Quotes & Sayings About Gnats

Summer was full on and the nights hot. It was like lying in warm syrup there in the dark under the viaduct, in the steady whine of gnats and nightbugs. — Cormac McCarthy

Other people write about the bling and the booty. I write about the pus and the gnats. To me, that's beautiful. — Vic Chesnutt

Gnats drifted on the same warm summer breeze that saw colorful paper lanterns swaying on their strings. Lily of the valley filled jam jars at each table, but sweet peas had won out in the battle to fragrance the evening air. — Anouska Knight

Hawk wasn't a normal man, nor a man with a virtuous compass, he felt nothing most of the time, no guilt, regret, he flicked people off like gnats neither bothered nor caring about them. — V. Theia

We all think we are gods, when we are no more than gnats. — Caedem Marquez

You make terrible, terrible plans."
"Hey, " I protested. "One of my plans caught you didn't it?"
"Yeah, but you meant to catch Sean."
He took his hand off my shoulder.
I waved his concerns away, along with a cloud of gnats that had found us in the forest.
"You're getting lost in the details. Keep the big picture in mind. — Jennifer Echols

Linnaeus, setting out for Lapland, surveys his "comb" and "spare shirt," "leathern breeches" and "gauze cap to keep off gnats," with as much complacency as Bonaparte a park of artillery for the Russian campaign. The quiet bravery of the man is admirable. — Henry David Thoreau

Strangely enough, he felt his fear whisked away like a swarm of gnats caught in the wind, replaced by an intense curiosity. — James Dashner

Surely all God's people, however serious or savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small mischievous microbes- all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun in them. — John Muir

As well might a gnat seek to drink in the ocean, as a finite creature to comprehend the Eternal God. A God whom we could understand would be no God. If we could grasp Him, He could not be infinite. If we could understand Him, He could not be divine. — Charles Spurgeon

Don't you swat away my concerns like they're gnats around your ears." He got to his feet as well. "Don't you dare make light of them, Eve, or what it is to me to sit and wait. — J.D. Robb

For the madness of men is a divine spectacle: In fact, could one make observations from the Moon, as did Menippus, considering the numberless agitations of the Earth, one would think one saw a swarm of flies or gnats fighting among themselves, struggling and laying traps, stealing from one another, playing, gamboling, falling, and dying, and one would not believe the troubles, the tragedies that were produced by such a minute animalcule destined to perish so shortly. — Michel Foucault

Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple. — Mary Oliver

Can you walk on water? You have done no better than a straw. Can you fly through the air? You are no better than a gnat. Conquer your heart-then you may become somebody. — Khwaja Abdullah Ansari

They believe themselves Lucifer's equals, Cain, all these pitiful little gnats. But there is only one that we have ever owned to be our superior. There is but one greater than us, and to him ... to him we no longer speak. — Neil Gaiman

We must understand how to hide in darkness in order to escape the gnat-swarms of utterly annoying admirers. — Friedrich Nietzsche

What would people think?'
Jesus said that people think all sorts of things. The human mind is like a cloud of gnats. Constant motion. That's why you have to look at the heart.
'Oh,' said Grandpa. — Garrison Keillor

This is a deeply sacrilegious book, and I expect that many will find it offensive. But I think that they will be offended in the right way; that is, the same way that Jesus offended people. Part of the mission of Jesus (and by extension his church) is to relieve us of the intolerable burden of our neo-pharisaic religion. I call it neo-pharisaic because it is just a new manifestation of a disease that has always plagued people of faith - religion! Religion is comprised of laying burdens on people's shoulders, hypocrisy and double standards, gracelessness toward "sinners," high-minded judgmentalism, straining at gnats and swallowing camels, externalization of faith in religious ritual, and not being pure in heart, among other things. — Hugh Halter

But once in a while, even if nobody mentioned one, the thought of women entered his head all on its own, and once it came it usually tneded to stay for several hours, filling his noggin like a cloud of gnats. Of course, a cloud of gnats was nothing in comparison to a cloud of Gulf coast mosquitoes, so the thought of women was not that bothersome, but it was a thought Pea would rather not have in his head. — Larry McMurtry

