The Flies Quotes

Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love - or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The eastward spurs tip backward from the sun.
Nights runs an obscure tide round cape and bay
and beats with boats of cloud up from the sea
against this sheer and limelit granite head.
Swallow the spine of range; be dark. O lonely air.
Make a cold quilt across the bone and skull
that screamed falling in flesh from the lipped cliff
and then were silent, waiting for the flies.

Here is the symbol, and climbing dark
a time for synthesis. Night buoys no warning
over the rocks that wait our keels; no bells
sound for the mariners. Now must we measure
our days by nights, our tropics by their poles,
love by its end and all our speech by silence.
See in the gulfs, how small the light of home.

Did we not know their blood channelled our rivers,
and the black dust our crops ate was their dust?
O all men are one man at last. We should have known
the night that tidied up the cliffs and hid them
had the same question on its tongue for us.
And there they lie that were ourselves writ strange.

Never from earth again the coolamon
or thin black children dancing like the shadows
of saplings in the wind. Night lips the harsh
scarp of the tableland and cools its granite.
Night floods us suddenly as history
that has sunk many islands in its good time. ~ Judith A. Wright

Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.' ~ Philip Zimbardo

Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks - all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere. ~ Virginia Woolf

All the world is God,' McVries said, and giggled hysterically. 'We're walking on the Lord, and back there the flies are crawling on the Lord, in fact the flies are also the Lord, so blessed be the fruit of thy womb Percy. Amen, hallelujah, chunky peanut butter. Our father, which art in tinfoil, hallow'd be thy name. ~ Richard Bachman

By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer. ~ Edmund Burke

I said with great dignosity, Father, I am afraid I can't discuss my private life with you as I have a date with Lord of the Flies. ~ Louise Rennison

When Frank Sinatra sings Stormy Weather, the flies and the spiders get along together. ~ Cake

An anniversary is where you look back at having either fulfilled Cinderella or Lord of the Flies. ~ Fernando A. Torres

As I looked at the stains on the coral, I recalled some of the eloquent phrases of politicians and newsmen about how "gallant" it is for a man to "shed his blood for his country," and "to give his life's blood as a sacrifice," and so on. The words seemed ridiculous. Only the flies benefited. ~ Eugene B. Sledge

Why, an old, mangy dog, warming himself at the hearth, and struggling to his feet with a little
whimper to welcome his master home - why, that dog has more memories than I! At least he
recognizes his master. His master. But what can I call mine? ~ Jean-Paul Sarte

I recently watched Peter Brook's Lord of the Flies, and it wasn't a favorite film. Then I saw the one that was made in 1990, which in my opinion didn't match up to the original. ~ Brendan Fraser

I learned that if you're going to be a troublemaker, you don't want a ton of witnesses, because there's inevitable fallout from living like you're in 'Lord of the Flies.' ~ Natasha Lyonne

Any day you had gym class was a weird school day. It started off normal. You had English, Social Studies, Geometry, then suddenly your in Lord of the Flies for 40 minutes. Your hanging from a rope, you have hardly any clothes on, teachers are yelling at you, kids are throwing dodge balls at you and snapping towels - you're trying to survive. And then it's Science,Language, and History. Now that is a weird day. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

I've looked over what I wrote yesterday and I see it wasn't as clear as it should be. It's perfectly clear for any of us, I mean. But who knows? Maybe you unknown people who'll get my notes when the INTEGRAL brings them - maybe you've read the great book of civilization only up to the page our ancestors reached about 900 years ago. Maybe you don't even know the basics - like the Table of Hours, Personal Hours, Maternal Norm, Green Wall, Benefactor. It feels funny to me, and at the same time it's very hard to talk about all this. It's just as if a writer of the twentieth century, for instance, had to explain in his novel what he meant by "jacket" or "apartment" or "wife." Still, if his novel was translated for savages, there's no way he could write "jacket" without putting in a note.
...
But what of that? After man's tail fell off, it was probably some little while before he learned to shoo away the flies without a tail. I don't doubt that during that first time he probably missed his tail. But now - can you even imagine yourself with a tail? Or: Can you imagine yourself walking down the street naked - without your "jacket"? (Maybe you still run around in "jackets.") Well, it's the same here: I can't imagine a city that isn't girdled about with a Green Wall. I can't imagine a life that isn't clad in the numerical robes of the Table. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

