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hanadoesstuffbadly · 3 years

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Daughter of Giants

"You should move along, Giant, we don't want your sort around here." The bartender's voice was low and authoritative, the voice of a man not easily ignored, but one didn't need the ears of a bat to make out the tremors coursing through it. Everything about him was a well made manor with good foundations, but Aravis could tell it was built on sand. Give him a little shake and everything would start slipping.

Aravis smirked and tapped her fingers idly against the bar's puckered wooden surface. A part of her cursed how ineffective her disguise had been proving recently, even after she's taken to covering her folc markings. The last thing she needed now was to have word of a nomadic folcwoman travelling the Engle Lands like a sad silk trader. Her tankard's rim just brushed her lips as she held it there and she concentrated on the fact that the man had not moved along, still standing just out of sight behind her mustard coloured hood. If he just needed a shake, why was she feeling inclined to rattle him until the very bricks of his character were dust to be scraped off of her heel. Maybe she was too tired for this today, too done with walkers and their sloppy, indelicate ineptitude. But at the same time, her ichor was roaring through her veins, violet and rushing. It made her lungs burn like magma beneath the island's crust. Her titanic heart yearned for a fight. It had been too long.

"My sort?" Silk dropped into her tone inadvertently, turning her deep, hoarse, broken voice into an almost mechanical purr. Fear rippled through the room like ribbons. It was a cool breeze in a suffocating glare of self-importance and Aravis breathed it in.

"You're a bounty-hunter!" Not the bartender, but a nasal, underdeveloped voice called from the crowd of patrons that had interrupted their own meals to gawk like a gaggle around what had been a peaceful evening drink. Aravis didn't bother seeking out the speaker (though she suspected one of the pasty, mealy shepherds seated closer to the entrance. An easy escape, she mused, smart choice.) Her brow, however, creased at his choice of words. Bounty hunters were perhaps the lowest of the low creatures grovelling on the earth's filthy surface. Turning in fellows of your kind for the reward of others? Had they no sense of honour or kinship at all. Had a folcman or woman acted in such a way, they would be plunged beneath the clouds to the endless oceans below and ripped to shreds by the wild, Bacchic merpeople of the depths. Honour, trust, loyalty; mere dramatic concepts to be learned and forgotten by those thugs like poor poetry.

"Now what would give you that idea?" Likely her stature or lack of ladylike grace. Maybe-

"The ends of your hair. They're white." The thought died before it even took shape in her mind. A chill crawled up around her shoulders, turning the thick muscle there into cold stone. She was frozen in place, barely able to open her mouth to reply through gritted teeth, her head bowed lower toward the counter and her tankard rested against her suddenly ringing forehead.

"Why," she ground out, "would that," turning slowly like a tin doll, her eyes flashed, "mark me out?" Moonlight flashed against a bronze knife behind the bar and it set the room aflame. The man- boy really- stood and quaked like a tethered kite before the entrance like it was a headwind. He had a round, dark, unfinished face; the face of a scholar or bard, not a warrior. Nevertheless, Aravis wanted nothing more than to turn it blue with bruises.

"I've heard stories," He shuddered and searched any face but hers for help "my father's a pepper merchant, he told me about you and your kind." The idea of some miserable, slimy, slithering underwalker's tongue speaking of her ‘kind’ made Aravis' fists curl. "Your hair is dark and- and blue, right?" He was slipping, but didn't run. Yet. "He used to say, when- when what was inside your head became darker, your hair literally started paling in comparison... Making the tips turn white... And- I-I thought..."

"Tom Tom, that's enough." Hissed the bartender.

Aravis was very still. Whispers are meant to be lost in the chaos. Aravis’ words were like breaths, yet each one rang in the floorboards and out of the door like the echoes of screams.

"Your father is well-learned. Darkness seeping into every crevice of the mind, turning you into a miasma veiled in flesh? What better fits that description than a callous, underhanded criminal? What could be so dark, so evil, as to turn the tips of my hair so pale?"

With one hand she tore the hood from her head. And not a breath was drawn as their pathetic faces took in the blank, dull cascades, the colour of new snow. Cold and dead. White to the roots.

She closed her eyes when the whispers started seeping into their fear, and as always, before her there stretched a great gash in the clouds on which she, still an adolescent wrapped in sunlight, stood. Beneath that crevice she saw the island of the underwalkers. But she wasn't looking at them. Instead, all that filled her vision was the great, massive warrior lying like unwanted venison beside the hulking, grotesque, monstrous corpse of a Beanstalk. And the underwalkers were dancing. At their head, leading them on there stood a creature of pale flesh and golden hair. To others he might have looked like a child, beautiful and beaming. Aravis knew what he really was. The axe was still in his hands. That smiling, glittering face was the last thing she saw before the vision cleared and Aravis opened her eyes to the bar counter.

Shards of metal and broken wood lay before her. Her hand was bloodied by purple ichor. Still lodged within the cut were some remains of the crushed tankard. But it was her eyes that were burning with pain.

The whispers had ceased. And so had the roar in her veins. She was ice.

Standing, she swept her cloak aside to rest both hands on her hips, her feet apart. She was taller now than she had been when she entered, and now the crest of her ringed headband just skimmed the ceiling. Everybody in the room cowered below her. It felt right.

"Indeed. I am a hunter. But what I'm after is not the reward of a slippery, stupid nobleman. It is justice. And it is mine alone." the low rasp of her voice grew full and round as pride swelled within, "as a daughter of the mighty Laestrygonians."

At the name of her folc, new horror trickled into slow running red blood all around her. So many eyes darted to the door, for escape. Many more became fixed on her lips or, more specifically, on the teeth that lay behind them. Aravis didn’t need to be a mind mage to know they were wondering how much mortal flesh had been shredded upon them. That stout bartender was the first to finish quivering.

"Who do you seek, great Giantess? I will tell you all that I know, just don't hurt any of my customers, I beg of you!" Ugh. Begging. Typical underwalkers.

"I'm hunt Prince Jack of Gaul. As I have for almost ten years." Voice rising such that everyone might hear, she let fear carry her words. "He has taken something very precious from me, many things in fact, and I intend to exact justice."

“But, he’s been missing over three years! Many young princes have been.” Aravis was well aware of that. So close. She had been so close she could see the ridiculous peak of his hair, illuminated under dragon fire. But the presence of one of the more powerful fae had forced to keep her distance. But she had him cornered. It was almost over. And then he was gone.

“Haven’t you heard? They’re back, now.” Every head turned back to the scholarly boy by the entrance. “Yeah, the entire Fearless-”

But Aravis was deaf to the world.

They’re back now. He’s back now. He’s back. Again, and again, and again. The sound of clouds being split down the middle and the shining eyes of the blonde, beautiful murderer. And dancing. Aravis’ eyes were filled with axes, ichor and dancing.

Her bident spear was in her hand one moment and whistling across the room the next. The boy- Tom Tom he’d been called- was pinned between its prongs like a fish, flailing and panicked. He grasped at the twin spikes which were twice as thick as his arm. As Aravis strode over, he just resisted going limp.

With her feelings crashing and shrieking in her head, Aravis paid no attention to the fact that the ceiling had splintered around it. She didn’t notice the splinters to timber that clawed at her waist, nor the frigid night air whipping her face as she waded through the bar like mud. People the size of dolls scurried for the exit, while the one she wanted remained pinned. Until she knelt down and gripped the long handle of her weapon, pushing it closer into his throat.

“Where?” Was all she managed. Everything inside was a storm that even she herself was becoming lost in.

“I- I don’t know! I was told by a friend!”

“WHERE?!” Her bellow ricocheted off the dark sky itself like thunder and the bident spear-head pressed harder against his trachea until he gasped for air.

“STONEBURY!” Violent sobs wracked his body but Aravis did not relent, “GLASS STONEBURY! MY FRIEND HORNER IS IN GLASS STONEBURY! HE CAN TELL YOU!”