Now and again, one could detect in a childless woman of a certain age the various characteristics of all the children she had never issued. Her body was haunted by the ghost of souls who hadn't lived yet. Premature ghosts. Half-ghosts. X's without Y's. Y's without X's. They applied at her womb and were denied, but, meant for her and no one else, they wouldn't go away. Like tiny ectoplasmic gophers, they hunkered in her tear ducts. They shone through her sighs. Often to her chagrin, they would soften the voice she used in the marketplace. When she spilled wine, it was their playful antics that jostled the glass. They called out her name in the bath or when she passed real children in the street. The spirit babies were everywhere her companions, and everywhere they left her lonesome - yet they no more bore her resentment than a seed resents uneaten fruit. Like pet gnats, like phosphorescence, like sighs on a string, they would follow her into eternity. — Tom Robbins

A place where a clock's minute and hour hands spread away from its face, flapping like wings. A place where he'd pluck a daisy and watch the petals whirl like the propellers of a helicopter. Where he'd throw a handful of sand, and the grains would buzz away like a swarm of gnats. Where colorful fruits on a tree would burst into flight, and new ones would perch in their place. — Michelle Cuevas

You and I and everyone else have the attention span of gnats. And that means that saying or doing anything once simply doesn't work. — Gene Simmons

Example is a dangerous lure: where the wasp got through the gnat sticks fast. — Jean De La Fontaine

In the vast cosmical changes, the universal life comes and goes in unknown quantities ... sowing an animalcule here, crumbling a star there, oscillating and winding, ... entangling, from the highest to the lowest, all activities in the obscurity of a dizzying mechanism, hanging the flight of an insect upon the movement of the earth ... Enormous gearing, whose first motor is the gnat, and whose last wheel is the zodiac. — Victor Hugo

If we may credit certain hints contained in the lives of the saints, love raises the spirit above the sphere of reverence and worship into one of laughter and dalliance: a sphere in which the soul says: 'Shall I, a gnat which dances in Thy ray, Dare to be reverent?' — Coventry Patmore

'What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, 'if they won't answer to them?' 'No use to them,' said Alice; 'but it's useful to the people who name them, I suppose. If not, why do things have names at all?' 'I can't say,' the Gnat replied. — Lewis Carroll

You mind Ralph," she called back to Bubber. "Mind the gnats don't sit on his eyelids. — Carson McCullers

If every gnat that flies were an archangel, all that could but tell me that there is a God; and the poorest worm that creeps tells me that. — John Donne

Sometimes I can almost see around our heads,
like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them. — Sharon Olds

I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others. — Lewis Thomas

Is the sun dimmed that gnats do fly in it? — William Shakespeare

Insist on time with the person you love and make extended time for one another. learn to say no to desirable offers. get wise to the tricks of the multitude of thieves of your time and attention that swarm around you like gnats every second. have a clear vision of the life you want. You have to know what matters most to you, and you have to make time for that, with iron-fisted determination. Here is a hard and fast Law of Modern Life: if you do not take your time, it will be taken from you. If you do not insist on making time for what matters, you will not do what matters. If — Edward M. Hallowell

Most people do not know this, but hummingbirds also feed on small insects. Among the many insects that hummingbirds feed on, they especially like spiders, gnats, aphids, caterpillars, flies and mosquitoes. They are fairly aggressive hunters and insects can make up to 1/4 of their daily diet! — Susan G. Charles

I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest concerns were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot dogs and dopes, and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering summer bath houses ... We could lie in long citoneuse beams of the five o'clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves. — Zelda Fitzgerald

Anyone watching her would have thought her cold, indifferent, but this was the only way she knew to tackle her deepest troubles, to shoo them aside as if they were a cloud of summer gnats, and deal with the task at hand brusquely and efficiently. Hannah always thought of it as her mother's Englishness, that ability to equalize problems so that a scuffed shoe and an impending disaster were almost equally distasteful, but both were born with aplomb. — Laura L. Sullivan

All your winning or losing of a good conscience, is in your first buying; for such is the deceitfulness of sin, and the cunning conveyance of that old serpent, that if his head be once entering in, his whole body will easily follow after; and if he make you handsomely to swallow gnats at first, he will make you swallow camels ere all be done. Oh, happy they who dash the little ones of Babylon against the stones (Ps. 137:9)! — George Gillespie

With the single exception of Park Lane, every north-south route in London slows traffic to the pace of a wounded gnat with pleurisy struggling with a squaddie's backpack. — Michael Gove

They strain over gnats and swallow camels. They also cannibalize each other for power. — Mike Duran

Do ye remember the love potion Una made for yer feckin' balls and how the gnats bit the hell outta big daddy and the twins? — Vonnie Davis