If I could repeat my childhood, I would repeat it exactly as it was, with the poverty, the cold, little food, with the flies and pigs, all that. ~ Jose Saramago

Recurrent invasions racked the city of Theodora in the centuries of its history; no sooner was one enemy routed than another gained strength and threatened the survival of the inhabitants. When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms. One by one the species incompatible to the city had to succumb and were extinguished. By dint of ripping away scales and carapaces, tearing off elytra and feathers, the people gave Theodora the exclusive image of human city that still distinguishes it. ~ Italo Calvino

Not since Lord of the Flies has a novelist written with such perceptiveness about the potential for harm that lurks within the innocence of childhood. ~ Paula Sharp

A lot of people have been saying 'The 100' reminds them of 'Lord Of The Flies,' 'Lost' and 'Battlestar Galactica,' and all of those titles have been very successful and interesting to watch. Any time anyone refers to any of those great shows, I'm flattered. ~ Marie Avgeropoulos

Sad as it seems, I miss both the flies and Ma with equal measure. ~ Barry Napier

She said that what was in the past was best left there and that talking about it was like stirring a fresh cow pile with a wooden spoon. Didn't accomplish a thing, and only made the stink and the flies worse and the spoon useless for anything else. Then ~ Carolyn Brown

The Colors, The Iliad, Ulysses, Metamorphosis, the Theban plays, The Draconic Labels, Anabasis, and restricted works like The Count of Monte Cristo, Lord of the Flies, Lady Casterly's Penance, 1984, and The Great Gatsby. I ~ Pierce Brown

Ralph ... would treat the day's decisions as though he were playing chess. The only trouble was that he would never be a very good chess player. ~ William Golding

She watched with morbid fascination as they gathered at the stumps at the ends of the man's wrists, the old scar tissue the only place on him unclaimed by Fener, but the paths the sprites took to those stumps touched not a single tattooed line. The flies dance a dance of avoidance - but for all that, they were eager to dance. ~ Steven Erikson

The Flies And The Honey-Pot
A NUMBER of Flies were attracted to a jar of honey which had been overturned in a housekeeper's room, and placing their feet in it, ate greedily. Their feet, however, became so smeared with the honey that they could not use their wings, nor release themselves, and were suffocated. Just as they were expiring, they exclaimed, "O foolish creatures that we are, for the sake of a little pleasure we have destroyed ourselves." Pleasure bought with pains, hurts. ~ Aesop

I remember realizing, when I did Little Women [1994], that that was the only time girls that age were being written about. It was always boys - from David Copperfield to Lord of the Flies to Holden Caulfield. There were never young women going through adolescence or teen years; there were only little girls. ~ Winona Ryder

A decent cowboy does not take what belongs to someone else and if he does he deserves to be strung up and left for the flies and coyotes ~ Roy Bean

They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. ~ William Golding

The thing that keeps you scrambling over the rocks, risking snakes, and swatting at the flies is the view. It is only your enjoyment of and commitment to what you see, not to what you rationally understand, that balances the otherwise absurd investment of labor. ~ Robert Adams

Over them, in a swaying, muddy mist, hung the flies, snoring on a single note. ~ John Le Carre

But those who initially went to the West were overtaken by the barbarism of the frontier with astonishing speed - think Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness. There was murder, mayhem, robbery, alcoholism, depression, and suicide, and all of it on a positively Homeric scale that still has cultural anthropologists enraptured. ~ Simon Winchester

