Anthill Quotes & Sayings

We are anthill men upon an anthill world. — Ray Bradbury

I say we should stake him to an anthill and throw little pickles at him! (Selena) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

For those of us who were brought up in the creed of respect for humanity, the simple encounters that can sometimes change into almost miraculous experiences mean a great deal. Respect for humanity ... that is the touchstone! When the Nazi respects only what resembles him, he merely respects himself. He rejects the creative contradictions, ruins any hope of advance, and for the next thousand years replaces man with the robot in the anthill. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

My starting point is the fundamental initial fact that each one of us is perforce linked by all the material organic and psychic strands of his being to all that surrounds him ... If we look far enough back in the depths of time, the disordered anthill of living beings suddenly, for an informed observer, arranges itself in long files that make their way by various paths towards greater consciousness. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

TURN ON. to contact the ancient energies and wisdoms that are built into your nervous system. They provide unspeakable pleasure and revelation. TUNE IN. to harness and communicate these new perspectives in a harmonious dance with the external world. DROP OUT. detach yourself from the tribal game. current models of social adjustement - mechanized, computerized, socialized, intellectualized, televised, sanforized - make no sense to the new LSD generation who see clearly that American society is becoming an air-conditioned anthill. — Timothy Leary

Los Angeles, this anthill, this slag heap, the city where I suffered and grappled with life and was defeated, and where I finally triumphed. — Donald O'Donovan

People always think there's this huge hundred-foot-high barrier that separates doing good from doing bad. But there's not. There's nothing. There's not even a little anthill. You just take one baby step in any direction and you're already there. You've doing something awful. And your life is changed forever. — Matt De La Pena

If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not 'ant-made'. — C.S. Lewis

The general picture was that Ymir would not be anything like the traditional idea of a spaceship, in the sense of an orderly, symmetrical piece of architecture. It would be more like a flying robotic anthill, constructed out of a natural found object. The robots crawling around on and in it had general instructions as to what they were supposed to be doing, but could make their own judgments from moment to moment to avoid collision with other robots, or from hour to hour as to when they needed to recharge their batteries. — Neal Stephenson

An anthill increases by accumulation. Medicine is consumed by distribution. That which is feared lessens by association. This is the thing to understand. — Ovid

You can make your own son or daughter one of a kind if you have the time and will to do so; school can only make them part of a hive, herd or anthill. — John Taylor Gatto

I think that an anthill is better than a nest ... that in the anthill among a hundred thousand or a million you are freer than in a nest, where all sit around and look at one another, waiting until scientists finally discover ways to make us mind readers ... the psychology of the nest is loathsome to me, and I always sympathize with one who flees his nest, even if he flees into an anthill, where it may be crowded but one can find solitude - that most natural, most worthy state of man, that precious and intense state of being conscious of the world and of oneself. — Nina Berberova

You stake a guy out on an anthill in the desert - see? He's facing upward, and you put honey all over his balls and pecker, and you cut off his eyelids so he has to stare at the sun till he dies." So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Ants are more like the parts of an animal than entities on their own. They are mobile cells, circulating through a dense connective tissue of other ants in a matrix of twigs. The circuits are so intimately interwoven that the anthill meets all the essential criteria of an organism. — Lewis Thomas

After the storm the city lies becalmed. It is a sunny morning, still and cold. Branches litter the streets like broken limbs. People clear away the wreckage. They swarm around like ants whose anthill has been scuffed; how doggedly they rebuild their lives. — Deborah Moggach

That language may be a compound code, and that the discovery of an enormous complexity beneath a simple surface may well be more dismaying than delightful. E.g.: the maze of termite tunnels in your joist, the intricate cancer in her perfect breast, the psychopathology of everyday life, the Auschwitz in an anthill casually DDT'd by a child, the rage of atoms in a drop of ink - in short, anything examined curiously enough. — John Barth

Had you accepted that third counsel of the mighty spirit, you would have furnished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill - for the need for universal union is the third and last torment of men. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I discovered another analogy in the legacy of Prophet Muhammad that immediately clicked with me: that the angels put down their wings in humility for a person who seeks knowledge, and that all living things, even the ants in their anthill and the fish in the sea, pray for a person who teaches people good things.
When I read this, I literally felt the goodness flow out of my heart for all creatures. The beautiful mental image it evoked resonated with my concept of the universe as one unit, and of all living things seeking to live together in peace and harmony, and being grateful when humans tried to fit into the circle of life, instead of working so hard to disrupt its equilibrium — Sahar El-Nadi

I handed it over, and Jenks stumbled at the weight. His head thunked into the wall of the narrow hallway.

"Bloody hell!" he exclaimed, crashing into the opposite wall when he overcompensated.