You have enemies? Why, it is the story of every man who has done a great deed or created a new idea. It is the cloud which thunders around everything that shines. Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. - VICTOR HUGO — Eric Greitens

Fame must have enemies, as light must have gnats. — Victor Hugo

I don't think fireflies have friends. They seem to be singular bugs. They travel in packs, I guess, because when you see one, usually you'll see others. but they're never flocking together, like gnats or hornets. They're individuals. They're independent. Maybe that's why I like them. They're okay by themselves. That and their butts glow green. And that's just cool. — A.C. Williams

The months came and went, and back and forth they twisted through the uncharted vastness, where no men were and yet where men had been if the Lost Cabin were true. They went across divides in summer blizzards, shivered under the midnight sun on naked mountains between the timber line and the eternal snows, dropped into summer valleys amid swarming gnats and flies, and in the shadows of glaciers picked strawberries and flowers as ripe and fair as any the Southland could boast. In the fall of the year they penetrated a weird lake country, sad and silent, where wild- fowl had been, but where then there was no life nor sign of life - only the blowing of chill winds, the forming of ice in sheltered places, and the melancholy rippling of waves on lonely beaches. — Jack London

In the apartment, the answering machine blinked fiercely, two gnats drag-raced around the apparently sweet, rotting hole of the kitchen drain, and life was difficult once again, and familiar, and a disappointment. — Meg Wolitzer

Labor Day. We could hear their bellow and grind from the Route 19 overpass. Below, the river gleamed like a flaw in metal. Leaving the parking lot behind, we billy-goated down the fisherman's trail, one by one, the way all mountain people do. Loud clumps of bees clustered in the fireweed and boneset, and the trail underfoot crunched with cans, condom wrappers, worm containers. A half-buried coal bucket rose from the dirt with a galvanized grin. The laurel hell wove itself into a tunnel, hazy with gnats. There, a busted railroad spike. The smell of river water filled our noses. — Matthew Neill Null

There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. — C.S. Lewis

The girl dreams she is dangerously ill. Suddenly birds come out of her skin and cover her completely ... Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and all the stars except one. That one start falls upon the dreamer. — C. G. Jung

Splitting the atom is like trying to shoot a gnat in the Albert Hall at night and using ten million rounds of ammunition on the off chance of getting it. That should convince you that the atom will always be a sink of energy and never a reservoir of energy. — Ernest Rutherford

Both parents passed away of the Gnats on their farm out in the wilds, sir, and he was raised by peas.' 'Surely you mean on peas, Mr Groat?' 'By peas, sir — Terry Pratchett

And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything as you like it, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose, and it's always daisy-time. — D.H. Lawrence

What gnats are compared with humans, so is the whole creation compared with God. — Saint John Chrysostom

Towards gnats and fleas we should show no pity. We would do right to hang petty thieves, petty calumniators, and slanderers. — Friedrich Nietzsche

TO MY MIND, PUSHKIN BEST SUMS UP THE SEASON: Lovely summer, how I could cherish you / If heat and dust and gnats and flies were banished. — Paul Russell

As the moths around a taper,
As the bees around a rose,
As the gnats around a vapour,
So the spirits group and close
Round about a holy childhood, as if drinking its repose. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

And somewhat as in blind night, on a mild sea, a sailor may be made aware of an iceberg, fanged and mortal, bearing invisibly near, by the unwarned charm of its breath, nothingness now revealed itself: that permanent night upon which the stars in their expiring generations are less than the glinting of gnats, and nebulae, more trivial than winter breath; that darkness in which eternity lies bent and pale, a dead snake in a jar, and infinity is the sparkling of a wren blown out to sea; that inconceivable chasm of invulnerable silence in which cataclysms of galaxies rave mute as amber. — James Agee

Straining at gnats and swallowing camels is a required course in all law schools. — Robert A. Heinlein

Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive,
Half wishing they were dead to save the shame.
The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow;
They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats,
And flare up bodily, wings and all. What then?
Who's sorry for a gnat ... or a girl? — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Will you joust today, my lord?" she asked him. Clegane's voice was thick with contempt. "Wouldn't be worth the bother of arming myself. This is a tournament of gnats." The king laughed. "My dog has a fierce bark. Perhaps I should command him to fight the day's champion. To the death." Joffrey was fond of making men fight to the death. — George R R Martin

When the sun shines let foolish gnats make sport,
But creep in crannies when he hides his beams. — William Shakespeare

Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat's navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent's heart. — Fred Allen