The Mayor spoke proudly. 'Yes, they will light it. I have no choice of living or dying, you see, sir, but - I do have a choice of how I do it. If I tell them not to fight, they will be sorry, but they will fight. If I tell them to fight, they will be glad, and I who am not a very brae man will have made them a little braver.' He smiled apologetically. 'You see, it is an easy thing to do, since the end for me is the same.'
Lanser said, If you say yes, we can tell them you said no. We can tell them you begged for your life.'
And Winter broke in angrily, 'They would know. You do not keep secrets. One of your men got out of hand one night and he said the flies had conquered the flypaper, and now the whole nation knows his words. They have made a song of it. The flies have conquered the flypaper. You do not keep secrets, Colonel. ~ John Steinbeck

Make yourself honey and the flies will devour you. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

The flies buzzed in answer above the dirty water standing in the washbasin, in which floated a solitary black hair. It, too, was like life
and as meaningless. ~ Stella Gibbons

The flies festered over the bodies, in some way aware that the war had ended and determined to hoard every morsel of flesh for the coming famine of the peace. ~ J.G. Ballard

The flies of some other summer darkening its windowsills. ~ William Trevor

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies. ~ George Orwell

How easily Neverland is corrupted into the deserted island of Lord of the Flies. How quickly Tinkerbell regresses to being one of the flies pestering the gouged eye sockets of the pig that the lost boys butcher. ~ Gregory Maguire

These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you thought of it, had settled on other people's noses. As for the cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn't cleanliness, so much as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. ~ Virginia Woolf

The flies have conquered the flypaper. ~ John Steinbeck

You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. ~ Erma Bombeck

Then the wind died down and the air grew warm and the flies awoke and started to drone, and they were a constant background hum, like ocean waves, rushing and ebbing and flowing, loud enough to hear through closed windows, and in great numbers, floods of flies, a communal purr, never just a single buzz. ~ J.T. McGowan

Good digestions, the gray monotony of provincial life, and the boredom - ah the soul-destroying boredom - of long days of mild content. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

We are quiet, contemplative people, and our behaviour in the field is relatively aristocratic. Running is not necessarily beneath our dignity but it is in any case pointless because the flies move much too fast. Consequencly, we stand still, as if on guard, and moreover almost exclusively in blazing sunshine, little breeze and fragrant flowers. Passersby can therefore easily get the impression that the fly hunter is a convalescent of some kind, momentarily lost in meditation. This is not wholly inaccurate. ~ Fredrik Sjoberg

generally, we refuse to admit within ourselves, within our friends, the fullness of that self-protective, carnivorous fever which is the nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, reinterpret; meanwhile, imagining that all the flies in the ointment are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organ of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, becomes intolerable to the pure pure pure soul. The innocent delight of oedipus in his first possession of the queen turns to an agony of spirit when he learns who the woman is. ~ Joseph Campbell

Eyes shining, mouths open, triumphant, they savored the right of domination. They were lifted up: were friends. ~ William Golding

Each time I wander into blogdom, I'm reminded of the savage children stranded on an island in William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies.' Without adult supervision, they organize themselves into rival tribes, learn to hunt and kill, and eventually become murderous barbarians in the absence of a civilizing structure. ~ Kathleen Parker

My intention, this time, was to transfer a play to the screen while keeping its theatrical character. It was in some senses a matter of walking, invisibly, around the stage and catching the different aspects and nuances in the play, the urgency and the facial expressions that escape a spectator who cannot follow them in detail from a seat in the stalls.
Apart from that, I had noticed how effective a play becomes when you have a bird's-eye view from it, for example from the flies, that is to say from the viewpoint of a voyeur. The Audience is enclosed with the characters in a room lacking its fourth wall and listens to them on equal terms, without the element of my story conferred on scenes of intimacy by the whimsical shape of a keyhole."
"L'aigle à deux têtes is not History. It is a story, an invented story lived out by imaginary heroes, and I should never have dared venture into the realistic world of cinema without being able to rely on the help of Christian Bérard. He has a genius for situating whatever he touches, for giving it a depth in time and space and an appearance of truth that are literally inimitable." (...)

