Adder Quotes & Sayings

To whom the wilie Adder, blithe and glad. — John Milton

One cannot always keep an adder in one's breast to feed one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one's soul. — Oscar Wilde

Was peering through the microscope at the tooth of an adder I had captured behind the coach house that very morning after church, when there came a light knock at the laboratory door. — Alan Bradley

Who hath woe? who hath sorrow? who hath contentions? who hath babbling? who hath wounds without cause? who hath redness of eyes? pr.23.30 They that tarry long at the wine; they that go to seek mixed wine. pr.23.31 Look not thou upon the wine when it is red, when it giveth his colour in the cup, when it moveth itself aright. pr.23.32 At the last it biteth like a serpent, and stingeth like an adder. pr.23.33 Thine eyes shall behold strange women, and thine heart shall utter perverse things. pr.23.34 Yea, thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea, or as he that lieth upon the top of a mast. pr.23.35 They have stricken me, shalt thou say, and I was not sick; they have beaten me, and I felt it not: when shall I awake? I will seek it yet again. — Anonymous

I love 'Monty Python,' 'Black Adder,' 'Fawlty Towers.' I'm a huge fan of British comedy. — Isla Fisher

You must realize ... that the men of the Valley have built their houses and brought up their families without help from others, without a word from the Government. Their lives have been ordered from birth by the Bible. From it they took their instructions. They had no other guidance, and no other law. If it has produced hypocrites and pharisees, the fault is in the human race. We are not all angels. Our fathers upheld good conduct and rightful dealing by strictness, but it is in Man Adam to be slippery, and many are as slimy as the adder. The wonder is to me that the men of the Valley are as they are, and not barbarians at all.I was sorry for Meillyn Lewis, too. But that session of the deacons was helpful as a preventative. It was cruel, but it is more cruel to allow misconduct to flourish without check. — Richard Llewellyn

What is the use of going right over the old track again? There is an adder in the path which your own feet have worn. You must make tracks into the Unknown. — Henry David Thoreau

Gula and Cali lie on their sides, their tiny adder-mouths showing the pink of their palates, their bodies throbbing with lustful and obscene dreams. The sky releases its burden of sun and color. Eyes closed, Catherine takes the long fall that carries her deep into herself, down where some animal stirs gently, breathing like a god. — Albert Camus

She gathered a circle of children around her and commenced singing 'For Those Who Peril on the Sea' over their little heads. But no, 'safety from storms' wasn't enough for her. God had to keep them from being blown up too. She set about ordering the poor things to pray for their parents every night- who knew what the German soldiers might do to them? Then she said to be especially good little boys and girls so Mama and Daddy could look down on them from heaven and BE PROUD OF THEM ... she had those children crying and sobbing fit to die.
I was too shocked to move, but no, not Elizabeth. No, quick as an adder's tongue, she had ahold of Adelaide's arm and told her to SHUT UP.
'Let me go!' Adelaide cried. 'I am speaking the Word of God!'
Elizabeth, she got a look on her that would turn the devil to stone, and then she slapped Adelaide right across the face! — Mary Ann Shaffer

What's this?" Amarantha said, her voice lilting despite the adder's smile she gave me ...
"Just a human thing I found downstairs," the Attor hissed, and a forked tongue darted out between his razor-sharp teeth. — Sarah J. Maas

Every hangover feels like the worst hangover you've ever had, but this one was definitely a classic. One for the ages. He felt like all the water had been forcibly sucked out of his body, like an apricot in a dehydration chamber, and replaced with venom from an angry adder. — Lev Grossman

I think these movements and become them, here,
In this room's stillness, none of them about,
And relish them all-until I think of where
Thrashed by a crook, the cursive adder writes
Quick V's and Q's in the dust and rubs them out.
from Movements — Norman MacCaig

They take their punishment so well, so cheerfully: I go out with an adder in my heart, and an asp in my tongue, and every night I sow thorns in the garden of my soul. — Oscar Wilde

I've learned that it helps when you're in love with a mummy to pay attention to little things like curses, adder stones, and long-winded archaeologists. — Colleen Houck

And, anyway, no matter how much you may behave like the deaf adder of Scripture which, as you are doubtless aware, the more one piped, the less it danced, or words to that effect, I shall carry on as planned. — P.G. Wodehouse

