A Wasp Quotes & Sayings

Of course. I am well aware that the streets of New York are not safe, but then there is no longer any place in the world which is safe. One cannot live in perpetual fear, one has to be as prudent as possible, and get on with life. - A Severed Wasp — Madeleine L'Engle

I'm half Jewish, but no one believes me because my looks lean a little WASP-y ... It's sometimes hard for me to get the roles I'm drawn to. — Armie Hammer

Just inside the doorway he puts down the bags, motions her to stand by them a minute. He saunters out ahead, carefully casual. Peers up one way, down the other. Nothing. The street's dead to the world.
Then suddenly, from nowhere, ping! Something flicks off the wall just behind him, flops at his feet like a dead bug. He doesn't bend down to look closer, he can tell what kind of a bug it is all right. He's seen that kind of bug before, plenty of times. No flash, no report, to show which direction it came from. Silencer, of course.
He hasn't moved. Fsssh! and a bee or wasp in a hurry strokes by his cheek, tingles, draws a drop of slow blood. Another pokk! from the wall, another bug rolling over. The insect-world seems very streamlined, very self-destructive, tonight. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

Silver nitrate and water in a super soaker," he told her. "My own invention. Ought to be good at twenty feet, kind of like wasp spray."
Oh. "You get me the nicest things."
"Anybody can get jewelry. Posers — Rachel Caine

The new home fashion will be spare. This will be the return of an old WASP style: the good, frayed carpet; dogs that look like dogs and not a hairdo in a teacup, as miniature dogs back from the canine boutique do now.
A friend, noting what has and will continue to happen with car sales, said America will look like Havana - old cars and faded grandeur. It won't. It will look like 1970, only without the bell-bottoms and excessive hirsuteness. More families will have to live together. More people will drink more regularly. Secret smoking will make a comeback as part of a return to simple pleasures. People will slow down. Mainstream religion will come back. Walker Percy again: Bland affluence breeds fundamentalism. Bland affluence is over. — Peggy Noonan

Being alive hurts. I have found it best not to rush for the aspirin bottle. - A Severed Wasp — Madeleine L'Engle

If there is a wasp in the room, I'd like to be able to see it. — C.S. Lewis

The WASP style was often portrayed on TV and in movies as a sort of archetypical American look, and some of my new friends seemed to subscribe to it. I decided I'd try it too. I'd tried other looks previously, like Glam dude and Amish geezer, so why not this one? — David Byrne

That is the Wasp, yes. But it was captured by Black Stache, and he's coming for this ship now."
"And how do you know that?" asked Slank. "Did a seagull tell you?" This brought chuckles from the crew.
Something like that, thought Peter. — Dave Barry

Lost love, precious," Grams replied, turning her head to look out the side window. "Stings like a wasp bite that never fades. — Kristen Ashley

Slow, skinny, and an utter countryside coward: I lived in dread of nettles, spiders, and the very sound of a wasp. As a victim, I was beneath the dignity of the bullies in my year but fair game to the ones in the year below. — Robert Webb

He was a canny old rascal. "I'm no pirate," James said. "I have been in the navy since I was eleven." "The way my daughter tells it, you hailed our late and not particularly lamented skipper, and threatened him with a broadside. When Molineaux did not heave to, you dismasted the Sally and boarded her. And it was the Wasp that sailed away with the gold. If you don't think that's piracy, my boy, I suggest you make a closer study of the word. — Donna Thorland

Reading Mr. Malcolm Muggeridge's brilliant and depressing book, "The Thirties", I thought of a rather cruel trick I once played on a wasp. He was sucking jam on my plate, and I cut him in half. Hr paid no attention, merely went on with his meal, while a tiny stream of jam tricked out of his oesophagus. Only when he tried to fly away did he grasp the dreadful thing that had happened to him. It is the same with modern man. The thing that has been cut away is his soul, and there was a period - twenty years, perhaps - during which he did not notice it. — George Orwell

I'm a girl of extremes. When I love something, I'm like a puppy dog (without all the licking). When I'm cranky, I'm a wasp (like a whole hive of 'em). And when I'm angry, I'm a Mother Bear with a predator after her cubs: Dangerous. — James Patterson

