Book Of Poisonous Quotes & Sayings

That reminds me." I dug into my book bag and pulled out a white cardboard box tied with a string. "I brought these back for you."
He looked at the box, then at me, before slowly reaching out. "What are they?"
"Poisonous snakes. Open it."
Zachary untied the string. "They seem like very quiet snakes."
"They're stealthy. Or maybe dead. — Jeri Smith-Ready

Everyone knows how to cook parasols - you soak them in milk, then dip them in egg and breadcrumbs and fry them until they're brown as chops. You can do the same thing with a panther amanita that smells of nuts, but people don't pick amanitas. They divide mushrooms into poisonous and edible, and the guidebooks discuss the features that allow you to tell the difference - as if there are good mushrooms and bad mushrooms. No mushroom book separates them into beautiful and ugly, fragrant and stinking, nice to touch and nasty, or those that induce sin and those that absolve it. People see what they want to see, and in the end they get what they want - clear, but false divisions. Meanwhile, in the world of mushrooms, nothing is certain. — Olga Tokarczuk

Alice Miller has summed up these rules under the title "Poisonous Pedagogy" in her book For Your Own Good. These rules state: 1. Adults are the masters of the dependent child. 2. They determine in godlike fashion what is right and what is wrong. 3. The child is held responsible for the parents' anger. 4. The parents must always be shielded. 5. The child's life-affirming feelings pose a threat to the autocratic adult. 6. The child's will must be "broken" as soon as possible. 7. All this must happen at a very early age so that the child "won't notice" and will therefore not be able to expose the adult. — John Bradshaw

One hardly knew at times whether one was reading the spiritual ecstasies of some mediaeval saint or the morbid confessions of a modern sinner. It was a poisonous book. — Oscar Wilde

It was Rachel Carson's famous book 'Silent Spring' that got me involved with the environment. I read it in The New Yorker, in installments. Up to then, I'd thought the main job to do is help the meek inherit the Earth. And I still, that's a job that's got to be done. But I realized if we didn't do something soon, what the meek would inherit would be a pretty poisonous place to live. — Pete Seeger

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition. — C.S. Lewis

We need to stop excusing mediocre and downright pernicious art, stop 'taking it for what it's worth' as we take our fast foods, our overpriced cars that are no good, the overpriced houses we spend all our lives fixing, our television programs, our schools thrown up like barricades in the way of young minds, our brainless fat religions, our poisonous air, our incredible cult of sports, and our ritual of fornicating with all pretty or even horse-faced strangers. We would not put up with a debauched king, but in a democracy all of us are kings, and we praise debauchery as pluralism. This book is of course no condemnation of pluralism; but it is true that art is in one sense fascistic: it claims, on good authority, that some things are healthy for individuals and society and some things are not. — John Gardner

Some read books only with a view to find fault, while others read only to be taught; the former are like venomous spiders, extracting a poisonous quality, where the latter, like the bees, sip out a sweet and profitable juice. — Roger L'Estrange

Read the whole book, suffer it to tell even one of its secrets to your soul, and your soul will grow eager to know more, and will feed upon poisonous honey, and make atonement for terrible pleasures that it has never known. — Oscar Wilde

Never let it be said that Harry Dresden is afraid of a dried, dead bug. Creepy or not, I wasn't going to let it ruin my concentration.
So I scooped it up with the corner of the phone book and popped it into the middle drawer of my desk. Out of sight, out of mind.
So I have a problem with creepy, dead, poisonous things. So sue me. — Jim Butcher