Feeding Fish Quotes

Life is wonderful and strange...and it's also absolutely mundane and tiresome. It's hilarious and it's deadening. It's a big, screwed-up morass of beauty and change and fear and all our lives we oscillate between awe and tedium. I think stories are the place to explore that inherent weirdness; that movement from the fantastic to the prosaic that is life....

What interests me - and interests me totally - is how we as living human beings can balance the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the colossal, indifferent, and desolate scales of the universe. Earth is four-and-a-half billion years old. Rocks in your backyard are moving if you could only stand still enough to watch. You get hernias because, eons ago, you used to be a fish. So how in the world are we supposed to measure our lives - which involve things like opening birthday cards, stepping on our kids' LEGOs, and buying toilet paper at Safeway - against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?

How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters, writers. Isn't that why we seek each other out, why people go to churches and temples, why we read books? So that we can find out if life occasionally sets other people trembling, too? ~ Anthony Doerr

Let me just say that I am not often lonely in country places. In cities I am, like the writers of the letters. Nature doesn't break your heart: other people do. Yet, we cannot live apart from each other in bowers feeding on nectar. We're in this together, this getting through our lives, as the fact that we are word-users shows. ~ Nuala O'Faolain

He lies there listening to it, absorbing this sense of his own quiet drone transmuted into something of certain substance, something large, magnificent and grand - no longer him, no, but something bursting from him, leaving his split carcass behind as a monument to its source, its host, its feeding ground. ~ Patrick Bryant

They washed up on some far-off bank, where their bodies were devoured by animals and birds of prey." He chuckled when I turned pale. "Not a pretty way to go, is it?"

"It is as good as any," Seba disagreed. "When I die, this is how I want to be disposed of. Dead bodies are an essential part of the natural food chain. Feeding flesh to fires is a waste. ~ Darren Shan

That sounded good," Daisy said with surprise.
"It sounded like a fish vomiting," Sarah said into the piano.
"A charming image," Honoria remarked.
"I don't think fish do vomit," Daisy remarked, "and if they did, I
don't think it would sound like - ~ Julia Quinn

But you're a naughty girl. Last holidays you licked the paint off my lozenge box, and the holidays before that you let the boat drag my fish-line down when I'd set you to watch it, and you pushed your head through my kite, all for nothing. ~ George Eliot

A bird may love a fish but where would they build a home together? ~ Joseph Stein

Only small fish swim in schools. (p. 31)

"Don't ever see another human being, lock yourself up and live like a misanthrope." And another power tells me to accept people, talk to them. There is a struggle all the time within me. I also know that if I stay away from people, then I have to deal with only one human being-myself - and I 'd rather have other people than to all the time have only myself for an associate. When you are with yourself your egotism grows, your bitterness and suspicions grow. You become twice as meshuga as before. (p. 32)

An assimilated Jew is a man who is ashamed of his origin, who denies his roots. He wants to make believe that he's somebody else. (p. 60)

I believe in God but I have my doubts about revelation. I would say that I have no proof whatsoever
that God reveals Himself or tells us how to behave, what He wants. I believe that God is a silent God, and He must have a very good reason why He is silent. If He would begin to talk, He would have to speak in three thousand languages and in all kinds of dialects. God speaks in deeds, but the language of deeds is so large its vocabulary is as large as the universe perhaps. So we only understand a very small part of His language. Everything man says about God is pure guesswork. But since I believe in God's existence and since God created man and formed his brain, I believe also that there must be something of the divine in men's ideas about Him even if they are far fr ~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

I feel like I am doing a lot, but if someone asks me what exactly I have accomplished, I don't know ... putting my son to sleep, feeding him, taking care of things in the house amount to a lot of work. But, yes, I haven't arrested 14 criminals in one day or saved the world or anything of that sort! ~ Kajol

I laugh when I hear that the fish in the water is thirsty.
You don't grasp the fact that what is most alive of all is inside your own house;
and you walk from one holy city to the next with a confused look!
Kabir will tell you the truth: go wherever you like, to Calcutta or Tibet;
if you can't find where your soul is hidden,
for you the world will never be real! ~ Kabir

All of us need to leave things behind in order to follow God. For some of us, it is addictive patterns of behavior, for others an overweening emphasis on our own success, for others the adulation of the crowd. It helps sometimes to look not just at what we're leaving behind and what God promises us, but also at what God has shown us already. Just look at all those fish. ~ James Martin

What can't you bear?'

'This island,' Gabe says. He breathes a long pause between every word he says. 'That house you and Finn are in. People talking. The fish - goddamn fish. I'll smell like them for the rest of my life. The horses. Everything. I can't do it any more.'

. . . It feels like he's confessed that he's dying of a disease I've never heard of, with symptoms I can't see. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

Wilder went into his sons' bedroom. Glad to see Wilder, they banged their empty feeding-bowls with their plastic machine-pistols. They were dressed in miniature paratroopers' camouflage suits and tin helmets
the wrong outfit, Wilder reflected, in light of what had been taking place in the high-rise. The correct combat costume was stockbrokers' pin-stripe, briefcase and homburg. ~ J.G. Ballard

Lord Cut-Glass, in his kitchen full of time, squats down alone to a dogdish, marked Fido, of peppery fish-scraps and listens to the voices of his sixty-six clocks, one for each year of his loony age, and watches, with love, their black-and-white moony loudlipped faces tocking the earth away: slow clocks, quick clocks, pendulumed heart-knocks, china, alarm, grandfather, cuckoo; clocks shaped like Noah's whirring Ark, clocks that bicker in marble ships, clocks in the wombs of glass women, hourglass chimers, tu-wit-tuwoo clocks, clocks that pluck tunes, Vesuvius clocks all black bells and lava, Niagara clocks that cataract their ticks, old time weeping clocks with ebony beards, clocks with no hands for ever drumming out time
without ever knowing what time it is. His sixty-six singers are all set at different hours. Lord Cut-Glass lives in a house and a life at siege. Any minute or dark day now, the unknown enemy will loot and savage downhill, but they will not catch him napping. Sixty-six different times in his fish-slimy kitchen ping, strike, tick, chime, and tock. ~ Dylan Thomas