"A drama of this kind would be unacceptable, and almost impossible to tell, unless it was interpreted by superb actors who could instill grandeur and life into it. Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais, applauded evening after evening in their parts in the play, surpass themselves on the screen and give of themselves, as I suggested above, e ~ Jean Cocteau

Honestly, I'm not sure how much longer I can keep doing this. It's like there are seven candles lit in my stomach. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Seven candles burning and smoking - lit - seven flames of doubt, fear, sorrow, pain, waste, hopelessness, despair. They turn my insides black with soot and ash. There is something at the back of my eyes- a pressure building, building, building - hot like the flames of seven candles, which no amount of breath can extinguish.
I imagine drinking glasses of water. One, two, three four, five, six, seven. I dive into the clearest pool. I drown myself in the coarse, dry sand. I swallow handfuls of crushed white salt, but the flames burn still - brighter, hotter, deeper. Sweat runs in delicate patterns down my back, over my crooked spine and jutting hips. I scratch at the wounds these last weeks have left, but I can't break free of them. The flies gather and vultures circle overhead. The fire eats away my flesh. The fire spreads. The fire runs through my veins. The fire courses beneath my muscles - my tendons - the marrow of my bones.
I sit rocking on the street corner. No, I can't keep doing this. I just can't. ~ Nic Sheff

But some of the ideas are ridiculous. Such as matching the hatch. Of course there are times when you have a fly as alike as possible to the flies on the water. But casting and accuracy and how you present your fly and how fast it gets there and how fast it swims are all more important than matching the hatch. ~ Charles Ritz

Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies. So now you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. ~ Ray Bradbury

The shadows of the tombstones in the graveyard stretched out long and violet, and the sound of the flies buzzed in my ears, louder than the ringing of the shots that still came - were coming closer - to the frail barrier of the dead. ~ Diana Gabaldon

Grownups know things, said Piggy. They ain't afraid of the dark. They'd meet and have tea and discuss. Then things 'ud be alright
They wouldn't set fire to the island. Or lose
They'd build a ship
The three boys stood in the darkness, striving unsuccessfully to convey the majesty of adult life.
They wouldn't quarrel
Or break my specs
Or talk about a beast
If only they could get a message to us, cried Ralph desperately. If only they could send us something grownup ... a sign or something. ~ William Golding

Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God. ~ Thornton Wilder

A worthwhile day, I had killed two spiders, I had upset the balance of nature - now we would all be eaten up by the bugs and the flies. ~ Charles Bukowski

Eighth grade is like Lord Of The Flies but with eyeliner. ~ Holly Brown

The glamorous side is all they want to hear, the real part of war isn't believed or [is] listened to with a bored feeling, such as: the constant waiting, baking in the sun all day the flies all day & the mosquitoes all night, the hr. on & hr. off all night, the rain & shivering all night, the thirst & the same canned ration all the time till it becomes tasteless paste that you spit out, the always incomplete "word" never being told what the situation is. Furthermore an admission of fear is either regarded as weakness or modesty in a combat veteran. They don't realize that without fear there can be no courage. ~ Dan Levin

The first crime was mine: I committed it when I made man mortal. Once I had done that, what was left for you, poor human murderers, to do? To kill your victims? But they already had the seed of death in them; all you could do was to hasten its fruition by a year or two. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

The dominant literary mode of the twentieth century has been the fantastic. This may appear a surprising claim, which would not have seemed even remotely
conceivable at the start of the century and which is bound to encounter fierce resistance even now. However, when the time comes to look back at the century, it seems very likely that future literary historians, detached from the squabbles of our present, will see as its most representative and distinctive works books like J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and also George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, William Golding's Lord of the Flies and The Inheritors, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle, Ursula Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed, Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot-49 and Gravity's Rainbow. The list could readily be extended, back to the late nineteenth century with H.G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau and The War of the Worlds, and up to writers currently active like Stephen R. Donaldson and George R.R. Martin. It could take in authors as different, not to say opposed, as Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Stephen King, Terry Pratchett, Don DeLillo, and Julian Barnes. By the end of the century, even authors deeply committed to the realist novel have often found themselves unable to resist the gravitational pull of the fantastic as a literary mode.

