Starfish Quotes

• Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

  Gail Caldwell

  Heart, Amputation, Endure

  Gail Caldwell (2010). “Let's Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship”, p.163, Random House

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• If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.

  Sylvia Earle

  Ocean, Sea, Sick

  Sylvia A. Earle (1995). “Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans”, Putnam Publishing Group

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• The living ocean drives planetary chemistry, governs climate and weather, and otherwise provides the cornerstone of the life-support system for all creatures on our planet, from deep-sea starfish to desert sagebrush. That's why the ocean matters. If the sea is sick, we'll feel it. If it dies, we die. Our future and the state of the oceans are one.

  Sylvia Earle

  Ocean, Support Systems, Sea

  Sylvia A. Earle (1995). “Sea Change: A Message of the Oceans”, Putnam Publishing Group

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• Maybe a story will cheer you up... Once there was an ugly barnacle. He was so ugly that everyone died. The End.

  Patrick Star

  Cheer, Once Upon A Time, Stories

  "Fictional character: Patrick Star". TV Series "SpongeBob SquarePants" ("Something Smells/Bossy Boots", 2000), www.imdb.com. 1999–.

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• This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
  the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
  stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
  your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
  down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
  the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
  is this a message, finally, or just another day?

  Eleanor Lerman

  Coffee, Night, Eggs

  Eleanor Lerman (2005). “Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds”

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• ... the most important concept ever put forth was that matter, ALL matter, with no exceptions from stone to star to starfish to student to sovereign, is as divine as all else in the cosmos, for all flows from Consciousness, the Word that came before the World - and all, in time, will flow back.

  Ki Longfellow

  Stars, Important, Cosmos

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• I am not an attractive man. These clothes are the only thing holding me together; when I'm nude, my body shoots off in all directions. I'm like a starfish.

  Jeremy Hotz

  Men, Clothes, Together

  "Five Minutes With Jeremy Hotz". Interview with Rick Chandler, deadspin.com. May 2, 2007.

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• That's why I loved being with you. We could do the simplest things, like toss starfish into the ocean and share a burger and talk and even then I knew that I was fortunate. Because you were the first guy who wasn't constantly trying to impress me. You accepted who you were, but more than that, you accepted me for me. And nothing else mattered-- not my family or your family or anyone else in the world. It was just us.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Ocean, Guy, Trying

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• What do you think? I'm not a starfish or a pepper tree. I'm a living, breathing human being. Of course I've been in love.

  Haruki Murakami

  Thinking, Breathing, Tree

  FaceBook post by Haruki Murakami from May 07, 2014

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• But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

  John Updike

  Dark, Hands, Two

  John Updike (2010). “Rabbit, Run”, p.35, Random House

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• Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

  Sylvia Plath

  Jam, Alive, Rivals

  Sylvia Plath (2013). “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: and other prose writings”, p.95, Faber & Faber

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• Are there any mythical beasts which aren't simple pastiches of nature? Centaurs, minotaurs, unicorns, griffons, chimeras, sphinxes, manticores, and the like don't speak well for the human imagination. None is as novel as a kangaroo or starfish.

  William Poundstone

  Simple, Imagination, Kangaroos

  "Labyrinths of Reason: Paradox, Puzzles, and the Frailty of Knowledge". Book by William Poundstone, 1988.

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• Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.

  Janet Fitch

  Rocks, Blue, Sea

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• He loves me, he doesn't love my bowels, if they showed him my appendix in a glass he wouldn't recognize it, he's always feeling me, but if they put the glass in his hands he wouldn't touch it, he wouldn't think, "that's hers," you ought to love all of somebody, the esophagus, the liver, the intestines. Maybe we don't love them because we aren't used to them, but if we saw them the way we saw our hands and arms maybe we'd love them; the starfish must love each other better than we do.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Thinking, Glasses, Hands

  Jean-Paul Sartre (2010). “The Wall: (Intimacy) and Other Stories”, p.56, New Directions Publishing

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• When we think about living donor transplant, what we're banking on is the ability of the liver to regenerate itself. Now, it's not the same sort of regeneration we think about with the starfish where we cut off the arm and it grows a new arm. With the liver, what happens is the remaining liver gets bigger, and your body knows the size of the liver that it needs, and when it recognizes that there is not enough liver, it sends nutrients and signals to the liver and says "get bigger."

  John Roberts

  Cutting, Thinking, Needs

  Source: www.ucsfbenioffchildrens.org

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• Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits.

  H. G. Wells

  Beach, Heart, Men

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• All my friends got dogs and cats for Christmas, and I got a starfish called Roy. I used to take him down to the park on a lead.

  Noel Fielding

  Dog, Cat, Parks

  "The Weird World of Noel Fielding". Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 2, 2016.

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• I don't think any poetry is written that isn't primarily written to the self, in a way... I'm always talking to myself. But I seem to want somebody else to listen to it. I need, I do want an audience. So it's a strange thing. It's a very private conversation that then, you make public, kind of, like, the starfish flipping its stomach out.

  Kay Ryan

  Thinking, Self, Talking

  "ArtWorks" with Jo Reed, www.arts.gov.

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• How fishy on the fishiness scale? Ten is a stickleback and one is a whale shark." "A whale isn't a fish, Thursday." "A whale shark is--sort of." "All right, it's as fishy as a crayfish." "A crayfish isn't a fish." "A starfish, then." "Still not a fish." "This is a very odd conversation, Thursday.

  Jasper Fforde

  Sharks, Whales, Thursday

  Jasper Fforde (2003). “Lost in a Good Book”, Viking Adult

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• People sometimes try to score debating points by saying, Evolution is only a theory. That is correct, but it's important to understand what that means. It is also only a theory that the world goes round the Sun - it's just a theory for which there is an immense amount of evidence. There are many scientific theories that are in doubt. Even within evolution, there is some room for controversy. But that we are cousins of apes and jackals and starfish, let's say, that is a fact in the ordinary sense of the word.

  Richard Dawkins

  Cousin, Mean, People

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• Why haven't we fixed sick yet? You scientists there-- put down those starfish and HELP us. I hereby demand that all the people who are good at math make the world free of illness. The rest of us will write you epic poems and staple them together into a booklet.

  Daniel Handler

  Writing, Math, Epic

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• Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.

  Michele Bachmann

  Real, Cat, Cells

  "Michele Bachmann Said What?!" by Tim Murphy, www.motherjones.com. June 6, 2011.

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