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yespoetry · 5 years

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Control the Echoes

By Jonathan Russell Clark

Her spoken sentences tended to omit proper nouns, leaving only discursive, aimless run-ons that veered off one point, switched to another, swooped again, got murky, and finally landed not really anywhere specific but simply where a period arbitrarily stopped them.

“You were here when they told me,” she’d say, “and so you know that I’m not trying to do anything like they said I did, but they keep coming at me, and I don’t know who or what or where anymore, because there isn’t anything like that that I want, and I said that I was fine yesterday because I saw her over there, you know the young one, the one with the, oh what’s her hair like, and she wasn’t asking because like I said I wasn’t saying anything if I didn’t want to.”

The hospice info pamphlets said to go along with whatever she said, but how do go along with that? It didn’t take long, though, for me to figure out the purpose of going along with the things she said. If you don’t, you have to ask for clarification, or you have to contradict them, or you have to interrupt an already tenuous thread—and none of it with any results. It’s the flow that’s important, not the content. If I’d stopped my grandmother and said, for example, “Who are they?” she’d look at me as if I’d just asked her the most nonsensical thing, since of course she didn’t know who they were, because who they were didn’t matter. What mattered for her was some deep need to express, to communicate something, even if that something didn’t come out explicable. It was the act of talking that compelled her, and any obstruction jammed the rhythm and frustrated her. And since no actual clarification or sense came from any question we asked her, it was obviously better to let the linguistic current expel forth unimpeded.

Among her verbal hemorrhaging were numerous references to her long life: sometimes she’d wonder why her parents hadn’t been around to see her; sometimes she asked if I knew her brother, and where was he; and other times it seemed the words were some uncontrollable reverberation of various points in her nine decades.

An echo of herself.

In Aleksander Hemon’s novel The Lazarus Project, there is the following line: “Nobody can control resemblances, any more than you can control echoes.”

If there is a sound and a reverberating obstacle, there is an echo. There is no judgment in the existence of that echo, no choice, no accusation of agency, no life in it. Nobody accuses an echo of hyperbole, of lying, of falsifying the expanse of its resound. It is simply there because it is there.

Three years. Three years. Three years. Three years.

I’ve never reached a fourth anniversary with a partner. All four of my major relationships ended at three, never developing the ability to speak in complex sentences, never learned to count past ten or understand the concept of time or tell a story about what happened to them.

My relationships died before they began to truly become independent. The failure of my love—its inability to keep something alive—repeats in my mind and through me when I meet someone who moves me. The joyous noise of new love echoes off the obstacle of my past failures, and I can no more control it than I can family resemblances.

My mother looks like my grandmother, and my sister looks like my mother, but my sister really looks like my grandmother. I see each of them in each other, in little softly articulated ways, as subtle as color schemes in well-decorated interiors, minute spots of this shade, that one, which unite a space of otherwise unconnected things.

Echoes are beyond our control—unless we alter the geography of where the sound is made.

Echo is a nymph in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, who is condemned to repeat the last few words of whatever Narcissus says. So when he asks, “Is anyone there?” she responds, “One there?”

I am standing in a cavern at Old Man’s Cave in Ohio, where I’m from. I yell out, “HELLO!” and hear loud and clear my voice coming back to me: ELLO Ello ello lo lo o.

Echoes do not return our words; rather, they transform them.

From Lacy M. Johnson’s essay “The Reckonings,” in which she grapples with notions of justice and retribution for the man who kidnapped, raped, and tried to kill her:

I carry these stories with me because I don’t know what else to do with them. The details may differ. If it is not the story of an abusive lover, perhaps it is a mother, or a father, or an uncle; or it is the story of a friend who has been killed by a stranger while trying to do the right thing, or a woman who is shot in the back of the head while asking for help; it might be a story about the abuse of power, or authority, of the slow violence of bureaucracy, of the way some people are born immune to punishment and others spend whole lifetimes being punished in ways they did nothing to deserve.

These horrific and common stories demand a corresponding action—some form of symmetrical absolution, as in movies where the villain is righteously killed by the victimized hero. “Then, as now,” Johnson writes, “we want to transform our suffering: to take a pain we experience and change it into the satisfaction of causing pain for someone else.”

