Teeming Quotes

The world is teeming; anything can happen. ~ John Cage

Outside the drizzling rain had begun again. It pattered around the house, and on the roofs and eaves, like a million, tiny, stealthy feet: softly, as though the night were teeming with a host of minute, dark beings. ~ Evangeline Walton

Summer in Karachi is brutal. The heat alone is ugly and unforgiving. Add unrelenting humidity, and the elements become merciless. The city sits on the sea but is surrounded by desert land that has been known to reach some of the hottest temperatures anywhere. When the heat reaches its peak, you feel baked in an oven and the thick, humid air gives everything an extra, hot skin. It's an effort to even lift your finger. You could get by with air-conditioning, but in this teeming, overpopulated Third World megapolis, it is a luxury few can afford. ~ Saad Shafqat

Thrilling to the sensation of hard, teeming flesh. ~ Emma Holly

There is no greater power on this earth than story." Will paced the length of the room. "People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense - words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions - words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History." Will grabbed the sheaf of newspaper clippings he kept in a stack on his desk. "This, and these" - he gestured to the library's teeming shelves - "they're a testament to the country's rich supernatural history. ~ Libba Bray

He flung self-control to the unseen winds of the Force and reached down deep to fully sense her presence. Layers and layers: the living depth of Endor's teeming forest, the all-enveloping warmth of a night on sandy Tatooine, and the hypnotic glitter of deep space came to mind.… ~ Kathy Tyers

The soil is, as a matter of fact, full of live organisms. It is essential to conceive of it as something pulsating with life, not as a dead or inert mass. There could be no greater misconception than to regard the earth as dead: a handful of soil is teeming with life. The living fungi, bacteria, and protozoa, invisibly present in the soil complex, are known as the soil population. This population of millions and millions of minute existences, quite invisible to our eyes of course, pursue their own lives. They come into being, grow, work, and die: they sometimes fight each other, win victories, or perish; for they are divided into groups and families fitted to exist under all sorts of conditions. The state of a soil will change with the victories won or the losses sustained; and in one or other soil, or at one or other moment, different groups will predominate. ~ Albert Howard

If you live in the midst of bad people, bad books, and bad things, you lose your power of detecting bad thoughts when they come teeming about you like microbes. But if every day you spend an hour on God's mountains or upon the broad sea of the Bible, and get some of God's accurate senses into you, you will be able to detect things which are wrong that other people, even Christians, pass without seeing as wrong. ~ F.B. Meyer

The multiplicity of human identity is not just a spiritual principle, it's a biological fact - a basic ecological reality. ... only 10% of the cells in your body belong to you. The rest are the cells of bacteria and microorganisms that call your body home, and without these symbionts living on and within your physical self, you would be unable to digest and process the nutrients necessary to keep you alive. Your physical body is teeming with a microscopic diversity of life that rivals a rainforest. The insight of the Gaia Theory - that "the Earth system behaves as a single self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components" - is as much a statement about our own physical bodies as it is about the planet. If we imagine the Earth as the body of a goddess, we can also imagine our own bodies as a sacred home to an ecologically complex and diverse array of microscopic life." -- Alison Leigh Lilly, "Naming the Water: Human and Deity Identity from an Earth-Centered Perspective ~ John Halstead

Her mighty lakes, like oceans of liquid silver; her mountains, with bright aerial tints; her valleys, teeming with wild fertility; her tremendous cataracts, thundering in their solitudes; her boundless plains, waving with spontaneous verdure; her broad, deep rivers, rolling in solemn silence to the ocean; her trackless forests, where vegetation puts forth all its magnificence; her skies, kindling with the magic of summer clouds and glorious sunshine - no, never need an American look beyond his own country for the sublime and beautiful of natural scenery. ~ Washington Irving

