Whales Quotes - Page 11

Anyhow, there simply isnt enough room in the museums Fishes Hall, so weve decided to pretend to the public that a whale is actually a mammal without any legs. Its pathetically ridiculous-I mean to say, just look at the thing, its a gigantic fish if I ever saw one-but mums the word! In my experience the public will believe just about anything, so long as you write it down on a little piece of card.

Gideon Defoe

Believe, Mean, Writing

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So, too, if, to our surprise, we should meet one of these morons whose remarks are so conspicuous a part of the folklore of the world of the radio--remarks made without using either the tongue or the brain, spouted much like the spoutings of small whales--we should recognize him as below the level of nature but not as below the level of the imagination.

Wallace Stevens

Imagination, Brain, World

Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.74, Vintage

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Most people, when they imagine New England, think about old colonial homes, white houses with black shutters, whales, and sexually morbid WASPs with sensible vehicles and polite political opinions. This is incorrect. If you want to get New England right, just imagine a giant mullet in paint-stained pants and a Red Sox hat being pushed into the back of a cruiser after a bar fight.

Matt Taibbi

Home, Fighting, Thinking

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But I'll never see any of those fish," said Maxie."Or those whales. Or any lions or tigers. I'm never going to set foot in a rain forest now, am I? I won't even be able to watch old DVD's about them without electricity. What does the future hold? It's like going back to the middle ages. Nobody knowing what was going on beyond their front doorstep. All I'll ever know is this. This little bit of London.

Charlie Higson

Rain, Knowing, Dvds

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A large section of the idling classes of England get their incomes by believing that Jesus was born of a virgin and that Jonah swallowed a whale; and with the progress of science they were naturally finding this more and more difficult. A school of ingenious Bible-twisters arose, to invent symbolical and literary meanings for fairy tales, in order that people who no longer believed could continue with good conscience to collect the salaries of belief.

Upton Sinclair

Jesus, Believe, School

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Tobias asked. "Weird? Weird?" Marco crowed. "The talking bird wants to know if getting information on the location of an alien from a whale, that you've just saved from sharks, by turning into dolphins . . . You're suggesting that's weird?

Katherine Applegate

Sharks, Talking, Bird

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You ought to try eating raw oysters in a restaurant with every eye focused upon you - it makes you feel as if the creatures were whales, your fork a derrick and your mouth Mammouth Cave.

Lillian Russell

Eye, Oysters, Trying

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He: "Whale you be my valentine?" She: "Dolphinitely.

Adam Young

Valentine, Be My Valentine, Wordplay

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Culture, which by definition serves no purpose, has now found a role as the consort of business. Right off the bat we have a beached whale, since there is nothing that disdains culture as much as business does. ... In fact, 'corporate culture' is nothing more than the crystallization of the stupidity of a group of people at a given moment.

Corinne Maier

Business, People, Stupidity

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All killer whales are named Kevin. You knew that, right?

Christopher Moore

Killer Whales, Kevin, Killers

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To have a huge, friendly whale willingly approach your boat and look you straight in the eye is without doubt one of the most extraordinary experiences on the planet.

Mark Carwardine

Eye, Doubt, Friendly

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We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

John Adams

Religious, Revenge, Passion

John Adams (1854). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.229

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When that happens [the demise of golf], old men will furtively beckon to their sons and, like fugitives from the guillotine recalling the elegant orgies at the court of Louis XV, will recite the glories of Portmarnock and Merion, of the Road Hole at St. Andrews, the sixth at Seminole, the eighteenth at Pebble Beach. They will take out this volume from its secret hiding place and they will say: "There is no question, son, that these were unholy places in an evil age. Unfortunately, I had a whale of a time."

Alistair Cooke

Beach, Son, Golf

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I'm not someone who can lie on a beach and do nothing. I am not sure what you are supposed to do, so I get bored. I prefer to have a purpose, such as going to Alaska to see orca whales.

Miranda Richardson

Beach, Lying, Alaska

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America loves the representation of its heroes to be not just larger than life, but stupendously, awesomely bigger than anything else. If blue whales built statues to each other they'd be smaller then these.

Simon Hoggart

Hero, Blue, America

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Women are the fulfilled sex. Through our children we are able to produce our own immortality, so we lack that divine restlessness which sends men charging off in pursuit of fortune or fame or an imagined Utopia. That is why we number so few geniuses among us. The wholesome oyster wears no pearl, the healthy whale no ambergris, and as long as we can keep on adding to the race, we harbor a sort of health within ourselves.

Phyllis McGinley

Sex, Children, Women

Phyllis McGinley (1962). “The province of the heart”

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What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.

Annie Dillard

Differences, Blue, Trying

Annie Dillard (2016). “Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters”, p.66, Canongate Books

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I like people. I like animals, too-whales and quail, dinosaurs and dodos. But I like human beings especially, and I am unhappy that the pool of human germ plasm, which determines the nature of the human race, is deteriorating.

Linus Pauling

Science, Animal, Race

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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This isn't a hunt that's going to kill just four or five gray whales. The repercussions of this will have an effect on tens of thousands of whales that will be killed by the Japanese and Norwegians.

Paul Watson

Animal, Four, Gray

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If you lose touch with nature you lose touch with humanity. If there's no relationship with nature then you become a killer; then you kill baby seals, whales, dolphins, and man either for gain, for "sport," for food, or for knowledge. Then nature is frightened of you, withdrawing its beauty. You may take long walks in the woods or camp in lovely places but you are a killer and so lose their friendship. You probably are not related to anything to your wife or your husband.

Jiddu Krishnamurti

Love, Life, Sports

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Spain: A whale stranded upon the coast of Europe.

Edmund Burke

Europe, Spain, Coast

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Now that I finally have the time for it, this web surfing stuff turns out to be as interesting and fun and addictive as you've all been telling me. Zipping from link to link, chasing an idea across the noosphere, sucking up information like a killer whale - way cool.

Spider Robinson

Fun, Ideas, Interesting

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Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan hillsides, when folk in Norway and Tasmania in dead of winter could dream of fresh strawberries, dates, guavas and passion fruits and find them spread next morning on their tables, there was a woman who was largely irrelevant, and therefore happy.

A. S. Byatt

Dream, Song, Morning

FaceBook post by A.S. Byatt from Aug 27, 2011

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Eventually man, too, found his way back to the sea. Standing on its shores, he must have looked out upon it with wonder and curiosity, compounded with an unconscious recognition of his lineage. He could not physically re-enter the ocean as the seals and whales had done. But over the centuries, with all the skill and ingenuity and reasoning powers of his mind, he has sought to explore and investigate even its most remote parts, so that he might re-enter it mentally and imaginatively.

Rachel Carson

Ocean, Men, Sea

Rachel Carson (2011). “The Sea Around Us”, p.19, Open Road Media

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Seeing the whales off James Price Point, mothers, babies, bull whales, seeing the count, going up into the thousands of these whales, the assurance that they will be ok with a mega port, mega ships and a huge factory ashore, is now clearly proven wrong.

Bob Brown

Mother, Baby, Bulls

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