Centipede Quotes

It's kind of like a Zen thing. Like playing the piano, or being a centipede in Heaven. ~ Peter Watts

At first it was simply that the spells would not come off. Or they would, but with the most unexpected results. He would try to move a small object, a salt cellar; it would overturn. He would try again and the salt would burst into flames. On the third try it might fly at his head, or mine. One day he attempted a simple messenger spell, and in the space of five minutes every spider, centipede, and earwig in the place came swarming in under the door. We began conducting his training outside after that.

"Attempting to levitate, he blew up an entire grove of trees in the park. A simple summoning, butterflies I think, and all the horses went crazy for an hour. Things soon reached such a state that whenever anything unusual happened within the Orëska grounds, we got the blame for it.

"Oh, but it was frustrating! In spite of all the blunders, all the destruction, I knew the power was there. I could feel it, even when he could not. For he did succeed now and then, but so erratically! Poor Seregil was devastated. I saw him brought to tears just trying to light a candle. Then there was the time he turned himself into a brick. ~ Lynn Flewelling

After the shot he collapsed on the bed and lay there inert, but something was stirring in his spine from neck to the tail - and now pieces tore loose in the eggs and then a red, glistening head emerges in reeking yellow slime - and then the whole centipede crawling out quick. ~ William S. Burroughs

The centipede has rhythm and flow in its hundred legs precisely because it does not have to think about it. Consider this the next time you move the instruments of your art. ~ Robert Genn

The centipede was happy, quite, Until a toad in fun Said, "Pray, which leg goes after which?" This worked his mind to such a pitch, He lay distracted in a ditch, Considering how to run. ~ Alan W. Watts

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

I have always been averse to theorizing about the art or craft of biography. Like Disraeli's biographer, Lord Blake, who offers the cautionary analogy of the biographical centipede unsure of her next step because of too much cerebration, I have made it my practice to let the facts find the theory. ~ David Levering Lewis

I'm not a big fan of spiders, rats, especially if they're like - I got up one morning on a holiday recently, and there was a centipede in the bed that big. I wasn't very happy about that. ~ Tim Burton

They say only love can create, so who the fuck could love up a centipede? He's got more love in him than I got.
Now, killing a centipede makes me feel safer - like, one less. ~ William S. Burroughs

What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they'd think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present. For example, the father of a family might go out for a walk, and, across the street, he'll see something like a red rag, blown towards him by the wind. And when the rag has gotten close to him he'll see that it is a side of rotten meat, grimy with dust, dragging itself along by crawling, skipping, a piece of writhing flesh rolling in the gutter, spasmodically shooting out spurts of blood. Or a mother might look at her child's cheek and ask him: "What's that, a pimple?" and see the flesh puff out a little, split, open, and at the bottom of the split an eye, a laughing eye might appear. Or they might feel things gently brushing against their bodies, like the caresses of reeds to swimmers in a river. And they will realize that their clothing has become living things. And someone else might feel something scratching in his mouth. He goes to the mirror, opens his mouth: and his tongue is an enormous, live centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping his palate. He'd like to spit it out, but the centipede is a part of him and he will have to tear it out with his own hands. And a crowd of things will appear for which people will have to find new names, st ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

They're pretty extreme, but I loved the two 'Human Centipede' films from Tom Six. Those movies are fun because they're well-made. They're crazy and psychotic and perverted and twisted, but they're really well-made. ~ Bill Moseley

It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.

A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals. ~ Mark Twain

We are dying birds we are sinking ships - the world rocks down against us and we throw out our arms and we throw out our legs like the death kiss of the centipede: but they kindly snap our backs and call our poison politics. ~ Charles Bukowski

I'm afraid of coaching, of writer's classes, of writer's magazines, of books on how to write. They give me centipede trouble - you know the yarn about the centipede who was asked how he managed all his feet? He tried to answer, stopped to think about it, and was never able to walk another step. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

The ownership of land is not natural. The American savage, ranging through forests who game and timber are the common benefits of all his kind, fails to comprehend it. The nomad traversing the desert does not ask to whom belong the shifting sands that extend around him as far as the horizon. The Caledonian shepherd leads his flock to graze wherever a patch of nutritious greenness shows amidst the heather. All of these recognise authority. They are not anarchists. They have chieftains and overlords to whom they are as romantically devoted as any European subject might be to a monarch. Nor do they hold as the first Christians did, that all land should be held in common. Rather, they do not consider it as a thing that can be parceled out.

