Minnows Quotes

• Freedom for the pike is death for the minnow.

  R. H. Tawney

  53 Copy quote

• Beginnings start without shade,Thinner than minnows.The live grass whirls with the sun,Feet run over the simple stones,There's time enough.Behold, in the lout's eye, love.

  Theodore Roethke

  Running, Eye, Simple

  Theodore Roethke (2011). “The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke”, p.146, Anchor

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• Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.

  Austin O'Malley

  Life, Lakes, Water

  10 Copy quote

• We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.

  Joseph Campbell

  Whales, Fishing, Standing

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.46, Anchor

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• I stayed under the moon too long.I am silvered with lust.Dreams flick like minnows through my eyes.My voice is trees tossing in the wind.I loose myself like a flock of blackbirdsstorming into your face.My lightest touch leaves blue prints,bruises on your mind.Desire sandpapers your skinso thin I read the veins and arteriesmaps of routes I will traveltill I lodge in your spine.The night is our fur.We curl inside it licking.

  Marge Piercy

  Dream, Eye, Moon

  Marge Piercy (2013). “What Are Big Girls Made Of?: Poems”, p.69, Knopf

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• Shall remain! Hear you this Triton of the minnows? Mark you His absolute 'shall'?

  William Shakespeare

  Authority, Mark, Absolutes

  'Coriolanus' (1608) act 3, sc. 1, l. 88

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• The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn't realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself.

  Lewis Thomas

  Writing, Long, Important

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

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• The point of the dragonfly's terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows,is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn'tbut that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world's water and weather, the world's nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.

  Annie Dillard

  Beautiful, Nature, Freedom

  21 Copy quote

• Never attempt to catch a whale with a minnow.

  P. T. Barnum

  Whales, Publicity

  14 Copy quote

• I'm solitary as a pulled tooth, Lonely as an unwelcome truth, Lost as a minnow out of school, A genius in a crop of fools.

  Gail Carson Levine

  Lonely, School, Teeth

  5 Copy quote

• A silence reigns upon the air, Upon the pansies by the shore, Upon the violets, pale and fair, Upon the willow, bending o'er; The reeds and lilies silent grow, The dark green waters silent sleep, Save when the summer breezes blow, Or silvery minnows leap.

  George Arnold

  Summer, Sleep, Dark

  George Arnold (1866). “Drift: A Sea-shore Idyl : and Other Poems”, p.81

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• Simplest of blossoms! To mine eye
  Thou bring'st the summer's painted sky;
  The May-thorn greening in the nook;
  The minnows sporting in the brook;
  The bleat of flocks; the breath of flowers;
  The song of birds amid the bowers;
  The crystal of the azure seas;
  The music of the southern breeze;
  And, over all, the blessed sun,
  Telling of halcyon days begun.

  David Macbeth Moir

  Summer, Song, Flower

  David Macbeth Moir (1852). “The Poetical Works of David Macbeth Moir”, p.149

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• Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.

  Virginia Woolf

  Clouds, Sharks, Hands

  Virginia Woolf (2015). “To the Lighthouse”, p.58, Virginia Woolf

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