Earthworms Quotes

How did I gain from not remembering my earthly self? It allowed me to go deep into realms beyond the worldly without having to worry about what I was leaving behind. Throughout my entire time in those worlds, I was a soul with nothing to lose. No places to miss, no people to mourn. I had come from nowhere and had no history, so I fully accepted my circumstances - even the initial murk and mess of the Realm of the Earthworm's-Eye View - with equanimity. ~ Eben Alexander

Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don't chirp or sing, they don't gallop or soar, they don't hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth. ~ Amy Stewart

Earthworms are far more valuable than people. ~ Paul Watson

Go for a short walk in a soft rain - lovely - so many wild flowers startling me through the woods and a lawn sprinkled with dandelions, like a night with stars. And through it all the sound of soft rain like the sound of innumerable earthworms stirring in the ground. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Earthworms cannot be painters. Those who live in the darkness can never perceive and appreciate the beauties of the light! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived. ~ Randall Munroe

Earthworms are the intenstines of the soil. ~ Aristotle.

If I were a bird that needs feathers to fly higher, my mother would be my strongest feather. She was extremely supportive. When I was one and a half, I took a whole handful of earthworms to bed with me. My mother said very quietly, "Jane, they will die if they leave the earth." And so, together, we put them back into the garden. ~ Jane Goodall

He was grateful, then, for his friends, and for how relatively little they had mined from him, how they had left him to himself, a blank, faceless prairie under whose yellow surface earthworms and beetles wriggled through the black soil, and chips of bone calcified slowly into stone. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

I'd like to know how to catch a girl. I've caught frogs, I've caught snakes, earthworms ... ~ Sam The Sham

I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better. ~ Amy Stewart

We are always completely, and therefore equally, known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can….Ordinarily, to be known by God is to be, for this purpose, in the category of things. We are, like earthworms, cabbages, and nebulae, objects of Divine knowledge, But when we (a) become aware of this fact--the present fact, not the generalization--and (b) assent with all our will to be known, then we treat ourselves, in relation to God, not as things but as persons. We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled his sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view. ~ C.S. Lewis

Earthworms will dance ~ Joel Salatin

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

God bless the woman who'd invented air-conditioning. Okay, it might have been a man, but I'll bet you dollars to earthworms that a woman nagged him into it. ~ Carolyn Brown

Oh, she felt like dirt. Less than dirt. She felt like the bacteria on the dirt that earthworms ate and then pooped out. Here ~ T.S. Joyce

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

I am a battery hen. I live in a cage so small I cannot stretch my wings. I am forced to stand night and day on a sloping wire mesh floor that painfully cuts into my feet. The cage walls tear my feathers, forming blood blisters that never heal. The air is so full of ammonia that my lungs hurt and my eyes burn and I think I am going blind. As soon as I was born, a man grabbed me and sheared off part of my beak with a hot iron, and my little brothers were thrown into trash bags as useless alive.

My mind is alert and my body is sensitive and I should have been richly feathered. In nature or even a farmyard I would have had sociable, cleansing dust baths with my flock mates, a need so strong that I perform 'vacuum' dust bathing on the wire floor of my cage. Free, I would have ranged my ancestral jungles and fields with my mates, devouring plants, earthworms, and insects from sunrise to dusk. I would have exercised my body and expressed my nature, and I would have given, and received, pleasure as a whole being. I am only a year old, but I am already a 'spent hen.' Humans, I wish I were dead, and soon I will be dead. Look for pieces of my wounded flesh wherever chicken pies and soups are sold. ~ Karen Davis

Figure 14: Garter snakes hunt during the day and sleep at night in common dens with fellow garters. They eat anything they can overpower, including small rodents, birds, earthworms, and frogs. ~ Janet Evans

But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru? Why are we supposed to be psychiatrists? Isn't it enough to write and tell the truth? It's not like telling the truth is common. Writers are the earthworms of society. We aerate the soil. That's enough. ~ Erica Jong

Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a little while. You feel ashamed of your matted hair, your torn clothes, the dirt on your face. Who would want to speak to you? They are all shiny and pretty. They have parents and house with gardens. What do you have? The earth. Whole handfuls of it. The lizard people with their slit eyes and scaly skin. Your loneliness. Your longing. ~ Francesca Lia Block

HORKLUMP M.O.M. Classification: X The Horklump comes from Scandinavia but is now widespread throughout northern Europe. It resembles a fleshy, pinkish mushroom covered in sparse, wiry black bristles. A prodigious breeder, the Horklump will cover an average garden in a matter of days. It spreads sinewy tentacles rather than roots into the ground to search for its preferred food of earthworms. The Horklump is a favourite delicacy of gnomes but otherwise has no discernible use. H ~ J.K. Rowling

The Earthworm plows the whole world with his tunnels, drains and aerates the earth ... If you ever buy any land, be sure it has plenty of Earthworms toiling and moiling all day so that you can sit down and relax. ~ Will Cuppy

Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sed ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The creatures who act as though they belong to the world follow the peace-keeping law, and because they follow that law, they give the creatures around them a chance to grow toward whatever it's possible for them to become. That's how man came into being. The creatures around Australopithecus didn't imagine that the world belonged to them, so they let him live and grow. How does being civilized come into it? Does being civilized mean that you have to destroy the world?" "No." "Does being civilized make you incapable of giving the creatures around you a little space in which to live?" "No." "Does it make you incapable of living as harmlessly as sharks and tarantulas and rattlesnakes?" "No." "Does it make you incapable of following a law that even snails and earthworms manage to follow without any difficulty?" "No." "As I pointed out some time ago, human settlement isn't against the law, it's subject to the law - and the same is true of civilization. ~ Daniel Quinn

Proponents of the "we're all one race," swill took another hit recently when scientists revealed that bananas share about 50% of the DNA of humans (I kid you not). This is 10% more than what we share with earthworms. Add this information to the previous revelation that humans and chimps are 98.4% the same genetically, and you begin to see the problem for the we're all one race crowd - our present ignorant flat worlders. The reason this is a hit for the all one race crackpots is because it is just a further indication that nature works with minor changes to make major differences. In fact, there are no "tiny" changes in nature at the DNA level of existence. Just a minor change here or there makes a totally different animal or plant. ~ H. Millard

I don't know why, but this seemed like one of the nicest things I had learned in the woods--that earthworms, lowly, confined to the darkness of the earth, could make just a little stir in the world. ~ Jean Craighead George

In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in. ~ Lewis Nordan

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures. ~ Charles Darwin

I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap and let him sing me crazy Irish songs and go over the names of the planets. "Gwampa, tell me about Outer Space." ... "Gwampa, sing the Swimming Song."
I wish I could go back there, just for a little while, and pick raspberries by myself in the sun and find secret hideaways and not hurt, not worry, not carry the heavy things. If I could be five years old ... just for a few minutes. Remember what it felt like to be free. That would be something. ~ Jennifer DeLucy

This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious. ~ Richard Dawkins

It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots. ~ Erica Jong

In a deserted stretch of the Karadj highway Munis had come face-to-face with unbridled lust, although she knew what lust was before being touched by it. The problem was that she had an unbounded awareness of things, an awareness that instilled undue caution in her, making her fearful that action would lead to ignominy, humiliation. This created in her a desire to be ordinary, average. Yet she did not truly know what it meant to be ordinary. She did not know that it meant not loving an earthworm, not genuflecting at the altar of withered leaves, not standing in prayer at the call of a lark, not climbing a mountain to see the sunrise, not staying awake all night to gaze at the Ursa Major. She did not differentiate between earth and gravel, but she distinguished the earth from the sky. She had not seen the skies of the earth, but she knew there were earths of the sky. She saw herself in an inevitable process of stagnation. She was already partially rotten within.
"What can I do with this mass of trivial knowledge?" she wondered aloud. "How can I cut through it? ~ Shahrnush Parsipur

A passionate interest in what you do is the secret of enjoying life ... whether it is helping old people or children, or making cheese or growing earthworms. ~ Julia Child