Grachev Fish Spoon Quotes

Gloria put a bowl of stew in Peter's hands. "Eat," she said.

Peter raised the spoon to his lips. He chewed. He swallowed.

It had been a long time since he had eaten anything besides tiny fish and old bread.

And so when Peter had his first bite of stew, it overwhelmed him. The warmth of it, the richness of it, knocked him backward; it was as if a gentle hand had pushed him when he was not expecting it. Everything he had lost came flooding back: the garden, his father, his mother, his sister, the promises that he had made and could not keep.

"What's this?" said Gloria Matienne. "The boy is crying."

"Shhh," said Leo. He put his hand on Peter's shoulder. "Shhh. Don't worry, Peter. Everything will be good. All will be well. We will do together whatever it is that needs to be done. But for now, you must eat."

Peter nodded. He raised his spoon. Again he chewed and swallowed, and again he was overcome. He could not help it. He could not stop the tears; they flowed down his cheeks and into the bowl. "It is a very good stew, Madam Matienne. he managed to say. "Truly, it is an excellent stew. ~ Kate DiCamillo

I peered at the bowl, which was piled high with shrimp and vegetables, little cubes of what looked like meat or fish. The broth was a beautiful golden color, with little circles of orange oil floating on the surface, near the edge of the bowl. My heart rate slowed, oblivion averted. "More chances at wishes. But also, this looks damn good."
I realized I was still holding the spoon with the dumpling, the steam not wafting out like a volcano anymore. So I closed my eyes and readied myself for another bite.
This time the heat took a step back and allowed everything else to come forward. The savory richness of pork, a bite of ginger and scallions, the broth. Oh, man, the broth. I hadn't ever tasted anything quite like this before. I chewed the dumpling, which was starchy but also managed to melt away, letting its texture dominate. For a moment, I wanted to reach for something beyond the flavor, but failed. Would I recognize the taste of magic, if magic even had a taste? Then I let the flavor itself take over. ~ Adi Alsaid

We were enclosed, O eternal Father, within the garden of your breast. You drew us out of your holy mind like a flower petaled with our soul's three powers and into each power you put the whole plant, so that they might bear fruit in your garden, might come back to you with the fruit you gave them. And you would come back to the soul, to fill her with your blessedness. There the soul dwells like the fish in the sea and the sea in the fish. ~ St. Catherine Of Siena

After centuries of darkness
fish may lose their vision,
and happy in the still pool
will forget that light was once their day. ~ Barry Pomeroy

Wanda: But you think you're an intellectual, don't you, ape? Otto: Apes don't read philosophy. Wanda: Yes, they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. A Fish Called Wanda (1988) One cannot help but think of A Fish Called Wanda when one reads Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion; or at least I can't. ~ Edward Feser

He felt a killing hate for the stupid, ordinary, disapproving people who kept him from doing what he wanted to do. "Someday I am going to have things just like I want," he said to himself. "And if any moralizing son of a bitch gives me any static, they will fish him out of the river. ~ William S. Burroughs

The shark is the apex predator in the sea. Sharks have molded evolution for 450 million years. All fish species that are prey to the sharks have had their behavior, their speed, their camouflage, their defense mechanisms molded by the shark. ~ Paul Watson

The people we love get under our skin and crawl through our veins and fine their way into our heart. They choke up our blood flow and mess up our breathing and tangle themselves through our bodies like wire. Like razors, like fire.
We remember them even when we don't remember them.
We try and forget, but it's pointless.
Even amnesia. Even comas and brain damage and traumatic shock.
Whatever makes us not remember, we still remember.
Our minds flounder like fish but our bodies...
Our bodies remember. ~ Katrina Leno

The fish will be the last to discover water. ~ Jerome Bruner

Yes, sir, but the Librarian likes bananas, sir."
"Very nourishin' fruit, Mr Stibbons."
"Yes, sir. Although, funnily enough it's not actually a fruit, sir."
"Really?"
"Yes, sir. Botanically, it's a type of fish, sir. According to my theory it's cladistically associated with the Krullian pipefish, sir, which of course is also yellow and goes around in bunches or shoals."
"And lives in trees?"
"Well, not usually, sir. The banana is obviously exploiting a new niche."
"Good heavens, really? It's a funny thing, but I've never much liked bananas and I've always been a bit suspicious of fish, too. That'd explain it. ~ Terry Pratchett