We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world--temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-laughing, and healthy. Once in a while one comes on the other kind--what used in the university to be called a 'dry-ball'--but such men are not really biologists. They are the embalmers of the field, the picklers who see only the preserved form of life without any of its principle. Out of their own crusted minds they create a world wrinkled with formaldehyde. The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. The dry-balls cannot possibly learn a thing every starfish knows in the core of his soul and in the vesicles between his rays. He must, so know the starfish and the student biologist who sits at the feet of living things, proliferate in all directions. Having certain tendencies, he must move along their lines to the limit of their potentialities. And we have known biologists who did proliferate in all directions: one or two have had a little trouble about it. Your true biologist will sing you a song as loud and off-key as will a blacksmith, for he knows that morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers. Sometimes he may proliferate a little too much in all directions, but he is as easy to kill as any other organism, and meanwhile he is very good company, and at least he does not confuse a low hormone productivity ~ John Steinbeck

I have an immoderate passion for water; for the sea, though so vast, so restless, so beyond one's comprehension; for rivers, beautiful, yet fugitive and elusive; but especially for marshes, teeming with all that mysterious life of the creatures that haunt them. A marsh is a whole world within a world, a different world, with a life of its own, with its own permanent denizens, its passing visitors, its voices, its sounds, its own strange mystery. ~ Guy De Maupassant

I see, and sing by my own eyes inspired.
O let me be thy Choir and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged Censer teeming;
Thy Shrine, thy Grove, thy Oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouthe'd Prophet dreaming!
Yes, I will be thy Priest and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my Mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pies shall murmer in the wind ~ John Keats

To finish building the free society dreamed of by Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, we must draw upon the resources of the enlightened imagination, which can be systematically developed by the spiritual sciences of India and Tibet. We have not yet tamed our own demons of racism, nationalism, sexism, and materialism. We have not yet made peace with a land we took by force and have only partly paid for. We are a teeming conglomeration of people from different tribes who have yet to embrace fully the humanness in one another. And none of us can be really free until all of us are. ~ Robert Thurman

With songwriting I spend a lot of time living life, accruing all these experiences, journaling, and then by the time I get to the studio I'm teeming with the drive to write. ~ Alanis Morissette

I was invisible, and I was only just beginning to realise the extraordinary advantage my invisibility gave me. My head was already teeming with plans of all the wild and wonderful things I had now impunity to do. ~ H.G.Wells

It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table - how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heartbeat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes; the vital force. And this man thinks he can - this man alone, out of all the world's teeming billions! ("Jane Brown's Body") ~ Cornell Woolrich

The president, who finds so much to complain about in other areas of the world, apparently saw nothing wrong in recognizing a Communist regime that has killed more people in its short history of control over the teeming millions of that great country than any other collection of dictators or tyrants in the history of the world. ~ Barry Goldwater

Gale spreads the bread slices with the soft goat cheese, carefully placing a basil leaf on each while I strip the bushes of their berries. We settle back in a nook in the rocks. From this place, we are invisible but have a clear view of the valley, which is teeming with summer life, greens to gather, roots to dig, fish iridescent in the sunlight. The day is glorious, with a blue sky and soft breeze. The food's wonderful, with the cheese seeping into the warm bread and the berries bursting in our mouths. ~ Suzanne Collins

I was struck by how life moved so fast, almost cruelly, on Broadway. Fiorello! had fled the Broadhurst to make way for Sail Away, as if it had never existed. I studied each such metamorphosis with contradictory emotions of excitement and loss. With their new marquees and posters and glass-encased displays of fresh photos, the theaters promised a teeming bounty of surprises. But there remained not a shred of their previous tenants, who were gone forever and mourned by no one, perhaps, except me. When shows left the National, I knew they were going on to Broadway or at least to another town on the road. Where did the plays that left New York go? ~ Frank Rich

Ode to Psyche - Excerpt

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.
So let me be thy choir, and make a moan
Upon the midnight hours;
Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet
From swinged censer teeming;
Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat
Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane
In some untrodden region of my mind,
Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,
Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind: ~ John Keats

