Quotes & Sayings About Earthworms

It may not be irrelevant to note that even very modest forms of life, like earthworms, dung beetles and fiddler crabs, have no trouble identifying the real problems they must deal with if they are to survive. — Edward Goldsmith

Under the ground seep the toxins of the population that lives above. If you have to, you will eat roots and earthworms. It is always night. Candles burn in lanterns made from tin cans. When it is nighttime up above, you can crawl out, but only for a little while. You feel ashamed of your matted hair, your torn clothes, the dirt on your face. Who would want to speak to you? They are all shiny and pretty. They have parents and house with gardens. What do you have? The earth. Whole handfuls of it. The lizard people with their slit eyes and scaly skin. Your loneliness. Your longing. — Francesca Lia Block

I'm a bad case of arrested development, stuck in early adolescence, more screwed-up-twisted-up-tangled-up than a couple earthworms makin' babies. — Dean Koontz

But we should ask the question: Why should a writer be more than a writer? Why should a writer be a guru? Why are we supposed to be psychiatrists? Isn't it enough to write and tell the truth? It's not like telling the truth is common. Writers are the earthworms of society. We aerate the soil. That's enough. — Erica Jong

Some species moved north faster than others; when Europeans arrived in New England, earthworms had not yet returned. As the ice sheets withdrew, large chunks of ice broke off and were left behind. When these chunks melted, they left behind water-filled depressions in the ground called kettlehole ponds. Oakland Lake, near the north end of Springfield Boulevard in Queens, is one of these kettlehole ponds. The ice sheets also dropped boulders they'd picked up on their journey; some of these rocks, called glacial erratics, can be found in Central Park today. — Randall Munroe

I have come to understand, like Darwin had, that earthworms are not destroyers, but redeemers. They move through waste and decay in their contemplative way, sifting, turning it into something else, something that is better. — Amy Stewart

God bless the woman who'd invented air-conditioning. Okay, it might have been a man, but I'll bet you dollars to earthworms that a woman nagged him into it. — Carolyn Brown

The creatures who act as though they belong to the world follow the peace-keeping law, and because they follow that law, they give the creatures around them a chance to grow toward whatever it's possible for them to become. That's how man came into being. The creatures around Australopithecus didn't imagine that the world belonged to them, so they let him live and grow. How does being civilized come into it? Does being civilized mean that you have to destroy the world?" "No." "Does being civilized make you incapable of giving the creatures around you a little space in which to live?" "No." "Does it make you incapable of living as harmlessly as sharks and tarantulas and rattlesnakes?" "No." "Does it make you incapable of following a law that even snails and earthworms manage to follow without any difficulty?" "No." "As I pointed out some time ago, human settlement isn't against the law, it's subject to the law - and the same is true of civilization. — Daniel Quinn

The Earthworm plows the whole world with his tunnels, drains and aerates the earth ... If you ever buy any land, be sure it has plenty of Earthworms toiling and moiling all day so that you can sit down and relax. — Will Cuppy

I'd like to go back to five years old again. Just sometimes. To be turning over rocks and looking for pill bugs and holding earthworms, playing dolls, erecting forts, digging through dirt for marbles, burrowing in leaf piles, failing at igloo building, when my biggest concern was going to sleep with the lights off. I wish I was five again, before things got hard, before I was forced to grow up way too early and been stuck in this "adult" thing way too long. I wish I could sit in my Grandpa's lap and let him sing me crazy Irish songs and go over the names of the planets. "Gwampa, tell me about Outer Space." ... "Gwampa, sing the Swimming Song."
I wish I could go back there, just for a little while, and pick raspberries by myself in the sun and find secret hideaways and not hurt, not worry, not carry the heavy things. If I could be five years old ... just for a few minutes. Remember what it felt like to be free. That would be something. — Jennifer DeLucy

Earthworms are the intenstines of the soil. — Aristotle.