Later, on becoming a writer: “I’ve called myself a writer now for more than half of my life, and during all this time, I have learned that sometimes the hardest and more important work I’ve done has meant turning a story I couldn’t tell into one that I can—and that this practice on its own is one not only of discovery but of healing.”

The American Psychiatric Association has this to say on PTSD:

People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event has ended. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares; they may feel sadness, fear or anger; and they may feel detached or estranged from other people. People with PTSD may avoid situations or people that remind them of the traumatic event, and they may have strong negative reactions to something as ordinary as a loud noise or an accidental touch.

Echo tries to touch Narcissus, but he repels and rebukes her, saying, “Hands off! May I die before you enjoy my body.” To which Echo replies: “…enjoy my body.”

Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves features a chapter dedicated to echoes. This chapter has caused much consternation in readers: if you Google “house of leaves echoes” you’ll find numerous threads asking why this section is included in the book at all.

From that chapter:

Nevertheless, above and beyond the details of frequency shifts and volume fluctuations—the physics of ‘otherness’—what matters most is a sound’s delay.

Point of fact, the human ear cannot distinguish one sound wave from the same sound wave if it returns in less than 50 milliseconds. Therefore for anyone to hear a reverberation requires a certain amount of space.

My grandmother, out of necessity, does the same things everyday: she gets out of bed, takes medications, eats some fruit or toast, sits in her chair and watches TV. And she talks. In circles, full of non sequitors, wholly incomprehensible. Though there is sometimes a hint of frustration or helplessness in her words, she does not seem unhappy.

And yet she is losing herself. Has already lost most of herself. This self now—the one that still lives, functions, talks—isn’t her. So she isn’t happy; she is gone.

It is this echo that seems happy.

From Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence:

The painting is an allegory of the evils of power, how they pass down the chain from the greater to the lesser. Human beings were clutched at, and clutched at others in their turn. If power was a cry, then human lives were lived in the echo of the cries of others. The echo of the mighty deafened the ears of the helpless.

I repeat: echoes do not repeat; they transform. It may be slight, it may seem miniscule, but it is not the same as the original vibration; it is like a recollection of it, a memory.

Memories fuzz the details. They make them murky. They soften the edges of some parts, intensify the sharpness of others. But we do not mistake memories for current realities, no more than we believe that a son and a father are the same person, merely because they share traits, look alike, echo each other.

Imagine the inside of yourself. Not the physical inside but the abstract inner space—the spirit or the soul or the heart or the essence—whatever you want to call it or believe it to be.

Imagine it as an open expanse of sky, or an endless field of grass, or a wide ocean. Imagine these impossible geographies filled with items: the house you grew up in; your first pair of glasses; your crush on your neighbor; the backpack you lost on the subway; the books you read and remember; the words that hurt you, that healed you, that gave definition to something that before was inarticulate; the shape of your calf; a painting by a friend; the hope you carry that persists in the face of repeated failures. It is you who connect this space of otherwise unconnected things.

Now imagine moving through these expanses—flying, walking, swimming—brushing up against the items, through them, past them, around them; touching them, holding them, feeling them. Imagine the culmination of these touches, these brushes, how they add up in your fingertips, give you a sense of surfaces, a variety of weight.

Imagine a sudden interruption in these spaces—a wall bounding upwards forever, a cliff with no foot routes, a curved shaped you can’t get above or below or around or inside. Imagine trying to continue moving through the space, but not matter what you do, you can’t get above or below or around or inside this interruption. In vain, you attack it with your fists, which only serves to confound your sense of touch, which before had been the entire point of moving. You have no options. Like some Biblical figure, like some mythological cypher, you yell at the interruption, condemning, berating, pleading, accusing, decrying…

But your words do nothing to it; they only echo back, mocking your futility.

When Narcissus first hears Echo in the woods, before he rebukes her, he calls out to her, “This way! We must come together.” Echo replies: “We must come together.”

We do not know what to do about my grandmother. She is not she and yet she is.

I do not know what to do with my new love, how I can deflect the echoes of my three-year pattern. Every love is different and yet shades of similarity persist.