Now the moon of the Aztecs is at the zenith, and all the world lies still. Full and white, the white of bones, the white of a skull; blistering the center of the sky well with its throbbing, not touching it on any side. Now the patio is a piebald place of black and white, burning in the downward-teeming light. Not a leaf moves, not a petal falls, in this fierce amalgam. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") ~ Cornell Woolrich

Becoming a porn star is pretty much exactly like becoming a superhero. One day, an intrepid, fresh-faced young woman discovers that she has a talent. She chooses a new name – something over the top, flamboyant, a little arrogant, with a tinge of the epic. Somebody makes her a costume – skintight – revealing, a flattering color, nothing much left to the imagination. She explores her power, learns a specialty move or two, sweats her way through a training montage, throwing out punny quips here, there, and everywhere. She inhabits an archetype. She takes every blow that comes her way like she doesn't even feel it. Then she goes out into the big, bad night and saves people from loneliness. From the assorted villanies that plague the common man. From despair and bad dreams. From tedium. Oh, sure, her victories are short-lived. She finishes off her foes in one glorious masterstroke, but the minute she's gone, all the wickedness and darkness of the scheming, teeming world comes rushing back in. But when you need her, here she comes to save the day, doing it for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

In any case, if the reader would have a correct idea of the mood of these exiles, we must conjure up once more those dreary evenings, sifting down through a haze of dust and golden light upon the treeless streets filled with teeming crowds of men and women. For, characteristically, the sound that rose towards the terraces still bathed in the last glow of daylight, now that the noises of vehicles and motors
the sole voice of cities in ordinary times
had ceased, was but one vast rumour of low voices and incessant footfalls, the drumming of innumerable soles timed to the eerie whistling of the plague in the sultry air above, the sound of a huge concourse of people marking time, a never-ending, stifling drone that, gradually swelling, filled the town from end to end, and evening after evening gave its truest, mournfullest expression to the blind endurance which had ousted love from all our hearts. ~ Albert Camus

Cemeteries used to be nice and quiet. Now they're teeming with life. ~ Anthony T. Hincks.

He wanted to scream at his parents, to hit them, to elicit from them something - some melting into grief, some loss of composure, some recognition that something large had happened, that in Hemming's death they had lost something vital and necessary to their lives. He didn't care if they really felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn't see them without aching for them. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to your new home.' He gestured to the stone walls of the cavern that surrounded them. 'Your lives as you once knew them are over,' he continued. 'You have been selected, all of you, the worst, the most cunning, the most mischievous minds from around the world . . . selected to become part of an institution like no other. You have all exhibited certain unique abilities, abilities that set you apart from the mediocrity of the teeming masses and which mark you out as the leaders of tomorrow. Here, in this place, you will be furnished with the knowledge and experience to best exploit your own natural abilities, to hone your craft to a cutting edge.'

He paused and slowly surveyed the pale, wide-eyed faces before him.

'Each of you has within you a rare quality, a gift if you will, a special talent for the supremely villainous. Society would have us believe that this is an undesirable characteristic, something that should be subdued, controlled, destroyed. But not here . . . no, here we want to see you blossom into all that you can be, to see your innate wickedness flourish, to make you the very worst that you can be.'

He stepped out from behind the lectern and walked to the edge of the raised platform. As he loomed over them he seemed to grow taller and some of those at the front of the group edged backwards nervously.

'For today all of you have the unique honour and privilege of becoming the newest students ~ Mark Walden

I turned to the teeming small creatures that can be held between the thumb and forefinger: the little things that compose the foundation of our ecosystems, the little things, as I like to say, who run the world. ~ E. O. Wilson

As one looks across the barren stretches of the pack, it is sometimes difficult to realise what teeming life exists immediately beneath its surface. ~ Robert Falcon Scott

How do we hold the paradox of giving up our life in order to find it? I believe Chesterton is saying that the more we open our heart to both heartache and hope, the more we can look death in the face and say, "Where is your sting?" (1 Cor. 15:55). We must love all that bears the mark of life: the sound of an owl finch and its call that sounds like the meowing of a kitten. We must love Bach, Ethiopian berbere, and the smell of freshly baked bread. Life is teeming with goodness. We must also experience death and powerlessness, but darkness will not win. Life and love will have the final word. ~ Dan B. Allender

