Dung Beetles Quotes

It may not be irrelevant to note that even very modest forms of life, like earthworms, dung beetles and fiddler crabs, have no trouble identifying the real problems they must deal with if they are to survive. ~ Edward Goldsmith

I matched him glare for glare and refused to back down. I'd learnt that much, working with the guys we recruited for protection work. Forget your average heavy ... we used the elite. Ex-commandos used to living behind enemy lines on nothing more than fresh air and dung beetles, and who could zero in on a target using mouse farts three miles away. ~ Mina Carter

Watching copulating dung-beetles is exciting if you drink enough Red Bull, Jack. ~ Jonathan Dunne

THEOLOGY IS THE study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study man and his ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. One hopes that God feels likewise. ~ Frederick Buechner

Dung beetles follow the Milky Way; the Cataglyphis desert ant dead-reckons by counting its paces; monarch butterflies, on their thousand-mile, multigenerational flight from Mexico to the Rocky Mountains, calculate due north using the position of the sun, which requires accounting for the time of day, the day of the year, and latitude; honeybees, newts, spiny lobsters, sea turtles, and many others read magnetic fields. - Kim Tingley, The Secrets of the Wave Pilots ~ Hope Jahren

I've seen many a small life meet its doom at the end of a beak in our yard, not just beetles and worms but salamanders and wild-eyed frogs. (The "free-range vegetarian hens" testimony on an egg-carton label is perjury, unless someone's trained them with little shock collars.) ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Drunk or not, Niall caught the insult. "Lass, I promise ye what hides under me kilt is anything but funny." "You're right. Anything that hasn't bathed in decades is probably more likely to send a woman screaming. Or fainting from the smell." "Why you little harpy." Incredulous, he could only stare at her while she smirked. "Ah, have we reached the point of pet names? How sweet. I was thinking of dung beetle for you. ~ Eve Langlais

The beauteous dragonfly's dancing By the waves of the rivulet glancing; She dances here and she dances there, The glimmering, glittering flutterer fair. Full many a beetle with loud applause Admires her dress of azure gauze, Admires her body's bright splendour, And also her figure so slender ... ~ Heinrich Heine

You are quarter ghost on your mother's side.
Your heart is a flayed peach in a bone box.
Your hair comes away in clumps like cheap fabric wet.
A reflecting pool gathers around your altar
of plywood sub flooring and split wooden slats.
You are rag doll prone. You are contort,
angle and arc. Here you rot. Here
you are a greening abdomen, slipping skin,
flesh fly, carrion beetles.
This is where bullets take shelter,
where scythes find their function, breath loses
its place on the page. This is where the page is torn
out of every book before chapter's close,
this is slippage, this is a shroud of neglect
pulled over the body, this
is your chance to escape.
Little wraith,
bend light around your skin until it colors you clear,
disappear like silica in a kiln, become
glass and glass beads, become
the staggered whir of an exhaust fan:
something only noticed
when gone. Become
an origami swan. Fold yourself smaller
than ever before. Become less. More
in some ways but less
in the way a famine is less. They will
forgive you for not being satisfied
with fitting in their hands.
They will forgive you
for dying to be
a bird diminutive enough
to fit in a mouth and not be crushed. ~ Jamaal May

And all of this from what source? A wayside farm in the Polesine. It illustrates the adage that the deeper the dung, the richer the rose. Who remembers the dung when the rose has blossomed? ~ Samuel Shellabarger

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech. ~ Gene Wolfe

Haesten.
If this world ever contained one worthless, treacherous slime-coated piece of human dung then it was Haesten. ~ Bernard Cornwell

I know when I was a kid I ate a beetle. I ate a beetle because I thought it was licorice. ~ Karl Pilkington

Some stories last many centuries,
others only a moment.
All alter over that lifetime like beach-glass,
grow distant and more beautiful with salt.

Yet even today, to look at a tree
and ask the story Who are you? is to be transformed.

There is a stage in us where each being, each thing, is a mirror.

Then the bees of self pour from the hive-door,
ravenous to enter the sweetness of flowering nettles and thistle.

Next comes the ringing a stone or violin or empty bucket
gives off --
the immeasurable's continuous singing,
before it goes back into story and feeling.

