Fins Quotes & Sayings

It's nothing he can see or lay hands on - sudden gases, a violence upon the air and no trace afterward ... a Word, spoken with no warning into your ear, and then silence forever. Beyond its invisibility, beyond hammerfall and doomcrack, here is its real horror, mocking, promising him death with German and precise confidence, laughing down all of Tantivy's quiet decencies ... no, no bullet with fins, Ace ... not the Word, the one Word that rips apart the day ... — Thomas Pynchon

The cute little fish had big eyes and a rounded body with black polka dots and fins on either side of him that fluttered like hummingbird wings.
"He's staring at me."
"He knows a beautiful thing when he sees it. — Robin Bielman

Nothing in the world has tentacles or fins or paws or claws. Nothing in the world soars. Nothing swims. Nothing purrs, barks, growls, roars, chitters, trills, or cries repeatedly two notes, a descending fourth, for three months of the year. There are no months of the year. There is no moon. There is no year. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't like jellyfish, they're not a fish, they're just a blob.
They don't have eyes, fins or scales like a cod.
They float about blind, stinging people in the seas,
And no one eats jellyfish with chips and mushy peas.
Get rid of 'em! — Karl Pilkington

If the creatures with fur/feathers/fins are our brothers in a lower stage of development then their very weakness and inability to protest, demands that man should refrain from torturing them for the mere possibility of obtaining some knowledge which he believes may be to his own interest. — Luther Burbank

Do they have names?"
"The red one with the silver markings is Lady Liadrin, the dark blue one is Queen Azshara, and the black one with the long, wavy fins is Lady Vashj."
She glanced at him. Those are the strangest names for fish I've ever heard. What's wrong with Dory? — Paige Tyler

The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn't have eyeballs or fins. — Dave Barry

Her legs were gone, lost in the tangle of dark alien webs; she reminded Miller of a mermaid who had traded her fins for a space station. Her eyes were closed, but he could see them shifting and dancing under the lids. And she was breathing. — James S.A. Corey

The year of the birth of Israel, the year of the Republican tax cut and the Truman Balcony, would be remembered also as the year green (chlorophyll) chewing gum became a fad, the year of a new word game called "Scrabble," of tail fins on Cadillacs, and an unimaginably daring new bathing suit called the bikini, after the island where the atomic bomb tests were carried out the summer before. — David McCullough

If you stop to listen every once in a while, you might hear good things. — Tera Lynn Childs

For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and scales, fangs and horns and wings and fins and claws. They are in the lands we strip for veins of precious ore. They are in the waters we poison. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God — John Halstead

Pools of blood are not recreational even lifeguards drown when the undertow breaks bread with the underbelly demons disguised as sharks have not put enough thought into their costumes a wiseman stays ashore when pointed fins read like italian subtitles the end is near ( ... ) the beginning — Saul Williams

It is the beginning of the end.
[Fr., C'est le commencement de al fin.] — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand

Louie found the raft offered an unlikely intellectual refuge. He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow porcession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. In his head, he could roam anywhere, and he found that his mind was quick and clear, his imagination unfettered and supple. He could stay with a thought for hours, turning it about. — Laura Hillenbrand

Anything's possible in Human Nature," Chacko said in his Reading Aloud voice. Talking to the darkness now, suddenly insensitive to his little fountain-haired niece. "Love. Madness. Hope. Infinite joy."
Of the four things that were Possible in Human Nature, Rahel thought that Infinnate Joy sounded the saddest. Perhaps because of the way Chacko said it.
Infinnate Joy. With a church sound to it. Like a sad fish with fins all over. — Arundhati Roy

Many fishermen "fin" sharks - that is, slice their fins off, then dump them back into the water to die. — Bill Bryson

In Ecuador the Indian mate was too poor to buy Polaroid glasses but he saw the caudal fins of marlin long before my perfect eyes noticed anything. Benny played pool as if the cue stick emerged from his body. Not my alcohol & geometry. She was an asshole and I couldn't have loved her at gunpoint. — Jim Harrison

We call them groundsharks."
Sanguine shook his head immediately. "That's a stupid name. Makes them sound like little shark fins slicing through the living room carpet."
"I wanted to call them razorworms," said Persephone.
"That's a damn sight better than groundsharks."
(Eyes of the Beholder) — Derek Landy

When you find something that's whole, you do what you can to keep it that way.
And when you fins something that isn't, then maybe it's not a bad idea to try to make it whole again. Maybe. — Gary D. Schmidt

1944 - Exploring London in wartime, a city with stiff upper lip, gritted teeth, clenched fists, makes you realize that Paris is a bit of whore.