I'd like to know how to catch a girl. I've caught frogs, I've caught snakes, earthworms ... — Sam The Sham

A passionate interest in what you do is the secret of enjoying life ... whether it is helping old people or children, or making cheese or growing earthworms. — Julia Child

Eternity can be found in the minuscule, in the place where earthworms, along with billions of unseen soil-dwelling microorganisms, engage in a complex and little-understood dance with the tangle of plant roots that make up their gardens, their cities. — Amy Stewart

Proponents of the "we're all one race," swill took another hit recently when scientists revealed that bananas share about 50% of the DNA of humans (I kid you not). This is 10% more than what we share with earthworms. Add this information to the previous revelation that humans and chimps are 98.4% the same genetically, and you begin to see the problem for the we're all one race crowd - our present ignorant flat worlders. The reason this is a hit for the all one race crackpots is because it is just a further indication that nature works with minor changes to make major differences. In fact, there are no "tiny" changes in nature at the DNA level of existence. Just a minor change here or there makes a totally different animal or plant. — H. Millard

Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is how we celebrate the Day of the Dead in America: by turning up our collars against the scent of earthworms calling us home. — Barbara Kingsolver

Earthworms will dance — Joel Salatin

Admittedly, man is small and insignificant in nature's scheme; but he is part of it. And are we to think less of the man who exposes himself to nature's forces than of him who just delights in looking at her, safe from dangers and tempests? Even those ridiculous earthworms know that an icicle can "sneeze"; but they have learned by obervation when and where it happens, and will do their best to avoid the danger with clear-eyes alertness and which they owe to their own daring. They are not deaf; they too hear the mighty voice of the mountains, but they understand and interpret it in a different way from those who enjoy it so passively and with such self-satisfaction. — Heinrich Harrer

HORKLUMP M.O.M. Classification: X The Horklump comes from Scandinavia but is now widespread throughout northern Europe. It resembles a fleshy, pinkish mushroom covered in sparse, wiry black bristles. A prodigious breeder, the Horklump will cover an average garden in a matter of days. It spreads sinewy tentacles rather than roots into the ground to search for its preferred food of earthworms. The Horklump is a favourite delicacy of gnomes but otherwise has no discernible use. H — J.K. Rowling

Any environment, any single life is in a continuous state of change. This is just more obvious when you pay attention to earthworms. Their work may seem unspectacular at first. They don't chirp or sing, they don't gallop or soar, they don't hunt or make tools or write books. But they do something just as powerful: they consume, they transform, they change the earth. — Amy Stewart

Oh, she felt like dirt. Less than dirt. She felt like the bacteria on the dirt that earthworms ate and then pooped out. Here — T.S. Joyce

What does it mean that man is a 'social animal? Only that humans need one another in order to define themselves and achieve self-consciousness, in a way that molluscs or earthworms do not. We cannot come to a proper sense of ourselves if there aren't others around to show us what we're like. 'A man can acquire anything in solitude except a character,' wrote Stendhal, suggesting that character has its genesis in the reactions of others to our words and actions. Our selves are fluid and require the contours provided by our neighbours. To feel whole, we need people in the vicinity who know us as well, sometimes better, than we know ourselves. — Alain De Botton

If nature is left to itself, fertility increases. Organic remains of plants and animals accumulate and are decomposed on the surface by bacteria and fungi. With the movement of rainwater, the nutrients are taken deep into the soil to become food for microorganisms, earthworms, and other small animals. Plant roots reach to the lower soil strata and draw the nutrients back up to the surface. — Masanobu Fukuoka

If you allow a creek to go back to being a creek, if you let the trees and the bramble get overgrown, and you let the stream overrun its banks whenever it wants to, the wetland will take care of itself. The water that trickles into the ocean will be clean and pristine if everything is just left alone to work the way it was designed to work. Earthworms have shown that they can take care of the soil in the same way that a wetland takes care of the water. Nature regenerates. It Cleans. It hides a multitude of sins. — Amy Stewart

It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest of us may eat green shoots. — Erica Jong

We think we know that chimpanzees are higher animals and earthworms are lower, we think we've always known what that means, and we think evolution makes it even clearer. But it doesn't. It is by no means clear that it means anything at all. Or if it means anything, it means so many different things to be misleading, even pernicious. — Richard Dawkins

Earthworms cannot be painters. Those who live in the darkness can never perceive and appreciate the beauties of the light! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Animals are everywhere. Some are more romantic, like tigers and elephants and chimpanzees, and some are less romantic, like earthworms, but they are just as interesting. — Isabella Rossellini

The plow is one of the most ancient and most valuable of man's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly plowed, and still continues to be thus plowed by earthworms. It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures. — Charles Darwin