Dalton gaped at something in the stream.
"Did you see that trout? Where's my fishing pole when I need it?" He was leaning so far over she feared he might fall in headfirst. She grasped his arm and pulled him back.
"You made that up," she laughed. "You didn't see a fish. Trout don't swim at night."
"What makes you think that? They don't have a little house to go home to when the sun goes down, with a small woodstove and comfortable bed. ~ Caroline Fyffe

Anyhow,' one of the scientists was saying to another, 'there simply isn't room in the museum's Fishes Hall , so we've decided to pretend to the public that a whale is actually a mammal without any legs. It's patently ridiculous - I mean to say, just look at the thing, it's a gigantic fish if ever you saw one - but mum's the word! In my experience the public will believe just about anything, so long as you write it down on a little piece of card. ~ Gideon Defoe

It is a very remarkable fact that the species of shell-fish common to Greenland and Finmark are not all inhabitants of deep or moderately deep water ... That these littoral mollusks indicate by their presence on both sides of the Atlantic, some ancient continuity or contiguity of coast-line is what I firmly believe. ~ Edward Forbes

Can't stand all these poisonous creatures, all these snakes and insects and fish and things. Wretched things, biting everybody. And then people expect me to tell them what to do about it. I'll tell them what to do. Don't get bitten in the first place. (quoting Dr. Struan Sutherland) ~ Douglas Adams

He studied her, as if she were some exotic specimen of fish he'd pulled up from the lake depths and he was deciding whether to keep her or throw her back. ~ Lindsay Buroker

Fear These incredible bodies called to them, but the Nivakle men dared not enter. They had seen the women eat: they swallowed the flesh of fish with the upper mouth, but chewed it first with the lower mouth. Between their legs they had teeth. So the men lit bonfires, called to the women, and sang and danced for them. The women sat around in a circle with their legs crossed. The men danced all through the night. They undulated, turned, and flew like smoke and birds. When dawn came they fell fainting to the ground. The women gently lifted them and gave them water to drink. Where they had been sitting, the ground was all littered with teeth. (192) ~ Eduardo Galeano

Oh, fish sauce! How we missed it, dear Aunt, how nothing tasted right without it, how we longed for the grand cru of Phu Quoc Island and its vats brimming with the finest vintage of pressed anchovies! This pungent liquid condiment of the darkest sepia hue was much denigrated by foreigners for its supposedly horrendous reek, lending new meaning to the phrase "there's something fishy aroud here," for we were the fishy ones. We used fish sauce the way Transylvanian villagers were cloves of garlic to ward off vampires, in our case to establish a perimeter with those Westerners who could never understand that was truly fishy was the nauseating stench of cheese. What was fermented fish compared to curdled milk? ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

When at last he finally hooked one, despite Elizabeth's best efforts to prevent it, she scrambled to her feet and backed up a step. "You-you're hurting it!" she cried as he pulled the hook from its mouth.
"Hurting what? The fish?" he asked in disbelief.
"Yes!"
"Nonsense," said he, looking at her as if she was daft, then he tossed the fish on the bank.
"It can't breathe, I tell you!" she wailed, her eyes fixed on the flapping fish.
"It doesn't need to breathe," he retorted. "We're going to eat it for lunch."
"I certainly won't!" she cried, managing to look at him as if he were a cold-blooded murderer.
"Lady Cameron," he said sternly, "am I to believe you've never eaten a fish?"
"Well, of course I have."
"And where do you think the fish you've eaten came from?" he continued with irate logic.
"It came from a nice tidy package wrapped in paper," Elizabeth announced with a vacuous look. "They come in nice, tidy paper wrapping."
"Well, they weren't born in that tidy paper," he replied, and Elizabeth had a dreadful time hiding her admiration for his patience as well as for the firm tone he was finally taking with her. He was not, as she had originally thought, a fool or a namby-pamby. "Before that," he persisted, "where was the fish? How did that fish get to the market in the first place?"
Elizabeth gave her head a haughty toss, glanced sympathetically at the flapping fish, then gazed at him with haughty condemnation in her ~ Judith McNaught