Yet he moved toward her, darkly shimmering out of the library shadows with feeding fangs ready. However, the moment he touched Miss Tarabotti, he was suddenly no longer darkly doing anything at all. He was simply standing there, the faint sounds of a string quartet in the background as he foolishly fished about with his tongue for fangs unaccountably mislaid. ~ Gail Carriger

When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages. ~ Mark Kurlansky

If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him - the politician will not. ~ David D. Friedman

Every queen begins as a siren, and when the crown passes to her, it's magic steals her fins and leaves in their place mighty tentacles that hold the strength of armies. She becomes more squid than fish, and with that transformation comes the magic, unyielding and grand. Enough to shape the seas to her whim. Sea queen and sea witch both. ~ Alexandra Christo

Even a dead fish can go with the flow. ~ Jim Hightower

Paying alimony is like feeding hay to a dead horse. ~ Groucho Marx

I never lost a little fish - Yes, I'm free to say. It always was the biggest fish I caught, that got away. ~ Eugene Field

Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.
That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.
Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend. ~ Douglas Adams

SN: what was under the glass tonight?

Me: Some sort of delicious fish and the big couscous. What's that called?

SN: Israeli.

Me: Ha, I know. Just wanted to make you use your shift key. I want to get you a T-shirt that says "No proper noun left uncapitalized."

SN: and I'm the weirdo. ~ Julie Buxbaum

My diet is mostly chicken and fish. I make sure I get a lot of vegetables, a lot of fruit. I am a big fruit man, I am a vegetable man anyway. And I also get a lot of rest. That's the key I may be up early, but I'm in bed early too. ~ Magic Johnson

A fish is more valuable swimming in the sea maintaining the integrity of oceanic eco-systems than it is on anyone's plate. ~ Paul Watson

I used to have some fish, some nice little carp, but they got too big for the tank. I don't have any pets now. ~ Tom Felton

My face is muffled in my mother's clothing. Her rhinestones injure me. See: my feet are going. Fish flee the forefinger of my aunt. The sun streams over the geraniums. What has this to do with what I feel, with what I am. ~ William H Gass

Indeed if fish had fish-lore and Wise-fish, it is probable that the business of anglers would be very little hindered. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

It was once convenient to think biblically, to believe we're surrounded for our benefit by edible automata on land and sea. Now it turns out that even fish can feel pain. This is the growing complication of the modern condition, the expanding circle of moral sympathy. ~ Ian McEwan

We found letters at the house we bought from a sailor to his wife who lived in the house. He went down to the Caribbean on this trader vessel, bringing down salted fish. There would be handwritten letters, but also telegrams, saying which ports he was in. And he'd be gone for three months. That was just the way it is. ~ Michael Winter

Earth allows several levels for Soul to gain experience in life, including the mineral, plant, fish, animal and human stages. ~ Harold Klemp

At that time, a number of myths were created by the young people of the smoking carriages and forests of hallucinogenic mushrooms, the hungry for the thirst of lysergic acid, who were too tired of the suffering they grew up in and needed to take refuge in dreams. In these children's universe there were unbelievable stories about places in the mountains that women sought to retreat to, places where people were united by music and love for a mutual spiritual growth. For Aunt Jeanine, who had grown up with the image of her father, an amputee due to the war, feeding on such stories was like a haven, one she would later try to turn into her home. And one of those stories, one particular one, stood in her memory until the last stage of her life, when she passed away at eighty-one, burned with fire. (...) At that time, kid, they said that if we searched enough, we would find a place where the world wouldn't end. Men would never know what hell of a place that was, totally unconquerable! A place where the dirty hands of men would never arrive. A place men would never know about . Don't you think I could find it? To have my body disappearing in the woods, as I saw happening to kids in Japan, in that forest that swallows them to its core. Flesh turned to powder, my essence disappearing in the middle of life. They said that, when you die at a place, you'll stay at that place forever. That was why everyone was afraid to go to war. They weren't afraid of dying, kid, they were afraid of dyi ~ Pat R

In Kenya, where there isn't the luxury of feeding grains to animals, livestock yield more calories than they consume because they are fattened on grass and agricultural by-products inedible to humans. ~ Tristram Stuart

I can talk to fish!" Angel said happily, water dripping off her long, skinny body. "Ask one over for dinner," Fang said, joining us. ~ James Patterson

If a bird is caged, expect all its songs to be songs of freedom. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Snorting cocaine is like feeding pork to the brain. ~ Big Pun

Give a man a proverb
and he'll muse for a moment.
Teach a man to find the verb in every proverb
and he'll walk in wisdom for a lifetime. ~ Cameron Semmens

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Teach a man to create an artificial shortage of fish and he will eat steak. ~ Jay Leno

There is a difference between feeding someone and eating dinner with them. If every Christian at home just made room for the stranger we would end homelessness overnight. ~ Shane Claiborne

Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow. ~ Charles Dickens

If the germ plasm wants to swim in the ocean, it makes itself a fish; if the germ plasm wants to fly in the air, it makes itself a bird. If it wants to go to Harvard, it makes itself a man. The strangest thing of all is that the germ plasm that we carry around within us has done all those things. There was a time, hundreds of millions of years ago, when it was making fish. Then ... amphibia ... reptiles ... mammals, and now it's making men. ~ George Wald