The Moth Diaries Quotes

Girls are always saying things like, "I'm so unhappy that I'm going to overdose on aspirin," but they'd be awfully surprised if they succeeded. They have no intention of dying. At the first sight of blood, they panic. ~ Rachel Klein

How can she create with all your negative energy?"
"Yeah, man. You're bringing us down."
"This is about as low as it gets," Ariel said. "Where did you get those ridiculous black berets?"
Moth adjusted his recently donned beatnik attire. "This is what the hip cats wear , daddy-o."
"Can you dig it?" Cobweb stroked a few wisps of fake chin hair, while the others nodded and snapped their fingers. ~ Lisa Mantchev

Her voice would die before she ran out of rage. She could scream a hole in her throat and come unraveled, fall to pieces like moth-chewed silk, and still, from the leftover shreds of her, the little pile of tatters, would pour forth this unending scream. ~ Laini Taylor

The problem with cats is that they get the same exact look whether they see a moth or an ax-murderer. ~ Paula Poundstone

I feel it, I feel my thin morals dissolving. I feel my flimsy, moth-eaten skin of humanity begin to come apart, and with it, the veil keeping me from complete darkness. There are no lines I won't cross. No illusions of mercy.

I wanted to be better for her. For her happiness. For her future.

But if she's gone, what good is goodness?

- Warner ~ Tahereh Mafi

All the expressions that are possible crossed its face, as if its thoughts were wise and limitless one moment, daft and animal the next. And Liga too was pulled towards awe, that this little girl-thing gave off such an air of being entitled, and then towards pity at its abjectness and its frailty and-how soft it was, the surface of it, and so warm! She could not believe the tiny makings of its mouth, or its perfected eyelashes, its ears like uncrumpling buds, all down and tenderness. She was full of the joy of her father being gone-that she could sit like this all night if she wanted, not bothered or harangued, without a remark from any other person, and watch this creature busy with its morsel of life, its scrap of sleep, its breaths light as moth-wings lifting its narrow red chest. ~ Margo Lanagan

Never will I make that extra effort to live according to reality which alone makes good writing possible: hence the manic-depressiveness of my style, - which is either bright, cruel and superficial; or pessimistic; moth-eaten with self-pity ~ Cyril Connolly

To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed unmanly, and therefore we think that to love light and find knowledge must always be right. Yet wherever pride has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill pursued. Knowledge is good, and light is good: yet man perished in seeking knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light; and if we, who are crushed before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful to us, we shall perish in like manner. ~ John Ruskin

There was a time when she had indulged in the hypothetical for hours a day, plotting the map that had led her here. But no life is a line, and hers was an uneven orbit around a dark star, a moth circling a dead bulb, searching for the light it once held. ~ Anthony Marra

Sitting on Rosa's moth-littered bed, he felt a resurgence of all the aches and inspirations of those days when his life had revolved around nothing but Art, when snow fell like the opening piano notes of the Emperor Concerto, and feeling horny reminded him of a passage from Nietzsche, and a thick red-streaked dollop of crimson paint in an otherwise uninteresting Velazquez made him hungry for a piece of rare meat. ~ Michael Chabon

Beautiful, fragile, fleeting, the sunrise shell; but not, for all that, illusory. Because it is not lasting, let us not fall into the cynic's trap and call it an illusion. Duration is not a test of true or false. The day of the dragon-fly or the night of the Saturnid moth is not invalid simply because that phase in its life cycle is brief. Validity need have no relation to time, to duration, to continuity. It is on another plane, judged by other standards. "And what is actual is actual only for one time and only for one place." The sunrise shell has the eternal validity of all beautiful and fleeting things. ~ Anne Morrow Lindbergh

WHISPERS OF LOVE
Lover whispers to my ear,
Better to be a prey than a hunter.
Make yourself My fool.
Stop trying to be the sun and become a speck!
Dwell at My door and be homeless.
Don't pretend to be a candle, be a moth,
so you may taste the savor of Life
and know the power hidden in serving. ~ Rumi

The night life draws me in like a moth to a flame and not even fear could convince me to not walk amongst the giants that line the streets. ~ Z.L. Arkadie

The transmission of SARS, Dwyer said, seems to depend much on super spreaders - and their behavior, not to mention the behavior of people around them, can be various. The mathematical ecologist's term for variousness of behavior is "heterogeneity," and Dwyer's models have shown that heterogeneity of behavior, even among forest insects, let alone among humans, can be very important in damping the spread of infectious disease.