The soil is not a mass of dead debris, merely resulting from the physical and chemical weathering of rocks; it is a more or less homogeneous system which has resulted from the decomposition of plant and animal remains. It is teeming with life. ~ Selman Waksman

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the signposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment. ~ Andre Aciman

Then there were long, lazy summer afternoons when there was nothing to do but read. And dream. And watch the town go by to supper. I think that is why our great men and women so often have sprung from small towns, or villages. They have had time to dream in their adolescence. No cars to catch, no matinees, no city streets, none of the teeming, empty, energy-consuming occupations of the city child. Little that is competitive, much that is unconsciously absorbed at the most impressionable period, long evenings for reading, long afternoons in the fields or woods. ~ Edna Ferber

The world, Lula was thinking, is oozing, teeming, crawling with miracles. And we live in the opaque plastic bubble of television and booze. ~ Glen Duncan

Dostoevsky was the first to reveal to us this teeming multiplicity of emotions, this complexity of our spiritual universe. ~ Stefan Zweig

A Far Cry From Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool ~ Derek Walcott

This is a truth that should be repeated like a mantra: to have any chance of a ful - filling life, we require not only clean air and a steady climate, but also an abundance of meadows and woodlands, rivers and oceans, teeming with life and the mass existence of other living creatures. ~ John Burnside

It's striking how so many immigration activists don't seem to particularly like this country. They tell us that America is a teeming mass of racist, sexist, homophobic bigots. But then they insist on bringing the rest of the world to live here. ~ Ann Coulter

Our ignorance of the teeming wilderness that is the soil (even the act of regarding it as a wilderness) is no impediment to nurturing it. To the contrary, a healthy sense of all we don't know
even a sense of mystery
keeps us from reaching for oversimplifications and technological silver bullets. ~ Michael Pollan

If in this wide world, teeming with abundant supplies for human want, to thousands of wretched creatures no choice is open, save between starvation and sin, may we not justly say that there is something utterly wrong in the system that permits such things to be? ~ Tennessee Celeste Claflin

To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. ~ Pope Leo XIII

The first words that are read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world, are when they look into The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.
The first question they ask is: 'Why was he eternally surprised?'
And they are told: 'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.'
The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Ankh-Morpork were: 'Rooms For Rent, Very Reasonable.' And he was glad of it. ~ Terry Pratchett

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob, and not a very arduous task to astonish them; but essentially to benefit and to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty, and teeming with danger. ~ Charles Caleb Colton

Over nine whole acres while a huge, horrendous Vulture puddles forever with hooked beak In his liver and entrails teeming with raw pain. It burrows deep below the breastbone, feeding And foraging without respite, for the gnawed-at Gut and gutstrings keep renewing. ~ Virgil

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir ... ) ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I lay awake for hours in my twin bed next to the other, empty bed, feeling and hearing the spruces, the hemlocks, the rhododendron scraping at the partly open window, the verdant mountain out there in the night, the burgeoning of nature that did not seem to include me. And when, my restless body asked my teeming brain, had I agreed to be excluded? ~ Elizabeth Kostova

O Earth, that hast no voice, confide to me a voice!
O harvest of my lands! O boundless summer growths!
O lavish, brown, parturient earth! O infinite, teeming womb!
A verse to seek, to see, to narrate thee. ~ Walt Whitman

Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like all borders, it's teeming with energy and fraught with danger. ~ Mary Pipher

Shame, which is the reluctance to be who we're not even sure we are, could end up being the deepest thing about us, deeper even than who we are, as though beyond identity were buried reefs and sunken cities teeming with creatures as we couldn't begin to name because they came long before us. ~ Andre Aciman

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Muscle and pluck forever!
What invigorates life, invigorates death,
And the dead advance as much as the living advance,
And the future is no more uncertain than the present,
And the roughness of the earth and of man encloses as much as the delicatesse of the earth and of man,
And nothing endures but personal qualities.
What do you think endures?
Do you think the great city endures?
Or a teeming manufacturing state? or a prepared constitution? or the best-built steamships?
Or hotels of granite and iron? or any chef-d'oeuvres of engineering, forts, armaments?