Only then, with a grunt of dark satisfaction did she pull the spear from the wall, releasing him. With the first real, tangible feeling she had felt in years melting into her veins, she shrank back down until she was practically the same stature she had been when she had arrived. The bar’s roof was gone, allowing freezing wind to howl through. She cared not.

Aravis finished a drink that had been abandoned on a table in the panic. It was revolting, crude stuff, typical for underwalkers. But a smile was curled on her face regardless.

"What will you do once you find the prince? He's a hero, and has many powerful friends!" So the bartender had stayed, she hadn’t counted on that. She graciously turned to look at him, feeling lighter than she had in almost four years.

"Simple. I will rend his arms from his sides. I will cast his broken body across the air until each and every bone is ground into dust."

"They'll see you coming, people have already run to tell others of you."

"You speak as if I’d intended this to be a slaughter. You are wrong.” Aravis’ hood fell to the floor and her hand reached into her satchel. She sighed softly when her fingers met the gentle, rippling fabric of her cloak. Her mother’s cloak. “It’s an execution.” she pulled it free, letting it grow in size until it could wrap around her completely. Her legs and torso disappeared from sight. “And I must have him know his sentence.”

Turning, she vanished behind the concealment of the cloak and into the darkness of the night. The Engle Lands were solitary, located deep in the marshes of Fairytale Island.

It wasn’t far to Glass Stonebury. And then all that was left was to find this Horner.

Just an intro that I couldn't get out of my head since creating Aravis (her name was Astrid originally). I kinda want to write a whole fic about this but I'm not sure since it would be pretty much all my ocs... I'm imagining basically zootopia but with a Giant princess and a bounty hunter.

Also ive already started about two big projects with no third chapter soooo.....

#beginning of something??#maybe #red shoes and the 7 dwarfs #red shoes and the seven dwarfs #red shoes movie #red shoes fanfic #hana writing #my ocs #standing on the shoulders of giants #SotSoG #red shoes fanfiction #horner appears in my gwen fic red cloak #the third chapter of that is in the works #schools just been pummeling recently #laestrygonians are the cannibal giants featured in the odyssey #they pretty kuch hav a culture that's 2/3 celtic 1/3 ancient greek #aravis #red shoes oc #giant oc

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networkingdefinition · 5 years

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Insects Quotes

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• “Are you okay?” he says, still looking at me, and I feel my smile slip, fade, and the silence that falls over us then is so total I can’t hear anything, not the rush-hiss of my heart pounding in my chest, not the sounds all around us; insects, wind, and the distant clatter of others’ lives in houses built close but not too close because when we look out our windows we all like to pretend that everything we see is ours. But Ryan is not mine. – Elizabeth Scott • a country encapsulates our childhood and those lanes, byres, fields, flowers, insects, suns, moons and stars are forever reoccurring. – Edna O’Brien • A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still. – Samuel Johnson • A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. – Robert A. Heinlein • A net set up to catch fish may snare a duck; a mantis hunting an insect may itself be set upon by a sparrow. Machinations are hidden within machinations; changes arise beyond changes. So how can wit and cleverness be relied upon? – Zicheng Hong • A refuge is supposed to prevent what? The genes from flowing out of sight? This refuge idea won’t stop insects from moving across boundaries. That’s absurd. – Jeremy Rifkin • A single swallow, it is said, devours ten millions of insects every year. The supplying of these insects I take to be a signal instance of the Creator’s bounty in providing for the lives of His creatures. – Ambrose Bierce • A standard saying among fly fishermen is that trout spend anywhere from 80 to 90 percent of their time feeding below the water’s surface on the immature forms of aquatic insects. Some anglers are even more precise, but whatever the exact percentage , it’s safe to say that to fully appreciate any tailwater fishery you will have to learn the fine art of nymphing. – Ed Engle • 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 • A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree. – Gretel Ehrlich • A worm tells summer better than the clock, The slug’s a living calendar of days; What shall it tell me if a timeless insect Says the world wears away? – Dylan Thomas • Ah, Meese has brought us her finest goblets! A moment, whilst Kruppe sweeps out cobwebs, insect husks and other assorted proofs of said goblets’ treasured value. – Steven Erikson • All of nature talks to me – if I could just figure out what it’s saying – trees are swinging in the breeze. They’re talking to me. Insects are rubbing their legs together. They’re all talking. They’re talking to me. – Laurie Anderson • Although you should respect venomous snakes and approach them with caution, most snakes you encounter in an urban environment are harmless and beneficial because they eat insects, mice and other rodents. – Robert Pierce • An innocent bird is not innocent from the insect’s point of view! Only man can attain the rank of innocence through becoming a peaceful vegetarian! – Mehmet Murat Ildan • An insect is more complex than a star..and is a far greater challenge to understand. – Martin Rees • Around the steel no tortur’d worm shall twine, No blood of living insect stain my line; Let me, less cruel, cast the feather’d hook, With pliant rod athwart the pebbled brook, Silent along the mazy margin stray, And with the fur-wrought fly delude the prey. – John Gay • As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. – Franz Kafka • At seventy-three I learned a little about the real structure of animals, plants, birds, fishes and insects. Consequently when I am eighty I’ll have made more progress. At ninety I’ll have penetrated the mystery of things. At a hundred I shall have reached something marvellous, but when I am a hundred and ten everything I do, the smallest dot, will be alive. – Hokusai