We do not know how to get over trauma—not fully, not completely. Those echoes will always be there; we can no more control them than we can control the cause of that trauma.

We do not control the echoes of us; we can only control our own volume, the spaces we create sound in, our voices. We cannot control the sounds of others—“the physics of ‘otherness’”—but we can to the best of our ability change our distance, our space in relation to the echoes, to maybe get close enough to the source, that we can hear it no longer. We must turn the stories we can’t tell into ones that we can. We must reverse the echoes of power.

We must come together.

Jonathan Russell Clark is a literary critic. He is the author of An Oasis of Horror in a Desert of Boredom (Fiction Advocate), on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. A former contributing editor at Literary Hub, his work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, the San Francisco Chronicle, Vulture, Tin House, The Atlantic, The New Republic, the Columbus Dispatch, The Georgia Review, The Millions, LA Review of Books, The Rumpus, Chautauqua, PANK, and numerous others.

#essay #Jonathan Russell Clark #special feature

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revoevokukil · 5 years

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On Showing & Telling in Captain Marvel and its Flaws

Let me premise this off by clarifying that I saw the film thrice, I loved it thoroughly in my first viewing, and I have written about it on multiple occasions. Most notably I am NOT arguing that Carol does not have an arc or a journey – see my thoughts on that here.

I do think, however, that the film has many problems that make it feel underwhelming, and the most serious problems for me appear in regard to what extent the script manages to make the audience care about Carol Danvers and the central twists of the film. Twists which alter and affect her, which form the plot machine of the film. For instance, one of the most puzzling questions I have had to answer to is, what are Carol Danvers’ flaws, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities? Not that they are not there in concept, but that I really have to infer them or hear about them rather than see them play out on screen. It is the vulnerabilities and things a hero cannot do or struggles with that usually are more interesting as well.

While this is not central to what I am about to write, it figures in it because showing the internal tensions of a protagonist usually reveals much about them and makes us really afraid for them and their humanity. We hurt with them and we cheer with them because of them. I have found that Captain Marvel does not do this nearly enough given the plotlines it utilises to spin the story forward. It does not entirely feel like you go on a fully fleshed out emotional journey with her, even though conceptually it seems like you are. And there are good reasons for it that come down to writing and showing.

The twist in the film has two aspects – one upheaves the political world-building and one capsizes Carol’s world on a personal level. Let’s take them in order.

The political is personal and the personal is political – they bleed into each other. Carol sacrifices herself for Mar-Vell’s cause of helping the Skrulls – she acts selflessly and heroically, though she knows nothing about the Skrulls nor the Kree. Although by the end of the film Carol comes to empathise with Talos’ cause, because she too has lost family and sense of belonging (twice over), her first introduction to this intergalactic conflict is from the perspective of the Kree. It is their point of view that informs the character Carol, or Vers, is when we meet her, and it is that basis from which she develops. It informs the culmination of her journey, the twist of the film, and the consistency and wholesomeness of her character writing – something that ought to make her believable and engaging. Why does Carol care so deeply about her battle against the Skrulls, and why should we care to be on her side’s side? Why is her owning up to her role in the war meaningful but tough at the end?

When we meet Carol Danvers, she believes herself to be a victim of a Skrull attack (a lie) and that gives us one plausible source of motivation. But are we therefore to infer that Carol is seeking personal justice and vengeance? Does she want to control her powers and use them for her own sake or for the sake of the people who saved her life after the attack (explosion)? Is it a selfish or selfless motivation? In the very first scene of the film, where Yon-Rogg is teaching Carol to fight, she is told to control her emotions, which amounts to “no fireworks” with her hands. This is a fair fight, the point of which is to train her not to rely overly on her powers. That it turns out to have a more insidious undertone and subtext is currently irrelevant. Carol gets beaten in this unarmed combat scene and just blasts Yon-Rogg anyway. What does it tell us about her character? That Carol seems to be a sore loser, she has trouble controlling her temper, she is extremely competitive, and that she really-really loves to win. That Carol is willing to cheat in order to win is displayed in another scene she has with Maria. They race their cars to the base and Carol takes a shortcut, thus “violating pre-determined rules of engagement.” Given all we know about her life on Earth, it is safe to say Carol is a bit of a rebel in general, while also being a soldier – a contradiction in set expectations.