Instead of walking along the winding roads she had settled on hiking, which she had discovered was both more difficult and more likely to yield photographic possibilities. She carried her cameras in a nylon backpack. There was a dry wall of stone that she had photographed from a number of angles and that she thought might have possibilities. There was an old paper wasp nest built around the limb of a pine tree that had galvanized her for an entire morning and then when she looked at the pictures afterward on the computer screen they'd amounted to nothing, nothing that made her feel or think or look twice or hard. They were photographs you had to explain, which meant they were a failure. The — Anna Quindlen

Link is a quiet man to meet- easy and courteous. His music, though, betrays that deep inside he gets very very mean very often. I remember being made very uneasy the first time I heard Rumble , and yet very excited by the guitar sound. And his voice! He sounds like a cross between Jagger and Van Morrison, even sometimes like Robbie Robertson. We met him in New York in 1970 while recording Who's Next ... this later inspired the b-side Wasp Man, a tune we dedicated to Link Wray. — Pete Townshend

When Carleton was three
months old, Henry had realized that they'd misunderstood something.
Babies weren't babies - they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests. They
were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely a listening
for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky,
sticky manifestation of not-sleep. Once Henry had stood and watched
Carleton in his crib, sleeping peacefully. He had not done what he wanted
to do. He had not bent over and yelled in Carleton's ear. Henry still hadn't
forgiven Carleton, not yet, not entirely, not for making him feel that way. — Kelly Link

My banner was behind me and that banner would attract ambitious men. They wanted my skull as a drinking cup, my name as a trophy. They watched me as I watched them and they saw a man covered in mud, but a warlord with a wolf-crested helmet and arm rings of gold and with close-linked mail and a cloak of darkest blue hemmed with golden threads and a sword that was famous throughout Britain. Serpent-Breath was famous, but I sheathed her anyway, because a long blade is no help in the shield wall's embrace, and instead I drew Wasp-Sting, short and lethal. I kissed her blade then bellowed my challenge at the winter wind.
"Come and kill me! Come and kill me!"
And they came. — Bernard Cornwell

I came up with the best pastime in the history of man. What you do is find an aerosol tin of spray adhesive, such as you would use to stick posters to a wall. You then lie in wait and when a wasp flies by, you leap out and give it a squirt. Bingo. One minute it's flying; the next it's tumbling silently out of the sky with a confused look on its stupid little face. — Jeremy Clarkson

You're not like other Wasps."
"Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. "No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score."
"A few," Salma allowed.
"Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes ... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken. — Adrian Tchaikovsky

At what point is a wasp ever going to have a chat with a spider? — Karl Pilkington

In the OASIS, you got used to seeing freakishly beautiful faces on everyone. But Art3mis's features didn't look as though they'd been selected from a beauty drop-down menu on some avatar creation template. Her face had the distinctive look of a real person's, as if her true features had been scanned in and mapped onto her avatar. Big hazel eyes, rounded cheekbones, a pointy chin, and a perpetual smirk. I found her unbearably attractive. Art3mis's body was also somewhat unusual. In the OASIS, you usually saw one of two body shapes on female avatars: the absurdly thin yet wildly popular supermodel frame, or the top-heavy, wasp-waisted porn starlet physique (which looked even less natural in the OASIS than it did in the real world). But Art3mis's frame was short and Rubenesque. All curves. — Ernest Cline

A slavish concern for the composition of words is the sign of a bankrupt intellect. Be gone, odious wasp! You smell of decayed syllables. — Norton Juster

He's about as predictable as a Wasp on speed. — Sid Waddell

I could understand the moon leaning across a bar on skid row
and asking for a drink, but I couldn't understand anything about
myself,
I was murdered, I was shit, I was a tentful of dogs,
I was poppies mowed down by machine-gun fire
I was a hotshot wasp in a web
I was less and less and still reaching for
something, and I thought of her corny remark
a night or so ago:
You have wounded eyes. — Charles Bukowski

Anger is as a stone cast into a wasp's nest. — Pope Paul VI

The quirky little melodrama that unfolded in Bosnia on 28 June 1914 played the same role in the history of the world as might a wasp sting on a chronically ailing man who is maddened into abandoning a sickbed to devote his waning days to destroying the nest — Max Hastings

It was only a wasp,' I say, 'there are plenty more where they came from.' This is not good enough for Tomomi: 'There are plenty more humans where we come from, so does that make homicide okay? — David Mitchell