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Insect', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_insect').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_insect img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Be able to recognize the dangerous snakes, spiders, insects, and plants that live in your area of the country.- Marilyn vos Savant • Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on. – Robert Southey • Because there is something helpless and weak and innocent – something like an infant – deep inside us all that really suffers in ways we would never permit an insect to suffer. – Jack Abbott • 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 • Better to be an animal than a man, an insect than an animal, a plant than an insect, and so on. Salvation? Whatever diminishes the kingdom of consciousness and compromises its supremacy. – Emile M. Cioran • Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle. – Jared Diamond • By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad’…By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. – George Orwell • 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 • Cats are like insects. They should be left outside to clean up the garbage. – Michael Mewshaw • Compassion is an emotion of which we ought never to be ashamed. Graceful, particularly in youth, is the tear of sympathy, and the heart that melts at the tale of woe. We should not permit ease and indulgence to contract our affections, and wrap us up in a selfish enjoyment; but we should accustom ourselves to think of the distresses of human, life, of the solitary cottage; the dying parent, and the weeping orphan. Nor ought we ever to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty. – Hugh Blair • Each moss, Each shell, each drawling insect, holds a rank Important in the plan of Him who fram’d This scale of beings; holds a rack which, lost Would break the chain, and leave behind a gap Which Nature’s self would rue. – Benjamin Stillingfleet • Each particle of matter is an immensity, each leaf a world, each insect an inexplicable compendium. – Johann Kaspar Lavater • English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman’s apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. – Bill Bryson • Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. – Francis Bacon • Every blade of grass, every insect, ant, and golden bee, all so amazingly know their path, though they have not intelligence, they bear witness to the mystery of God and continually accomplish it themselves. – Fyodor Dostoevsky • Every living being on earth loves life above all else. The smallest insect, whose life lasts only an instant, tries to escape from any danger in order to live a moment longer. And the desire to live is most developed in man. – Hazrat Inayat Khan • Every man has the basis of good. Not only human beings, you can find it among animals and insects, for instance, when we treat a dog or horse lovingly. – Dalai Lama • Everything is a hero: A lighthouse which gives light to us; weeds that provide shelter to little insects; a water drop which quenches a thirsty ant! Everything that helps us to live is a hero! • Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star. Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper. – Albert Einstein • Everything is important. To the smallest insect, even the mouldering tree, the deepest stone in the drift. – Marlene van Niekerk • For us, a pretty bird is a pretty bird; for an insect, pretty bird is an ugly enemy! – Mehmet Murat Ildan • From inanimate object, to microorganism, to plant, to insect, to animal, to human, there is an evolving level of intelligence. – Bryan Kest • From my earliest memories I was fascinated by animals. I would explore my backyard for insects and gaze at anthills until my elbows became sore. When I was 8, my mother bought me a book of North American birds and I’ve been keen on birdwatching since. – Jonathan Balcombe • Garden: One of a vast number of free outdoor restaurants operated by charity-minded amateurs in an effort to provide healthful, balanced meals for insects, birds and animals. – Henry Beard • Happy insect! what can be In happiness compared to thee? Fed with nourishment divine, The dewy morning’s gentle wine! Nature waits upon thee still, And thy verdant cup does fill; ‘Tis fill’d wherever thou dost tread, Nature’s self’s thy Ganymede. – Abraham Cowley • Herein lies our problem. If we level that much land to grow rice and whatever, then no other animal could live there except for some insect pest species. Which is very unfortunate. – Steve Irwin • Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days. – Terry Pratchett • How describe the delicate thing that happens when a brilliant insect alights on a flower? Words, with their weight, fall upon the picture like birds of prey. – Jules Renard • How poor, how rich, how abject, how august, how complicate, how wonderful is man! Distinguished link in being’s endless chain! Midway from nothing to the Deity! Dim miniature of greatness absolute! An heir of glory! A frail child of dust! Helpless immortal! Insect infinite! A worm! A God! – Edward Young • How would you like to have a thousand brilliantly colored cliff swallows keeping house in the eaves of your barn, and gobbling up insects over your farm at the rate of 100,000 per day? There are many Wisconsin farmsteads where such a swallow-show is a distinct possibility. – Aldo Leopold • Human beings ought not to draw in their antennae at every ungentle touch, like supersensitive insects. – E. T. A. Hoffmann • I always liked the idea that America is a big facade. We are all insects crawling across on the shiny hood of a Cadillac. We’re all looking at the wrapping. But we won’t tear the wrapping to see what lies beneath. – Tom Waits • I craved your warmth. I hugged myself, rubbing my fingers up and down. I guess people are like insects sometimes, drawn to heat, A kind of infra-red longing. – Lucy Christopher • I do not see why men sheould be so proud insects have the more ancient lineage according to the scientists insects were insects when man was only a burbling whatisit. – Don Marquis • I fear no man, no woman; flower does not fear bird, insect nor adder. – Hilda Doolittle • I got a little studio in Chicago and practiced. I realized I had to earn some money. So I went to work for an advertising agency where my job was mostly drawing insects for a company that sold an insecticide spray. – Claes Oldenburg • 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 • I hate banana bread. It’s too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs. – Elizabeth Berg • I hated the words. Each one was like a big live insect in my mouth. – Glen Duncan • I have always found thick woods a little intimidating, for they are so secret and enclosed. You may seem alone but you are not, for there are always eyes watching you. All the wildlife of the woods, the insects, birds, and animals, are well aware of your presence no matter how softly you may tread, and they follow your every move although you cannot see them. – Thalassa Cruso • I listen to the summer symphony outside my window. Truthfully, it’s not a symphony at all. There’s no tune, no melody, only the same notes over and over. Chirps and tweets and trills and burples. It’s as if the insect orchestra is forever tuning its instruments, forever waiting for the maestro to tap his baton and bring them to order. I, for one, hope the maestro never comes. I love the music mess of it. – Jerry Spinelli • I love insects. They are amazing. – Andrea Arnold • I never kill insects. If I see ants or spiders in the room, I pick them up and take them outside. Karma is everything. – Holly Valance • I personally feel that parachute files give a more realistic impression of an insect to the fish that views the fly, since the hackles are in the same position as the insect’s legs, and when tied with brightly colored hackles, these flies are easier to see on the float. A final advantage is that in rough water, a parachute-hackled dry fly will float longer and better than a conventional one – Lefty Kreh • 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 • I think it’s so archaic that cosmetic companies are still using animal by-products and insects in their products! It’s 2016, why is anyone still doing that? – Jeffree Star • I think that the leaf of a tree, the meanest insect on which we trample, are in themselves arguments more conclusive than any which can be adduced that some vast intellect animates Infinity. – Percy Bysshe Shelley • I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing. – John Fowles • 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 • I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its color, where it got its life – but there was no one to tell me. – George Washington Carver • I was really interested in collecting insects. – Satoshi Tajiri • If all insects disappeared, all life on earth would perish. If all humans disappeared, all life on earth would flourish. – Jonas Salk • If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos. – E. O. Wilson • If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish. – Jonas Salk • If we go on the way we have, the fault is our greed and if we are not willing to change, we will disappear from the face of the globe, to be replaced by the insect. – Jacques Yves Cousteau • If we were to wipe out insects alone on this planet, the rest of life and humanity with it would mostly disappear from the land. Within a few months. – E. O. Wilson • If you had an alien race that looked like insects, then they would build robots to look like themselves, not to look like people. – Kevin J. Anderson • If you see a thing that looks like a cross between a flying lobster and the figure of Abraxas on a Gnostic gem, do not pay it the least attention, never mind where it is; just keep quiet and hope it will go away – for that’s your best chance; you have none in a stand-up fight with a good thorough-going African insect. – Mary Kingsley • If you want to study one of these strange organisms, you had better have a good justification. It’s not good to say I want to study gene organisation in some obscure insect that no one’s ever heard about. – Thomas Cech • I’m always very interested in breeding. Raising cacti is breeding. My lotus plant collection is breeding. The insects are breeding. – Takashi Murakami • I’m writing a film called ‘Bug.’ It’s an original script, and it’s not about killer insects. It’s a thriller set in a high school. The bug of the title refers to a surveillance device. – Wes Craven • In handling a stinging insect, move very slowly. – Robert A. Heinlein • In my grandparents’ time, it was believed that spirits existed everywhere – in trees, rivers, insects, wells, anything. My generation does not believe this, but I like the idea that we should all treasure everything because spirits might exist there, and we should treasure everything because there is a kind of life to everything. – Hayao Miyazaki • In my life outdoors, I’ve observed that animals of almost any variety will stand in a windy place rather than in a protected, windless area infested with biting insects. They would rather be annoyed by the wind than bitten. – Tim Cahill • In my youth, I spent my time investigating insects. – Maria Sibylla Merian • In summer the empire of insects spreads. – Adam Zagajewski • In the future, I mean to be a fine streamside entomologist. I’m going to start on that when I am much too old to do any of the two thousand things I can think of that are more fun than screening insects in cold running water – Thomas McGuane • In the vast, and the minute, we see The unambiguous footsteps of the God, Who gives its lustre to an insect’s wing And wheels His throne upon the rolling worlds. – William Cowper • In time they sank and decayed, and nothing is left of them except an occasional impression in stones, in stones now found in deserts and on high mountain peaks. Birdless forests block the sun in uninhabited lands. Insects swirl in the air. And then, in a majestic, bloodthirsty, and mighty heave, the spinal columns of the vertebrates rise as monstrous lizards and fabulous creatures; dragons flinging their fearful bellows up to a steaming sky… Slowly they become birds, birds as light as undreamt dreams. The searing roars become birdsong, whimpering flutes on warm nights. – Erik Fosnes Hansen • Insect life was so loud that when you parked the car and got out it sounded as if you had suddenly tuned into a radio frequency from another planet. – David Samuels • Insect politics, indifferent universe. Bang your head against the wall, but apathy is worse. – Don Henley • Insect resistance to a pesticide was first reported in 1947 for the Housefly (Musca domestica) with respect to DDT. Since then resistance to one or more pesticides has been reported in at least 225 species of insects and other arthropods. The genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds. – Francisco J. Ayala • Insects are my secret fear. That’s what terrifies me more than anything – insects. – Michael O’Donoghue • Insects are not only cold-blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship. – Annie Dillard • Insects are what neurosis would sound like, if neurosis could make a noise with its nose. – Martin Amis • Insects have their own point of view about civilization a man thinks he amounts to a great deal but to a flea or a mosquito a human being is merely something good to eat. – Don Marquis • Insects leave (Madagascar periwinkle) Catharanthus roseus out of their diets. So, for that matter, do deer. The reason is that the plants