Tadpole Quotes

I've always wanted to be an expert on tadpoles; I've always fancied being a tadpole expert. It's a wonderful life if you become an experty tadpoleous, as they are known in the trade. You get invited out to all the smart parties and social gatherings. When smart people are making out their lists for the dinner parties, they say, 'Now, who can we have to make up the ten? A tadpole expert would be very nice. He could sit next to Lady Sonia. ~ Peter Cook

Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can't explain, something that created it all at the end of the search.

"And no matter how far they try to go the other way – to extend life, play around with the genes, clone this, clone that, live to one hundred and fifty – at some point, life is over. And then what happens? When the life comes to an end?"

I shrugged.

"You see?"

He leaned back. He smiled.

"When you come to the end, that's where God begins. ~ Mitch Albom

Others may not notice it, because an angry Toraf is truly a rare thing to behold, but Galen can practically feel the animosity emanating from his friend. Which is why he casually bumps into him, taking care to be overly apologetic.
"Oh, sorry about that, minnow. I didn't even see you there." Galen mimics Toraf's demeanor, crossing his arms and staring ahead of them. What they're supposed to be staring at, he's not sure.
His effort is rewarded with a slight upward curve of his friend's mouth. "Oh, don't think twice about it, tadpole. I know it must be difficult to swim straight with a whale's tail."
Galen scowls, taking care not to glance down at his fin. Ever since they went to retrieve Grom, he's been sore all below the waist, but he'd just attributed it to tension from finding Nalia, and then the whole tribunal mess-not to mention, hovering in place for hours at a time. Still, he did examine his fin the evening before, hoping to massage out any knots he found, but was a bit shocked to see that his fin span seemed to have widened. He decided that he was letting his imagination get the better of him. Now he's not so sure. "What do you mean?" he says lightly.
Toraf nods down toward the sand. "You know what I mean. Looks like you have the red fever."
"The red fever bloats you all over, idiot. Right before it kills you. It doesn't make your fin grow wider. Besides, the red tide hasn't been bad for years now." But Toraf already knows what the red fever lo ~ Anna Banks

For the entirety of my young and skittish life, I had fixated upon my fear as if it were the most interesting thing about me, when actually it was the most mundane. In fact, my fear was probably the only 100 percent mundane thing about me. I had creativity within me that was original; I had a personality within me that was original; I had dreams and perspectives and aspirations within me that were original. But my fear was not original in the least. My fear wasn't some kind of rare artisanal object; it was just a mass-produced item, available on the shelves of any generic box store. And that's the thing I wanted to build my entire identity around? The most boring instinct I possessed? The panic reflex of my dumbest inner tadpole? No. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm getting off the boat at Coconut Grove. It's six and you're not on the dock. I finish up, and start walking home, thinking you're tied up making dinner, and then I see you and Ant hurrying down the promenade. He is running and you're running after him. You're wearing a yellow dress. He jumps on me, and you stop shyly, and I say to you, come on, tadpole, show me what you got, and you laugh and run and jump into my arms. Such a good memory.
I love you, babe. ~ Paullina Simons

In my tadpole stage I was delivered to Metron Ariston and transmogrified, and here am I. My name is Sporos, by the way, and I do not like your thinking names like mouse-creature and shrimp-thing at me. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

growing up we always had a pack of dogs, usually four
held in prestige among many familiars
them and a few cats we let indoors
though we loved every bird, mouse, tadpole, crayfish
froze in a spring frost we grew more conscious of weather
wide skies read power lines hum dove coos
the leaves turnt dirt melt change on the breeze creaks
and rain the gravel trucks of spring full by slow
then empties in summer barrelling too fast past our hillbilly stake
mother threw potatoes later hard to explain
to the police who got called in from a county over
drove out to say, "ma'am, you can't throw potatoes at trucks"
then all polite as we stood with our pack and stuck to our guns ~ Cecily Nicholson