More than a catbird hates a cat,
Or a criminal hates a clue,
Or the Axis hates the United States,
That's how much I love you.
I love you more than a duck can swim,
And more than a grapefruit squirts,
I love you more than a gin rummy is a bore,
And more than a toothache hurts.
As a shipwrecked sailor hates the sea,
Or a juggler hates a shove,
As a hostess detests unexpected guests,
That's how much you I love.
I love you more than a wasp can sting,
And more than the subway jerks,
I love you as much as a beggar needs a crutch,
And more than a hangnail irks.
I swear to you by the stars above,
And below, if such there be,
As the High Court loathes perjurious oathes,
That's how you're loved by me. — Ogden Nash

The nearest we have to a Henry James or an Edith Wharton of the East Coast's Wasp upper classes. — Charlotte Curtis

Maybe it will go away,' said Lucy.
'It'll be worse if it does,' said Edmund, 'because then we shan't know where it is. If there is a wasp in the room I like to be able to see it. — C.S. Lewis

In the American Grain"
"Ninth grade, and bicycling the Jersey highways:
I am a writer. I was half-wasp already,
I changed my shirt and trousers twice a day.
My poems came back ... often rejected, though never
forgotten in New York, this Jewish state
with insomniac minorities.
I am sick of the enlightenment:
what Wall Street prints, the mafia distributes;
when talent starves in a garret, they buy the garret.
Bill Williams made less than Band-Aids on his writing,
he could never write the King's English of The New Yorker.
I am not William Carlos Williams. He
knew the germ on every flower, and saw
the snake is a petty, rather pathetic creature. — Robert Lowell

The batsman's technique was like an old lady poking her umbrella at a wasp's nest. — John Arlott

A terrorist attack is like a wasp sting. It may be very painful, but it does not kill the host. It only makes the host more determined to find the nest and destroy it. — Karlyle Tomms

I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account? — Samuel Butler

I never panic when I get a wasp at my ear. As soon as you strike out, they'll sting you. So just stay cool. — Martin McGuinness

Early Morning in Your Room
It's morning. The brown scoops of coffee, the wasp-like
Coffee grinder, the neighbors still asleep.
The gray light as you pour gleaming water
It seems you've traveled years to get here.
Finally you deserve a house. If not deserve
It, have it; no one can get you out. Misery
Had its way, poverty, no money at least.
Or maybe it was confusion. But that's over.
Now you have a room. Those lighthearted books:
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Kafka's Letter
to his Father, are all here. You can dance
With only one leg, and see the snowflake falling
With only one eye. Even the blind man
Can see. That's what they say. If you had
A sad childhood, so what? When Robert Burton
Said he was melancholy, he meant he was home. — Robert Bly

Of the two classes of Prussian officer, the bull-necked and the wasp-waisted, he belonged to the second. Monocled and effete in appearance, cold and distant in manner, he concentrated with such single-mindedness on his profession that when an aide, at the end of an all-night staff ride in East Prussia, pointed out to him the beauty of the river Pregel sparkling in the rising sun, the General gave a brief, hard look and replied, 'An unimportant obstacle. — Barbara W. Tuchman

If there is a rumor in the air about you, you'd better treat it as you would a wasp: either ignore it or kill it with the first blow. Anything else will just stir it up. — James Alexander Thom

An historian without political passions is as rare as a wasp without a sting. — Agnes Repplier

It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss. — C.S. Lewis

What an almighty balls-up. Who snorts a wasp? No sane person snorts a live wasp. It's like putting your hand up a tiger's arse. - Egg — Jamie Scallion

Outside, the Air was Alert and Bright and Hot ... She could see the pattern of the cross-stitch flowers from the blue cross-stitch counterpane on Ammu's cheek. She could hear the blue cross-stitch afternoon.
The slow ceiling fan.
The sun behind the curtains.
The yellow wasp wasping against the windowpane in a dangerous dzzzzzzzzzzzz.
A disbelieving lizard's blink.
High-stepping chickens in the yard.
The sound of the sun crinkling the washing.Crisping white bed-sheets. Stiffened starched saris. Off white and gold.
Red ants on yellow stones.
A hot cow feeling hot. Ahmoo in the distance. — Arundhati Roy

Lines and greyness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone - the equivalent of yellow and black lines on a wasp, or the markings on the back of a black widow spider. — Caitlin Moran

