Rattlesnakes Quotes

RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, "Homo ventrambulans". ~ Ambrose Bierce

I've sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I've helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup. ~ Alan Alda

The creator and arbiter of beauty is the heart; to the male rattlesnake the female rattlesnake is the loveliest thing in nature. ~ Ambrose Bierce

My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants. ~ Jim Fowler

Nature is not infallible. Nature makes mistakes. That's what evolution is all about: growth by trail and error. Nature can be stupid and cruel. Oh, my, how cruel! That's okay. There's nothing wrong with Nature being dumb and ugly because it is simultaneously--paradoxically--brilliant and superb.

But to worship the natural at the exclusion of the unnatural is to practice Organic Fascism--which is what many of my pilgrims practice. And in the best tradition of fascism, they are totally intolerant of those who don't share their beliefs; thus, they foster the very kinds of antagonism and tension that lead to strife, which they, pacifists one and all, claim to abhor. To insist that a woman who paints berry juice on her lips is somehow superior to the woman who wears Revlon lipstick is sophistry; it's smug sophistical skunkshit. Lipstick is a chemical composition, so is berry juice, and they both are effective for decorating the face. If lipstick has advantages over berry juice then let us praise that part of technology that produced lipstick. The organic world is wonderful, bot the inorganic isn't bad, either. The world of plastic and artifice offers its share of magical surprises.

A thing is good because it's good, not because it's natural. A thing is bad because it's bad, not because it's artificial. It's not a damn iota better to be bitten by a rattlesnake than shot by a gun. ~ Tom Robbins

The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy.
She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall.
Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the armed knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity.
Bogies will not scare her in the dark: bullets will not frighten her in the day.
Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.
The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.
A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong turning: but she passes safely through.
He details immortal gods to attend her: upon every road where she must travel.
They take her hand at hard places: she will not stub her toes in the dark.
She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionettes.
He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world's desire. ~ C.S. Lewis

I do not think I have any uncharitable prejudice against the rattlesnake, still, I should not like to be one. ~ Herman Melville

I've gotten rid of the yips four times but they hang in there. You know those two-foot downhill putts with a break? I'd rather see a rattlesnake. ~ Sam Snead

After a hard day of basic training, you could eat a rattlesnake. ~ Elvis Presley

Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one. [ There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from the United States ]. ~ Will Cuppy

We're all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us. ~ Greg Iles

Well if this be order
give me a wheelbarruh of chaos
and a pop bottle full of shook up rattlesnakes ~ Bob Henry Baber

To the goggling unbeliever Texans say, as people always say about their mangier dishes, 'But it's just like chicken, only tenderer.' Rattlesnake is, in fact, just like chicken - only tougher. ~ Alistair Cooke

I hate a hook. It nauseates me. I could vomit when I see one. It's like a rattlesnake in your pocket. ~ Ben Hogan

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake. ~ Ross Macdonald

And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced - mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes - would miraculously vanish from the trail for me? ~ Rinker Buck

I loved her like a rabbit loves a rattlesnake ~ James M. Cain

Hello, my name is Holly Eryngo Nemov. My last name is pronounced like 'Nemo', and if you spell 'Nemo' backwards, it becomes 'omen'. 'Nemov' is also an anagram for 'venom'. It also means 'nobody'. My family thought it was a good last name for me. I am fifteen years old – I'll be sixteen after October the 31st – and I'm a necromancer's apprentice. Necromancy, from the Greek words 'nekros' and 'manteia', means 'divination from the dead'. My family prayed to a demon prince a long time ago, to bring me back from that realm of the world, so I used to believe that they wanted me, but they didn't. I like reading, I like practicing magic, I like catching rattlesnakes and I like quiet, isolated places. I don't like dogs, riverbanks, big cities or survival. My family is dead, and I'm supposed to have joined the thing that killed them. ~ Rebecca McNutt

When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh. ~ Edward Abbey

We angels are misconceived in the human world. People perceive us as kindly and bountiful; when, in truth, we are about as fluffy, as gentle, as yielding, as rattlesnakes. ~ Rebecca Lim