"I'm all right!" he said quickly, waving off any help. "I'm all right. Sweet mother of Tink, the damn walls are so close! It's like walking in a freaking anthill. — Kim Harrison

Words present us with little pictures, clear and familiar, like those that are hung on the walls of schools to give children an example of what a workbench is, a bird, an anthill, things conceived of as similar to all others of the same sort. But names present a confused image of people
and of towns, which they accustom us to believe are individual, unique like people
an image which derives from them, from the brightness or darkness of their tone, the color with which it is painted uniformly, like one of those posters, entirely blue or entirely red, in which, because of the limitations of the process used or by a whim of the designer, not only the sky and the sea are blue or red, but the boats, the church, the people in the streets. — Marcel Proust

In her experience every man thought he was a natural dancer, and every one thought he was good in bed. The truth was that most men only knew one dance step - usually the pogo - and between the sheets they were like a monkey in a nature film poking at an anthill with a stick. — Chuck Palahniuk

To call the place an anthill would be like calling the Versailles Palace a single-family home. Earthen ramparts rose almost to the tops of the surrounding trees
a hundred feet at least. The circumference could have accommodated a Roman hippodrome. A steady stream of soldiers and drones swarmed in and out of the mound. Some carried fallen trees. One, inexplicably, was dragging a 1967 Chevy Impala. — Rick Riordan

They walked slowly, taking the shortest way, deliberately cutting through Campo delle Fava to avoid the crowds in Calle della Bissa. When they arrived at the foot of the Rialto bridge, they looked up at it, horrified. Anthill, termites, wasps. Ignoring these thoughts, they locked arms and started up, eyes on their feet and the area immediately in front of them. Up, up, up as feet descended towards them, but they ignored them and didn't stop. Up, up, up and across the top, shoving their way through the motionless people, deaf to their admiration. Then down, down, down, the momentum of their descent making them more formidable, They saw the feet of the people coming up towards them dance to the side at their approach, hardened their hearts to their protests, and plunged ahead. Then left and into the underpass, where they stopped, Brunetti's pulse raced and Paola leaned helpless on his arm.

"I can't stand it any more," Paola said and pressed her forehead against his shoulder. — Donna Leon

One day we found them. They must of been holding a gook convention or something, cause it seem like the same sort of deal as when you step on a anthill and they all come swarming around. — Winston Groom

Do not cry to me. I can only cry with you. I will not die for you. I am still too young in the meaning of love. Talk to the Fool, to the one who left a throne to enter an anthill. He will enter your shadow. It cannot taint HIm. He has done it before. His holiness is not fragile. It burns like a father to the sun. Touch His skin, put your hand in His side. He has kept His scars when He did not have to. Give Him your pain and watch it overwhelmed, burned away in the joy He takes in loving. In stooping. — N.D. Wilson

Air and earth form an anthill traversed, level upon level, by roads live with traffic. Air trains, ground trains, underground trains, people mailed through tubes special-delivery, and chains of cars race along horizontally, while express elevators pump masses of people vertically from one traffic level to another; at the junctions, people leap from one vehicle to the next, instantly sucked in and snatched away by the rhythm of it, which makes a syncope, a pause, a little gap of twenty seconds during which a word might be hastily exchanged with someone else. Questions and answers synchronize like meshing gears; everyone has only certain fixed tasks. — Robert Musil

Somewhere along the way we have gone astray. The human anthill is richer than ever before. We have more wealth and more leisure, and yet we lack something essential, which we find it difficult to describe. We feel less human; somewhere we have lost our mysterious prerogatives. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

A lizard, resting in the shade of the anthill, studied Atkinson with interest, tilting its head this way and that. Atkinson studied it in return. A small, dull brown animal, usually it would not catch Atkinson's attention, but under the circumstances it became a thing of beauty. — Martin Marais

Man is sitting disconsolate on an anthill one morning. God asks him what the matter is and man replies that the soil is too swampy for the cultivation of the yams which God has directed him to grow. God tells him to bring in a blacksmith to dry the soil with his bellows. The contribution of humanity to this creation is so important. God could have made the world perfect if he had wanted. But he made it the way it is. So that there is a constant need for us to discuss and cooperate to make it more habitable, so the soil can yield, you see. — Chinua Achebe

Now this was like trying to comprehend all the activity of an anthill, and read all the words in a book, and feel all the splendor of a cathedral, in one glance. Jack's mind was not equal to the demands that Cairo placed on it, and so for a long while he fixed his attention on small and near matters, as if he were a boy peering through a hollow reed. — Neal Stephenson

Every time a significant discovery is being made one sets in motion a tremendous activity in laboratories and industrial enterprises throughout the world. It is like the ant who suddenly finds food and walks back to the anthill while sending out material called food attracting substance. The other ants follow the path immediately in order to benefit from the finding and continue to do so as long as the supply is rich. — Bengt I. Samuelsson

In America, the fatness is not the fatness I was used to at home. Over there, the fatness was of bigness, just ordinary fatness you could understand because it meant the person ate well, fatness you could even envy. It was fatness that did not interfere with the body; a neck was still a neck, a stomach a stomach, an arm an arm, a buttock a buttock. But this American fatness takes it to a whole 'nother level: the body is turned into something else - the neck becomes a thigh, the stomach becomes an anthill, an arm a thing, a buttock a I don't even know what. — NoViolet Bulawayo

Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement ... anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an African anthill, assiduously annihilating ant after ant, and afterward, Alex astonishingly accuses Albert as also accepting Africa's antipodal ant annexation. — Walter Abish

Can a single ant be said to be alive, in any meaningful sense of the word, or does it only have relevance in terms of its anthill? — Margaret Atwood

Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull. It is the sex instinct which makes women seem beautiful, which they are once in a blue moon, and men seem wise and brave, which they never are at all. Throttle it, denaturalize it, take it away, and human existence would be reduced to the prosaic, laborious, boresome, imbecile level of life in an anthill. — H.L. Mencken