Every day and every night for weeks now, London has been bleeding and hiding its wounds with impressive dignity. A 'don't show off' attitude prevails. From time to time a sputtering doodle-bug (a VI) shatters the torpor of the overcast sky. One second, sometimes two ... at most three ... of silence. Visualizing that fat cigar with shark fins as it stops dead, sways, idiotically tips over, then goes into a vertical dive. And explodes. Usually it's an entire building that's destroyed.

Apparently the Civil Defense rescue teams observe a very strict rule of discretion and restraint. You never see any panic. In this impassive city detachment is the expression of panic. — Jacques Yonnet

I love my Force Fins, which are the kind of fins Special Forces use and really are adapted from the fins of fish. They're very efficient. They are so beautiful, a pair is in the Museum of Modern Art. The set I have are ruby red. I call them my ruby flippers. — Sylvia Earle

Sure enough the goldfish was swimming upside down, its boggle eyes wide and staring, its fins flapping madly at its sides. Brandon felt like the fish looked. He was anxious over how Lewis
knew he was a vet and the address of the practice he worked at.
"I don't think it has vertigo, Lewis." A professional approach was all he could think of. "Has it ever done this before?"
"He. He's not an 'it' and his name is Fluffles. I'd appreciate it if you referred to Fluffles by his name rather than a generic term demeaning him into nothing more than an object devoid of gender." Lewis cocked his head, staring unblinking. "Fluffles is a beloved pet. I demand you show him respect!"
"Ooookaaaay." Brandon pressed his lips together and released them with a loud pop. "Has Fluffles ever done this before?"
"Don't know." Lewis peered into the bag. "I've only had him forty-five minutes. — Zathyn Priest

I am really a sea creature. Just a mammal that lost its fins. — Kathleen Quinlan

Darius was clearly of the opinion
That the air is also man's dominion,
And that, with paddle or fins or pinion,
We soon or late
Shall navigate
The azure, as now we sail the sea. — John Townsend Trowbridge

I felt the full breadth and depth of the ocean around the sphere of the Earth, back billions of years to the beginning of life, across all the passing lives and deaths, the endless waves of swimming joy and quiet losses of exquisite creatures with fins and fronds, tentacles and wings, colourful and transparent, tiny and huge, coming and going. There is nothing the ocean has not seen — Sally Andrew

I'm not a vegetarian by any means; I eat fish. But the problem with shark finning is they catch the shark, cut their fins and throw them back in the ocean, and to me, that's wrong. If you're going to kill an animal, you should use the entire animal and do it humanely. I'm definitely not a big fan. — Bethany Hamilton

He lifted the thrashing muskellunge, held it up for the world to see, and let the thrash go out of its body in a final, lurking shudder. He had pierced it through, a third of the way behind its head. Pale out of the water, all dull greenish-bronze and insipid vermiculations, except for reddish fins that reminded Henry of his mother's hard tack candy. It had the teeth of a nasty little dog. Sarsen slid its body down off the staff, leaving a watery braid of blood. Off the pike, its wound seemed to close. He lifted it by the tail and hollered.

Sarsen could do anything. — Matthew Neill Null

And you," Jude said, stepping forward and putting his finger in Tony's face. "Don't you ever try to give something of yours to put on her body." The muscles just below Jude's neck were sticking out like shark fins he was so tense. "Or I'm never throwing another ball your way. Got that? — Nicole Williams

I look forward to the day when animals will have the right to run if they have legs, swim if they have fins, and fly if they have wings. — Gretchen Wyler

Quince reaches me, and instead of wrapping me in a hug like I expect, he reaches for my hair. I try to swim back, away from the near-desperate look in his eyes, afraid that he's going to fail the test.
He tugs something from my hair.
I look down and see a Padina antillarum - a beautiful little seaweed shaped like ginkgo leaves - in his hand. And it's glowing.
"You," he says with an explosive grin. "You are the sixteenth object. — Tera Lynn Childs

In children's drawings, all houses have chimneys, all monkeys eat bananas, and every rocket is a V-2. Even after decades of stepped-back multistage behemoths, chunky orbiters, and space planes, the midcentury-modern Enterprise, the polyhedral bulk of Imperial star destroyers and Borg cubes, the Ortho-Cyclen disk of Millennium Falcon - in our deepest imaginations the surest way to the nearest planet remains a trim cigar tapering to a pointed nose cone, poised on the tips of four swept-back axial fins. — Michael Chabon