You'll find a man can live without his money as merrily as a tortoise without its head, or a wasp without its body." '"But — Anne Bronte

He feels the darkness of the grave pressing around the fire and infecting his vision so that there seems to be no separation between the living and the dead, a child born with a mud wasp's nest for a heart and its eyes already pocketed with dust, ready to be clapped into a box and dropped down a hole. — Benjamin Percy

Yes, I know, if the American Indians had enforced such a policy none of us pale-faced honkies would be here. But the Indians were foolish, and divided, and failed to keep our WASP ancestors out. They've regretted it ever since. — Edward Abbey

Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window. — Jules Renard

Why, what a wasp-stung and impatient fool
Art thou, to break into this woman's mood,
Tying thine ear to no tongue but thine own! — William Shakespeare

One of the marvels of evolution is the Asian giant hornet, a predatory wasp especially common in Japan. It's hard to imagine a more frightening insect. The world's largest hornet, it's as long as your thumb, with a two-inch body bedecked with menacing orange and black stripes. It's armed with fearsome jaws to clasp and kill its insect prey, and a quarter-inch stinger that proves lethal to several dozen Asians a year. And with a three-inch wingspan, it can fly twenty-five miles per hour (far faster than you can run), and can cover sixty miles in a single day. — Jerry A. Coyne

I switched the light out again. The room was totally dark, not even the starlight showing while my eyes adjusted. Perhaps I would ask for one of those LED alarm radios, though I'm very fond of my old brass alarm clock. Once I tied a wasp tot the striking-surface of each of the copper-coloured bells on top, where the little hammer would hit them in the morning when the alarm went off.
I always wake up before the alarm goes, so I got to watch. — Iain Banks

I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how - although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform - he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider's abdomen. — Dan Simmons

Granddaddy had told me about the wasp that could opt to be male or female while in a larval stage. An interesting thought. I wondered why human children weren't given that option in their grub stage, say up through age five. With everything I had seen about the lives of boys and girls, I would definitely choose to be a boy grub. — Jacqueline Kelly

Say I feel all sad and self-indulgent, then get stung by a wasp, my misery feels quite abstract and I long just to be in spiritual pain once more - 'damn you tiny assassin, clad in yellow and black, how I crave my former innocence where melancholy was my only trial'. — Russell Brand

Each of the 630 pupae killed by Gambrus hatched not just one wasp but, on average, thirty-three. That is, these pupae represent 630 x 33 = 20,790 individual ichneumon parasitoids, which could potentially produce 20,790 x 33 = 686,000 more parasitoids in the next generation, and this wasp can have more than one generation in a year. One — Bernd Heinrich

From an early age they knew what little value the world placed in books, and so didn't waste their time with them. Whereas I, even now, persist in believing that these black marks on white paper bear the greatest significance, that if I keep writing I might be able to catch the rainbow of consciousness in a jar. The only trust fund I have is this story, and unlike a prudent Wasp, I'm dipping into principal, spending it all. — Jeffrey Eugenides

The burrowing wasp, which in order to provide a supply of fresh meat for her offspring after her own decease, calls in the science of anatomy to amplify the resources of her instinctive cruelty, and, having made a collection of weevils and spiders, proceeds with marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder ... — Marcel Proust

When Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York and one of the last of the WASP aristocrats, undertook a vast expansion of his state's university system, he did so, he said, because he thought that every citizen deserved an education that was just as good as the one that he'd received at Dartmouth. — William Deresiewicz

He taunted me, "Pony boy, pony boy," because I liked ponies. Pony boy. He always came to vent his anger of dragons on me. They must really like us. They hide behind their Wasp Queen and pretend to hate us dragons, but in truth they love us. Why else would they bother with fucking us? That sentence probably turned you off. Thing is, I'm a very vulgar boy.
-Chance Karrucci (the Sweet Dragon) — L'Poni Baldwin

When one felt like a wasp, one's main inclination was to sting. — Lisa Kleypas

I have gone into town to buy a few last things we need for the expedition: Peruvian wasp repellent, toothbrushes, canned peaches, and a fireproof canoe. It will take a while to find the peaches, so don't expect me back until dinnertime.
Stephano, Gustav's replacement, will arrive today by taxi. Please make him feel welcome. As you know, it is only two days until the expedition, so please work very hard today.
Your giddy uncle,
Monty — Lemony Snicket