Away! These are not to be cherish'd for themselves;
They fill their hour, the dancers dance, the musicians play for them;
The show passes, all does well enough of course,
All does very well till one flash of defiance.

The great city is that which has the greatest man or woman;
If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world."

-from "Song of the Broad-Axe ~ Walt Whitman

Plume"

Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure - dusky flutter - trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who've engraved on her locket phrases in script: "glide on a blade" and "rustling precedes the shuck." This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh. Always it's morning, afternoon or evening - the loot of hours - a magic sack grasping vacuum but heavy in the hand, and from which, together, we pull a swarm of telepathic bees, melons beached in a green bin, a lithograph of the city from its crumbling ramparts, crackled pitchers and the mouth of a cave. Perhaps this is my open weave, my phantom rialto or plume of light. We bow to each other in the mash of flickering things. We are completely surrounded. ~ Aaron Shurin

But now he saw that truths were as innumerable as falsehoods - that for sheer teeming chaos, the world of man could only be matched by the world of the divine. And as he traveled backward the Almighty shrank smaller and smaller, until He was merely another desert deity, and His commandments seemed no more than the fearful demands of a jealous lover. ~ Helene Wecker

Bubble-gum angels swooped from top margins, or scraped their wings between teeming paragraphs. Maidens with golden hair dripped sea-blue tears into the books spine. Grape-colored whales spouted blood around a newspaper item (pasted in) listing arrivals to the endangered species list. Six hatchlings cried from shattered shells near an entry made on Easter. Cecilia had filled the pages with a profusion of colors and curlicues, Candyland ladders and striped shamrocks. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

The wondrous thing about nature, her gift to us, is her wanton promiscuity. She reproduces herself with abandon, with teeming infinite generosity. ~ Ruth Ozeki

Perhaps, if one wishes to remain an individual in the midst of the teeming multitudes, one must make oneself grotesque. ~ Salman Rushdie

It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles. It amuses me because it seems so much like my life at the moment, like most women's lives in the middle years of marriage. It is untidy, spread out in all directions, heavily encrusted with accumulations ... ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

We actually have 10 times as many cells of microbes on us as we have human cells ... We are literally a teeming ecosystem of microorganisms. ~ Jonathan Eisen

The thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate. ~ Jodi Picoult

A sincere person owes it to themselves to expose the frightful barbarity which still prevails in the hidden depths of a society so outwardly well-ordered. Take, for instance, our great cities, the leaders of civilization, especially the most populous, and, in many respects, the first of all - the immense London, which gathers to herself the riches of the world, whose every warehouse is worth a king's ransom; where are to be found enough, and more than enough, of food and clothing for the needs of the teeming millions that throng her streets in greater numbers than the ants which swarm in the never-ending labyrinth of their subterranean galleries. And yet…beside these untold splendors, want is consuming the vitals of entire populations, and it is only sporadically that the fortunate for whom these hoards are amassed hear, as barely a muffled wailing, the bitter cry which rises eternally from those unseen depths. ~ Elisee Reclus

This was what she couldn't get enough of, not if she lived forever: Harry on her skin, Harry's grateful kisses on her neck, Harry and Olive, teeming and sated, brimming over with each other, as if this house and this world had been built by God's hands for their love alone. ~ Beatriz Williams

…a hilarious, angry and sympathetic portrait of boys behaving badly, teeming with sadistic bullies, imperfect heroes, adolescent onanists and ice-cream gorging hedonists.' - The West Australian ~ Jon Doust

The testimony of DMT, for me, is that there is a nearby dimension, teeming with intelligences, that from one of the more conservative perspectives seems like an ecology of souls. ~ Terence McKenna