You'll get in," Quince assures me, proving once again that he can read my mind, even without a magical bond. "And if you don't," he adds, slinging an arm around my shoulders, "you can always take over for me at the lumberyard."
"Ha ha," I reply, sending a sharp elbow into his ribs.
"Lighten up, princess. — Tera Lynn Childs

Look at life from our perspective, and you eukaryotes will soon cease giving yourselves such airs. You bipedal apes, you stump-tailed tree-shrews, you desiccated lobe-fins, you vertebrated worms, you Hoxed-up sponges, you newcomers on the block, you eukaryotes, you barely distinguishable congregations of a monotonously narrow parish, you are little more than fancy froth on the surface of bacterial life. Why, the very cells that build you are themselves colonies of bacteria, replaying the same old tricks we bacteria discovered a billion years ago. We were here before you arrived, and we shall be here after you are gone. — Richard Dawkins

I am a pop culture person. And car people have clearly contributed to pop culture, which is how I knew about purple French tail lights and 30-inch fins without exactly knowing what they were. — Rachel Sklar

No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again - till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed. — Madeleine L'Engle

There, at a depth to which divers would find it difficult to descend, are caverns, haunts, and dusky mazes, where monstrous creatures multiply and destroy each other. Huge crabs devour fish and are devoured in their turn. Hideous shapes of living things, not created to be seen by human eyes wander in this twilight. Vague forms of antennae, tentacles, fins, open jaws, scales, and claws, float about there, quivering, growing larger, or decomposing and perishing in the gloom, while horrible swarms of swimming things prowl about seeking their prey.
To gaze into the depths of the sea is, in the imagination, like beholding the vast unknown, and from its most terrible point of view. The submarine gulf is analogous to the realm of night and dreams. There also is sleep, unconsciousness, or at least apparent unconsciousness, of creation. There in the awful silence and darkness, the rude first forms of life, phantomlike, demoniacal, pursue their horrible instincts. — Victor Hugo

He loves her. Circumstances and considerations - what are those? The whole world recedes and there is room for only one thought: he loves her. She had not misunderstood him. She is not an eccentric and a burden. He has been thinking of her as she has of him. Above her bed the broad fins whirl gently; the night will pass and the morning will come and he loves her. — Ahdaf Soueif

The layout was griping, the glide is awesome. Two ten-inch fins up, way up. — Roger Ebert

If about a dozen genera of birds had become extinct or were unknown, who would have ventured to have surmised that birds might have existed which used their wings solely as flappers, like the logger-headed duck (Micropterus of Eyton); as fins in the water and front legs on the land, like the penguin; as sails, like the ostrich; and functionally for no purpose, like the Apteryx. Yet the structure of each of these birds is good for it, under the conditions of life to which it is exposed, for each has to live by a struggle; but it is not necessarily the best possible under all possible conditions. It must not be inferred from these remarks that any of the grades of wing-structure here alluded to, which perhaps may all have resulted from disuse, indicate the natural steps by which birds have acquired their perfect power of flight; but they serve, at least, to show what diversified means of transition are possible. — Charles Darwin

Sharks are being driven to extinction because people want to eat their fins and their flesh. — Barbara Block

Professor Galbraith is horrified by the number of Americans who have bought cars with tail fins on them, and I am horrified by the number of Americans who take seriously the proposals of Mr. Galbraith. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Rohan returned, his breath quickened from exertion. A mist of sweat had accumulated on his skin until it gleamed like bronze. "Right on course," he said to Westcliff and Swansea. "The stabilizing fins worked. It landed at a distance of approximately two thousand yards."
"Excellent!" Swansea exclaimed. "But where is the rocket?"
Rohan's white teeth flashed in a grin. "Buried in a deep, smoking hole. I'll go back to dig it up later."
"Yes, we'll want to see the condition of the casing and the inner core." Swansea was red-faced with satisfaction. He used a handkerchief to blot his steaming, wrinkled countenance. "It's been an exciting morning, eh?"
"Perhaps it's time to return to the manor, Captain," Westcliff suggested.
"Yes, quite." Swansea bowed to Amelia. "A pleasure, Miss Hathaway. And may I say, you took it rather well, being the target of a surprise attack."
"The next time I visit, Captain," she said, "I'll remember to bring my white flag. — Lisa Kleypas