There's a part of every living thing that wants to become itself: the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, a damaged human being into a whole one.That is spirituality. ~ Ellen Bass

sometimes a caterpillar will wait too long and die in its cocoon before ever becoming a buterfly. ~ Jomny Sun

Her shoes squished with the movement and, as she peered uncomprehendingly down at them, a tadpole emerged from the leg of her jeans and flopped about on the ground.
"Eew!" She pointed a shaking finger at it. "A tadpole. I had a tadpole in my pants!"
"Lucky tadpole," he murmured. ~ Karen Marie Moning

The tadpole poet will never grow into anything bigger than a frog; not though in that stage of development he should puff and blow himself till he bursts with windy adulation at the heels of the laureled ox. ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne

I found myself drawn to biology, with all its frustrating yet fascinating complexities. When I was twelve, I remember reading about axolotls, which are basically a species of salamander that has evolved to remain permanently in the aquatic larval stage. They manage to keep their gills (rather than trading them in for lungs, like salamanders or frogs) by shutting down metamorphosis and becoming sexually mature in the water. I was completely flabbergasted when I read that by simply giving these creatures the "metamorphosis hormone" (thyroid extract) you could make the axolotl revert back into the extinct, land-dwelling, gill-less adult ancestor that it had evolved from. You could go back in time, resurrecting a prehistoric animal that no longer exists anywhere on Earth. I also knew that for some mysterious reason adult salamanders don't regenerate amputated legs but the tadpoles do. My curiosity took me one step further, to the question of whether an axolotl - which is, after all, an "adult tadpole" - would retain its ability to regenerate a lost leg just as a modern frog tadpole does. And how many other axolotl-like beings exist on Earth, I wondered, that could be restored to their ancestral forms by simply giving them hormones? Could humans - who are after all apes that have evolved to retain many juvenile qualities - be made to revert to an ancestral form, perhaps something resembling Homo erectus, using the appropriate cocktail of hormones? My mind reeled out a stream of qu ~ V.S. Ramachandran

Well, cheer up. At least you've got more mobility than a fucking tadpole on dry land. ~ Scott Lynch

Shelves full of books are all around me. Opening the different volumes I take a look, and find the pages covered with writings in unknown scripts - tadpole traces, bird feet markings, twisted branches. And in my dream I am able to read them all, to make sense of everything despite its difficulty. ~ Jonathan D. Spence

Why it is that animals, instead of developing in a simple and straightforward way, undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they often acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace ... To the Darwinian, the explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish. ~ Francis Maitland Balfour

Were it not for the presence of the unwashed and the half-educated, the formless, queer and incomplete, the unreasonable and absurd, the infinite shapes of the delightful human tadpole, the horizon would not wear so wide a grin. ~ Frank Moore Colby

When tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realised I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become.
Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I were to join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today. ~ Catherine Sanderson

I'm not a diva. I'm a tadpole trying to be a frog. ~ Toni Braxton

Mascara was dripping down her cheeks, splattering on her shirt. She backed away from him, eyes narrowing. Her shoes squished with the movement and, as she peered uncomprehendingly down at them, a tadpole emerged from the leg of her jeans and flopped about on the ground.
"Eem!She pointed a shaking finger at it. "A tadpole. I had a tadpole in my pants!"
"Lucky tadpole," he murmured.
-Adam and Gabrielle ~ Karen Marie Moning

In a world full of monochromatic tadpoles, if you are fluorescent it does not matter what size of tadpole you are. ~ Subroto Bagchi

Nobody really metamorphoses. Cinderella is always Cinderella, just in a nicer dress. The Ugly Duckling was always a swan, just a smaller version. And I bet the tadpole and the caterpillar still feel the same, even when they're jumping and flying, swimming and floating.
Just like I am now. ~ Holly Smale