So, perhaps she holds grudges. Or, which I think is more likely, perhaps she has witnessed the people she connects with on Hala lose their loved ones or/and get hurt? Has she met Kree children who’ve lost their parents to the war? Carol’s character could be shown to identify with that, given that she is essentially an orphan in their society herself. Has she witnessed Skrull terrorists’/freedom fighters’ respective atrocities first-hand? Do the Kree have their own version of the events and reasons for why they are not satisfied with having destroyed the Skrulls’ homeworld? Does Carol care deeply about the ordinary Kree, Yon-Rogg, and the people who saved her? Is being grateful enough of a motivator to go to war over? Her mentor is a war hero, a person deeply respected and looked up to in their society – does he have personal reasons beyond the ideological ones that Carol is also aware of and sympathises with?

Sadly, none of this is shown or explored.

While all of these questions make Carol’s eventual turning against the Kree more striking and impactful it also makes Carol’s sympathy toward Talos and his family more emotionally satisfying to witness. She empathises with him even through the haze of war ideology, fear, and learned antagonism toward the Skrulls as the enemies of herself and the Kree. She empathises with Talos even though she probably knows that war is not black and white – something the film currently makes the Kree-Skrull conflict out to be. Showing her motivations for really having faith in the cause of the “noble warrior heroes” really addresses the tension that should accompany Carol’s switching sides and realising that she has fought for the stronger side that is now committing genocide. Carol is owning up to having done wrong and killed innocents, but the impact of that realisation is undercut by the audience never really witnessing the depth of her convictions, and therefore the meaningfulness of their eventual change.

Equally, conveying Carol’s personal motivations for wanting to fight the Kree-Skrull war at more depth addresses the fact that war is dirty and it is difficult to say where the line between right and wrong in conflict lies (should all Kree suffer now because of their leadership’s decisions?) – a hallmark of a hero’s struggle. It also adds much needed depth to the true antagonistic forces of this film by making the Kree’s and Yon-Rogg’s motivations and essence more complex and intricate, more life-like and realistic. Domination alone is never sufficient or interesting or true enough of a motivation and was, in my opinion, one of the greatest weaknesses of Captain Marvel’s film.

What about the twist that capsizes Carol’s world on a personal level? How does that inform her character-writing?

Carol starts out as having amnesia. Writing-wise this is a complicated, but not an undoable plot line. What makes this trope executable is this: even while the writing takes us on a journey with Carol as she is discovering about her past self, Carol Danvers already has a present self. Her present self (a Kree “noble warrior hero”) should captivate the audience – we should be able to care about Carol being an amnesiac, and about what that means for her. Film is a visual medium, which means that what a book tells you a film must be able to show. For instance, an amnesiac’s anguish and sadness over knowing absolutely nothing about herself, the feeling of helplessness, the craving for reassuring emotional connections with just about anyone in the absence of a strong, centred self.

It jots down a starting point upon which the film’s emotional tension centre (betrayal by Yon-Rogg and the Kree (her second adopted family, essentially) and the loss of control over one’s selfhood and life narrative) depends. Unfortunately, this bit of storytelling is entirely lacking. Most of the aforementioned examples are likely to have happened to Carol Danvers off-screen, at the beginning of her time on Hala – but Hala and Carol’s connection to the Kree, the emotional impact of the loss of a sense of self + nearly dying + integrating into a new life and culture + the impact her nightmares have on her newfound stable identity – how all of this impacts upon her character and her sense of meaning and purpose in life when we first meet her is pretty much not showed at all. After 6 years she is no longer a blank slate.

From the get-go, it does not do enough to endear the character’s starting position in the plot to the audience, and it does not endear Carol herself too much because not much about her present self is made relatable and nuanced enough when she is first introduced to us. The audience is not learning enough about the hero: her fears, her hopes for herself, her convictions, etc. Above all, it sets up a very weak starting point for the internal conflict Carol Danvers should very reasonably feel at discovering the truth.