"If you hold mean transmission rate constant," he told me, "just adding heterogeneity by itself will tend to reduce the overall infection rate." That sounds dry. What it means is that individual effort, individual discernment, individual choice can have huge effects in averting the catastrophes that might otherwise sweep through a herd. An individual gypsy moth may inherit a slightly superior ability to avoid smears of NPV as it grazes on a leaf.

An individual human may choose not to drink the palm sap, not to eat the chimpanzee, not to pen the pig beneath mango trees, not to clear the horse's windpipe with his bare hand, not to have unprotected sex with the prostitute, not to share the needle in a shooting gallery, not to cough without covering her mouth, not to board a plane while feeling ill, or not to coop his chickens along with his ducks. "Any tiny little thing that people do," Dwyer said, if it makes them different from one another, from the idealized standard of herd behavior, "is going to reduce infection rates. ~ David Quammen

A Mystic And A Drunk

The Universe turns on an axis.
Let my soul circle around a table
like a beggar, like a planet
rolling in the vast, totally helpless and free.

The knight and the castle move jaggedly
about the chessboard, but they're actually
centered on the king. They circle.

If love is your center, a ring
gets put on your finger.

Something inside the moth
is made of fire.

A mystic touches the annihilating tip
of pure nothing.

A drunkard thinks peeing is absolution.
Lord, take these impurities from me.

The lord replies, First, understand
the nature of impurity. If your key is bent,
the lock will not open.

I fall silent.
King Shams has come.
Always when I close, he opens. ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Where dost thou careless lie, Buried in ease and sloth? Knowledge that sleeps, doth die; And this security, It is the common moth, That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both. ~ Ben Jonson

The moth batted its wings angrily at him as it twisted and spun gracelessly in the green blades. For
Consort's sake, throw us a lifeline and stop lettin' death take me hand! ~ C. Kennedy

We were passing the city cemetery. Adjoining it was a field occupied only by a couple of amiable and moth-eaten horses, and a grey tower. I asked what the tower was for. My grandfather answered that it held a giant's arm. ~ Isobelle Carmody

A story demanded to be written, and that is why I have not answered your letter before: a wrong-headed story, that would come blundering like a moth on my window, and stare in with small red eyes, and I the last writer in the world to manage such a subject. One should have more self-control. One should be able to say, Go away. You have come to the wrong inkstand, there is nothing for you here. But I am so weakminded that I cannot even say, Come next week. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

You have been reading Byron. You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing it-self against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there, "I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny." Yet Byron never made tea as you do, who fill the pot so that when you put the lid on the tea spills
over. ~ Virginia Woolf

The sheer delight of peering through a magnifying glass at a mouse bite, a moth hole or the zigzag channel carved by a woodworm, while breathing in the acerbic fragrance of the mould. It has here he came alive; here in the past. ~ Dezso Kosztolanyi

i am dead but i know the dead are not like this."

the dead can sleep
they don't get up and rage
they don't have a wife.

her white face
like a flower in a closed window lifts up and
looks at me.

the curtain smokes a cigarette
and a moth dies in a
freeway cash
as I examine the shadows of my
hands.

an owl, the size of a baby clock
rings for me, come on come on
it says as Jerusalem is hustled
down crotch-stained halls.

the 5 a.m. grass is nasal now
in hums of battleships and valleys
in the raped light that brings on
the fascist birds.