Everything that can weaken us as a race we have had for the last thousand years. It seems as if during that period the national life had this one end in view, viz how to make us weaker and weaker, till we have become real earthworms, crawling at the feet of every one who dares to put his foot on us. Therefore my friends, as one of your blood, as one that lives and dies with you, let me tell you that we want strength, strength, and every time strength. — Swami Vivekananda

They are near the bottom of the food chain - a meal for fish and birds - while humans eat from the top of the food chain, consuming an astonishing array of what lies on the planet. But eventually, even we become food for the worms. Shakespeare saw this connection, writing in Hamlet, "A man may fish with a worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of a fish that hath fed of that worm. — Amy Stewart

The jogger sighed. He pulled out his phone and my eyes got big, because it glowed with a bluish light. When he extended the antenna, two creatures began writhing around it-green snakes, no bigger than earthworms.
The jogger didn't seem to notice. He checked his LCD display and cursed. "I've got to take this. Just a sec ... " Then into the phone: "Hello?" He listened. The mini-snakes writhed up and down the antenna right next to his ear.
Yeah," the jogger said. "Listen-I know, but ... I don't care if he is chained to a rock with vultures pecking at his liver, if he doesn't have a tracking number, we can't locate his package ... A gift to humankind, great ... You know how many of those we deliver-Oh, never mind. Listen, just refer him to Eris in customer service. I gotta go. — Rick Riordan

You keep seeing your picture on posters that you are missing but you're not. That'd be weird, right? Or say you look down at the sidewalk and earthworms are spelling your name. Or you open a peanut bag and the 'hello' is written in your writing on the inside of the shell. Would that weird ya? — Lynda Barry

Though Farmer Troutham had just hurt him, he was a boy who could not himself bear to hurt anything. He had never brought home a nest of young birds without lying awake in misery half the night after, and often reinstating them and the nest in their original place the next morning. He could scarcely bear to see trees cut down or lopped, from a fancy that it hurt them; and late pruning, when the sap was up and the tree bled profusely, had been a positive grief to him in his infancy. This weakness of character, as it may be called, suggested that he was the sort of man who was born to ache a good deal before the fall of the curtain upon his unnecessary life should signify that all was well with him again. He carefully picked his way on tiptoe among the earthworms, without killing a single one. — Thomas Hardy

Figure 14: Garter snakes hunt during the day and sleep at night in common dens with fellow garters. They eat anything they can overpower, including small rodents, birds, earthworms, and frogs. — Janet Evans

In my mind, I gave the woman gifts. I gave her a candle stub. I gave her a box of wooden kitchen matches. I gave her a cake of Lifebuoy soap. I gave her a ceilingful of glow-in-the-dark planets. I gave her a bald baby doll. I gave her a ripe fig, sweet as new wood, and a milkdrop from its stem. I gave her a peppermint puff. I gave her a bouquet of four roses. I gave her fat earthworms for her grave. I gave her a fish from Roebuck Lake, a vial of my sweat for it to swim in. — Lewis Nordan

I am not quite sure how writing changes things, but I know that it does. It is indirect-like the trails of earthworms aerating the earth. It is not always deliberate-like the tails of glowing dust dragged by comets. — Erica Jong

Go for a short walk in a soft rain - lovely - so many wild flowers startling me through the woods and a lawn sprinkled with dandelions, like a night with stars. And through it all the sound of soft rain like the sound of innumerable earthworms stirring in the ground. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

There were no earthworms in New England when the European colonists arrived. — Randall Munroe

How earthy old people become
moldy as the grave! Their wisdom smacks of the earth. There is no foretaste of immortality in it. They remind me of earthworms and mole crickets. — Henry David Thoreau

Earthworms are far more valuable than people. — Paul Watson

If I were a bird that needs feathers to fly higher, my mother would be my strongest feather. She was extremely supportive. When I was one and a half, I took a whole handful of earthworms to bed with me. My mother said very quietly, "Jane, they will die if they leave the earth." And so, together, we put them back into the garden. — Jane Goodall

In science too, one dedicates his life to an Albanian snail, another to a virus. Darwin gave eight years to barnacles. And in wise later life, to earthworms. The Higgs boson, a tiny thing, perhaps not even a thing, was the lifetime's pursuit of thousands. To be bound in a nutshell, see the world in two inches of ivory, in a grain of sand. Why not, when all of literature, all of art, of human endeavor, is just a speck in the universe of possible things. And even this universe may be a speck in a multitude of actual and possible universes.
So why not be an owl poet? — Ian McEwan