When Carol discovers that her life with the Kree is built upon a lie and that she has effectively, at that moment, lost not one, but two lives, two versions of herself – it should be an earth-shattering moment. The big twist of the film should make Carol re-evaluate everything in her life. She tears up and is angry, but then promptly shrugs it off as Maria grounds her by telling her that she has faith in Carol, that she was a badass and a wholesome “self” all along, and implies that Carol can be so again (something greater than the sum of her parts). That is the only moment in the film where we really get to go inside Carol’s head as pertains to her internal conflict. But the magnitude of the twist and its effect on Carol regarding her re-evaluating everything about herself must happen off-screen, I suppose. As much of the rest of the story…

In order for that impact of what we knew about Carol/Vers at the beginning of the film to be truly poignant as it is turned upside down, the film should really show a continuing sense of conflict within Carol regarding her loyalties, the personal connections she has formed with the Kree vs the lost connection she has with Maria/life on Earth, the fact she has come to like being a “noble warrior hero” while now knowing it is not as noble as it seemed, the sense that she effectively “belongs” nowhere and with no one in particular now, the fact that she is about to kill her friends from Starforce (Att-Lass, for instance; “the only family she has” as Brie put it in Brazil), etc.

At the end Carol cracks jokes with Starforce – the people who have been her family and friends, and whom she is about to beat/kill. It is supposed to come off as this fun, empowering moment but from storytelling’s perspective it is tonally really weird. I don’t remember Steve doing that with Tony, or Thor with Loki – it undermines the emotional impact of the devastation the entire betrayal twist of the film is supposed to have. Remember, even though factually Carol’s life with the Kree may be based on falsehoods and deceit at its inception, the feelings she develops toward everyone and their lives are genuine and real. That is what makes the twist so painful.

However, this sense of internal conflict never really comes across. And it feels very hollow in terms of character-writing, despite there being a culmination of Carol’s journey through her re-establishing control over her own life. Since her self and its motivations/conflicts and likes/dislikes at the beginning of the film are devoted little to no time, none of this sense of internal conflict and its resolution could ever be potently shown. The absolutely wonderful moment where Carol asserts herself by having nothing to prove to Yon-Rogg is undercut by the question – did she ever really care all that much about her mentor and about living up to his ideals in the first place? Was she not a self-reliant rebel from the start anyway?

Also, as a side point, consider that whenever Carol is faced with a powers-related difficulty in the film, she overcomes it by simply “getting stronger.” On its own, that is not game breaking for a superhero film, but if it happens repeatedly and without any emotional tension to accompany it in any other way, it starts to come off as impactless. When she is imprisoned by the Skrulls and cannot use her powers, she eventually just shoots harder. When she is about to fall to her death, she concentrates and instantly knows how to fly. When she overcomes the Kree fleet, Carol does it again – simply gets stronger. It makes the character’s struggles feel a little bit too weightless sans all else I have outlined in this piece.

This, I believe, leads to accusations that Carol has “no arc” or that “she doesn’t change”. While these accusations are patently false, much in really showing the effects of drama in Captain Marvel’s titular character’s life remains to be desired. The film does try to do a little too much. It’s about Carol and her relationship to Yon-Rogg. Until it isn’t. It’s a buddy cop comedy with Nick Fury. Until it isn’t. It’s about her deep friendship with Maria. Until it isn’t. It is about Carol’s relationship with the Skrulls. Until it isn’t. It’s about Carol finding herself, questioning herself, re-evaluating herself, struggling with herself. And then it isn’t.

I hope they remedy that in the future, because in essence, Carol Danvers’ story has so much potential to be emotionally touching and interesting, and I hope for it dearly, since I love the character. Given the many similarities Carol shares with Gamora’s and Starlord’s stories, I would hope to see her cosmic opera as well realised as the Guardians’.

#captain marvel #carol danvers #maria rambeau #yon-rogg #nick fury #brie larson #jude law #mcu #marvel cinematic universe #character analysis #plot analysis #critique

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asianpacificbechdeltest-blog · 8 years

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Silence (2016) dir. Martin Scorsese

“The legendary filmmaker’s latest follows a Jesuit priest preaching the gospel to persecuted Japanese Christians, but is far more concerned with his agony than that of the ‘other.’”

