Quotes About Insects

Those last nights in Paris, walking home with her father at midnight, the huge book clasped against her chest, Marie-Laure thinks she can sense a shiver beneath the air, in the pauses between the chirring of the insects, like the spider cracks of ice when too much weight is set upon it. As if all this time the city has been no more than a scale model built by her father and the shadow of a great hand has fallen over it.

Thirty-one years old, and already Naaliyah was more comfortable with insects than people: they were more chemically predictable, more elegantly designed.

I will become invisible, he thinks. I will work only at night. I will be so careful they will never suspect me; I will be like the swallows on their gutter, the insects in their lawn, concealed, a scavenger, part of the scenery. When the trees shift in the wind, so I will shift, and when rain falls I will fall too. It will be a kind of disappearing.

At night she'd close her eyes and imagine: over a hundred million billion insects hatching and dying every year—all those bristling, pointed, winged lifetimes: murderers and egg raiders, cooperators and queens. There were the glamorous dragonflies and fearsome widows; slave-holding ants; migrating monarchs; the delicate mantid chewing down her lover; dragonflies making love at thirty miles an hour—all the flagships of entomology. But

I learned so much in Laos. I learned that fried silkworm larvae are delicious. I learned how to make ant-egg salad.

declared you could see buds unsheath themselves. Also you could make the acquaintance of strange busy insect things running about on various unknown but evidently serious errands, sometimes carrying tiny scraps of straw or feather or food or climbing blades of grass as if they were trees from whose tops one could look out to explore the country.

Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.

In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music.

I don't like creepy-crawly stuff. Girls can pick up a spider and just chuck it out of the window. No way, I'm not doing that. I actually scream.

Dragonflies kill their prey in the air and eat it on the wing. They feed on aerial plankton, which consists of any sort of small living thing that happens to be aloft - mosquitoes, midges, moths, flies, ballooning spiders.

Only flies have true halteres. In fact, the scientific term for flies, 'diptera,' means 'two wings.' Most insects, including bees, have two pairs of wings for a total of four. In flies, the hindwing pairs have been transformed through evolution into the halteres.

I ate bugs while I was in Thailand.

I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks.

We have to protect the bees. If we kill the insects and the bees disappear, we're doomed. The balance is delicate and the health of the plants and animals and consumers is... Am I putting you to sleep?

though down here the air was warm but not blistering. If not for the mosquitoes that got in an ear or went up his nose and occasionally bit through the repellent, he would have been comfortable. The chatter of birds, the light hum of insects. He lay there listening to his stomach complain, waiting for something to happen. Toward late afternoon

Dragonflies dipped over the surface, brilliant tiny helicopters of green and blue. "They live ninety-five percent of their lives underwater," said Jack helpfully. He was an insect fan. A fan of all wildlife, in fact. "In nymph form. You know, larvae. Dragonfly nymphs have big huge jaws. They're vicious predators." "Is that interesting?" asked Jen, cocking her head. Not mean, just speculative. She hadn't decided.

Good news. Maybe the insects would handle it. Since the dinosaurs didn't have it in them. The insects might be naturals at revolution, with their hive minds. Their brainless, decentralized intelligence. That was the answer. Insects. Even more ancient than the birds. A formidable legion.

Wild animals passed on their way under the leaves; each track was an arterial road; and when I stooped and looked at the earth close to, I saw, from leaf to leaf and flower to flower, a moving host of insects.

The manners and customs of bugs are peculiar; they wait till the candle is out, and then, as soon as it is dark, sally forth—not at random; they make straight for the neck, the place of their predilection; sometimes they select the wrists; a few rare ones prefer the ankles. It is not exactly known for what reason they inject into the sleeper's skin an exquisitely irritating oily substance, the virulence of which is intensified by the slightest rubbing...

Take a look at this." "Those poor little ants," says Jill.

She was back on the ground, looking down at the bugs rather than up at the sky.

Cicadas," Craw said. "Also known as locusts. Or, as John the Baptist would say, lunch." I

Everyone should have two or three hives of bees. Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils.

The heart should have fed upon the truth, as insects on a leaf, till it be tinged with the color, and show its food in every ... minutest fiber.