In Borneo, there are palm trees that walk on their high roots.
Slowly, with effort, they lift one leg then another.

I would like to join that stilted transmigration,
to feel my own skin vertical as theirs:
an ant-road, a highway for beetles.

I would like not minding, whatever travels my heart.
To follow it all the way into leaf-form, bark-furl, root-touch,
and then keep walking, unimaginably further. ~ Jane Hirshfield

It was done with respect for both tradition and the full array of Nazi panoply. The mood was jovial at the May 1938 laying of the VW factory's cornerstone as Hitler tried his Beetle's rear seating. Robert Ley and Ferdinand Porsche were the most prominent of those behind him. ~ Karl Ludvigsen

Dogs were both feared, in their guise as tools of war and as guards, yet loathed as contemptible dung eaters. That is why so many insults, even today, link the word "dog" with someone who is being conveyed as both a threateningly evil and/or disgusting object. Note that the word "bitch" is still thrown like a verbal rock at women who seem to be usurping masculine traits, such as competiveness or aggression (Hazelton, 2009:173). ~ Kyra Cornelius Kramer

Estimated height in feet of a memorial tree planted for George Harrison that died in July after an attack by beetles : 15 ~ Anonymous

That dung flop?" Nakita said, her dislike almost visibly dripping into nasty puddles at Amy's designer flats. "Yes, I guess. That doesn't mean I have to like him."
"I know what you mean." Amy faked a heartfelt sigh. "I have a brother too." The girls behind her giggled when she pushed past me to Barnabas. "I'm Amy," she said, smiling as she extended her hand."
"Barnabas," the reaper said as he darted past me to give Nakita a sideways hug to avoid having to shake Amy's hand. "This is Nakita. She's my favorite sister. We're from Norway. ~ Kim Harrison

Flowers often grow more beautifully on dung-hills than in gardens that look beautifully kept. ~ Saint Francis De Sales

Standing in the courtyard with a glass eye; only half the world is intelligible. The stones are wet and mossy and in the crevices are black toads. A big door bars the entrance to the cellar; the steps are slippery and soiled with bat dung. The door bulges and sags, the hinges are falling off, but there is an enameled sign on it, in perfect condition, which says: "Be sure to close the door." Why close the door? I can't make it out. I look again at the sign but it is removed; in it's place there is a pane of colored glass. I take out my artificial eye, spit on it and polish it with my handkerchief. A woman is sitting on a dais above an immense carven desk; she has a snake around her neck. The entire room is lined with books and strange fish swimming in colored globes; there are maps and charts on the wall, maps of Paris before the plague, maps of the antique world, of Knossos and Carthage, of Carthage before and after the salting. In the corner of the room I see an iron bedstead and on it a corpse is lying; the woman gets up wearily, removes the corpse from the bed and absent mindedly throws it out the window. She returns to the huge carven desk, takes a goldfish from the bowl and swallows it. Slowly the room begins to revolve and one by one the continents slide into the sea; only the woman is left, but her body is a mass of geography. I lean out the window and the Eiffle Tower is fizzing champagne; it is built entirely of numbers and shrouded in black lace. The sewers are gurg ~ Henry Miller

There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good. ~ Charles Saatchi

Here I discovered water - a very different element from the green crawling scum that stank in the garden tub. You could pump it in pure blue gulps out of the ground, you could swing on the pump handle and it came out sparkling like liquid sky. And it broke and ran and shone on the tiled floor, or quivered in a jug, or weighted your clothes with cold. You could drink it, draw with it, froth it with soap, swim beetles across it, or fly it in bubbles in the air. You could put your head in it, and open your eyes, and see the sides of the bucket buckle, and hear your caught breath roar, and work your mouth like a fish, and smell the lime from the ground. ~ Laurie Lee

I am not going to talk about patriotism, duty, liberty, and the defense of freedom because that's all dung to a soldier. ~ David Gemmell

He danced with a young woman with no hair, but who wore a wig of shining beetles that swarmed and seethed on her head. His third partner complained bitterly whenever Stephen's hand happened to brush her gown; she said it put her gown of its singing; and, when Stephen looked down, he saw that her gown was indeed covered with tiny mouths which opened and sang a little tune in a series of high, errie notes. ~ Susanna Clarke