I had spent the whole of my savings ... on a suit for the wedding - a remarkable piece of apparel with lapels that had been modelled on the tail fins of a 1957 Coupe de Ville and trousers so copiously flared that when I walked you didn't see my legs move. — Bill Bryson

You're just going to leave me here?" I shout after her.
"I'm not leaving you here, Emma. You're keeping yourself here." She leaves me with those crazy words, and then she's gone.
I am paralyzed on the beach in my school clothes. I can't help but feel that I'm in huge trouble. But why should I? She was babysitting me, not the other way around, right? It's not like I can chase her down and follow her. Her fins have already gone a distance I can't cover with my puny human legs. Besides, these are my favorite jeans; the salt water would be unforgiving.
Except ... There is that shiny new jet ski sitting there. I could close the distance between us, put my foot in the water, and find her. She would sense me, come back to see why I was in the water. Wouldn't she? Of course she would. Then I could talk her into staying here, not leaving me alone to drive myself crazy. I could manipulate her into feeling sorry for me.
Unless she's the complete sociopath I think she is. — Anna Banks

Pleased to meet you," Tellin says, shaking me out of my reverie. "Lily told me much about you last weekend."
"Funny." Quince throws me a questioning glance. "She didn't mention you at all. — Tera Lynn Childs

We may think of them as silent, but fish make many sounds that are rarely appreciated by the human ear. Clownfish chirp and pop by gnashing their teeth together. Oyster toadfish hum and blare like foghorns by quickly contracting muscles attached to their swim bladders. Croaking gourami make their signature noise by snapping the tendons of their pectoral fins. Altogether, more than eight hundred fish species are known to hoot, moan, grunt, groan, thump, bark, or otherwise vocalize. — Anonymous

Nobody wants to admit that mermaids who survive the dangers of the ocean can still be defeated by their own pain." He links his fingers through mine. He squeezes my hand until I look back.
"A mermaid's heart is the most fragile thing in the sea. You've somehow managed to keep yours beating. The shield doesn't matter. What matters is you're a survivor. — Emm Cole

Emma this is not a joke. Look at your hands! They're ... they're ... wrinkled!"
"Yes that's because-"
"No way. I'm not going down for this. This isn't my fault."
"Toraf-"
"Galen will find some way to blame me though. He always does. 'You wouldn't have gotten caught if you didn't swim so close to that boat, tadpole.' No it couldn't be the humans fault for fishing in the first place-"
"Toraf."
"Or how about. 'Maybe if you'd stop trying to kiss my sister, she'd stop bashing your head with a rock.' How does my kissing her have anything to do with her bashing my head with a rock? If you ask me, it's just a result of poor parenting-"
"Toraf."
"Oh and my favorite: 'If you play with a lionfish, you're going to get pricked.' I wasn't playing with it! I was just helping it swim faster by grabbing its fins-"
"TOR-AF."
He stops pacing along the water, even seems to remember that I exist. "Yes, Emma? What were you saying? — Anna Banks

It all began when ... they're funny, those words. Everyone uses them, without thinking what they mean. When does anything begin? With everyone it begins when you're born. Or before that, when your parents got married. Or before that, when your parents were born. Or when your ancestors colonised the place. Or when humans came squishing out of the mud and slime, dropped off their flippers and fins, and started to walk. But all the same, all that aside, for what's happened to us there was quite a definite beginning — John Marsden

Having fins in the water was useful to travel quickly, but the bulky appendage left much to be desired for exerting dominance. Something about being unable to sit, legs open, left me feeling feminine."
~Fin — Brenda Pandos

Fainting with heat, he suddenly found himself in the cold, cold river. He had turned into a fish. Tail, body, fins - everything was fishlike, except the head, which was his own and still ached. He swam through the muted, cool, underwater darkness and thought that now he would remain a fish forever and never go back to the moutains. "I won't return," he said to himself. "It's better to be a fish, it's better to be a fish ... — Chingiz Aitmatov

I was born the same year the greatest automobile in the history of automobiles was created, the 1957 Chevrolet. Thank God only one of us had tail fins. — Michael Buffalo Smith

We've fallen into a fin-de-siecle period of crisis in which people believe only the things they see right in front of them — Mariko Mori