are loaded with alkaloids so potent that they are the source of vincristine and vinblastine. These are drugs important in routines of chemotherapy for treating Hodgkin’s disease and certain forms of leukemia. – Allen Lacy • Iris all hues, roses, and jessamine Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaic; underfoot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth with rich inlay Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone Of costliest emblem: other creature here Beast, bird, insect, or worm durst enter none; Such was their awe of man. – John Milton • Is it reasonable to suppose that we can apply a broad-spectrum insecticide to kill the burrowing larval stages of a crop-destroying insect … without also killing the ‘good’ insects whose function may be the essential one of breaking down organic matter and maintaining healthy soil? – Rachel Carson • Is not disease the rule of existence? There is not a lily pad floating on the river but has been riddled by insects. Almost every shrub and tree has its gall, oftentimes esteemed its chief ornament and hardly to be distinguished from the fruit. If misery loves company, misery has company enough. Now, at midsummer, find me a perfect leaf or fruit. – Henry David Thoreau • It began as this desire to do this science fiction movie about perhaps one of the last insects left that nobody’s done anything on, which is the cockroach – and truly one of the most frightening insects. – Michael O’Donoghue • It skims in through the eye, and by means of the utterly delicate retina hurls shadows like insect legs inward for translation. Then an immense space opens up in silence and an endlessly fecund sub-universe the writer descends, and asks the reader to descend after him, not merely to gain instructions but also to experience delight, the delight of mind freed from matter and exultant in the strength it has stolen from matter. – John Updike • It was the hour when gauze-winged insects are born that only live for a day. – Lord Dunsany • It’s time to stop pretending I’m ok with things I’m not ok with like all insects and Foster the People. – Greg Behrendt • It’s very easy to make insects move. Because they do move mechanically without the rippling of flesh as you mentioned. They move more like real tinker toys and you can make models of them quite easily. – Michael O’Donoghue • I’ve always gone with Kafka’s model of establishing the world from the first line, as in Kafka’s famous line from Metamorphosis, “Gregor Samsa woke up from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect” (or beetle or cockroach, depending on the translation). I have to have that first line before I can go further. – Laurie Foos • I’ve become a much more serious young insect. – Andrew Denton • I’ve come to realize that the mark is the primal gesture, the internal connection of the caveman to the cosmos; an impossibility similar to an impulse in an insect’s nervous system that it could somehow reduce to dust a steel beam by endlessly crawling over it. – Joel-Peter Witkin • Large flocks of butterflies, all kinds of happy insects, seem to be in a perfect fever of joy and sportive gladness. – John Muir • Life is hard for insects. And don’t think mice are having any fun either. – Woody Allen • Little soldier, little insect You know war it has no heart It will kill you in the sunshine Or happily in the the dark Where kindness is a card game Or a bent up cigarette In the trenches, in the hard rain With a bullet and a bet. – Conor Oberst • Lobsters displays all three of the classic biological characteristics of an insect, namely: 1. It has way more legs than necessary. 2. There is no way you would ever pet it. 3. It does not respond to simple commands such as “Here, boy!” – Dave Barry • Love has its own instinct, finding the way to the heart, as the feeblest insect finds the way to its flower, with a will which nothing can dismay nor turn aside. – Honore de Balzac • Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtous, as men become more so; for the improvement must be mutual, or the injustice which one half of the human race are obliged to submit to, retorting on their oppressors, the virtue of men will be worm-eaten by the insect whom he keeps under his feet – Mary Wollstonecraft • Many of the earth’s habitats, animals, plants, insects and even micro-organisms that we know to be rare may not be known at all by future generations. We have the capability and the responsibility to act; we must do so before it is too late. – Dalai Lama • Men should stop fighting among themselves and start fighting insects. – Luther Burbank • My 10th Sonata is a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun… they are the sun’s kisses. – Alexander Scriabin • My painting is not violent, it’s life that is violent. Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves, the insects are eating each other; violence is a part of life. We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death. – Francis Bacon • Nations! What are nations? Tartars! and Huns! and Chinamen! Like insects they swarm. The historian strives in vain to make them memorable. It is for want of a man that there are so many men. It is individuals that populate the world. – Henry David Thoreau • Natural selection certainly operates. It explains how bacteria will gain antibiotic resistance; it will explain how insects get insecticide resistance, but it doesn’t explain how you get bacteria or insects in the first place. – William A. Dembski • Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. – Henry David Thoreau • No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity. – Edith Wharton • 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 • No poetic phantasy but a biological reality, a fact: I am an entity like bird, insect, plant or sea-plant cell; I live; I am alive. – Hilda Doolittle • None of God’s Creatures absolutely consider’d are in their own Nature Contemptible; the meanest Fly, the poorest Insect has its Use and Vertue. – Mary Astell • Now summer is in flower and natures hum Is never silent round her sultry bloom Insects as small as dust are never done Wi’ glittering dance and reeling in the sun And green wood fly and blossom haunting bee Are never weary of their melody Round field hedge now flowers in full glory twine Large bindweed bells wild hop and streakd woodbine That lift athirst their slender throated flowers Agape for dew falls and for honey showers These round each bush in sweet disorder run And spread their wild hues to the sultry sun. – John Clare • 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 • Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths? – George Eliot • One cannot overestimate the power of a good rancorous hatred on the part of the stupid. The stupid have so much more industry and energy to expend on hating. They build it up like coral insects. – Sylvia Townsend Warner • One night a friend lent me a book of short stories by Franz Kafka. I went back to the pension where I was staying and began to read The Metamorphosis. The first line almost knocked me off the bed. I was so surprised. The first line reads, “As Gregor Samsa awoke that morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. . . .” When I read the line I thought to myself that I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like that. If I had known, I would have started writing a long time ago. So I immediately started writing short stories. – Gabriel Garcia Marquez • One of the really remarkably beneficial aspects of genetic engineering is that much of the previous methodology for controlling pests and so forth is through chemicals that affect a very broad spectrum of insects, for example, or fungicides that control fungi. – Nina Fedoroff • Our treasure lies in the beehive of our knowledge. We are perpetually on the way thither, being by nature winged insects and honey gatherers of the mind. – Friedrich Nietzsche • People have this idea that nature dictates a sort of 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. That is just not the case in the insect world. – Marlene Zuk • Perfect hexagonal tubes in a packed array. Bees are hard-wired to lay them down, but how does an insect know enough geometry to lay down a precise hexagon? It doesn’t. It’s programmed to chew up wax and spit it out while turning on its axis, and that generates a circle. Put a bunch of bees on the same surface, chewing side-by-side, and the circles abut against each other – deform each other into hexagons, which just happen to be more efficient for close packing anyway. – Peter Watts • Plant consciousness, insect consciousness, fish consciousness, all are related by one permanent element, which we may call the religious element inherent in all life, even in a flea: the sense of wonder. That is our sixth sense, and it is the natural religious sense. – D. H. Lawrence • Politics is made up of two words: “Poli,” which is Greek for “many,” and “tics,” which are bloodsucking insects. – Gore Vidal • Primates need good nutrition, to begin with. Not only fruits and plants, but insects as well. – Richard Leakey • Say, will the falcon, stooping from above, Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove? Admires the jay the insect’s gilded wings? Or hears the hawk when Philomela sings? – Alexander Pope • 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 • Shrimp are the insects of the ocean. They’re bottom feeders. So they’re delicious, but they’re the bugs of the sea. – Baron Vaughn • Since I turned the fields back to their natural state, I can’t say I’ve had any really difficult problems with insects or disease. – Masanobu Fukuoka • So important are insects and other land-dwelling arthropods that if all were to disappear, humanity probably could not last more than a few months. – E. O. Wilson • So there you have it: Nature is a rotten mess. But that’s only the beginning. If you take your eyes off it for one second, it will kill you. Thorns, insects, fungus, worms, birds, reptiles, wild animals, raging rivers, bottomless ravines, dry deserts, snow, quicksand, tumbleweeds, sap, and mud. Rot, poison and death. That’s Nature.It’s a wonder you even step outside of your cabin, I said.My bravery exceeds my good sense, he said. – Lee Goldberg • So, when I say ‘match the hatch’, if the fish are taking the nymph, and you’re actually producing a replica of a flying insect, you’ll catch fresh air. – Rex Hunt • Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way. – Neil Gaiman • Specialization is for insects. – Robert A. Heinlein • Specialization is for insects… The race of man? He’s a whole other creature. – Robert A. Heinlein • Spray a book with insect spray, drop it in a bag, add some mothballs and seal it. Put it in another bag and seal it. Another. The packages piled up on the floor, each a book sealed in four plastic envelopes. – Larry Niven • Stothard learned the art of combining colors by closely studying butterflies wings; he would often say that no one knew what he owed to these tiny insects. A burnt stick and a barn door served Wilkie in lieu of pencil and canvas. – Samuel Smiles • Suppose that insect wings developed primarily as thermoregulators and then were used for skimming and finally flying, evolving along the way. What would they be “for”? Or what is the skeleton “for”? For keeping one upright, protecting organs, storing calcium, making blood cells…? – Noam Chomsky • The air was calm and insects had not yet risen off the water, that crisp time of morning before the sun strikes, when it is still cool enough to work out solutions to sticky problems. – April Smith • The best gardener is a baby killer. Baby insects are much easier to kill than adults, and haven’t yet developed the big mouths and voracious appetite of the adolescent. – Janet Macunovich • The careful insect ‘midst his works I view, Now from the flowers exhaust the fragrant dew, With golden treasures load his little thighs, And steer his distant journey through the skies. – John Gay • The clearest window that ever was fashioned if it is barred by spiders’ webs, and hung over with carcasses of insects, so that the sunlight has forgotten to find its way through, of what use can it be? Now, the Church is God’s window; and if it is so obscured by errors that its light is darkness, how great is that darkness! – Henry Ward Beecher • The colours of insects and many smaller animals contribute to conceal them from the larger ones which prey upon them. Caterpillars which feed on leaves are generally green; and earth-worms the colour of the earth which they inhabit; butter-flies, which frequent flowers, are coloured like them; small birds which frequent hedges have greenish backs like the leaves, and light-coloured bellies like the sky, and are hence less visible to the hawk who passes under them or over them. – Erasmus Darwin • The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, . . . when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man . . . . It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth. – Rachel Carson • The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over. – H. G. Wells • The deeper men go into life, the deeper is their conviction that this life is not all. It is an unfinished symphony. A day may round out an insect’s life, and a bird or a beast needs no tomorrow. Not so with him who knows that he is related to God and has felt the power of an endless life. – Henry Ward Beecher • The eye sees the physical body, other individuals, even insects, worms and things. It sees everything that is within its range. The body too is a thing that the eye sees, along with the rest. So, how can we conclude that the