This is not the same, one should note, as fantasy as a literary genre – of the authors l ~ Tom Shippey

Back From Vacation"
"Back from vacation", the barber announces,
or the postman, or the girl at the drugstore, now tan.
They are amazed to find the workaday world
still in place, their absence having slipped no cogs,
their customers having hardly missed them, and
there being so sparse an audience to tell of the wonders,
the pyramids they have seen, the silken warm seas,
the nighttimes of marimbas, the purchases achieved
in foreign languages, the beggars, the flies,
the hotel luxury, the grandeur of marble cities.
But at Customs the humdrum pressed its claims.
Gray days clicked shut around them; the yoke still fit,
warm as if never shucked. The world is still so small,
the evidence says, though their hearts cry, "Not so! ~ John Updike

Then they, too, lay down on mattresses stuffed with straw, hearing the music of the flies to buzz them to sleep, holding each other's hands as they dozed, thinking of the miracles by which love works its will in the world. ~ Orson Scott Card

I make love like I sell sausages to strange women. One at a time, and always covered with a condom (to keep the flies away). ~ Jarod Kintz

Plants Fed On by Fawns"

All the flowers: the pleated leaves of the hellebore;
And the false blossom of the calla, a leaf like a petal -
The white flesh of a woman bathing - a leaf over-
Shadowing the small flowers hidden in the spadix;
And fly poison, tender little flower, whose cursed root
Pounded into a fine white powder will destroy flies.
But why kill flies? They do not trouble me. They
Are like the fruit the birds feed on. They are like
The wind in the trees, or the sap that threads all things,
The blue blood moving through branch and vine,
Through the wings of dead things and living things....
If I lift my hand? If I write to you? The letters
Can be stored in a box. Can they constitute the shape
Of a love? Can the paper be ground? Can the box
Be altar and garden plot and bed? Can there rise
From the bed the form of a two-headed creature,
A figure that looks both forward and back, keeping
Watch always, one head sleeping while the other wakes,
The bird head sleeping while the lion head wakes,
And then the changing of the guard?.... No,
The flies do not trouble me. They are like the stars
At night. Common and beautiful. They are like
My thoughts. I stood at midnight in the orchard.
There were so many stars, and yet the stars,
The very blackness of the night, though perfectly
Cold and clear, seemed to me to be insub ~ Brigit Pegeen Kelly

I want to be Ruler of the Exumas. I like the sound of it. I want to become Kurtz and live like in 'Lord of the Flies.' ~ Johnny Depp

If only my love was a net that could keep the flies out. If only my love was a net full of food for all the hungry bellies. I understand why so many people have given up on Africa - no one wants to say we are leaving a continent of people behind to tough it out in a hundreds-of-years-old war of survival, but we are, and the reason is because the level of change it would take to make a difference, to heal past wounds and chart a new path is mammoth, gargantuan, almost unimaginable. ~ Marcus Samuelsson

It's embarrassing to admit how many times I've reread the following: 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,' '1984,' 'Lord of the Flies,' 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,' 'Germinal,' 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle,' and 'A Moveable Feast.' ~ Suzanne Collins