The Proustian aquarium: grotesque and gorgeous fish drifting with languid fins through a subaqueous medium of pale violet polluted ink. — Edward Abbey

like the big bed it was enclosed in a permanent canopy of heavy netting. Mosquitoes were the least of the creatures this net was intended to exclude; its absence, at any time, night or day, would have been an invitation for snakes and scorpions to make their way between the sheets. In a hut by the pond a woman was even said to have found a large dead fish in her bed. This was a koimachh, or tree perch, a species known to be able to manipulate its spiny fins in such a way as to drag itself overland for short distances. It had found its way into the bed only to suffocate on the mattress. — Amitav Ghosh

And then she fell, from standing, foot-fins together, straight into the wavelets, where she was now seal, and she flung herself down toward the deeper water. — Margo Lanagan

Are you going to distract me by playing footsie?"
"Absolutely, princess," he says with a wink.
"Then I won't remember a thing."
"It's a samurai training technique," he teases, spinning the test prep book toward him. "I distract you as much as possible right now." He slides the book into his lap. "And you'll learn how to test through anything. — Tera Lynn Childs

You'll do fine."
"What, you're psychic now?"
"Didn't you know?" he asks seriously. "Must be an aftereffect of the bond. — Tera Lynn Childs

Sometimes I wish I had every different sort of board that I could just bring out for this surf when I feeling like surfing this board. I love riding old single fins and twin fins. — Mick Fanning

Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.
That was the saddest thing I ever saw with them, the old man thought. — Ernest Hemingway,

Stupid male ego. — Tera Lynn Childs

We were told that a strong attraction to a patient with a repeated history of failed treatment is a danger sign - like the fins on the parallel lines. It is an illusion - a cognitive illusion - and I (System 2) was taught how to recognize it and advised not to believe it or act on it. The question that is most often asked — Daniel Kahneman

Let me love you, girl who came from the sea. Let us swim to the bottom of the ocean where we can be anything and where no one can find us. We will grow gills and breathe salt water. We will sprout fins and scales and make our home in underground caves. Or else will drown there. But either way, i will be happy — Carolee Dean

OUR SPECIES has always been itching for a fight. Some say we started strangling each other with our fish fins as soon as we crawled out of the primordial ooze. — John O'Bryan

California is responsible for selling, trading and distributing large amounts of shark fins that come from all over the world. — Ted Danson

Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century. — John Lahr

I've been in the water so much these past few days, I swear I'm growing fins & scales. — April Mae Monterrosa

You can't afford to make the shark look good so you do most of it with ominous music and a fin. — Jim Howick

That the city would return to being the thriving white suburb of his youth. Cars with tail fins. Straw hats and sock hops. Episcopalians and ice cream socials. It would be the opposite of white flight, he said. "The Ku Klux influx." But when I'd ask him how, he'd just shrug and, like a conservative senator without any ideas, filibuster me with unrelated stories about the good ol' days. — Paul Beatty

I learnt to test the size of my brain..by trying this simple thought ! Look out for the good things, not the faults.It takes a good deal bigger sized brain to find out what is not wrong with people and things than to fins out what is wrong!!! — Abha Maryada Banerjee

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.' — Mohsin Hamid

You planned this? Why?"
"Yes." He walked over to one of the picnic tables and grabbed a backpack, which just happened to be there. He pulled a blanket from the pack and laid it down on the sand next to her.
She jumped up and away from him with her fins in her hands. She held them up like a weapon, not taking her eyes off of him. He saw her reaction and it didn't take long to figure out the thoughts running through her mind.
"Hey! No. It's not what you think." He stepped closer, but she swung her fins at him and whacked him across the arm. "Ouch!" He looked at her like she was insane.
"Stay away from me. This is so not happening. I'll hit you again, I swear. — S. Jackson Rivera

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits. — Constantin Brancusi

The water is alive. It is alive. If we could get a mask and fins and drop down off these docks, we'd see snook and redfish and probably goliath grouper. And it's an amazing world unto itself and a very thin demarcation between one world and the other. You know, the distance of the water surface. — Randy Wayne White

Food for us comes from our relatives, whether they have wings or fins or roots. That is how we consider food. Food has a culture. It has a history. It has a story. It has relationships. — Winona LaDuke

On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice. — H.P. Lovecraft

No opening sermons concerning children with humps and fins for limbs, who nonetheless, immortal souls all, deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of Happy Meals. — Gregory Maguire

He had never recognized how noisy the civilized world was. Here, drifting in almost total silence, with no scents other than the singed odor of the raft, no flavors on his tongue, nothing moving but the slow procession of shark fins, every vista empty save water and sky, his time unvaried and unbroken, his mind was freed of an encumbrance that civilization had imposed on it. — Anonymous