My father once said I was as gullible as a fish. I thought he said edible. I thought he meant I was tasty. The ~ Sharon Creech

God, San Francisco was such a thief. A lady of the night, a sorceress with her hands out. Every time, all my years as a child, that we crossed the bridge, we had to pay to get in, pay to get out, pay for every little thing. Oakland was free, San Francisco was not. Pay me, pay me. Pay for the Pacific Ocean and the beach. I am expensive, the city always said, so pay me for my wonderful dark treats like the Steinhart Aquarium, with its dark wide hall lit up by tank after tank of bright gold green blue sharks dolphins whales stinger fish, cold-eyed still-as-a-corpse fish that didn't blink or budge when we tapped the thick glass with our fingernails. Pay, the voice said, to whomever took us on Saturday to the Fleischacker Zoo ... the hand of San Francisco reaches out to grab your stupid little nickels and dimes. Pay. Even as I stood in front of the Fat Lady, whose cackling gap-toothed twelve-feet-high, three-feet-wide body made me laugh for a solid hour, even as I collapsed in tears driven out of my eyes by laughter, I understood that the other name for San Francisco wasn't Frisco; it was pay you dumb jerks from Oakland pay. ~ Judy Juanita

Uncle Pumblechook: a large hard-breathing middle-aged slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been all but choked, and had that moment come to. ~ Charles Dickens

A phantom fish, half beaten to death, wriggled in my stomach. ~ Mike Mehalek

Aureliano Segundo was deep in the reading of a book. Although it had no cover and the title did not appear anywhere, the boy enjoyed the story of a woman who sat at a table and ate nothing but kernels of rice, which she picked up with a pin, and the story of the fisherman who borrowed a weight for his net from a neighbor and when he gave him a fish in payment later it had a diamond in its stomach, and the one about the lamp that fulfilled wishes and about flying carpets. Surprised, he asked Ursula if all that was true and she answered him that it was, that many years ago the gypsies had brought magic lamps and flying mats to Macondo.
"What's happening," she sighed, "is that the world is slowly coming to an end and those things don't come here any more. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Places change over time with or without oil spills, but humans are responsible for the Deepwater Horizon gusher - and humans, as well as the corals, fish and other creatures, are suffering the consequences. ~ Sylvia Earle

What would she tell me, about the Commander, if she were here? Probably she'd disapprove. She disapproved of Luke, back then. Not of Luke but of the fact that he was married. She said I was poaching, on another woman's ground. I said Luke wasn't a fish or a piece of dirt either, he was a human being and could make his own decisions. She said I was rationalizing. I said I was in love. She said that was no excuse. Moira was always more logical than I am. I said she didn't have that problem herself anymore, since she'd decided to prefer women, and as far as I could see she had no scruples about stealing them or borrowing them when she felt like it. She said it was different, because the balance of power was equal between women so sex was an even-steven transaction. I said "even Steven" was a sexist phrase, if she was going to be like that, and anyway that argument was outdated. She said I had trivialized the issue and if I thought it was outdated I was living with my head in the sand. We ~ Margaret Atwood

Street-casting - people like Katie Jarvis in 'Fish Tank,' spotted having a row with her boyfriend on a railway platform - has helped make actors raise their game. They have to. ~ Joe Dempsie

I love Dylan. I only met him once, about three years ago, back at the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street. That was before I went to England. I think both of us were pretty drunk at the time, so he probably doesn't remember it. ~ Jimi Hendrix

It is important not to be careless about supper when you are alone. It is easily done, boring as it is to cook for one person only. There must be potatoes, sauce and green vegetables, a napkin and a clean glass and the candles lit on the table, and no sitting down in your working clothes. So while the potatoes are boiling I go into the bedroom and change my trousers, put on a clean white shirt and go back to the kitchen and lay a cloth on the table before putting butter in the frying pan to fry the fish I have caught in the lake myself. ~ Per Petterson

How To Make A Human

Take the cat out of the sphinx
and what is left? Riddle Me That.