“It makes perfect sense that Martin Scorsese, who’s been obsessed with Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence since a clergyman gave him a copy over two decades ago, should have spent the next quarter century trying to bring the Japanese Catholic author’s richly complex spiritual inquisition to the screen. And why not? On the heels of 2013’s Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese’s long-gestating passion project follows the thematic lineage of his Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, making it plainly essential viewing for the Scorsese faithful and those who share his keen interest in matters of personal faith.”

“But for skeptics and non-believers, the 161-minute tale of the spiritual struggle quietly raging within one white savior out of water in feudal Japan is a frustrating journey to take—and an ardent story about cultural imperialism and Western arrogance that doesn’t recognize its own.”

“The Portuguese first arrived in Japan in the middle of the 16th century, bringing guns and God along with them. Bearing gifts and preaching the gospel, the Jesuit Francis Xavier was the first European to succeed in spreading the germ of Christianity into a Buddhist and Shinto land. But when ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu reversed Japan’s stance on missionaries half a century later in order to protect the empire from encroaching Western cultural influence, the widespread eviction of foreign evangelicals and persecution of Japanese Christians forced practitioners into hiding under pain of torture or worse, birthing the Kakure Kirishitans—the “Hidden Christians.””

“It’s against this brutal climate of feudal control and religious oppression that Silence takes place, as seen through the kindly agonizing eyes of Sebastiao Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield), a young but devoted 17th century Portuguese priest. Sent from Lisbon with his fellow Jesuit Francisco Garrpe (Adam Driver) to investigate the unknown fate of their former teacher, Father Cristovao Ferreira (Liam Neeson), the Church’s “army of two” sets off on a harrowing journey into the heart of a hostile Japan, buoyed by their devotion and the unshakeable conceit that they’re on a mission from God to bring their “truth” to a country of naïve converts in need.”

“Adapting Endō’s celebrated novel with repeat collaborator Jay Cocks (The Age of Innocence, Gangs of New York), Scorsese traces its linear narrative at a languid pace that allows Garfield’s sensitive portrayal to emerge in long sections of quietude, narrating Rodrigues’s written letters back to Portugal over stunning scenes of the craggy and verdant Japanese coastline. The natural landscape of Japan comes alive through Rodrigo Prieto’s lensing as Rodrigues and Garrpe make their way onto the closed-off islands of Japan from Macau with the help of a shifty drunkard named Kichijiro (Yosuke Kubozuka), whose own crises of faith will become recurring provocations for Rodrigues’s spiritual evolution.”

“At first the frightened but determined priests find the land and poor villagers of Japan foreboding in their foreignness, and they cling to one another as they hide in dank squalor to elude discovery. They find gratification of purpose when they’re taken in and harbored by local Japanese Christians who, desperate for the ministrations of padres long gone, have adapted to worshipping in secret: carving their own icons from wood, clumsily reciting prayers learned from long-absent padres. All the while, they tell the duo, they’ve been longing for the return of the priests who can deliver Christian absolution, forgive their sins, and lead them to a paradise free of the worldly suffering they endure under the rule of a cruel and brutal Japanese overclass.”

“Scorsese’s restrained imagery immediately evokes the inherent contradictions in this interloper’s condescension, one validated by the extreme cruelties and horrors inflicted upon Japanese bodies so that they may be witnessed by the Portuguese. (He cast a Spider-Man, a Jedi, and Kylo Ren as his trio of padres and filmed in English, making the call to portray his Portuguese characters as noble Caucasian saviors with wildly differing accents but bankable faces.)”

“The film opens on a stunningly photographed inlet of steaming hot springs in winter: Neeson’s Ferreira watches helplessly as Japanese Christians are stripped down and burned with ladles of boiling water. Their screams pierce the air, but it’s Ferreira’s agony we are meant to feel—the agony of his inability to stop the torture, the suffering of his helplessness.”

