Insects Quotes - Page 10

• Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.

  David Suzuki

  Garden, Years, Community

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• We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.

  Lewis Thomas

  Party, Dna, Sea

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

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• Perceive ye not that we are worms, designed To form the angelic butterfly, that goes To judgment, leaving all defence behind? Why doth your mind take such exalted pose, Since ye, disabled, are as insects, mean As worm which never transformation knows?

  Dante Alighieri

  Butterfly, Mean, Leaving

  Dante Alighieri, Charles Hall Grandgent (1947). “The Portable Dante: The Divine Comedy, Complete”

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• My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Book, Smell, Should

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2011). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.304, Penguin

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• Time is rhythm: the insect rhythm of a warm humid night, brain ripple, breathing, the drum in my temple—these are our faithful timekeepers; and reason corrects the feverish beat.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Night, Breathing, Faithful

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1969). “Ada: or, Ardor, a family chronicle”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• What gives a wriggle And makes you giggle When you eat'em? Whose weensy little feet Make my heart really beat? Why, it's those little creepy crawlies That make me feel so jolly. For the darling centipede My favorite buggy feed I always want some more. That's the insect I adore More than beetles, more than crickets, Which at times gives me the hiccups. I crave only to feed On a juicy centipede And I shall be happy forevermore." -Soren

  Kathryn Lasky

  Heart, Feet, Giving

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• Squatting on old bones and excrement and rusty iron, in a white blaze of heat, a panorama of naked idiots stretches to the horizon. Complete silence - their speech centres are destroyed - except for the crackle of sparks and the popping of singed flesh as they apply electrodes up and down the spine. White smoke of burning flesh hangs in the motionless air. A group of children have tied an idiot to a post with barbed wire and built a fire between his legs and stand watching with bestial curiosity as the flames lick his thighs. His flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony.

  William S. Burroughs

  Children, Air, Flames

  "Naked Lunch". Book by William S. Burroughs, 1959.

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• Looking a dead insect in the sack of basmati that had come all the way from Dehra Dun, he almost wept with sorrow and marvel at its journey, which was tenderness for his own journey. In India almost nobody would be able to afford this rice, and you had to travel around the world to be able to eat such things where they were cheap enough that you could gobble them down without being rich; and when you got home to the place where they grew, you couldn't afford them anymore.

  Kiran Desai

  Home, Journey, Sorrow

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• Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth. Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.

  Justin Cronin

  Rain, Men, Light

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• The poor dog, in life the firmest friend, The first to welcome, foremost to defend, Whose honest heart is still the master's own, Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone, Unhonour'd falls, unnoticed all his worth, Denied in heaven the soul he held on earth, While man, vain insect hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

  Lord Byron

  Dog, Fall, Heart

  George Gordon Byron, “Epitaph To A Dog”

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• Ben: "Gorog's no assassin! She's my best friend." Mara: "She's an insect, Ben." Ben: "So? Your best friend's a lizard." Mara: "Don't be ridiculous. Aunt Leia is my best friend." Ben: "Doesn't count. She's family. Saba is a lizard." Mara: "Okay, maybe my best friend's a lizard.

  Troy Denning

  Aunt, My Best Friend, Assassins

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• You were just a boy on a bed in a room, like a kaleidoscope is a tube full of bits of broken glass. But the way I saw you was pieces refracting the light, shifting into an infinite universe of flowers and rainbows and insects and planets, magical dividing cells, pictures no one else knew.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Flower, Boys, Light

  Francesca Lia Block (2009). “Wasteland”, p.6, Harper Collins

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• ...If there's a noise in the woods, and there's nobody around to hear it, is it really a noise?" "Of course it is," she replied calmly. "How did you reach that conclusion?" Beldin demanded. "Because there's no such thing as an empty place, uncle. There are always creatures around --wild animals, mice, insects, birds --and they can all hear." "But what if there weren't? What if the woods are truly empty?" "Why waste your time talking about an impossibility?