Look,let me give you the CliffNotes: You're a bitch in this life and Daniel doesn't care.Shocker! He courts you for a few weeks,there's some exchanging of flowers.A big kiss and then kaboom. Okay? Not much more to see."
"You don't understand."
"What? I don't understand that Victorians are as stuffy as an attic and as boring as watching wallpaper peel? Come on,if you're going to zigzag through your past,make it count. Let's hit some highlights.
Luce didn't budge. "Is there a way to make you disappear?"
"Do I have to stuff you in this Announcer like a cat in a suitcase? Let's move!"
"I need to see that he loves me, not just some idea of me because of some curse that he's bound to.I need to feel like there's something stronger keeping us together. Something real."
Bill took a seat next to Luce on the grass. Then he seemed to think better of it and actually crawled onto her lap. At first,she wanted to swat him, and the flies buzzing around his head,but when he looked up at her,his eyes appeared sincere.
"Honey,Daniel loving the real you is the last thing you should be worried about. You're freaking soul mates. You two coined the phrase. You don't have to stick around here to see that.It's in every life. ~ Lauren Kate

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation - and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer. ~ Edmund Burke

am the guy with the flies. I am the one that dies. ~ Nick Cave

There's a kind of time travel in letters, isn't there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never - and I have to write the rest of this not knowing. ~ Amal El-Mohtar

I have an agreement with the houseflies. The flies don't practice law and I don't walk on the ceiling. ~ Groucho Marx

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her. Put like that it seems so simple.

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived and then by some means or other, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes- forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'll mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection) but still unique.

Without individuals we see only numbers, a thousand dead, a hundred thousand dead, "casualties may rise to a million." With individual stories, the statistics become people- but even that is a lie, for the people continue to suffer in numbers that themselves are numbing and meaningless. Look, see the child's swollen, swollen belly and the flies that crawl at the corners of his eyes, this skeletal limbs: will it make it easier for you to know his name, his age, his dreams, his fears? To see him from the inside? And if it does, are we not doing a disservice to his sister ~ Neil Gaiman

We musn't let anything happen to Piggy, must we? ~ William Golding

The pile of guts was a black blob of flies that buzzed like a saw. After a while these flies found Simon. Gorged, they alighted by his runnels of sweat and drank. They tickled under his nostrils and played leapfrog on his thighs. They were black and iridescent green and without number; and in front of Simon, the Lord of the Flies hung on his stick and grinned. At last Simon gave up and looked back; saw the white teeth and dim eyes, the blood - and his gaze was held by that ancient, inescapable recognition. ~ William Golding

soon after we arrived in the U.S., Baba started grumbling about American flies. He'd sit at the kitchen table with his flyswatter, watch the flies darting from wall to wall, buzzing here, buzzing there, harried and rushed. "In this country, even flies are pressed for time," he'd groan. ~ Khaled Hosseini

She watched him take the trumpet from its case and fit the mouthpiece. She watched as he raised it to his lips and then, so suddenly, from that tiny cup of metal against his flesh, the sound would burst out like a glorious, brilliant knife dividing the air. And the little room would reverberate and the flies, jolted out of their torpor, would buzz round and round as if riding the swirling notes. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Come forward.
Come in from the summer heat and the flies. Come in from that assault on all senses, that pummelling of rod and cone and drum and cilia. Come in from the great spotlight of the sun, sweeping across the white sands, making everyone, and therefore no one, a star.

Come inside and meet the prologue. ~ Catherynne M Valente

The birds are the eyes of heaven, and the flies are the spies of hell. ~ Suzy Kassem

They walked along, two continents of experience and feeling unable to communicate. ~ William Golding

Curious that it is impossible for a man to be original without attracting around him a set of unoriginal minds, as though he were a honey-pot and they the flies! ~ Marie Corelli

Only make yourself honey and the flies will suck you. ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

The busy man has few idle visitors; to the boiling pot the flies come not. ~ Benjamin Franklin

And if you say a word about this over the radio, the next wings you see will belong to the flies buzzing over your rotting corpse. ~ John Malkovich

If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in school. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid. ~ Paul Graham

the question is not whether more flies can be caught with honey than with vinegar, but why the flies are being caught in either case - and how this feels to the fly. ~ Alfie Kohn