When God says hold up, wait, pray, it's not your time yet, our entire bodies rebel, legs kicking and flailing like some overturned dung beetle certain that if we try hard enough we might be able to gain a little traction on our own ~ Heather Choate Davis

I AM ROWING (a hex poem)

i have cursed your forehead, your belly, your life
i have cursed the streets your steps plod through
the things your hands touch
i have cursed the inside of your dreams

i have placed a puddle in your eye so that you cant see anymore
an insect in your ear so that you cant hear anymore
a sponge in your brain so that you cant understand
anymore

i have frozen you in the soul of your body
iced you in the depths of your life
the air you breathe suffocates you
the air you breathe has the air of a cellar
is an air that has already been exhaled
been puffed out by hyenas

the dung of this air is something no one can breathe
your skin is damp all over
your skin sweats out waters of great fear
your armpits reak far and wide of the crypt

animals drop dead as you pass
dogs howl at night their heads raised toward your house
you cant run away
you cant muster the strength of an ant to the tip of your feet

your fatigue makes a lead stump in your body
your fatigue is a long caravan
your fatigue stretches out to the country of nan
your fatigue is inexpressible

your mouth bites you
your nails scratch you
no longer yours, your wife
no longer yours, your brother
the sole of his foot bitten by an angry snake

someone has slobbered on your descendents
someone has droo ~ Henri Michaux

Beetles were made from 1938, in pre-war Nazi controlled Germany. The few actual civilian cars that were produced were used as staff cars and propaganda tools. It is a well known fact that not one of the original civilian orders for the cars were ever fulfilled, at least until the 1960's when a law suit brought about a settlement for a small number of successful claimants. ~ Christina Engela

I thought you were the docile one," he murmured.
"Yes, my lord," she said meekly. "Compared to my sister, my lord."
"And you're the smart one as well? Even though you were going to put horse dung on an infect wound?"
"Yes, my lord." She straightened her shoulders. "And the plain one."
His eyes were like a sly weapon, all soft, lingering caresses while he stood just out of reach. "I think you're a fraud, Lady Alys. You've yet to convince me of any of those three things. ~ Anne Stuart

We are intelligent beings: intelligent beings cannot have been formed by a crude, blind, insensible being: there is certainly some difference between the ideas of Newton and the dung of a mule. Newton's intelligence, therefore, came from another intelligence ~ Voltaire

When an artist submerges a crucifix in a jar of his own urine, or smears elephant dung on an image of the Virgin Mary, do these works belong in art museums?21 Can the artist simply tell religious Christians, "If you don't want to see it, don't go to the museum"? Or does the mere existence of such works make the world dirtier, more profane, and more degraded? If you can't see anything wrong here, try reversing the politics. Imagine that a conservative artist had created these works using images of Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela instead of Jesus and Mary. Imagine that his intent was to mock the quasi-deification by the left of so many black leaders. Could such works be displayed in museums in New York or Paris without triggering angry demonstrations? Might some on the left feel that the museum itself had been polluted by racism, even after the paintings were removed? ~ Jonathan Haidt

I continue to handpick the beetles, mosquitoes feast on me, birds eat the mosquitoes, something else eats the birds, and so on up and down the biotic pyramid. ~ William F. Longgood

By the time she had picked every visible corpse off her property, the heap included ants, beetles and cockroaches, different kinds of spiders, some bees, flies, a wasp, two fetid lizard skins and the brittle remains of their skeletons, six butterflies, a stick insect the length of her forearm, two dragonflies, a handful of crickets and other creatures that in the world of naming remained untitled. The collection measured a full hand deep. She paid no attention to the odour rising out of the bucket. The scent of decay was not offensive to her. It was the aroma of life refusing to end. It was the aroma of transformation. Such odour was proof that nothing truly ended, and she revelled in it as much as she did the cereus blossoms along the back wall of the house. ~ Shani Mootoo

Phi cang Saigon Tansonnhut"

