Fruit Fly Quotes & Sayings

The murderous, self-elected, megalomaniacal head of state with the morals of a fruit fly is an obscene feature of African life that is not likely to disappear. — Paul Theroux

I have a pet lizard named Puff, five goldfish - named Pinky, Brain, Jowels, Pearl and Sandy, an oscar fish named Chef, two pacus, an albino African frog named Whitey, a bonsai tree, four Venus flytraps, a fruit fly farm and sea monkeys. — Chris Pratt

It turned out to be just his sort of life in Melbourne [Florida]
a little three-room mini apartment to himself, and down on the strip, five different bars where you had women going around in bathing suits. In the backyard, his mother's new husband had grown a miraculous tree, a lemon trunk grafted with orange, tangerine, satsuma, kumquat, and grapefruit limbs, each bearing its own vivid fruit. Every morning, Jeff would go out and fill his arms, and squeeze himself a pitcher of juice, thick and sun-hot. That house was good for his mother, too. The swimming pool trimmed fifteen pounds off of her. She didn't seem to have moods anymore, and she didn't fly off the handle when Jeff beat her in the cribbage games they played most afternoons. — Wells Tower

The three of us have worked on the development of the small and totally harmless fruit fly, Drosophila. This animal has been extremely cooperative in our hands - and has revealed to us some of its innermost secrets and tricks for developing from a single celled egg to a complex living being of great beauty and harmony ... None of us expected that our work would be so successful or that our findings would ever have relevance to medicine. — Christiane Nusslein-Volhard

I think if we all gardened more, they and all of the other birds that fly in the air above and light in my garden below would be better off. I know that God values them no less than I do. So when I plant in spring I also hope to taste of God in fruit of summer sun and sight of feathered friends. — Vigen Guroian

Writing tales of horror makes it hard to convince people that I'm a nice, gentle person. I love rainbows and wildflowers and butterflies and babies, and I wouldn't swat a fly unless it was diving directly into my fruit salad. — Diane Hoh

January cold and desolate;
February dripping wet;
March wind ranges;
April changes;
Birds sing in tune
To flowers of May,
And sunny June
Brings longest day;
In scorched July
The storm-clouds fly,
Lightning-torn;
August bears corn,
September fruit;
In rough October
Earth must disrobe her;
Stars fall and shoot
In keen November;
And night is long
And cold is strong
In bleak December. — Christina Rossetti

Humboldt's glorious descriptions are & will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies & the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth,he averred. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind; if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over; if turning to admire the splendor of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another sun illuminates everything I behold. — Charles Darwin

Bernie Saunders is like a fly buzzing around a bowl of rotten fruit. Long hail this fly! — Marge Simon

Nevertheless,
in a few particular tissues of the fruit fly, these — Chris R. Calladine

[Tax] dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good things like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not. — Sarah Palin

A conscious fruit fly would have to confront exactly the same difficulties, the same kind of insoluble problems as man. — Emil Cioran

Fly enough, and you learn to go brain-dead when you have to. It's sort of like time travel. One minute you're bending to unlace your shoes,and the next thing you know you're paying fourteen dollars for a fruit cup, wondering, How did I get here? — David Sedaris

Why dost thou heap up wealth, which thou must quit,
Or what is worse, be left by it?
Why dost thou load thyself when thou 'rt to fly,
Oh, man! ordain'd to die?
Why dost thou build up stately rooms on high,
Thou who art under ground to lie?
Thou sow'st and plantest, but no fruit must see,
For death, alas! is reaping thee. — Abraham Cowley

Guinea pigs are practically synonymous with experiments. Lab rats have become the workhorses of modern medicine. Genetics owes a huge debt to the humble fruit fly. There's almost no branch of the life sciences, in fact, that hasn't leaned heavily on one animal or another. — Sam Kean

Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.
(from Trout Fishing on the Bevel, page 21) — Richard Brautigan

Sometimes when the year grinds to its end and the new term begins I feel I'm living the life of a fruit fly - the endless ephemeral cycle, each new semester a "fresh start" that leads to the same moribund conclusions. — Julie Schumacher

One of the fastest things a fruit fly does is take information from its eyes and react accordingly. — Michael Dickinson

When the man who knows all about the fruit fly chromosomes finds himself sitting next to an authority on Beowulf, there may be an uneasy silence. — Brand Blanshard

..he went to the kitchen to get a banana; after each mouthful he pulled back a fraction the four or five strips of striped skin, faded petals, which covered his fist as it clenched the base of the fruit; carefully he detached the friable, cardboard-flavoured filaments that run down its surface like meridian lines, in a word peeling his banana the way the anthropoid will forever peel his. He threw one of the filaments into the fly cage.. — Jean Echenoz

When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly. — Ross Macdonald

JAMES HALE sat at a side-street noodle-stall. The stall was set-up underneath the shade of a row of fruit trees. He watched a pair of pigeons courting beneath a fig tree. The male's tail feathers were pushed up in self-promotion and his plumage was arrogantly puffed up. He danced his elaborate dance of love. The female didn't look impressed. She turned her back to him. Birds were like gangster rappers, Hale thought. They sang songs about how tough they were and how many other birds they'd nested. They were egomaniacs with inferiority complexes. Posers in a leafy street. The bastards flew at the first sign of danger. They couldn't make it on the ground. Hale hated birds with their merry chirps and their flimsy nests. Tweet. Tweet. Fucking. Tweet. The only thing Hale admired about them was the fact that they could fly. That would be cool. Right now, flying would be good. — James A. Newman

Flies can be sitting in a garden and completely ignore the beautiful flowers around them. Instead they'll go right for the rotting banana peel or piece of trash. Bees, on the other hand, could be sitting in a room full of trash and find the tiniest speck of fruit or honey to land on. Don't be a fly. Become a bee and stay a bee. Look for the good in every circumstance, even the most horrible and disgusting places. There's always some honey to land on. — Marilyn Grey

No one knows what they are anymore," he says. "If you're not in the habit of reading nineteenth-century novels, you think that the author has killed a fruit fly directly above a comma - semicolons have become nothing but a distraction. — John Irving

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart. — Fred Allen

Whenever I get down about life going by too quickly, what helps me is a little mantra that I repeat to myself: at least I'm not a fruit fly. — Ray Romano

The fruit fly has roughly 150,000 neurons in the brain. — Michio Kaku

I require silence to write the way an apple tree requires winter to make fruit. Being with people is intimate and joyous, but at some point, I'll wander off by myself. The paradox is that what began in childhood as an act of necessary solitude has led me straight to a life with others, in which I fly to China or Lithuania or northern Minnesota to read my poems and talk with other people who love language made into a lathe on which a life can be tuned and be turned. — Jane Hirshfield

My first summer in college I worked in a fruit fly lab where I had two jobs: dissect the fruit fly larvae brains and incinerate the old tubes of flies. — Emily Oster