Do you have someone in mind, Galen?" Toraf asks, popping a shrimp into his mouth. "Is it someone I know?"
"Shut up, Toraf," Galen growls. He closes his eyes, massages his temples. This could have gone a lot better in so many ways.
"Oh," Toraf says. "It must be someone I know, then."
"Toraf, I swear by Triton's trident-"
"These are the best shrimp you've ever made, Rachel," Toraf continues. "I can't wait to cook shrimp on our island. I'll get the seasoning for us, Rayna."
"She's not going to any island with you, Toraf!" Emma yells.
"Oh, but she is, Emma. Rayna wants to be my mate. Don't you, princess?" he smiles.
Rayna shakes her head. "It's no use, Emma. I really don't have a choice."
She resigns herself to the seat next to Emma, who peers down at her, incredulous. "You do have a choice. You can come live with me at my house. I'll make sure he can't get near you."
Toraf's expression indicates he didn't consider that possibility before goading Emma. Galen laughs. "It's not so funny anymore is it, tadpole?" he says, nudging him.
Toraf shakes his head. "She's not staying with you, Emma."
"We'll see about that, tadpole," she returns.
"Galen, do something," Toraf says, not taking his eyes off Emma.
Galen grins. "Such as?"
"I don't know, arrest her or something," Toraf says, crossing his arms.
Emma locks eyes with Galen, stealing his breath. "Yeah, Galen. Come arrest me if you're feeling up to it. But I'm t ~ Anna Banks

Dear Rocky,
Here I am taking my pencil in my hand to say hello, hoping you are in the best of health, both physically and mentally. As for me, I am fine thanks to Almighty God.
The weather in the valley is in the shits. It's been raining since Thanksgiving and here it is almost at the end of December and it's still raining. Instead of growing a prick, I think I'm going to grow a tail, like a tadpole. Ha, ha, ha! ~ Rocky Gamez

You are no failure, on a river. The water moves regardless - for all it cares, you might be a minnow or a tadpole, a turtle on a beavered log. You might be nothing at all. ~ Leif Enger

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole. ~ William S. Burroughs

"This is Lakshmi Singh." It's like a tadpole dying in muck. Take a drink. Wet your mouth. ~ Doug Stanhope

Now. My turn. Look, if you say that science will eventually prove there is no God, on that I must differ. No matter how small they take it back, to a tadpole, to an atom, there is always something they can't explain, something that created it all at the end of the search. ~ Mitch Albom

It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then ... and then
ah
we open our eyes and the day is before us and ... we become ourselves. ~ Jerry Spinelli

When tadpole tails shrink in size,
their constituents are being broken down by lysosomes, and these organic molecules are then reabsorbed to fuel the growth of new structures such as the frog's budding arms and legs. ~ Steven Daniel Garber

Emma this is not a joke. Look at your hands! They're ... they're ... wrinkled!"
"Yes that's because-"
"No way. I'm not going down for this. This isn't my fault."
"Toraf-"
"Galen will find some way to blame me though. He always does. 'You wouldn't have gotten caught if you didn't swim so close to that boat, tadpole.' No it couldn't be the humans fault for fishing in the first place-"
"Toraf."
"Or how about. 'Maybe if you'd stop trying to kiss my sister, she'd stop bashing your head with a rock.' How does my kissing her have anything to do with her bashing my head with a rock? If you ask me, it's just a result of poor parenting-"
"Toraf."
"Oh and my favorite: 'If you play with a lionfish, you're going to get pricked.' I wasn't playing with it! I was just helping it swim faster by grabbing its fins-"
"TOR-AF."
He stops pacing along the water, even seems to remember that I exist. "Yes, Emma? What were you saying? ~ Anna Banks

I fall for centuries of life. First sunlight touches this hillside; and buried inside the earth, a seed stirs, turning slowly in the deep soil like a tadpole turning itself in a dank pool. ~ Ned Hayes

Jabba resembled a giant tadpole, like the cinematic creature for whom he was nicknamed, the man was a hairless spheroid. As resident guardian angel of all NSA computer systems, Jabba marched from department to department, tweaking, soldering, and reaffirming his credo that prevention was the best medicine. No NSA computer had ever been infected under Jabba's reign; he intended to keep it that way. ~ Dan Brown