body is the I? – Sathya Sai Baba • The German passion for bureaucracy — for written and signal forms . . . to move about, to work, to exist — is like a steel pin pinning each French individual to a sheet of paper, the way an entomologist pins each specimen insect . . . – Janet Flanner • The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every … minutest fiber. – Samuel Taylor Coleridge • The insect-youth are on the wing, Eager to taste the honied spring, And float amid the liquid noon! – Thomas Gray • The instinct of brutes and insects can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful ever-living agent. – Isaac Newton • The jungle looked back at them with a vastness, a breathing moss-and-leaf silence, with a billion diamond and emerald insect eyes. – Ray Bradbury • The life of an uneducated man is as useless as the tail of a dog which neither covers its rear end, nor protects it from the bites of insects. – Chanakya • The mortal enemies of man are not his fellows of another continent or race; they are the aspects of the physical world which limit or challenge his control, the disease germs that attack him and his domesticated plants and animals, and the insects that carry many of these germs as well as working notable direct injury. This is not the age of man, however great his superiority in size and intelligence; it is literally the age of insects. – Warder Clyde Allee • The only clear thing is that we humans are the only species with the power to destroy the earth as we know it. The birds have no such power, nor do the insects, nor does any mammal. Yet if we have the capacity to destroy the earth, so, too, do we have the capacity to protect it. – Dalai Lama • The only sensible approach to disease and insect control, I think, is to grow sturdy crops in a healthy environment. – Masanobu Fukuoka • The Planet drifts to random insect doom. – William S. Burroughs • 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 • The positive evidence for Darwinism is confined to small-scale evolutionary changes like insects developing insecticide resistance….Evidence like that for insecticide resistance confirms the Darwinian selection mechanism for small-scale changes, but hardly warrants the grand extrapolation that Darwinists want. It is a huge leap going from insects developing insecticide resistance via the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection and random variation to the very emergence of insects in the first place by that same mechanism. – William A. Dembski • The rain water enlivens all living beings of the earth both movable (insects, animals, humans, etc.) and immovable (plants, trees, etc.), and then returns to the ocean it value multiplied a million fold. – Chanakya • The Reproductions of the living Ens From sires to sons, unknown to sex, commence… Unknown to sex the pregnant oyster swells, And coral-insects build their radiate shells… Birth after birth the line unchanging runs, And fathers live transmitted in their sons; Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds, The same their manners, and the same their minds. – Erasmus Darwin • The rhythms of nature – the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects – must inevitably find their analogues in music. – George Crumb • The souls you have got cast upon the screen of publicity appear like the horrid and writhing creatures enlarged from the insect world, and revealed to us by the cinematograph. – James Larkin • The spider is an animal who eats mosquitoes. That’s why I love the spider – it is the only way we have to deal with these insects. – Louise Bourgeois • The transformation scene, where man is becoming insect and insect has become at least man and beyond that – a flying, godlike, shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful creature. – Michael O’Donoghue • There are men from whom nature or some peculiar destiny has removed the cover beneath which we hide our own madness. They are likethin-skinned insects whose visible play of muscles seem to make them deformed, though in fact, everything soon turns to its normal shape again. – E. T. A. Hoffmann • There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death. – Soren Kierkegaard • There’s no denying that the way horror has been packaged in the past has done it no favours. Lurid black covers adorned with skulls, corpses crawling with insects and scantily clad maidens being chewed into by vampires — all good clean fun, but it doesn’t do much to give the genre an air of respectability or seriousness to the casual browser. – Tim Lebbon • There’s this shop in New York I go to; it has bones and fossils and insects that are like works of art. I have a few on my wall. – Eva Green • These sprays, dusts, and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests, and homes-nonselective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad,’ to still the song of birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film, and to linger on in soil-all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects. Can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? They should not be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides.’ – Rachel Carson • Things without defense: insects, kittens, small boys. – Paul Fussell • Thousands of men breathe, move, and live; pass off the stage of life and are heard of no more. Why? They did not a particle of good in the world; and none were blest by them, none could point to them as the instrument of their redemption; not a line they wrote, not a word they spoke, could be recalled, and so they perished–their light went out in darkness, and they were not remembered more than the insects of yesterday. Will you thus live and die, O man immortal? Live for something. – Thomas Chalmers • Today I am sure no one needs to be told that the more birds a yard can support, the fewer insects there will be to trouble the gardener the following year. – Thalassa Cruso • Too many creatures both insects and humans estimate their own value by the amount of minor irritation they are able to cause to greater personalities than themselves. – Don Marquis • Tourists moved over the piazza like drugged insects on a painted plate. – Shana Alexander • Travel is said to be broadening because it makes us realize that our way of doing things is not the only one, that people in other cultures live differently and get by just fine. Insects do that, too, only better. – Marlene Zuk • TZETZE (or TSETSE) FLY, n. An African insect (“Glossina morsitans”) whose bite is commonly regarded as nature’s most efficacious remedy for insomnia, though some patients prefer that of the American novelist (“Mendax interminabilis”). – Ambrose Bierce • Unwittingly, every event and every microorganism – insect, fish, bird, animal, etc. – is playing a role that maintains a perfect balance to our ecosystem, which also includes our atmosphere. Have you ever considered that we, you and I, are also apart of that? – Bryan Kest • Vast chain of being! which from God began, Natures ethereal, human, angel, man, Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see, No glass can reach, from infinite to Thee, From Thee to nothing. – Alexander Pope • Very little makes me feel vulnerable these days. I hit my absolute apex of vulnerability when I returned to my home state of Louisiana, during the Gulf oil spill disaster, and witnessed mass devastation to every demonstration of life surrounding me – from grass, trees, bayous, insects, to animals and people – we all felt demolished. – Ian Somerhalder • war with poison and chemicals was not so rare in the ancient world … An astounding panoply of toxic substances, venomous creatures, poison plants, animals and insects, deleterious environments, virulent pathogens, infectious agents, noxious gases, and combustible chemicals were marshalled to defeat foes – and panoply is an apt term here, because it is the ancient Greek word for ‘all weapons. – Adrienne Mayor • We blame Walt Disney for goldenrod’s undeserved bad name. Despite Sneezy’s pronouncement, plants such as goldenrod with heavy, insect-carried pollen rarely cause allergic reaction. – Janet Macunovich • We can allow satellites, planets, suns, universe, nay whole systems of universes, to be governed by laws, but the smallest insect, we wish to be created at once by special act. – Charles Darwin • We hope that, when the insects take over the world, they will remember with gratitude how we took them along on all our picnics. – Bill Vaughan • We know of no behavior in ants or any other social insects that can be construed as play. – Bert Holldobler • We ought never to sport with pain and distress in any of our amusements, or treat even the meanest insect with wanton cruelty. – Hugh Blair • We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks that the insect controllers calculate. The public must decide whether it wishes to continue on the present road, and it can do so only when in full possession of the facts. – Rachel Carson • We’ve got a good inspection system in Arizona managing products that come from other parts of the county that could carry insects that could become problematic. – Carl E. Olson • What a difference that extra 120 ppm has made for plants, and for animals and humans that depend on them. The more carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere, the more it is absorbed by plants of every description – – and the faster and better they grow, even under adverse conditions like limited water, extremely hot air temperatures, or infestations of insects, weeds and other pests. As trees, grasses, algae and crops grow more rapidly and become healthier and more robust, animals and humans enjoy better nutrition on a planet that is greener and greener. – Paul Driessen • What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell. – Ilana Mercer • What would be left of our tragedies if an insect were to present us his? – Emile M. Cioran • When harvests are exuberant, joy and health follow in their train; but let delusive prosperity draw industry from agriculture; let an insiduous disease attack one of its important products; let an insect, or a parasite, fasten on a single esculent, and mark the effect upon commerce and human life. Upon such an event all business is deranged. – Elias Hasket Derby • When I see nature, when I look into the sky, the dawn, the sun, the colors of insects, snow crystals, the night stars, I don’t feel a need for God. Perhaps when I can no longer look and wonder, when I believe in nothing – then, perhaps, I might need something else. But I don’t know what. – Michelangelo Antonioni • When the moon shall have faded out from the sky, and the sun shall shine at noonday a dull cherry red, and the seas shall be frozen over, and the icecap shall have crept downward to the equator from either pole . . . when all the cities shall have long been dead and crumbled into dust, and all life shall be on the last verge of extinction on this globe; then, on a bit of lichen, growing on the bald rocks beside the eternal snows of Panama, shall be seated a tiny insect, preening its antennae in the glow of the worn-out sun, the sole survivor of animal life on this our earth – a melancholy bug. – William Jacob Holland • When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery like soil fertility gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine. Once that leap has been made, one input follows another, so that when the synthetic nitrogen fed to plants makes them more attractive to insects and vulnerable to disease, as we have discovered, the farmer turns to chemical pesticides to fix his broken machine. – Michael Pollan • When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products? – Jeremy Rifkin • When we usually think of fears, in comics or in films, it’s most often fears on a relatively superficial level: fear of murderous insects, of ghosts, of zombies, or even fear of dying. – Boaz Lavie • While an ant was wandering under the shade of the tree of Phaeton, a drop of amber enveloped the tiny insect; thus she, who in life was disregarded, became precious by death. – Martial • Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power. – Rachel Carson • Winding her arms close around his neck, she closed her eyes. To be embraced, safe in a man’s arms when she had never expected it to happen again, this would be enough.Time sheltered their embrace, enfolding them within a summer scented capsule that felt endless and theirs alone. The fragrance of grass and sunlight and nearby water sweetened each breath. Theirs was the music of birds ans the lazy buzz of insects and the beating of two hearts. Yes, she thought, she didn’t need more. This would be enough. – Maggie Osborne • Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it – a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves. – Jane Goodall • You cannot speak of ocean to a well-frog, the creature of a narrower sphere. You cannot speak of ice to a summer insect, the creature of a season. – Zhuangzi • You must walk sometimes perfectly free, not prying or inquisitive, not bent on seeing things. Throw away a whole day for a single expansion, a single inspiration of air. You must walk so gently as to hear the finest sounds, the faculties being in repose. Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. – Henry David Thoreau • You shall find books and sermons everywhere, in the land and in the sea, in the earth and in the skies, and you shall learn from every living beast, and bird, and fish, and insect, and from every useful or useless plant that springs from the ground. – Charles Spurgeon • 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