With his dripping basket and flip-flapped up the hill. Then a car turned into Cannery Row and Doc drove up to the front of the laboratory. His eyes were red rimmed with fatigue. He moved slowly with tiredness. When the car had stopped, he sat still for a moment to let the road jumps get out of his nerves. Then he climbed out of the car. At his step on the stairs, the rattlesnakes ran out their tongues and listened with their waving forked tongues. The rats scampered madly about the cages. Doc climbed the stairs. He looked in wonder at the sagging door and at the broken window. The weariness seemed to go out of him. He stepped quickly inside. Then he went quickly from room to room, stepping around the broken glass. He bent down ~ John Steinbeck

A rattlesnake loose in the living room tends to end all discussion of animal rights. ~ Lance Morrow

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous. ~ Nevada Barr

I asked Joe if he hated Ivy and Bucky. He said, "That would make as much sense as hating a rattlesnake. You don't hate rattlesnakes; you avoid them. ~ Maria Semple

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

The woods were full of peril - rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes. ~ Bill Bryson

There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

Every time I come across a rattlesnake on my farm I initially react in fear and am tempted to kill it. Then I realize I wouldn't want to live in a world where all wild things - without and within - are domesticated. ~ Sam Keen

I recollected that [the rattlesnake's] eye excelled in brightness, that of any other animal, and that she has no eye-lids. She may therefore be esteemed an emblem of vigilance. She never begins an attack, nor, when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true courage. As if anxious to prevent all pretensions of quarreling with her, the weapons with which nature has furnished her, she conceals in the roof of her mouth, so that, to those who are unacquainted with her, she appears to be a most defenseless animal; and even when those weapons are shown and extended for her defense, they appear weak and contemptible; but their wounds however small, are decisive and fatal. Conscious of this, she never wounds 'till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her. ~ Benjamin Franklin

If your gonna play with rattlesnakes, you better know what rattlesnakes do. ~ Smokey Yunick

I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim. ~ Janet Fitch

The things we do to eat! Running from scorpions the size of small dogs, dodging 10 foot long rattlesnakes and squashing monster spiders - all in a days work ~ Gail Saunders-Smith

People say if you face your worst fear, the rest is easy, but those are people who are afraid of rattlesnakes or enclosed spaces, not of themselves and the horrible things they've done. ~ Alice Hoffman

A Rattlesnake, if Cornered will become so angry it will bite itself. That is exactly what the harboring of hate and resentment against others is - a biting of oneself. We think we are harming others in holding these spites and hates, but the deeper harm is to ourselves. ~ E. Stanley Jones

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. ~ William S. Burroughs

I ran across a rattlesnake once in New Mexico, you know what I did with it, chopped its head off and we ate it. ~ Joe Teti

Knowing he [Bob Serber] was going to the [first atom bomb] test, I asked him how he planned to deal with the danger of rattlesnakes. He said, 'I'll take along a bottle of whiskey.' ... I ended by asking, 'What would you do about those possibilities [of what unknown phenomena might cause a nuclear explosion to propagate in the atmosphere]?' Bob replied, 'Take a second bottle of whiskey. ~ Edward Teller

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, ~ Bill Bryson

I'm not as good as a man as you are, Sundown. I find it hard to give an enemy my back under any circumstance." – Ren
"Oh, I didn't say I was giving her my back. I'm not lacking all my noodle sense. But I'm not holding a grudge neither. Sometimes you just got to let the rattlesnake lay in the sun." – Sundown
"Men? You do know I'm standing in this little box with you and can hear every word?" – Abigail
"We know. I merely don't care." – Ren ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

Rattlesnakes are only too plentiful everywhere; along the river bottoms, in the broken, hilly ground, and on the prairies and the great desert wastes alike ... If it can it will get out of the way, and only coils up in its attitude of defence when it believes that it is actually menaced. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Everybody knew that you should never provoke a rattlesnake, much less tie it into a bow. But that didn't stop Judd. What did stop him was the rattlesnake. ~ Demetri Martin

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother? ~ Elizabeth Moon

Ever feel like the land is swallowing you whole, Sierra? That all of this beauty is wrapped around you so tight it's like being in a rattlesnakes mouth?"
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My mother gives me a glance. "You will someday. Maybe it'll come later for you than it did for me. Children tend to do that. Marriage. Life. All these things. ~ Kali Fajardo-Anstine

The righteousness of men should be treated with the same respect that one would accord to a rattlesnake. Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for 'Serena.' ~ Ron Rash

Refrigerators are good for keeping homemade moonshine less gross. Freezers are good for keeping rattlesnakes less angry. Garages are good to hide in when your wife finds either. ~ Jenny Lawson