... your midthirties...is the age that women usually start to feel confident. Having finally left behind the...awfulness of your twenties...your thirties are the point where the good stuff kicks in...How odd, then, that as your face and body finally begin to display the signs (lines, softening, gray hairs) that you've entered the zone of kick-ass eminence and intolerance of dullards, there should be pressure for you to...totally remove them. Give the impression that, actually, you are still a bit gullible and incompetent, and totally open to being screwed over by someone a bit cleverer and older than you... Lines and grayness are nature's way of telling you not to fuck with someone--the equivalent of the yellow-and-black banding on a wasp...Lines are your weapons against the idiots. Lines are your 'KEEP AWAY FROM THE WISE INTOLERANT WOMAN' sign. — Caitlin Moran

As best I could make out, having never heard the term until I arrived in California, being a WASP meant being mossbacked, lockjawed, rigid, humorless, cold, charmless, insipid, less than penetratingly bright, but otherwise
and inexplicably
to be envied. — Kay Redfield Jamison

Even if he hadn't spent the past three years in the field and more than a decade before that studying for the priesthood, he would have felt a stranger among these students - the young men in brilliantly colored, intricately pleated coats that broadened shoulders and narrowed hips, the young women wasp-waisted and delicious in pale and shimmering fabrics the colors of peony blossoms and sherbet. — Mary Doria Russell

The raven hatches its young; the fish spew forth their eggs; the slim-waisted wasp transforms, and when a younger brother comes along the elder brother weeps. For too long I have not been able to work in harmony with these changes. So, given that I did not play my part in harmony with others, how could I expect to change people? — Zhuangzi

He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way - and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world? As — William Makepeace Thackeray

There was an old man of St. Bees,
Who was stung in the arm by a wasp;
When they asked, "Does it hurt?"
He replied, "No, it doesn't,
But I thought all the while 'twas a Hornet. — W.S. Gilbert

Sometimes life touches one person with a bouquet and another with a thorn bush, But the first may find a wasp in the flowers, and the second may discover roses among the thorns. — Billy Graham

-I will bathe in vinegar, down some raw eggs, and start looking for a wasp nest ASAP to put on my head.
-I do not understand this.
-To reverse the leanings of the heart. Ancient family wisdom.
-Ah. Very good. In my family, we just suffer. — Jandy Nelson

And Miss Ophelia?" he asked, getting round to her at last.
"Miss Ophelia? Well, to tell you the truth, Ned, we're all rather worried about her."
Ned recoiled as if a wasp had gone up his nose. "Oh? What's the trouble? Nothing serious, I hope."
"She's gone all green," I said. "I think it's chlorosis. Dr. Darby thinks so too. — Alan Bradley

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not. — Christopher Hitchens

I was a WASP kid going to a high school that was 99 percent Jewish and I wanted attention and I wanted to make a spectacle of myself because I couldn't stand to be ignored. — James Ellroy

I hope the day will come when a wasp-waist and a pair of thin shoulders will not be esteemed beauty: we have had our ideas ruined by trash novels, praising 'fragile forms' and 'delicate beauty,' 'dainty waists,' 'snow-drop faces,' and a lot of other nonsense. — Julia McNair Wright

He'd missed the first wasp, when it built its paperfine gray house on the blistered paint of the windowframe, but soon the nest was a fist-sized lump of fiber, insects hurtling out to hunt the alley below like miniature copters buzzing the rotting contents of the dumpsters. — William Gibson

I was raised as an upper-class WASP in New England, and there was this old tradition there that everyone would simply be guided into the right way after Ivy League college and onward and upward. And it rejected me, I rejected it, and I ended up as a kind of refugee, really. — Spalding Gray

Sometimes it's like watching a wasp land on a stinging nettle: someone's going to get stung and you don't care. — Terry Pratchett

I guess we all feel like underdogs. I remember being a freshman at Brown University and not knowing what a WASP was. We were reading an Edward Albee play, and - it was just a moment of accepting, certainly that I wasn't very worldly, but also that a lot of the plays that I'd been reading, let's say other kinds of family plays, were speaking a foreign language. — Stephen Karam

I'd been brought up on the Upper East Side in a WASP society, which was death on crutches. — Harry Mathews