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equitiesstocks · 5 years

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Insects Quotes

Official Website: Insects Quotes

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katkatcorf-blog · 6 years

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my world and its colors

by Kat Corfman / Yale University, ENGL 120: Reading and Writing the Modern Essay / 09.22.17

Once upon a time, my world was cloaked in gold.

Vanderbilt University's dominant collegiate color is gold, and the reason is unmistakable. Just step onto campus from the cramped, restless streets of downtown Nashville—trees of the most vibrant yellow stretch heavenward on all sides, creating a serene corner of Earth all to itself. Holy hell, I’m thinking as I swell with pirate-like lust, I'm in a treasure chest.

My mom waves in my peripheral vision as a girl approaches with a smile, a pamphlet, and an extended hand. She asks where I want to start, and I nearly reply, “Where do I sign?”

We’re two hours north of Florence, Alabama: home. All the conveniences of it begin to assemble in my mind. Left my favorite jacket in the laundry back home? A quick trip to pick it up and lunch with Momma for good measure. Papaw turns eighty-four? I could hug him that very day. Little brother needs a babysitter for the weekend? I’m the girl for the job.

My sights have been set on the Ivy League for quite a while, but Vandy is Ivy-caliber—everyone says so. Plus—let’s be real—Vandy has one of the relatively higher acceptance rates on my list, twice that of Yale or Harvard. There are no cons as far as I can see, and God have mercy on any soul who dares attempt to convince me otherwise.

And then, all the advantages of being close to home are magnified by the presence of Joseph, the quiet, handsome son of retired Navy veterans with a smile every bit as authentic as it is weakening. Every Sunday for months, I’ve been sitting in the front pew to get the best view of him and his hodgepodge drum set playing along with the worship band. My god—that passion, that focus. Hallelujah. And now he’s mine. Amen.

No more than a month passes before I know I love him. I am either ridiculously lucky or irrevocably fucked.

It’s on the floor of my bedroom that this realization comes to me all at once. We’re starting to share pieces of ourselves in breadcrumb increments, a little here and a little there, all the while praying, Please don’t leave me for the birds. He tells me his favorite color is red—I lock up this morsel and swallow the key.

Tonight, I bestow my breadcrumb in the form of poetry. He stretches out on the beige shag carpet, laces his fingers behind his head, closes his eyes, takes a slow breath, and at last nods that he’s ready. I begin to read with all the ardor, all the frustration, all the breathlessness, that I poured into writing this thing.

The last line comes and goes, and he’s still lying there with the same balanced expression he assumed at the beginning. My breath is stuck in my chest, my heart trapped in the cage of my body. Did he fall asleep? Was it that bad? Maybe it’s a good thing if he’s asleep——

“Read it again.”

Just like that, I’m winded. His eyes are still shut and his mouth has hardly shifted at all, yet the whole of his being seems to smile. And my world becomes red.

The Big Day comes. I’m with Joseph and his family, spring-breaking on the slopes of Colorado. Finally—the time comes to access Vanderbilt’s admission decision, and Joseph’s playing keep-away with my phone. He relents, of course, but not without a comment about my brown eyes and how it’s just not fair. A means to an end, I tell him, winking.