"We are not so innocent. When humanity first understood that a man's strength could create good to be marketed, that a woman's beauty was itself a commodity for trade, then slavery was born. So since Adam learnt to force the earth to feed him, fertile ground has become too profitable to be left in peace.

"This vital stuff that lives beneath our feet is a treasury of all times. The past: it is packed with metals and sparkling stones, riches made by the work of aeons. The future: it contains seeds and eggs: tight-packed promises which will unfurl into wonders more fantastical than ever jeweller dreamed of -- the scuttling centipede, the many-branched tree whose roots, fumbling down into darkness, are as large and cunningly ~ Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Or a mother might look at her child's cheek and ask him: "What's that, a pimple?" and see the flesh puff out a little, split, open, and at the bottom of the split an eye, a laughing eye might appear. Or they might feel things gently brushing against their bodies, like the caresses of reeds to swimmers in a river. And they will realize that their clothing has become living things. And someone else might feel something scratching in his mouth. He goes to the mirror, opens his mouth: and his tongue is an enormous, live centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping his palate. He'd like to spit it out, but the centipede is a part of him and he will have to tear it out with his own hands. And a crowd of things will appear for which people will have to find new names, stone eye, great three cornered arm, toe crutch, spider jaw. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Dick got up to Zurich on less Achilles' heels than would be required to equip a centipede, but with plenty - the illusions of eternal strength and health, and of the essential goodness of people; illusions of a nation, the lies of generations of frontier mothers who had to croon falsely, that there were no wolves outside the cabin door. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

There may be people who like centipedes ... Personally, I would regard such an individual with deep suspicion. I have just petted my cat: "And how is this good little cat beast?" Now what sort of man or woman or monster would stroke a centipede on his underbelly? "And here is my good big centipede!" If such a man exists, I say kill him without more ado. He is a traitor to the human race. ~ William S. Burroughs

One is reminded of the old joke about the centipede who was asked how he managed to coordinate his 100 legs : He started thinking about it and could never walk properly again. ~ Paul Krugman

The moment we begin to give a nation the unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin to think wildly. Because every man is a biped, fifty men are not a centipede. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Ushikawa's appearance made him stand out. He did not have the sort of looks suited for stakeouts or tailing people. As much as he might try to lose himself in a crowd, he was inconspicuous as a centipede in a cup of yogurt ~ Haruki Murakami

The more i live, the more i realize what strange creatures human beings are. some of them might just as well have a hundred legs, like a centipede, or six, like a lobster. the human consistency and dignity one has been led to expect from one's fellow-man seem actually non-existent. one doubts if they exist to any startling degree even in oneself. ~ D.H. Lawrence

So many knives and forks and spoons were not meant for a human being but for a centipede ... ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

He gave Gaspode a long, slow stare, which was like challenging a centipede to an arse-kicking contest. ~ Terry Pratchett

That's the problem with this never-ending centipede of lemmings, Beck. You know they're all pussies, each and every one of 'em. They buy these books to get scared because their lives are too easy. How pathetic is that? ~ Caroline Kepnes

Approaching us through a haze of dust that overhung the road was a long column of men - a slovenly column that marched irregularly and out of step, so that it had the look of a gigantic centipede whose feet hurt. ~ Kenneth Roberts

Ye dinna want to believe in witches and zombies and things that go bump in the night?" she said, with a small, sly smile at me. She nodded at the centipede, struggling round and round in frenzied, lopsided circles. "Well, legends are many-legged beasties, aye? But they generally have at least one foot on the truth." She ~ Diana Gabaldon

What goes click ninety-nine times and clack once? A centipede with a clubfoot. ~ Anne Frank

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on. ~ Mukesh Ambani