I put out the lamp and get in bed
beside her, she thinks I'm there
mumbles a rosy gratitude
as I stretch my legs
to coffin length
get in and swim away
from frogs and fortunes. ~ Charles Bukowski

Now, as they were all looking at the new moth, she, too, went to look at it. It was of a creamy yellow color, like the yellow of the lemon called Buddha's Hand, and it had long black antennae. These quivered as it felt itself impaled. The wide wings fluttered and dark spots upon them showed green and gold for a moment. Then the moth was still. "How quickly they die!" Ch'iuming said suddenly. ~ Pearl S. Buck

The eastern light our spires touch at morning, The light that slants upon our western doors at evening, The twilight over stagnant pools at batflight, Moon light and star light, owl and moth light, Glow-worm glowlight on a grassblade. O Light Invisible, we worship Thee! ~ T. S. Eliot

She pressed on, knowing she shouldn't. Unable to stop. "I wantyou, Devil. I want to woo you. I want to be your flame. But I fear . . ." She paused, hating the way he watched her, as though he saw every word that was coming before she formed it. And perhaps he did. It didn't matter. "I fear I am your moth, instead. ~ Sarah MacLean

Like a moth to a flame we become helpless to the beautiful ghosts that true love sheds. ~ Ryan O'Neal

A moth goes into a podiatrist's office, and the podiatrist's office says, "What seems to be the problem, moth?"

The moth says "What's the problem? Where do I begin, man? I go to work for Gregory Illinivich, and all day long I work. Honestly doc, I don't even know what I'm doing anymore. I don't even know if Gregory Illinivich knows. He only knows that he has power over me, and that seems to bring him happiness. But I don't know, I wake up in a malaise, and I walk here and there… at night I…I sometimes wake up and I turn to some old lady in my bed that's on my arm. A lady that I once loved, doc. I don't know where to turn to. My youngest, Alexendria, she fell in the…in the cold of last year. The cold took her down, as it did many of us. And my other boy, and this is the hardest pill to swallow, doc. My other boy, Gregarro Ivinalititavitch… I no longer love him. As much as it pains me to say, when I look in his eyes, all I see is the same cowardice that I… that I catch when I take a glimpse of my own face in the mirror. If only I wasn't such a coward, then perhaps…perhaps I could bring myself to reach over to that cocked and loaded gun that lays on the bedside behind me and end this hellish facade once and for all…Doc, sometimes I feel like a spider, even though I'm a moth, just barely hanging on to my web with an everlasting fire underneath me. I'm not feeling good. And so the doctor says, "Moth, man, you're troubled. But you should be seeing a psychiatrist. Why on ~ Norm Macdonald

Judge the moth by the beauty of the candle ~ Jalaluddin Rumi

"So good to see you again, little luv. How I've missed you."
Gasping, I fall to my knees. The Caterpillar and the moth and the winged guy. They are all one and the same. They have been all along ...
"I've seen that bug," Jeb says. "In your car. On the mirror." He drops the backpack and grips my shoulders, trying to drag me ti my feet. My legs won't cooperate.
"Tut-tut. You are never to bow to me, lovely Alyssa." The voice drifts from the moth's proboscis on gray puffs of smoke. His attention shifts to Jeb. "You, on the other hand, will bow to her." ~ A.G. Howard

Humans will be like decayed gentry. We'll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We'll have a piece of land that we didn't look after very well called the planet. And we'll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories. We'll be fading aristocracy. We'll be Blanche Dubois in a moth-eaten silk dress. We'll be Marie Antionette with no cake. ~ Jeanette Winterson

There's a moth, more than one in fact, that lives only on tears," he offered. "That's all they eat or drink." "What kind of tears? Whose tears?" "The tears of large land mammals, about our size. ~ Thomas Harris

I find a fascination, like the fascination for the moth of a star, in those who hold aloof and disdain me. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

Night had fallen on Manta by the time we awoke and a cooling breeze was rustling the palm fronds of the tree outside our window. We could hear laughter below as the nightlife of Manta got underway. Girls dressed for clubbing were leaving the hotel hoping to have their world rocked after a night of dancing and wake up to discover he really was Prince Charming in disguise. In truth he would be the tatted-up, dumbed-down, self-involved bad-boy they'd been drawn to like a moth to a flame after several drinks, because he was the male mirror-image of them. The tap-tap of high-heeled shoes designed to accentuate the girls' derrieres sounded like an ancient tribal mating song being drummed out on concrete. ~ Bobby Underwood