, threw out the bowl of fruit, bruised from your touch, left empty the jars you bought for preserves. The next morning, birds rustled the fruit trees, and later when I twisted a ripe fig loose from its stem, I found it half eaten, the other side already rotting, or-like another I plucked and split open-being taken from the inside: a swarm of insects hollowing it. I'm too late, again, another space emptied by loss. Tomorrow, the bowl I have yet to fill.

  Natasha Trethewey

  Morning, Taken, Loss

  Natasha Trethewey (2007). “Native Guard”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• The eye sees the physical body, other individuals, even insects, worms and things. It sees everything that is within its range. The body too is a thing that the eye sees, along with the rest. So, how can we conclude that the body is the I?

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Eye, Body, Individual

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• It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter.

  John Updike

  Mean, Eye, Space

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• People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.

  Charles Bukowski

  Animal, People, Interesting

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “Hollywood”, p.178, Canongate Books

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• A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it -- which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once.

  Mark Twain

  Children, Home, Boys

  Mark Twain (2012). “Adventures of Tom Sawyer Companion”, p.124, BookCaps Study Guides

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• Nile perch are enormous but lethargic fish, easy to catch once they have taken your bait. Some are bright golden yellow, some grey pink with the large, round surprised eyes of all fish, in which we humans cannot read any expression of pain or suffering, so that, as with insects or mollusks, we feel absolved of their deaths.

  Kuki Gallmann

  Pain, Taken, Eye

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• Loud is the summer's busy song
  The smallest breeze can find a tongue,
  While insects of each tiny size
  Grow teasing with their melodies,
  Till noon burns with its blistering breath
  Around, and day lies still as death.

  John Clare

  Summer, Song, Lying

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• Without birds to feed on them, the insects would multiply catastrophically. The insects, not man or other proud species, are really the only ones fitted for survival in the nuclear age. The cockroach, a venerable and hardy species, will take over the habitats of the foolish humans, and compete only with other insects or bacteria.

  H. Bentley Glass

  Science, Men, Bird

  "H. Bentley Glass, Provocative Science Theorist, Dies at 98" by Douglas Martin, www.nytimes.com. January 20, 2005.

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• Complete non-violence is complete absence of ill-will against all that lives. It therefore embraces even sub-human life, not excluding noxious insects and beasts. They have not been created to feed our destructive propensities. If we only knew the mind of the Creator, we should find their proper place in His creation.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Philosophical, Animal, Ill Will

  Mahatma Gandhi (1943). “The Wisdom of Gandhi in His Own Words”

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• If you confine yourself to this Skinnerian technique, you study nothing but the learning apparatus and you leave out everything that is different in octopi, crustaceans, insects and vertebrates. In other words, you leave out everything that makes a pigeon a pigeon, a rat a rat, a man a man, and, above all, a healthy man healthy and a sick man sick.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Learning, Health, Science

  Richard Isadore Evans, Konrad Lorenz (1975). “Konrad Lorenz: The Man and His Ideas”, Harcourt

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• How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of the Earth is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clear and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people.

  Chief Seattle

  Brother, Horse, Memories

  "Flow: For Love of Water". Documentary, www.imdb.com. 2008.

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• Clouds of insects danced and buzzed in the golden autumn light, and the air was full of the piping of the song-birds. Long, glinting dragonflies shot across the path, or hung tremulous with gauzy wings and gleaming bodies.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Song, Autumn, Light

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (2013). “Collected Works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Delphi Classics)”, p.2052, Delphi Classics

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• I love all animals. I have a fascination with fish, birds, whales - sentient life - insects, reptiles.

  Nicolas Cage

  Animal, Whales, Bird

  "Nicolas Cage Only Eats Animals With 'Dignified' Manner in Sex" by celebrity-mania.com, May 19, 2010.

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• Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.

  Terry Pratchett

  Girl, Running, Dog

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• Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.

  Neil Gaiman

  Way, Facts, Bees

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• I craved your warmth. I hugged myself, rubbing my fingers up and down. I guess people are like insects sometimes, drawn to heat, A kind of infra-red longing.

  Lucy Christopher

  People, Red, Heat

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• My grandmother lived in a universe filled with life. It was impossible for her to conceive of any creature - even the smallest insect, let alone a human being - as insignificant. In every leaf, flower, animal, and star she saw an expression of a compassionate universe, whose laws were not competition and survival of the fittest but cooperation, artistry and thrift. . . .

  Eknath Easwaran

  Stars, Flower, Grandmother

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• You cannot speak of ocean to a well-frog, the creature of a narrower sphere. You cannot speak of ice to a summer insect, the creature of a season.

  Zhuangzi

  Summer, Ocean, Ice

  Zhuangzi, Herbert Allen Giles (1909). “Teachings and Sayings of Chuang Tzu”, p.18, Courier Corporation

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• From one point of view we can say that we have human bodies and are practicing the Buddha's teachings and are thus much better than insects. But we can also say that insects are innocent and free from guile, where as we often lie and misrepresent ourselves in devious ways in order to achieve our ends or better ourselves. From this perspective, we are much worse than insects.

  Dalai Lama

  Buddhist, Lying, Teaching

  "Dzogchen: Heart Essence of the Great Perfection" by Dalai Lama, Snow Lion Publications, 2004.

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• ..."Are you okay?" he says, still looking at me, and I feel my smile slip, fade, and the silence that falls over us then is so total I can’t hear anything, not the rush-hiss of my heart pounding in my chest, not the sounds all around us; insects, wind, and the distant clatter of others’ lives in houses built close but not too close because when we look out our windows we all like to pretend that everything we see is ours. But Ryan is not mine.

  Elizabeth Scott

  Fall, Heart, Wind

  Elizabeth Scott (2010). “The Unwritten Rule”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

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• Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn't. It's programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other - deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway.

  Peter Watts

  Circles, Axes, Perfect

  Peter Watts (2014). “Firefall”, p.193, Head of Zeus

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• This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.

  Joseph Conrad

  Butterfly, Men, Littles

  Joseph Conrad (1905). “Lord Jim”, p.198, McClure, Phillips & Company

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• In 1847 I gave an address at Newton, Mass., before a Teachers' Institute conducted by Horace Mann. My subject was grasshoppers. I passed around a large jar of these insects, and made every teacher take one and hold it while I was speaking. If any one dropped the insect, I stopped till he picked it up. This was at that time a great innovation, and excited much laughter and derision. There can be no true progress in the teaching of natural science until such methods become general.

  Louis Agassiz

  Teacher, Laughter, Teaching

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