“Another scene of torture is also one of Silence’s most virtuosic sequences, in which a trio of Japanese villagers, having refused to renounce their faith—to apostatize—are crucified in the rising tide of the Pacific until they expire from exhaustion. It’s one of the film’s most soul-stirring moments thanks to fine work from Japanese actor Shinya Tsukamoto, who plays the unflaggingly devout Mokichi. And yet here again, the pain is twofold: Mokichi’s dying gasps, loyal to God to the end, are validated by Rodrigues, watching helplessly from afar as he hides from the local lord’s enforcers.”

“Later, Rodrigues is imprisoned by authorities and pressured to renounce God by trampling on a likeness of Christ. He refuses, and suffers. But he is to discover there are harsher punishments than those that might be physically inflicted upon his own body. Catholic guilt gets a workout for nearly three hours onscreen in Silence, as Rodrigues and the more rigid Garrpe struggle to resolve the austerity of the teachings they’re imparting to a desperate flock with the grim suspicion that it all might be for naught.”

“Throughout Silence those silent agonies flash across Garfield’s distressed baby face, which Scorsese alternately smudges with grime to blend in with his dirt-covered parishioners, or frames in long voluminous Jesus curls to juxtapose his Christ-like glow with the wretched, imploring Japanese Christians. It’s not the plight of the Japanese that Scorsese is interested in, nor is that what the prideful Rodrigues worries over, as he longs to serve his righteous way to the Lord or die a glorious martyr’s death. As a result, Silence is a frequently dragging and exhausting meditation on spiritual fidelity that has little time for the non-white people on either side of this unholy reign of terror.”

“Like Rodrigues, Scorsese’s sense of purpose and his own self-interest lead him down a narrow path that mostly preaches to the lapsed and likeminded. A nonbeliever, on the other hand, might find Scorsese’s dogmatic obsession so taxing that it seems perfectly reasonable when the Japanese take strategic measures to expel these interlopers from their country—yes, sure, even if it means hanging innocents by the feet until the torture drives them mad or worse. If you suffer from the affliction of not caring about the soul of Silence’s hero, you too might find yourself dreadfully uninterested in the crisis he’s brought upon himself, wishing he’d just go home to Portugal and leave Japan alone.”

“Alas, along the way Rodrigues finds himself lifted and spurred on by the devotion of the secret Christians he meets, who happily sacrifice themselves to torture and death if it means earning their Jesus stripes. But ultimately his journey becomes more defined by a trio of Japanese foils who become the biggest thorns in his side: Kichijiro, the Judas to his Christ; The Interpreter, an enigmatic court-appointed translator trying to convince him to renounce his faith (Tadanobu Asano); and Inquisitor Inouye (Issei Ogata), the feudal lord in charge of the persecution of Christians whose off-putting demeanor masks a ruthlessness reflected in the name Scorsese gave him—a reminder that the Catholics themselves weren’t so innocent elsewhere in the world around the same time.”

“The combined excellence of this Japanese trio is maddening, because they bring Silence’s most provocative characters to life only to ultimately and thanklessly be used as props for Rodrigues’s own self-absorbed journey of spiritual self-discovery. Ogata, a gifted comedian, infuses Inoue with a mesmerizing duality that combats Rodrigues’s youthful egotism; he’s more deserving of a supporting actor awards push than, say, Neeson, whose presence in the film is laughably scant by comparison. Asano, one of the best Japanese actors of his generation, shines with a deceptive charm as he works his master manipulations on the stubbornly resistant priest. Kubozuka lends the traitorous Kichijiro a pitiable relatability and turns Rodrigues’ own personal Judas into a compellingly illustrative figure of questioning and utterly human faith.”

“Scorsese’s very Catholic interest in Endō’s Silence lies in the question of whether or not God forgives those who renounce Him—and how the devoted deal with the psychological torment of His silence. But he seems only to care how those questions impact his light-skinned protagonist. To that end, he stakes more investment in the spiritual agonies of his priest than he does in the native peasants who are literally dying to protect the foreign padres, without granting the Japanese Christians or their tormentors the full breadth of context and complexity that Endō wrote into his novel. Absent from the film, for example, is any exploration of the socioeconomic power structure that turned so many poor Japanese peasants toward Christian teachings that promised paradise and salvation—escape from their miserable earthly lives. Silence ignores the economics of why Western faith found a berth in Japan to begin with and breezes over the underlying cultural clash that, one untrustworthy character argues, makes it impossible for Christianity to take root in the “swamp” of Japan.”