And then, in two short sentences, one beginning with “regret” and the other ending with an empty well-wish, my golden fortress crumbles. If Vanderbilt doesn’t want me, who the hell could?

Sure, I’ve been accepted to a few places, but they’re backups, last resorts—if all else fails. Worst of all, they mean I’m just like everybody else from my town.

I guess this is all else failing.

I mourn for myself into the fabric of his hoodie.

On day two of the drive home, I can feel Joseph’s slow, silent breath on my knees as he sleeps through Kansas or Arkansas or one of those places that all look the same. The final batch of admission decisions floods my inbox. Pretty soon they all start to look the same, too, and I almost stop checking them altogether. And then the scenery shifts.

“Welcome to Yale College.”

I read the letter three times beginning to end, staring awestruck at the blue—Yale Blue—logo, before rattling Joseph awake. I’m waving my phone in his face and starting to sob. The impossibility of it nearly suffocates me. I want to shatter the window and scream across the wheatfields: Fuck you, Vandy! Go to hell, Dartmouth! Kiss my ass, Brown!

His parents celebrate along with us for a moment. “Where exactly is Yale, again?” asks his dad.

“Connecticut.”

And then we’re quiet.

Joseph holds me and kisses me on the head, but he’s quiet, too.

One rainy summer night, we’re slow dancing in my kitchen to Chicago’s “Colour My World.” It’s made up of only one verse, with eight of its forty words devoted to the last line:

Colour my world with hope of loving you.

A pair of spoons sink into a forgotten tub of ice cream. No one else is home. And for two minutes and fifty-nine seconds, there is no talk of plane tickets or twenty-two-hour train rides or which sweaters to pack. For two minutes and fifty-nine blissful seconds, there is no Yale.

It’s move-in weekend, and we are one thousand seventy-four miles from home.

Joseph is running up and down the stairs bringing boxes to my second-floor suite. There it is—there’s that focus, that drive, that devotion. And here it is again as he’s rearranging furniture. Pinning posters to my walls. Taking me out for Chinese at 1:00 a.m. Sleeping as close as possible to me in the hotel.

In these few days, we fight more times than I can remember—in my dorm, on the street, outside the hotel, in the parking deck, in the courtyard, in seclusion and in public alike. We hash out every buried thing, every uncertain thing, everything we hate about ourselves that we can’t explain. I cry more times than I can count; he cries more times than he’ll ever admit. We throw words at each other that we’d never dreamed of saying. We patch it up in one shoddy way or another, each time coming back to how none of this would matter if we didn’t love each other so goddamn much.

We fight again, and then he’s leaving. I stand on my tiptoes and try to kiss him where he sits in my parents’ SUV; he makes little effort to bend down. He’d rather stare holes in the headrest in front of him than pass a glance at me. I start to cry again but glaze over it with a weak smile so I don’t worry my parents too much when I come around to hug them. Then, when I open the backseat door to tell my brother goodbye, I see that Joseph is not sitting beside him.

He’s behind me, looking like he might wilt. He falls into me; his arms grip me against his chest. The Yale t-shirt still smells like the store.

“I am so proud of you,” he’s saying. “You’re my girl. I love you always, my Katy.”

He hands me the one printed photo we have. We’re a wreck, the two of us. Too wrecked to kiss properly, so we kiss simply, we kiss again, and the car door shuts, and they’re gone, he’s gone, and I am so alone, and I am so free.

I have spent the last three weeks making this place into my new home. I have labored over the placement of string lights and the splitting of grocery costs. I have become great friends with the grand piano in the common room. I have been challenged, I have been pushed, and I have pushed back. I am more myself here than I have ever been.

Late one night in a sophomore friend’s suite, I’m in the midst of a monologue somehow tying together my new instrumental ventures and impromptu walks with professors and a number of other things that thrill me. She interrupts to tell me, “You’re refreshing to this place. You’re the kind of person we need here,” and I’m reminded of an email in which my admissions officer said something eerily similar. I’m still not sure I understand exactly what they mean—or if I ever will—but after hearing it for the second time, I’m starting to believe in something I aspire to comprehend: the power of my own two hands and the sturdiness of my own two feet.

I keep that photo, singular in both number and sentiment, tucked behind my student ID. It is my twenty-first-century locket, strung on a nylon lanyard instead of a delicate gold chain. Biking on the streets of New Haven and smiling at Yale Political Union mixers, all churning with people I’ve never seen before and a sprinkling of those I have, it is safe in the pocket of my jeans. It has spent whole afternoons in Sterling Memorial Library bathing in the serene solitude of a window desk on the sixteenth floor.

More and more each night, I miss running my hands through his thick black strands, once shaved close to his skin and now flipping up charmingly around his earlobes. When his breathing slows, I burrow my face between his shoulder blades and let his warmth lull me to sleep. I keep myself up some nights wondering when I’ll get a sleep like that again.

I think about the cobalt jar on my desk and all the folded letters I could fit in it. I think about the navy pennant on my wall reading YALE in broad letters, and I wonder how many more times I’ll say that name than I’ll get to say his.

I believe him when he says he’ll love me always, but I can’t help but wonder if he’ll look into my eyes one day and find that they are not the same shade of brown he remembers.

I turn my eyes to the sky above the courtyard as I wonder when all these days will come, if they will come over time or descend all at once, and as I become lost in the cerulean, I am also rescued by it.

My heart is red—my eyes are still brown—but now my world is blue.

#love #relationship #heartbreak #college #yale #yale university #university

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karmablackout-blog · 7 years

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North Woods

The last time I saw Ann, I was still living on Stratton Pond. She came to see me with a friend of hers… an older, mystic sort of man, likely left-over from the back-to-the-land movement in the sixties. He was emaciated and wore tight fighting jean shorts and no shirt. He had a homemade necklace that hung down onto his bare chest. It looked like it may have been made from squirrel bones. He talked passionately about buying grains in bulk, and I don’t remember much else. Ann looked tired… like she couldn’t concentrate on anything. I don’t remember her ever looking so tired before.

We had known each other before, in Philadelphia. She was a hanger-on with the music scene. There was one night—after much drinking and debating whether it was Saturn or Jupiter near the moon—that we stumbled back to her house…. We tried to date afterwards, but it did not work out.

The two of them, Ann and her mystic, sat on the edge of the pond all afternoon, while she lamented some boy, Eamon, she had met in Vermont. He was a controversial figure, I gathered…. He had spent some time in jail for having a relationship with an underage girl. He started doing heroin when he got out. I guess there weren’t many opportunities for ex-cons in Vermont…. There weren’t really opportunities for anyone.

He was in trouble again, now, it seemed…. Drugs, or something. His background meant they were looking to put him away for 15 years. Ann had tried to convince him to move with her to South America… promised him that her parents would pay. That was how she was…. It was not a rational or realistic proposition, but she loved him. Hers was an immediate love. She did not have the will, as a person, to wait out a prison sentence. She wanted everything now or not at all…. He, apparently, disappeared.

The old mystic kept trying to jump into the conversation…. He tried to rationalize some things, but mostly just said that Eamon was a confused and lost person. Ann immediately defended him.

“He isn’t lost, maybe confused, but not lost!” She argued. “Anyways, he is a good person, with a big heart. I just don’t think he knows how to handle what he’s facing.”

“Would anyone?” I put dryly. Certainly I could not imagine facing 15 years in prison, but I also couldn’t exactly imagine putting myself in that kind of position. I also knew she had a penchant for deadbeats–and I don’t disclude myself.

What Ann could not understand–the part that didn’t fit with all the others–was the fact that he had stopped returning her calls. Nothing would get under her skin like being ignored. If he didn’t want her anymore, she wanted him to tell her. Then they could at least have a fight, and fights were at least satisfying.

“I’m going to the bar tonight. He’s playing a show. I’ll find him at the show,” she told us.