Here, day was not the decorous successor to night known to us at home, lazily resuming sway over a drowsy world when the darkness thins and dies, bequeathing its lost kingdom to the unwilling light. This struggling, sun-born life in forest, swamp and teeming air was too urgent and too ephemeral to wait for the going of night before resuming its unchanging day-labor of growth, fruition and exhaustion once more. Day extended its reign into the darkness, stealing precious time from the night, and when the sky paled perceptibly at last the feeling of full day was already abroad on this impatient earth. ~ E. Arnot Robertson

War rages on the teeming earth;
The hot and sanguinary fight
Begins with each new creature's birth:
A dreadful war where might is right;
Where still the strongest slay and win,
Where weakness is the only sin. ~ Mathilde Blind

The sudden introduction of these magic mortgage bonds into the marketplace pushed most every major institutional investor in the world to suddenly become consumed with the desire to lend money to American home borrowers, even if they didn't know to whom exactly they were lending or how exactly these borrowers were qualifying for their home loans. As a result of this lunatic process, houses in middle- and lower-income neighborhoods from Fresno to the Jersey Shore became jammed full of new home borrowers, millions and millions of them, who in many cases were not equal to the task of making their monthly payments. The situation was tenable so long as housing prices kept rising and these teeming new populations of home borrowers could keep their heads above water, selling or refinancing their way out of trouble if need be. But the instant the arrow began tilting downward, this rapidly expanding death-balloon of phony real estate value inevitably had to - and did - explode. ~ Matt Taibbi

This is my genre ... the happiness, tragedies, and the sorrows of mankind as realized in the teeming black ghetto. ~ Jacob Lawrence

There are some days when history is made. Yesterday was one - and I was honoured to be in Washington to watch Barack Obama being sworn in. During his soaring inaugural address, the new president gazed over a teeming National Mall that was crowded with more than a million people. ~ Des Browne

Everything my guidebook said was true and also meaningless. Yes, the East was vast, teeming, and infinitely complex, but wasn't the West also? Pointing out that the East was an inexhaustible source of riches and wonder only implied that it was peculiarly the case, and not so for the West. The Westerner, of course, took his riches and wonder for granted, just as I had never noticed the enchantment of the East or its mystery. If anything, it was the West that was often mysterious, frustrating, and really interesting, a world utterly different from everything I had known before I began my education. As with the Westerner, the Easterner was never so bored as he was when on his own shores. ~ Viet Thanh Nguyen

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love! - then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink. ~ John Keats

You're not weak because you can't read. You're weak because you're afraid of people seeing your weakness. You're letting shame decide who you are. […] It's shame that lines my pockets, shame that keeps the Barrel teeming with fools ready to put on a mask just so they can have what they want with none the wiser about it. We can endure all kinds of pain. It's shame that eats men whole. ~ Leigh Bardugo

If we do discover more than one type of life on Earth, we can be fairly certain that the universe is teeming with it, for it would be inconceivable that life started twice here but never on all the other earth-like planets. ~ Paul Davies

My earliest recollections are of the teeming East Side where I was born. This Hester Street and its surrounding streets were the most densely populated of any city on Earth; and looking back at it, I realize what I owe to its unique and crowded humanity. ~ Jacob Epstein

Good, evil, these are human concepts, ways people have for understanding what it means to be alive," Nick said. "Before people came along, this planet was teeming with life, fighting to survive, to live long enough to reproduce, completing the circle of life."

"I'm with you so far," Elphaba said. "The circle of life is an essential Wiccan principle, in spite of The Lion King."

Nick ignored Elphaba's bit of humor as his mood became more serious. "Precisely so. And in this circle of life, you have predators and prey. The predators must kill to eat. If they don't, they starve. Are the predators evil?"

"No, of course not. They're simply acting on their nature."

"What is human nature, then? Are we a species that builds societies of trust and cooperation, or are we a species that seeks power over our fellow man, even if that means fighting wars or otherwise killing him?"