"He puzzled at the meaning and smiled inwardly. The sign probably said, "Welcome and Affectionate Salutations to All Who Enter the Glorious Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Home of Seventh Air Force, Only Minutes from Beautiful Saigon." Or maybe not; he couldn't know. Maybe it read, "Welcome to the Dung Heap of Despair - Abandon Cheer, All Ye Who Enter. ~ Tony Taylor

Again,7 the condition to which God brought Job in order that he might converse with God, was not that of delight and bliss, of which he there speaks, and to which he had been accustomed. God left him in misery, naked on a dung-hill, abandoned and even persecuted by his friends, killed with bitterness and grief, covered with worms:8 then it was that the Most High, Who lifteth up "the poor out of the dunghill,"9 was pleased to descend and speak to Job face to face,10 revealing to him "the deep mysteries of His wisdom,"11 as He had never done before in the days of Job's prosperity. ~ San Juan De La Cruz

I see in many places little barberry bushes just come up densely in the cow-dung, like young apple trees, the berries having been eaten by the cows. Here they find manure and an open space for the first year at least, when they are not choked by grass or weeds. In this way, evidently, many of these clumps of barberries are commenced. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I feel like an old warhorse at the sound of a trumpet when I read about the capturing of rare beetles. ~ Charles Darwin

The Beetle's body, whether it be a '49 split or a '73 Jeans Bug, or an '03 Mexican, was originally conceived in the mid 1930's. This is evident in it's body styling which aside from it's rear engine layout and absence of front radiator (or radiator!) grille, is very similar to other cars of the same period. Believe it or not, in those days streamlining was a hot new concept, kind of like how wireless networking is today with computing.
The only problem was, in the beginning they didn't seem to realize that streamlining ought to be applied sideways as well as longitudinally! ~ Christina Engela

NO ONE GETS OUT OF CHILDHOOD ALIVE. It's not the first time I've said that. But among the few worthy bon mots I've gotten off in sixty-seven years, that and possibly one other may be the only considerations eligible for carving on my tombstone. (The other one is the one entrepreneurs have misappropriated to emboss on buttons and bumper stickers: The two most common elements in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
(I don't so much mind that they pirated it, but what does honk me off is that they never get it right. They render it dull and imbecile by phrasing it thus: "The two most common things in the universe are ... "
(Not things, you insensate gobbets of ambulatory giraffe dung, elements! Elements is funny, things is imprecise and semi-guttural. Things! Geezus, when will the goyim learn they don't know how to tell a joke. ~ Harlan Ellison

They took a baseball bat and whacked open his head. Mummy Boy fell to the ground; he finally was dead. Inside of his head were no candy or prizes, just a few stray beetles of various sizes. ~ Tim Burton

But what was a body? Dust, dung, urine, itches. It was the light within which was important, and it was not significant if that light endured after death, or if the soul was blinded eternally in the endless night of the suspired flesh. ~ Taylor Caldwell

If wishes were horses,
we'd be wading in horse dung! ~ Manoj Vaz

All I want to know is why a party of Fey wanted to kill me," I said
heatedly.
The beetle's lips twisted enough to show fang. "Doesn't everyone?"
Radu hustled me out the door before I could find out if the vamp's plump
little carcass would fit into his overstuffed desk. ~ Karen Chance

Wealth Is Like Dung, Useful Only When Spread" - Chinese Proverb JIGGS ~ B.K. Froman

I did not know that the planning for biological and chemical warfare was so widespread in England, and even in France before France fell. It was news to me that there had been talk, even in the First World War, of dropping Colorado beetles on German potato crops and that kind of thing. ~ Nicholson Baker

Your pillow alone may be home to 40 million bed mites. (To them your head is just one large oily bon-bon). And don't think a clean pillow-case will make a difference ... Indeed, if your pillow is six years old
which is apparently about the average age for a pillow
it has been estimated that one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living mites, dead mites and mite dung. ~ Bill Bryson

I know, to be useful," broke in Abel impatiently. "When I said that, I had no idea you would be leaving us so soon. I also said that I couldn't give you advice, and I say the same now. But you're leaving tomorrow and we might never see each other again. I decided that, even if I can't advise you, I can at least tell you that a life without love, a life like the one you described just now, isn't live at all, it's a dung heap, a sewer. ~ Jose Saramago