  David Eddings

  Uncles, Animal, Talking

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• Of all the systems of the body - neurological, cognitive, special, sensory - the cardiological system is the most sensitive and easily disturbed. The role of society must be to shelter these systems from infection and decay, or else the future of the human race is at stake. Like a summer fruit that is protected from insect invasion, bruising, and rot by the whole mechanism of modern farming; so must we protect the heart.

  Lauren Oliver

  Summer, Heart, Race

  Lauren Oliver (2014). “Delirium: The Complete Collection: Delirium, Hana, Pandemonium, Annabel, Raven, Requiem”, p.47, Harper Collins

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• I tell you solemnly, that I have many times tried to become an insect. But I was not equal even to that. I swear, gentlemen, that to be too conscious is an illness — a real thorough-going illness.

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Real, Gentleman, Illness

  "White Nights and Other Stories".

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• No one knows, incidentally, why Australia's spiders are so extravagantly toxic; capturing small insects and injecting them with enough poison to drop a horse would appear to be the most literal case of overkill. Still, it does mean that everyone gives them lots of space.

  Bill Bryson

  Horse, Mean, Australia

  Bill Bryson (2001). “In a Sunburned Country”, Broadway

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• By the River Piedra I sat down and wept. There is a legend that everything that falls into the waters of this river -- leaves, insects, the feathers of birds -- is transformed into the rocks that make the riverbed. If only I could tear out my heart and hurl it into the current, then my pain and longing would be over, and I could finally forget.

  Paulo Coelho

  Pain, Fall, Heart

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• I brought the birdcages to the windows. I opened the windows, and opened the birdcages. I poured the fish down the drain. I took the dogs and cats downstairs and removed their collars. I released the insects onto the street. And the reptiles. And the mice. I told them, Go. All of you. Go. And they went. And they didn’t come back

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Dog, Cat, Reptiles

  Jonathan Safran Foer (2013). “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: A Novel”, p.185, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I had that trapped feeling, like some sort of a poor insect that you've put inside a downturned glass, and it tries to climb up the sides, and it can't, and it can't, and it can't.

  Cornell Woolrich

  Glasses, Feelings, Trying

  Cornell Woolrich, Mark T. Bassett (1991). “Blues of a Lifetime: Autobiography of Cornell Woolrich”, p.16, Popular Press

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• A stray fact: insects are not drawn to candle flames, they are drawn to the light on the far side of the flame, they go into the flame and sizzle to nothingness because they're so eager to get to the light on the other side.

  Michael Cunningham

  Light, Flames, Facts

  Michael Cunningham (2010). “By Nightfall: A Novel”, p.207, Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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• I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

  Mary Oliver

  Morning, Stars, Dark

  Mary Oliver (2017). “Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver”, p.368, Penguin

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• In his eyes shone the reflection of the most beautiful planet in the Universe---a planet that is not too hot and not too cold; that has liquid water on the surface and where the gravity is just right for human beings and the atmosphere is perfect for them to breathe; where there are mountains and deserts and oceans and islands and forests and trees and birds and plants and animals and insects and people---lots and lots of people. Where there is life. Some of it, possibly, intelligent.

  Stephen Hawking

  Beautiful, Ocean, Eye

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• It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.

  Rachel Carson

  Men, Thinking, Choices

  Rachel Carson (2002). “Silent Spring”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• She was afraid of all that and so much more, but what terrified her most was inside of her, an insect of unnatural intelligence who’d been living in her brain her entire life, playing with it, clicking across it, wrenching loose its cables on a whim.

  Dennis Lehane

  Brain, Whim, Terrified

  Dennis Lehane (2010). “Shutter Island”, p.221, Hachette UK

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• Angels are just pretty insects.

  Christopher Moore

  Angel

  Christopher Moore (2009). “Lamb: A Novel”, p.75, Hachette UK

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