Elphaba frowned, carefully considering her answer. "I'd like to think we are a species of trust and cooperation."

"Our entire history is a story of war, of murder and mayhem, of blood running in the streets," Nick said quietly.

"Yes, yes it is." Elphaba leaned back, grimacing.

"We are both," Nick said. "A species of cooperation, and a species of strife. We fight wars, and we also establish the rule of law to mete out justice to the criminals in our midst. Humans are both good and evil. ~ Abramelin Keldor

You know better than anyone that nothing lasts. Nothing good. Nothing bad. Everything lives. Everything dies. Sometimes cities just fall into the sea. It's not a tragedy, that's just the way it is. People look around them and see the world and say this is how the world is supposed to be. Then they fight to keep it that way. They believe that this is what was intended - whether by design or cosmic accident - and that everything exists in a tenuous balance that must be preserved. But the balance is bullshit. The only thing constant in this world is the speed at which things change. Rain falls, waters rise, shorelines erode. What is one day magnificent seaside property in ancient Greece is the next resting thirty feet below the surface. Islands rise from the sea and continents crack and part ways forever. What was once a verdant forest teeming with life is now resting one thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice in Antarctica; what was once a glorious church now rests at the bottom of a dammed-up lake in Kansas. The job of nature is to march on and keep things going; ours is to look around, appreciate it, and wonder what's next? ~ C. Robert Cargill

Data in our psychic program is often nonlinear, nonhierarchical, archaic, alive, and teeming with paradox. Simply booting up is a challenge, if not for no other reason than that most of us find acknowledging the unknowable and monitoring its intrusions upon the familiar and mundane more than a little embarrassing. ~ Tom Robbins

Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man's beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, ~ Richard Adams

Nothing is so pregnant as cruelty; so multifarious, so rapid, so ever teeming a mother is unknown to the animal kingdom; each of her experiments provokes another and refines upon the last; though always progressive, yet always remote from the end. ~ Johann Kaspar Lavater

Amar loosed a breath. "I understand, you know."
I looked up.
"The forced silence…the voices of this palace."
We stood there, not saying anything. I felt too aware of the space between us. Even with Akaran's secrets spiraling in the shadows of my head, I couldn't ignore the weightless feeling that had gripped me. Standing beside Amar did something to me. Like my center had shifted to make room for him.
"You do not trust me, do you?"
"No," I said. I had no reason to lie. "I told you in the Night Bazaar that trust is won in actions and time. Not words."
"I wish you trusted me."
"I don't place my faith in wishes," I said. "How can I? I can't even--"
I bit back the rest of my words. I can't even see your face. Perhaps Gupta was lying and he really did have a disfiguring scar. Amar moved closer until we were only a hand space apart.
"What?" he coaxed, his voice hovering between a growl and a question.
"I can't even see your face."
A strange chill still curled off of him like smoke and even though the glass garden was teeming with little lights, shades veiled him.
"Is that what you want?" he said. "Would it make you trust me?"
"It would be a start."
"You are impossible to please."
I said nothing. Amar leaned forward, and I felt the silken trails of his hood brush across my neck. My breath constricted. "Is that what you want? An unguarded gaze can spill a thousand secrets."
"I would know them anyway," I s ~ Roshani Chokshi

We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer. ~ Lauren Oliver

I have grown up listening to my grandparents' stories about 'the other side' of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn't quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents' early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness. ~ Aanchal Malhotra

The landscape of the Net has changed; that cyberfrontier of the past has become a teeming city of people, transactions, and businesses. ~ Charles Platt

Quantum physics has found that there is no empty space in the human cell, but it is a teeming, electric-magnet ic field of possibility or potential ~ Deepak Chopra

The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target; - carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message had distilled, by touching them with precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle. Swann's life, from the evening to come, as it would be, after dinner, at her home, - forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some appari ~ Marcel Proust

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there. That's how I saw it, and see it still. ~ Ronald Reagan

