Larvae Quotes & Sayings

...I could feel her burrowing into my heart. I didn't know if the burrowing was like a kitten cuddling up to its mother or if it was like a chigger depositing its larvae underneath the skin of my ankles. — Jason Porter

for some reason this metamorphosis didn't occur in all of his pupils, or even most of them, but rather in the minority. What was the essence of this process? The awakening of a moral sensibility? Yes, of course. But why did it happen in some, and not in others? Is there some kind of mysterious module of transition: a ritual, or rite? Or perhaps Homo sapiens, rational man, also undergoes a phenomenon similar to neoteny, which is observed in worms, insects, and amphibians - when the ability to reproduce appears not in mature specimens, but already in the larval stages? And then the immature organism spawns analogous larvae, which will in their turn never mature. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

He also could feel it in his nostrils like an impalpable soot; the emanations of the millions about them, packed away at night in layers like martins in martin boxes and by day wriggling and squirming down between the tall buildings like larvae enclosed within the ribs of a dead horse; and with this effluvia of humans, the taint of burnt gasoline and burnt lubricating oils and the smoke and the coal grit and the dirt motes that were churned and rechurned and never at rest - the Pollen of the City. — Irvin S. Cobb

The ancient house is our chrysalis, trapping us until our metamorphosis is complete: our chic city wings plucked from our backs and we'll emerge as fat, white farm larvae. Like the ones living in the corral cow pies. — Mix Hart

... we live in a society of larvae--immature human beings, adolescents disguised as adults. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

There is a reference in Aristotle to a gnat produced by larvae engendered in the slime of vinegar. This must have been Drosophila. — Alfred Henry Sturtevant

The two palm worms are brought in separate bowls, still alive, wriggling fiercely in a bath of turpentine-colored fish sauce with a few slivers of chili. The glossy brown heads of the grubs, the larvae of a weevil that infests palm trees, glisten like popcorn seeds; the wriggling abdomens have pale rubbery ridges. The owner of the restaurant, chubby and affable, comes out to instruct Nhat and me: we are to grasp the heads, pull off the fat white bodies with our teeth, and discard the heads, taking care that the larvae do not nip our tongues with their formidable pincers in the process. Biting down on squirming larvae seems barbaric, but my brain is starting to swim due to hunger, and the fish sauce is muskily aromatic. How bad could their fat glistening bodies taste? And am I not a direct descendant of insectivores, albeit roughly 100 million years removed? I — Stephen Le

The cows shorten the grass, and the chickens eat the fly larvae and sanitize the pastures. This is a symbiotic relation. — Joel Salatin

Smuts are parasitic fungi that are often spread by pollinators and so, in the case of campions, pollinators pose the double threat of both laying eggs that will hatch into voracious larvae and giving the flower a nasty dose of the clap. — Dave Goulson

The most widely raised type of silkworm, the larva of the 'Bombyx mori', no longer exists anywhere in a natural state. As my encyclopedia poignantly puts it: 'The legs of the larvae have degenerated, and the adults no longer fly'. — Jeffrey Eugenides

Though it is hard to believe, it is conservatively estimated that 25 to 50 million Americans carry trichinae larvae in their muscles and internal organs ... If the (trichinosis) worms affect the heart, respiratory systems, or the nerves, severe symptoms or even death may result. — Ruth Winter

One gram of moss from the forest floor, a piece about the size of a muffin, would harbour 150,000 protozoa, 132,000 tardigrades, 3,000 springtails, 800 rotifers, 500 nematodes, 400 mites, and 200 fly larvae. These numbers tell us something about the astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

I was covered in shit and maggots. So many larvae crawling all over me, squeezing into the crevices between my toes and riding waves of urine into my ears. My mouth was filled with the fetid material, and partially digested feces mixed with the sloppy crunch of cocooned flies as my jaws opened and closed, gasping for air. My legs kicked out, trying to find purchase on the one large object floating there with me, both the source of all the insufferable maggots and my one chance to propel myself higher. — Bo Unce

And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain") — Edward Bulwer-Lytton

Their dark silhouettes numbed the soft part of his brain, like a bee stinging and numbing a caterpillar, then laying eggs on the surface of its body. The bee larvae use the paralyzed caterpillar as a convenient source of food and devour it as soon as they're born. — Haruki Murakami

As time went by, it mattered less and less that in 1969 a rocket went from Florida to the moon and men walked there. Good men. People's dads. Those were only events, scattered in time. Draw them close, rub them between thumb and finger till they look like larvae, soften like silk, distend to knot, to weave. It takes a village to kill a child. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

We change into our bathing suits, both of us pale like larvae, and then we walk down to the water. — Melissa Bank

I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how - although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform - he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider's abdomen. — Dan Simmons

I hear Seven Cities natives grow fruit just so they can eat the larvae in them. — Steven Erikson

Dragonfly larvae breathe underwater through tracheal gills. These gills are located in a rectal respiratory chamber. Water is drawn into the rectum to the gills. This water-filled chamber can also function as a jet by the rapid expulsion of the water enabling the nymph to move at great speed for a short distance and escape danger or capture prey. — Laura Smith

Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

The extracellular genesis of cells in animals seemed to me, ever since the publication of the cell theory [of Schwann], just as unlikely as the spontaneous generation of organisms. These doubts produced my observations on the multiplication of blood cells by division in bird and mammalian embryos and on the division of muscle bundles in frog larvae. Since then I have continued these observations in frog larvae, where it is possible to follow the history of tissues back to segmentation. — Robert Remak

I learned so much in Laos. I learned that fried silkworm larvae are delicious. I learned how to make ant-egg salad. — Ruth Reichl

The mountain pine beetle is a tiny creature that chews through a lodgepole's bark, gouges out a hollow in the wood and lays its eggs. The larvae hatch hungry and feed on the cambium layer, a tree's most vital part, the annual layer of cells that makes up a growth ring. To prevent drowning in the tree's sap, the beetle larvae can eject a choking fungus that not only halts the life-giving flow of sap, but stains the wood a grey-blue color. — Annie Proulx

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

When in doubt about drinking from an unknown spring look for life. If the water is scummed with algae, crawling with worms, grubs, larvae, spiders and liver flukes, be reassured, drink hearty, you'll get nothing worse than dysentery. But if it appears innocent and pure, beware. — Edward Abbey

Sometimes at night I would look out and up at the glow rising up around me through the plastic and it would just make me shudder. It reminded me of larvae. We were like pale grubs in our eggs. When I got the horrors like that, I requested a little yellow pill from the dial-a-doc and flopped down into the fuzz along with everyone else. — Stevie O'Connor

Chickens are soaked in baths of chlorine to remove slime and odor. Mixtures of excrement, blood, oil, grease, rust, paint, insecticides, and rodent droppings accumulate in processing plants. Maggots and other larvae breed in storage and transportation containers, on the floor, and in processing equipment and packaging, and they drop onto the conveyor belt from infested meat splattered on the ceiling. — Steve Striffler

(Decadent style) is ingenious, complicated, learned, full of shades of meaning and research, always pushing further the limits of language ... forcing itself to express in thought that which is most ineffable, and in form the vaguest and most fleeting contours; listening that it may translate them to the subtle confidences of the neuropath, to the avowals of aging and depraved passion, and to the singular hallucinations of the fixed idea verging on madness ... In opposition to the classic style, it admits of shading, and these shadows teem and swarm with the larvae of superstitions, the haggard phantoms of insomnia, nocturnal terrors, remorse which starts and turns back at the slightest noise, monstrous dreams stayed only by impotence, obscure phantasies at which daylight would stand amazed, and all that the soul conceals of the dark, the unformed, and the vaguely horrible, in its deepest and furthest recesses. — Theophile Gautier

The larvae! The scent of young blood entices and draws them closer. There's no need to venture into antiquity to evoke the shades of the dead. — Jean Lorrain

It is not by sitting still at a grand distance and calling the human race larvae that men are to be helped. — Albert Einstein

Norm Zuckerman was approaching seventy and as CEO of Zoom, a megasize sports manufacturing conglomerate, he had more money than Trump. He looked, however, like a beatnik trapped in a bad acid trip. Retro, Norm had explained earlier, was cresting, and he was catching the wave by wearing a psychedelic poncho, fatigue pants, love beads, and an earring with a dangling peace sign. Groovy, man. His black-to-gray beard was unruly enough to nest beetle larvae, his hair newly curled like something out of a bad production of Godspell. Che — Harlan Coben

Dad smiles at me. I suddenly feel so stupid for giving up eating when I was thirteen. The ants say: Forget about it. We're all larvae once. — A.S. King

I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one — Annie Dillard

These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts. — H.P. Lovecraft

You are afraid to die?'
Yes, everyone is.'
But to die as lovers may - to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars when they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don't you see - each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structures. — J. Sheridan Le Fanu

Over one hundred ninety species of ants have been found to grow a kind of fungi which they fertilize, plant, and even prune. Many of them also keep aphids the way we keep cows. They milk them to obtain their sweet honeydew and build shelters for them like barns. One kind of ant, the fierce Amazon, goes so far as to steal the larvae of other ants to keep as slaves. These slave ants build homes for and feed the Amazon ants, who are unable to do anything but fight. The soldier ants depend completely on the slave ants for survival. Without them, they would die. — Jenny Offill

Just imagine the banner headlines if a marine biologist were to discover a species of dolphin that wove large, intricately meshed fishing nets, twenty dolphin-lengths in diameter! Yet we take a spider web for granted, as a nuisance in the house rather than as one of the wonders of the world. And think of the furore if Jane Goodall returned from Gombe stream with photographs of wild chimpanzees building their own houses, well roofed and insulated, of painstakingly selected stones neatly bonded and mortared! Yet caddis larvae, who do precisely that, command only passing interest. — Richard Dawkins

The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings. — Eugene Lim

What makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art — Vladimir Nabokov