“In his pursuit of his protagonist’s prerogative, Scorsese in effect reduces Japan to gorgeous, exotic, unforgiving scenery. (He shot it in Taiwan, where he also received partial financing.) Its people exist to serve Rodrigues’s reckoning with his own faith. The difference is crucial: Endō may have written a Western male protagonist and plopped him smack dab in the middle of a tumultuous time in Japan, but he also kept enough distance from his priest to illuminate his flaws against the bigger picture. Those nuances are seeded throughout Endō’s novel, which he himself co-adapted into a 1971 film and later, an opera. The author, both a conflicted Japanese and a conflicted Catholic, painted a portrait of a bygone Japan in flux, where missionaries found themselves in the position of reconciling their own strict doctrine with a culture they did not understand.”

“Scorsese is almost single-mindedly concerned with the salvation of Rodrigues’s soul. Is he, then, in the same rickety boat as his protagonist?”

“Compare his embellishments of the source material to the novel itself and the first film to be adapted from it, by Double Suicide filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda, five years after the book’s release. Co-written by Endō, 1971’s Chinmoku (Silence) ends with a controversial bang that leaves little ambiguity to Shinoda’s harsh view of the outsider Rodrigues, and the metaphorical consequences missionaries brought to Japan in the guise of spreading salvation. Endō, who passed away in 1996, reportedly hated the director’s ending, which hammers home its point by holding a gruesome freeze-frame on Rodrigues’s gnarled face. (For those interested, the 1971 film is available on the streaming platform FilmStruck.)”

“By comparison, Silence treats Endō’s protagonist with kid gloves as it ignores the cultural exploration that accompanies the religious one in Endō’s book—and in doing so embraces the white male perspective Scorsese brings with him. He spares Rodrigues the ignominy of Chinmoku’s ending, prizing the priest’s spiritual purity over all else, and in doing so turns Garfield’s earnestness into tedious, endless self-absorption. He also takes the liberty of giving Rodrigues a final act of grace that Endo never wrote. Is Scorsese playing God with Endō’s material, gifting Rodrigues with this last bit of ham-fisted redemption? At best it’s an indulgent affirmation that, like the whole of Silence, serves only the faithful and the questioning. At worst it’s an emotionally manipulative flourish that sends Silence off as a requiem for Rodrigues, true believer, noble victim of the cruel Japanese.”

“It’s no coincidence that Endō wrote his novel in 1966 inspired by his country’s own history and the life of the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Chiara, a generation removed from the sharp and forced end to Japan’s own imperialist efforts. He’d converted to Catholicism at age 10 for his mother and during WWII found himself a lonely practitioner of the religion of Japan’s enemies—an outsider in his own country. Later he moved to France seeking something closer to acceptance, only to find himself the target of European racism. His book, from this thornily conflicted Japanese Catholic perspective, reflects a much richer, and much more complicated interrogation into the collision of forces that converged upon and within Japan, yielding universal questions from such a specific life.”

“By filtering Endō’s complex moral conflict into a work of spiritual tourism Scorsese selfishly works out his own questions of faith, using Endō’s text to do it—while ignoring the cultural context that makes his Japanese-ness matter. That’s far too fine a line between self-serving cinema and cinema that serves the complex crises of religion and clashing cultures that Endō wrote of. In Silence, the padre Rodrigues agonizes over the silence of a God that won’t reply to him and by extension, validate his faith and suffering. Scorsese does more than enough of that for the both of them.”

ARTICLE: Yamato, Jen. “‘Silence’: Scorsese’s Flawed, Frustrating White Savior Tries to Save Japan From Itself,” The Daily Beast. Web. 2017

#silence #silence movie #martin scorsese #andrew garfield #shusaku endo #adam driver #liam neeson #film #white savior #japan #Yosuke Kubozuka #Shinya Tsukamoto #Tadanobu Asano #Issei Ogata #jen yamato #the daily beast #question mark

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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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Insects Quotes

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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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