To know your organism, you must eat it.' Not just the flies: the pupae. And not just to horrify people, but to know. ~ Jonathan Weiner

In the distant past, Muslim doctors advised nervous people to look up at the sky. Forget the tight earth. Imagine that the sky, all of it, belonged to them alone. Crescent, low moon, more stars than the eyes looking up at them. But the sky was free, without any price, no one I knew spoke of it, no one competed for it. Instead, one by one those who could afford it began to sleep indoors in cool air-conditioned rooms, away from the mosquitoes and the flies ... ~ Leila Aboulela

Block D was at the farthest corner of the camp from Block C. Whoever had laid out the Camp of the Flies had no respect for alphabetical order. ~ Susan Kaye Quinn

On who the flies landed without being chased away by that person, was on her way to death - this was one of the unmistakeable signs. From that time on, I think, dates my obsession with flies. In times of peace, when we all lied still, I made sure to sneak close up to my mother, watching very carefully that no fly would land on her, - I waved my hat over her body, flies don't like wind and movement ... ~ Jeroen Brouwers

The flies are angry bits of life;
why are they so angry?
it seems they want more,
it seems almost as if they
are angry
that they are flies;
it is not my fault;
I sit in the room
with them
and they taunt me
with their agony;
it is as if they were
loose chunks of soul
left out of somewhere; ~ Charles Bukowski

Toddlers were running the place like some miniature version of Lord of the Flies, complete with weapons made from blocks and tinker toys. One of them came at me, charging my knees and the pink pod that held my precious baby. I screamed and made a run for the front door, flip-flops sticking to squelchy dried puddles of juice. I let out a relieved sigh when we were outside breathing fresh air. The near-deafening roar of the highway was a lark song compared to the screeching we'd just escaped. ~ Piper Vaughn

The world was cruel and sudden. This he knew for sure. Relax for a moment, breathe in the scent of a rose, rest in the shade, pet a dog, take a sip of lemonade, fall in love with a dreamy-eyed girl or a haunted faced man, and you are just waiting for the other shoe to drop. Buzzing around the lemonade, you'll find flies. Follow the flies and you'll find death. ~ Kathy Hepinstall

It was Lord of the Flies without table manners. ~ Denise Mina

I don't miss much about my childhood. I lived in a good neighborhood, a wacky neighborhood. It was a very boy-heavy neighborhood - kind of Lord of the Flies-y. So many weird things happened, funny things. ~ Justin Theroux

Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.
'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.
'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.
Yossarian saw it clearly in all its spinning reasonableness. There was an elliptical precision about its perfect pairs of parts that was graceful and shocking, like good modern art, and at times Yossarian wasn't quite sure he saw it at all, just the way he was never quite sure about good modern art or about the flies Orr saw in Appleby's eyes. he had Orr's word to take for Appleby's eyes. ~ Joseph Heller

Lord of the Flies is so boring ... and so weird. I always thought boys were very very strange, but I didn't think they would start eating each other. ~ Louise Rennison

Mixed with the resinous scent of the firs there came another smell, strong and fragrant, yet sharp - the perfume of flowers, but of some kind unknown to Hazel. He followed it to its source at the edge of the wood. It came from several thick patches of soapwort growing along the edge of the pasture. Some of the plants were not yet in bloom, their buds curled in pink, pointed spirals held in the pale green calices, but most were already star-flowering and giving off their strong scent. The bats were hunting among the flies and moths attracted to the soapwort. ~ Richard Adams

Do no harm. Be nice. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
But what if I don't want to catch the flies? What if I'd rather see them swatted? ~ Mindy McGinnis

When I was young I used to smother myself with olive oil mixed with a dash of vinegar to keep the flies away and lay in the sunshine for hours on end. But we knew no better then. Now we know how stupid that was. ~ Stephanie Beacham

I don't know why I ever come in here. The flies get the best of everything. ~ W.C. Fields