Our plenteous streams a various race supply, The bright-eyed perch with fins of Tyrian dye, The silver eel, in shining volumes roll'd, The yellow carp, in scales bedropp'd with gold, Swift trouts, diversified with crimson stains, And pikes, the tyrants of the wat'ry plains. — Alexander Pope

Wolsey sits with his elbows on his desk, his fingers dabbing his closed lids. He takes a great breath, and begins to talk: he begins to talk about England. You can't know Albion, he says, unless you can go back before Albion was thought of. You must go back before Caesar's legions, to the days when the bones of giant animals and men lay on the ground where one day London would be built. You must go back to the New Troy, the New Jerusalem, and the sins and crimes of the kings who rode under the tattered banners of Arthur and who married women who came out of the sea or hatched out of eggs, women with scales and fins and feathers; beside which, he says, the match with Anne looks less unusual. These are old stories, he says, but some people, let us remember, do believe them. — Hilary Mantel

Well ... I love moving in extra dimensions. Not just backwards and forwards, but up and down and around. And fins. I love swimming with fins - human feet are practically useless underwater. I love all the unique things you see on each dive. Millions of
little aquatic soap operas playing out between all the creatures. And the silence. Well, it's not really silent
down there, but the roar of bubbles blocks any other
sound ... — Kirsten Hubbard

Everything drifts. Everything is slowly swirling, philosophies tangled with the grocery lists, unreal-real anxieties like rose thorns waiting to tear the uncertain flesh, nonentities of thoughts floating like plankton, green and orange particles, seaweed
lots of that, dark purple and waving, sharks with fins like cutlasses, herself held underwater by her hair, snared around auburn-rusted anchor chains. — Margaret Laurence

The dildo is long and elegant, a classic old school moon-rocket, complete with four stabilising fins at the bottom. Each fin controls a different haptic field. A silver pussy-rocket printed to the dimensions of her vagina and vulva. Not a penis. Never a penis. Ariel Corta has never allowed a penis inside her. — Ian McDonald

Like many kids, I used to pretend all sorts of things. I would climb into a tree and imagine that I was on an island, that the grass below we was an ocean, that the leaves were the fins of sharks. Perhaps unlike many people, I never really stopped. I still have a childlike predisposition to fantasise and share my fantasies. — Mohsin Hamid

Cocktail hour at the embassy consisted of lots of charming men and women in suits and LBDs drinking Buck's Fizz and being friendly to one another, and so what if half of them had gill slits and dorsal fins under the tailoring, and the embassy smelled of seaweed because it was on an officially derelict oil rig in the middle of the North Sea, and the Other Side has the technical capability to exterminate every human being within two hundred kilometers of a coastline if they think we've violated the Benthic Treaty? — Charles Stross

We must keep these waters for wild rice, these trees for maple syrup, our lakes for fish, and our land and aquifers for all of our relatives - whether they have fins, roots, wings, or paws. — Winona LaDuke

You're watching me, princess." His soft lips spread into an appreciative smile.
"People might get the wrong idea."
"What, that I actually like you now?" I tease.
He shakes his head and leans toward me. "No, that you're trying to see past me to get an eyeful of Benson."
I shift my gaze to the board and fix an innocent look on my face.
"What makes you think that's the WRONG idea?"
Quince leans even closer and says, "Because you came back for me. — Tera Lynn Childs

For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes. Time wears down resolve
then suddenly violence, something irrevocable flashes out of nowhere, there are thrashing fins and roiled, blood-streaked water, death floats up on its side, eyes bulging. — Edmund White

Mother Earth needs us to keep our covenant. We will do this in courts, we will do this on our radio station, and we will commit to our descendants to work hard to protect this land and water for them. Whether you have feet, wings, fins, or roots, we are all in it together. — Winona LaDuke

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. — Cormac McCarthy

The speeding reader guts a book the way the skillful clean fish. The gills are gone, the tail, the scales, the fins; then the fillet slides away swifly as though fed to a seal. — William H Gass

How do you always know just what to say?" I ask.
His laugh rumbles through me. "Practice, I guess."
I pull back and give him a quizzical look.
"I spent three years imagining what I would say to you if you were mine," he says, tugging me close.
"I should hope I know what to say now that I've got you. — Tera Lynn Childs

When a trout rises to a fly, it does not swim as much as tilt its fins and jet skyward. — Joseph Monninger

Packing all of your belongings into a U-Haul and then transporting them across several states is nearly as stressful and futile as trying to run away from lava in swim fins. — Allie Brosh