Home, home - a few small rooms, stiflingly over-inhabited by a man, by a periodically teeming woman, by rabble of boys and girls of all ages. No air, no space; an understerilized prison; darkness, disease and smells. ~ Aldous Huxley

Oh, treacherous night thou lendest thy ready veil to every treason, and teeming mischief's beneath thy shade. ~ Aaron Hill

After tea, when both Mrs Fisher and Lady Caroline had disappeared again - it was quite evident that nobody wanted her - she was more dejected than ever, overwhelmed by the discrepancy between the splendour outside her, the warm, teeming beauty and self-sufficiency of nature, and the blank emptiness of her heart. ~ Elizabeth Von Arnim

The New Colossus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
with silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door! ~ Emma Lazarus

Religion, too, has defenders on both halves of the political spectrum. Even writers who are unwilling to defend the literal content of religious beliefs may be fiercely defensive of religion and hostile to the idea that science and reason have anything to say about morality (most of them show little awareness that humanism even exists). Defenders of the faith insist that religion has the exclusive franchise for questions about what matters. Or that even if we sophisticated people don't need religion to be moral, the teeming masses do. Or that even if everyone would be better off without religious faith, it's pointless to talk about the place of religion in the world because religion is a part of human nature, which is why, mocking Enlightenment hopes, it is more tenacious than ever. ~ Steven Pinker

Little world, full of little people
shouting for recognition, screaming for love,
Rolling world, teeming with millions,
carousel of the hungry,
Is there food enough? Wheat and corn will not do.
The fat are the hungriest of all, the skinny the most silent. ~ James Kavanaugh

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed. ~ Susan Sontag

When your day has been teeming with different sensations, when you have things on your mind, you can get to sleep to start with but you can't get back to sleep. Sleep comes a lot more easily than it comes back. ~ Victor Hugo

Nonetheless the memory of you stayed with me, and I had no doubt whatever whom I ought to cling to, though I knew that I was not yet capable of clinging, because the perishable body weighs down the soul, and its earthly habitation oppresses a mind teeming with thoughts. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

On the very first page of the Bible, then, power, flourishing and image bearing are connected. Power is for flourishing - teeming, fruitful, multiplying abundance. Power creates and shapes an environment where creatures can flourish, making room for the variety, diversity and unpredictability of coral reefs and tropical forests, but also the surprising biological richness of high deserts and ocean depths. And image bearing is for power - for it is the Creator's desire to fill the earth with representatives who will have the same kind of delighted dominion over the teeming creatures as their Maker. Which means image bearing is for flourishing. The image bearers do not exist for their own flourishing alone, but to bring the whole creation to its fulfillment. ~ Andy Crouch

God abides in men"

"God abides in men,
These are men who are simple,
they are fields of corn...
Such men have minds
like wide grey skies,
they have the grandeur
that the fools call emptiness.

God abides in men.

Some men are not simple,
they live in cities
among the teeming buildings,
wrestling with forces
as strong as the sun and the rain.
Often they must forgo dream upon dream...
Christ walks in the wilderness
in such lives.
God abides in men,
because Christ has put on
the nature of man, like a garment, and worn it to his own shape.
He has put on everyone's life...
to the workman's clothes to the King's red robes,
to the snowy loveliness of the wedding garment...
Christ has put on Man's nature,
and given him back his humanness...

God abides in man. ~ Caryll Houselander

In very different ways, the possibility that the universe is teeming with life, and the opposite possibility that we are totally alone, are equally exciting. Either way, the urge to know more about the universe seems to me irresistible, and I cannot imagine that anybody of truly poetic sensibility could disagree. ~ Richard Dawkins

White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be - and still is - teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. ~ Ibram X. Kendi

Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world-in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion. ~ Jane Smiley

O, Senator, drop your trousers! Loosen your cravat! Eschew your spats and step into that shallow, teeming world of mayflies and dragonflies and frogs' eyes staring eye-to-eye with your own, and the silty bottom. Cease your filibuster against the world God gave you. ~ Paul Harding