Take the horse from the centaur
and you take away the sleek grace,
the strength of harnessed power.
What is left can still run across fields,
after a fashion, but is easily winded;
what is left will therefore erect buildings
to divide the open plains so he no longer
must face the wide expanse where once
his equine legs raced the winds
and, sometimes, won.

Take the bull from the Minotaur
but what is left will still assemble
a herd for the sake of ruling over it.
What is left will kill for sport,
in an arena thronged with spectators
shouting "Ole" at each deadly thrust.

Take the fish from the Merman:
What is left can still swim,
if only with lots of splashing; gone
is the sleek sliding through the waves,
alert to the subtle changes in the current.
What is left will build ships
so he can cross the oceans without
getting his feet wet, what is left won't care
if his boats pollute the seas he can no
longer breathe so long as their passage
can keep him from sinking.

Take the goat from the satyr
but what is left will dance out of reach
before you have the chance
to get that Dionysian streak of myschief,
the love of music and wine, the rutting parts
that like to party all th ~ Lawrence Schimel

It was hard to feel cheerful when someone kept telling you you were a little fish in a big sea. ~ Elif Batuman

Many comedians consider themselves to be cutting edge. But why do we have to use the knife for the analogy. Let's use the spoon. I like to consider myself the big bowl-like area of the spoon that holds all the stuff you like. ~ Brian Regan

If I do a role where I have to lose weight, I can do that. I eat meat, fish, vegetables, and I lose it right away. But sometimes I do a role where I have to gain weight, and I can tell you I prefer that. ~ Monica Bellucci

There was a tank of special flounder about fifteen feet away from the octopus tank," he said. The fish were part of a study. But to the researchers' dismay, the flounder started disappearing, one by one. One day they caught the culprit red-handed. The octopus had been slipping out of her tank and eating the flounder! When the octopus was discovered, Scott said, "she gave a guilty, sideways look and slithered away. ~ Sy Montgomery

Eating together is the most intimate form of kinship. By scripting a work where we share the same kind of food with fish, I'm scripting our interrelationship with them. ~ Natalie Jeremijenko

Maybe we should get a puppy since you love the fish so much," she says, slowly unbuttoning her shirt.
The container of fish food falls to the floor, and my dick twitches.
"Maybe you should have my baby."
Ella bites her bottom lip, exposing her left breast and shoulder. "Maybe you should put your baby inside of me. ~ Mary Elizabeth

Zach shoveled another spoonful of Fruit Loops cereal with milk into his mouth. "It is not possible!"
"How do you know? Just because there's no proof to prove it, there's no proof to disprove it either."
"You're trying to make me crazy, aren't you?"
"Not at all." Sara put her bowl down. "I'm just saying there could be bunny shifters."
"There are no bunny shifters!"
Shaking her head she accused, "You're a bunny bigot."
Zach threw his spoon back in the near-empty bowl. "And there is no such thing as bunny bigots. ~ Shelly Laurenston

Hey! I'm not gonna watch this damn Nemo fish by myself!" My dad yells from the living room, making the girls giggle. ~ Kristen Proby

Pen realized it: Sometimes there is nothing to do but surrender yourself to wonder ... You must stop measuring - over and over - the line between loving and being in love. You must offer yourself, whole, to the cobalt starfish (and the orange one and the pale pink one and the biscuit-colored one with the raised, chocolate-brown art deco design) and to the clear, clear water and to the sweep of shining sky and to the silver scattershot of leaping fish (an entire school skipping across the ocean like a stone.) ~ Marisa De Los Santos

It was a collage of mollycoddled, spoon-fed faces. An ugly pimple was their biggest misery and slow internet was the worst torture they knew. ~ Pawan Jangid

The woman behind the bar called out: 'Why do you stand like hypnotized fish? Did you come to drink beer or to eat food?'

'Be patient,' said Gersen. 'We are making our decision.'

The remark annoyed the woman. Her voice took on a coarse edge. "Be patient,' you say? All night I pour beer for crapulous men; isn't that patience enough? Come over here, backwards; I'll put this spigot somewhere amazing, at full gush, and then we'll discover who calls for patience! ~ Jack Vance

You tell him for me: if he fucks with you, if he lays one Russian knuckle on you, your buddy is coming after him and someone's gonna need a screen door to fish out the pieces. ~ Damon Suede