Swarms Quotes - Page 4

• There is more ado to interpret interpretations than to interpret things, and more books upon books than upon any other subject; we do nothing but comment upon one another. Every place swarms with commentaries; of authors there is great scarcity.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Book, Scarcity, Interpretation

  Michel de Montaigne (2015). “Montaigne's Essays: Top Essays”, p.1093, 谷月社

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• I see what I want of Love... I see horses making the meadow dance, fifty guitars sighing, and a swarm of bees suckling the wild berries, and I close my eyes until I see our shadow behind this dispossessed place... I see what I want of people: their desire to long for anything, their lateness in getting to work and their hurry to return to their folk... and their need to say: Good Morning.

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Morning, Horse, Eye

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• In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Kids, Writing, Mean

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• Don't buy society’s definition of success. Because it’s not working for anyone. It’s not working for women, it's not working for men, it's not working for polar bears, it's not working for the cicadas that are apparently about to emerge and swarm us. It’s only truly working for those who make pharmaceuticals for stress, sleeplessness and high blood pressure.

  Arianna Huffington

  Graduation, Stress, Heart

  Arianna Huffington's Commencement Address at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, www.smith.edu. May 19, 2013.

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• Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Hope, Clay, Cold

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1853). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete in One Volume”, p.575

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• I ran. A grown man running with a swarm of screaming children. But i didn't care. I ran with the wind blowing in my face, and a smile as wide as the Valley of Panjsher on my lip. I ran

  Khaled Hosseini

  Running, Children, Men

  Khaled Hosseini (2011). “The Kite Runner: Rejacketed”, p.324, A&C Black

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• However, as words become particularized, and as men begin - in however small a way - to use them in personal, arbitrary ways, so their transformation into art begins. It was words of this kind that, descending on me like a swarm of winged insects, seized on my individuality and sought to shut me up within it. Nevertheless, despite the enemy's depredations upon my person, I turned their universality - at once a weapon and a weakness - back on them, and to some extent succeeded in using words to universalize to my own individuality.

  Yukio Mishima

  Art, Men, Individuality

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• We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.

  Witold Gombrowicz

  Dog, Cat, Army

  Witold Gombrowicz (2011). “Cosmos: A Novel”, p.104, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who were disputing honestly.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Voice, Drones, Flew

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series): Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Resurrection, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, The Cossacks, The Death of Ivan Ilyich... (Including Biographies of the Author)”, p.2671, e-artnow

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• I wish that strife would vanish away from among gods and mortals, and gall, which makes a man grow angry for all his great mind, that gall of anger that swarms like smoke inside of a man's heart and becomes a thing sweeter to him by far than the dripping of honey.

  Homer

  Heart, Men, Mind

  Homer (2011). “The Iliad of Homer”, p.402, University of Chicago Press

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• I hate the endless admonishments of a nanny state that lives in fear of its lawyers. While colonies of dim-witted traffic wardens swarm about looking for minor parking infringements, nobody seems to notice that our very social fabric is falling apart.

  Christopher Fowler

  Hate, Fall, Fabric

  Christopher Fowler (2010). “The Victoria Vanishes: (Bryant and May Book 6)”, p.248, Random House

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• Chasing an errant swarm of bees is nothing to following a naked lunatic when the fit of escaping is upon him!

  Bram Stoker

  Escaping, Naked, Bees

  Bram Stoker (2016). “Dracula”, p.88, Zillmann Publishing

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• What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.

  Charles Baudelaire

  Eye, Cities, Monsters

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• 2 p.m. beer nothing matters but flopping on a mattress with cheap dreams and a beer as the leaves die and the horses die and the landladies stare in the halls; brisk the music of pulled shades, a last man's cave in an eternity of swarm and explosion; nothing but the dripping sink, the empty bottle, euphoria, youth fenced in, stabbed and shaven, taught words propped up to die.

  Charles Bukowski

  Dream, Horse, Beer

  Charles Bukowski (2009). “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame”, p.26, Harper Collins

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• Hosts of merchants encumber the cities, and the streets are cluttered with solicitors who swarm without limit or purpose.

  Charles Fourier

  Cities, Purpose, Limits

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• If the world goes crazy for a lovely fossil, that's fine with me. But if that fossil releases some kind of mysterious brain ray that makes people say crazy things and write lazy articles, a serious swarm of flies ends up in my ointment.

  Carl Zimmer

  Crazy, Writing, People

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• The firing on that fort will inaugurate a civil war greater than any the world has yet seen…you will lose us every friend at the North. You will wantonly strike a hornet's nest which extends from mountains to ocean. Legions now quiet will swarm out and sting us to death. It is unnecessary. It puts us in the wrong. It is fatal.

  Robert Toombs

  War, Ocean, Mountain

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• ...[We] must stop these swarms of Jews who are trading, bartering and robbing.

  William Tecumseh Sherman

  Robbing, Bartering, Trading

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• Henceforth the cosmos, once a swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even from the innermost ring of lifeless planets.

  Olaf Stapledon

  Stars, Dark, Fire

  Olaf Stapledon (1931). “Last and First Men, & Star Maker: Two Science-fiction Novels”, p.404, Courier Corporation

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• He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

  Thomas Jefferson

  People, Office, Substance

  Declaration of Independence (1776)

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• There where hundreds of graves. There where hundreds of women. There were hundreds of daughters. There were hundreds of sons. And hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands of candles. The whole graveyard was one swarm of candleshine as if a population of fireflies had heard of a Grand Conglomeration and had flown here to settle in and flame upon the stones and light the brown faces and the dark eyes and the black hair.

  Ray Bradbury

  Daughter, Eye, Son

  Ray Bradbury (2015). “The Halloween Tree”, p.100, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• The implied threat of using nuclear weapons to curb guerrillas was as absurd as to talk of using a sledge hammer to ward off a swarm of mosquitoes.

  B. H. Liddell Hart

  Military, Hammers, Mosquitoes

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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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• Life was a swarm of accidents waiting in the treetops, descending upon any living thing that passed, ready to eat them alive. You swam in a river of chance and coincidence. You clung to the happiest accidents- the rest you let float by.

  David Wroblewski

  Life, Rivers, Waiting

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• Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

  Charles Saatchi

  Stars, Ambition, Artist

  Charles Saatchi (2009). “My Name is Charles Saatchi and I Am an Artoholic”, Phaidon Press

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