“I don’t know how good an idea that is,” the mystic said. “You should let him come to you.” While I found the mystic’s faux-eastern way of saying it grating, I generally agreed. But, I had known Ann very well at one point. I knew she would not leave the situation alone. She would force his hand and probably make it worse.

“It’s on the way home from here,” she told the mystic, who I guess was her ride. It became clear now why she even visited. That had been part of the plan all along. It didn’t bother me any. I had no plan to get involved.

The afternoon progressed, and they stayed just long enough to see the first rays of golden hour light across the pond, spreading that drowsy warm light through the spruce boughs. Before they left, Ann asked me to visit her in the evening. She left me her address in Pawlet, told me she couldn’t bear to be alone when she was so upset. Some part of me felt pity for her. I sent them off and watched them meander down the winding mountain path.

When the dark came, I packed my pack and walked down the trail, by headlamp, to where my car was parked…. It was a route I knew well. I drove along the southern Greens, to where there was a pass through the mountains above Manchester. Manchester was a resort town nestled between the Greens and the Taconics… Mt. Equinox and Dorset Peak looming tall over the outlets and hotels. After Manchester the road to Pawlet wound through farm fields, with the darkened outlines of the mountains, faintly perceptible on the horizon… the line delineated only by the spectacularly bright night sky, and the moon, and Saturn.

Pawlet was a small town, with a bar and a general store. Ann lived on the right side of the road, on the second floor of a house with a two story porch. She could see the Mettawee flowing through the rolling hills, forested all around by sugar maple and paper birch. She was alone on the porch when I parked. She did not wave or call out. I thought of making a joke about her clearly not present boyfriend, but decided to leave it alone.

“This is a nice spot,” I said.

“Come inside. He has friends here. I don’t want them to think anything.”

These are things you have to worry about in Vermont. I remember a time when Ann and I were still dating, back when we first moved from Philadelphia. We had a fight, and it was pretty bad. After a while we made up, but it took a lot out of me. I went to the bar, and we planned to meet there later on. I saved a seat for her next to me. After a while the bar got full and there was a couple looking for a seat. The bartender offered the seat next to me. I thought she would have assumed I was saving it. After all, she had seen me in there plenty of times, and always with Ann. I stopped the couple from sitting down.

“I’m saving it,” I said, so both the couple and bartender could hear.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think Ann would be joining you tonight.”

I guess things like that make you realize how small these towns are. I used to like Philadelphia because I felt invisible. It was nice. Getting to choose who you know, at least to some degree… or at least who you didn’t know. There were so many people and so few of them mattered. But, it is not like that in Vermont.

The inside of the apartment was small and cluttered. It smelled like cigarette smoke and mold. Ann went to the kitchen and got me a beer without my asking. I caught a look at her in the light when she came back in. She had aged so much from when I had known her. Certain things were the same… the straight dirty blonde hair, her vintage summer dress—red with white polka dots. Her eyes seemed to have changed from bright blue to ashen gray, and her skin was so tanned it almost looked dirty. It made the whites of her eyes stand out. Her face was drawn, and I could tell she had been crying.

She sat me down in the front room and put on bluegrass music. The whole scene felt strangely familiar.

“I’m thinking of staying in Vermont this year,” she told me.

“Is the farm keeping you on?”

“No, it’s a long story. You know Bill, from the pond today? He told me that when something is supposed to happen it does…”

“That sounds like something he would say,” I said, smirking, but trying to hold it back.

“Yea,” she drawled and squinted her eyes. I guess she had caught my sarcasm and didn’t appreciate it. “So, I was up in Poultney,” she started, “There is a new coffee shop there. This woman always comes in with her kids…. They are the cutest kids, and super smart. All the kids in Vermont are so, so smart… so well behaved. She told me her kids’ school, the Mettawee School, is hiring…. Do you know of the Mettawee School?” She squinted again, and asked the question with a hint of condescension.

“No. I mean, I assume it’s near the Mettawee….”

“You would think it’s great. You bring the kids on walks in the woods, and that is how they learn science. They learn it by experiencing it.”

“I would’ve loved a school like that as a kid…. Instead, I got New York City schools,” I said.

“I’m going to apply tomorrow. You have to go there to apply, and they interview you right then. I’ve been teaching in Philly for so long, and teaching kids about social justice is super important to me, but I just feel it’s right to move on.”

“What’s the story with Eamon? Did you work things out?” I asked.

“We didn’t go to his show. Bill wouldn’t go.”

“Maybe that is best.”

“Bill doesn’t think much of Eamon, but he is a good person. Everyone around here judges him because he made mistakes when he was young…. And the whole thing about him sleeping with an underage girl… he was 18 and she was 17. Her parents didn’t like him so they pressed charges.” She said all this viciously, almost… squinting with each word she emphasized. By now the story felt a little over-rehearsed… like I wasn’t the first person she had to say it all to.

“That’s one of those difficult situations,” I said, a little disinterested.

“You were a year older than me,” she reminded me.

“I still am.”

“You know what I mean. He isn’t a pedophile like they call him. I met him at one of Steve’s parties, now Steve is going around calling him a pervert to everyone…. And the whole drugs thing, he smokes weed, that’s all. He got caught while driving, and they saw his record. He doesn’t deserve it.”

It wasn’t an unfamiliar story in the north woods. People tend to make trouble out of boredom, or whatever else. It’s not like I hadn’t had friends like that throughout my life…. At the same time, the way she defended him felt off… like she was trying to anticipate any criticisms I might have. I never met Eamon. How could I really pass judgment one way or the other? I couldn’t be the one to vindicate how she felt about it.

I did feel bad. It seemed like the stress had completely worn her down. Now… with planning to stay, and teach, and live in Vermont…. It’s not an easy life. She would find some things out about the way people are, too. Vermont may be the first state to have abolished slavery, but it wasn’t exactly a diverse community…. All the prejudices of rural America exist in various pockets.

In 2009, the owner of one of the cheesesteak joints in Philly put a sign out that read, “Order in English.” Ann was so incensed that, every time she passed the place she would yell, “racist cheesesteaks!” at the crowd gathered in front. How would someone like that handle the deeper and more malignant views that find safe harbor in the hearts of the rural poor? When Eamon finally went to jail, that would leave her isolated in a culture she didn’t really understand.

I started to feel tired. It was a long way back, and I felt that I had a lot to think about… a lot that needed time to process. It wasn’t my affair, but it made me feel bad about a lot of things that seemed to be just beyond it… things that bled over into my Vermont. Had I also idealized this place? Was there really anything for me here? I told Ann I needed to go.

“Don’t go. I can’t be alone tonight. I’m too upset,” she told me.

“I don’t want Eamon or his friends to think anything, and I really am very tired. I’m sorry.”

“Just stay and watch a movie with me,” she pleaded. It was a familiar tactic. It reminded me of all the times I had tried to leave. All the times I had caved in. I knew if I did stay I’d fall asleep and stay the whole night.

“If it means that much to you I’ll stay,” I said.

There really was nowhere for me to stay. There was only her bed, which she assured me was okay to lie down in. I had no intentions, and it wouldn’t have been the right way even if I had…. Still, it felt overly familiar to lay in her bed. It seemed like the sort of thing that could make the wrong impression.

For a long time after Ann and I had dated, she still relied on me as an emotional support. I never really appreciated it. I wanted a clean break… but, there were things she had trouble letting go of. She would call me out of loneliness, the way you call a significant other. This felt a bit too much like that. Back then, it had taken a lot to break that pattern, and I think it hurt both of us to some degree.

I got into bed and she put on the movie. I felt nervous, the way you do with a new lover. I didn’t want to touch her at all. I started to doze, and when I woke the movie was over and it was quiet. It had become cold in the room and I dozed off again. In the night I woke again, this time she was pressed against me, with her head resting on my shoulder. It was a position that she used to lay in. I surrendered to it, even though it didn’t feel quite right.

In the morning, I woke before her. I got up and left, trying not to wake her. It was the last time I ever saw her. Two weeks after, she called me in the late afternoon to tell me Eamon had shot himself. I packed my car and drove south.

#fiction #shortstory #shot story #literature #memories #nostalgia #northwoods

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