Did he annoy me? Yes, he was like a wasp at a picnic. — Gary Barlow

Holy shit, Riley." The human lowered his glass with a look of disbelief and horror. "The Order chapterhouse itself? So, what you're telling me is you've gone insane?"
"Very likely," I muttered.
"One of your hatchlings?"
"No." I scrubbed a hand through my hair. "One of them."
He stared at me, then used both hands to point at himself. "Okay, see this face? This is my what-the-hell face. Seriously, Riley. What. The. Hell. You snuck into enemy territory, dropped a figurative wasp down their pants and then brought that mess here, so I have to deal with it? Are you out of your freaking mind? Why would you do such a thing?
"It's ... complicated." He continued to give me his what-the-hell expression, and I scowled. — Julie Kagawa

Babies weren't babies - they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests. They were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep. — Kelly Link

Deborah Mercier couldn't have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She — John Connolly

As the black wasp landed on his wrist, he told himself not to slap it. It stung him. "Bitch!" he said, and swung the wine bottle at it. Another wasp joined the first. Greenmantle shook his arm, dislodging it, but a third flew at him. A fourth, a fifth, a hallway-full of them. They were all over him. He was wearing a beautiful jacket, and boxers, and wasps. — Maggie Stiefvater

The end of something, that specific mid-century American upper-middle-class WASP East Coast thing, the mercantile remnant of the Puritans, the ruling class tossed up by the Civil War and westward expansion, a whole litany of crimes now lost within the comforts of civilization, harmless as a lullaby... I felt nothing but regret. I do not suffer loss well... Their dark and unfortunate masterpiece, the Vietnam War...dislodged, then replaced...powerful now only in the heads of their children, the children of Little America... When we die, they'll vanish forever. — Henry Bromell

Example is a dangerous lure: where the wasp got through the gnat sticks fast. — Jean De La Fontaine

Betty ran to the door in time to see a handsome young man dashing through the rain toward the house beside her daughter, both of them in pants embroidered with sea creatures - blue whales on his yellow pants, pink lobsters on her ill-fitting brick red pants - and matching pastel green cotton sweaters. When did Miranda buy such odd clothes? She imagined the two of them spotting eachother somewhere, kindred spirits, and starting up a conversation about their shared hobby of Extreme Wasp Attire. — Cathleen Schine

God, he loved being a bloke. He loved it so much. He wouldn't be a woman for all the money in the world. — Dave Franklin

To change the leanings of the heart, wear a wasp nest on the head (Not this desperate. Yet.) — Jandy Nelson

If a ghost was a recording of a memory, as some believed, and Wasp pulled back the curtain from the third alcove on the right, she might find the wide-eyed bloody-handed ghost of herself, hugging her knees and shivering, trying to unremember the sound of her little dagger sinking hilt-deep into girlflesh, the day she earned her name. — Nicole Kornher-Stace

George Bush is by American standards rabidly Upper Class - Eastern, Socially Attractive, WASP, 19th-century money, several generations of Andover and Yale (and, while we're at it, his father, George H. W. 'Poppy' Bush, was a former president and his grandfather was the Nazis' U.S. banker in the 1930s). — Peter York

should result in a guileless Wasp artificer mouthing statements prepared — Adrian Tchaikovsky

This was truly advanced WASP: how to comfort a wronged wife and mother without acknowledging any misdeeds done or embarrassment caused by loved ones. — Maggie Shipstead

Thou hast hit it: come, sit on me. Kath. Asses are made to bear, and so are you. Pet. Women are made to bear, and so are you. Kath. No such jade as bear you, if me you mean.202 Pet. Alas! good Kate, I will not burden thee; For, knowing thee to be but young and light, - Kath. Too light for such a swain as you to catch, And yet as heavy as my weight should be. Pet. Should be! should buz! Kath. Well ta'en, and like a buzzard. Pet. O slow-wing'd turtle! shall a buzzard take thee?208 Kath. Ay, for a turtle, as he takes a buzzard. Pet. Come, come, you wasp; i' faith you are too angry. Kath. If I be waspish, best beware my sting. Pet. My remedy is, then, to pluck it out.212 Kath. Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies. Pet. Who knows not where a wasp does wear his sting? In his tail. Kath. In his tongue. Pet. Whose tongue? Kath. Yours, if you talk of tails; and so farewell.216 Pet. What! with my tongue in your tail? nay, come again. — William Shakespeare

A wasp in a wig is altogether beyond the appliances of art. — John Tenniel