In the heart of darkness, a flower blossoms, enriching the shadows with its promise of hope ...
In the fields of light, an adder coils, and the radiant tranquility is lent savor by its sinister presence.
Right and wrong, black and white, good and evil ... all my existence I have looked from one to the other, fully embracing neither one ... never before have I understood how much they depend on each other. — Alan Moore

Moriarty smiled his adder's smile.
And I relaxed. I knew. My destiny and his wound together. It was a sensation I'd never got before upon meeting a man. When I'd had it from women, the upshot ranged from disappointment to attempted murder. Understand me, Professor James Moriarty was a hateful man, the most hateful, hateable, creature I have ever known, not excluding Sir Augustus and Kali's Kitten and the Abominable Bloody Snow-Bastard and the Reverend Henry James Prince. He was something man-shaped that had crawled out from under a rock and moved into the manor house. But, at that moment, I was his, and I remain his forever. If I am remembered, it will be because I knew him. From that day on, he was my father, my commanding officer, my heathen idol, my fortune and terror and rapture. — Kim Newman

Balderdash, I say, let the sword turn into an adder and the adder a salmon and the salmon a birch twig and birch twig a sword and the sword a tongue ... Let it all run together so swiftly that it cannot be separated again ... — Sjon

No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history. — Edwin Percy Whipple

The young mouse's eyes snapped open, clear and bright. He swung the ancient sword high and struck at the giant adder.
He struck for Redwall!
He struck against evil!
He struck for Martin!
He struck for Log-a-Log and his shrews!
He struck for dead Guosim!
He struck as Methuselah would have wanted him to!
He struck against Cluny the Scourge and tyranny!
He struck out against Captain Snow's ridicule!
He struck for the world of light and freedom!
He struck until his paws ached and the sword fell from them! — Brian Jacques

It is the bright day that brings forth the adder, and that craves wary walking. — William Shakespeare

I fear no man, no woman;
flower does not fear
bird, insect nor adder. — Hilda Doolittle

Why could Tolkien not be more like Sir Thomas Malory, asked [Edwin] Muir, in the third Observer review of those cited above, and give us heroes and heroines like Lancelot and Guinevere, who ' knew temptation, were sometimes unfaithful to their vows,' were engagingly marked by adulterous passion? But T.H. White had already considered that paradigm, was indeed rewriting it at the same time as Tolkien in The Once and Future King; and he had seen the core of Malory's work not in romantic vice but in the human urge to murder. In White the poisonous adder that provokes the last disastrous battle is no adder but a harmless grass-snake, and the flash of the sword which brings on the two armies is not natural self-defense but natural blood-lust, creating a continuum from cruelty to animals to world wars and holocausts. Malory has to be rewritten to encompass a new view of evil. — Tom Shippey

I wish, my dear Kepler, that we could have a good laugh together at the extraordinary stupidity of the mob. What do you think of the foremost philosophers of this University? In spite of my oft-repeated efforts and invitations, they have refused, with the obstinacy of a glutted adder, to look at the planets or the Moon or my glass [telescope]. — Galileo Galilei

The tongue of the adder, visible only briefly, is a small matter. — L.E. Modesitt Jr.

She was not unattractive until she focused her eyes on a human being, when their unblinking coldness gave the effect of the stare of an adder. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Six of the juiciest from a cane of the type that biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder, as the fellow said. — P.G. Wodehouse

This is what comes of wearing those damned flimsy slippers outside. You must have walked right over an adder who was sunning himself ... and when he saw one of those pretty little ankles, he decided to take a nibble." He paused, and said something beneath his breath that sounded like, "I can't say that I blame him. — Lisa Kleypas

ADDER, n. A species of snake. So called from its habit of adding funeral outlays to the other expenses of living. — Ambrose Bierce

Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble. — William Shakespeare

John H. Watson might have been many things - a doctor, a storyteller, and by most accounts a kind and decent man-but he clearly wasn't a zoologist. There's no such thing as a swamp adder. And the idea that Sherlock Holmes deduced its existence from a saucer of milk is ridiculous- snakes have zero interest in milk. They also can't hear anything but vibrations, so they wouldn't hear a whistle. But they do breathe, so a snake couldn't survive in a locked safe. — Brittany Cavallaro

My God, Justin, do you hate him so?"
"Bah!" said his Grace ... "does one hate an adder? Because it is venomous and loathsome one crushes it underfoot, as I shall crush this Comte. — Georgette Heyer