Menagerie Quotes & Sayings

Venom has taken Naasir's place temporarily." This time, the amusement that shaped Raphael's lips was acute. "My mother called to ask what else I have in my menagerie."
Elena snorted, in no doubt of Caliane's acerbic tone. "Can you blame her? First you send her a tiger creature who eats people he doesn't like, and then a vampire with the eyes and fangs of a viper." She held up a finger. "Oh, and let's not forget the mortal you keep as a pet."
"My mother does not consider you my pet, Elena. She is very kind to pets."
"Oh, ouch! — Nalini Singh

It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie. — Upton Sinclair

I am overrun, infested with a menagerie of desires. — Elizabeth Smart

We assured Phelan that we were more than happy to let him have you and your menagerie," Leo retorted. "After that, he said he needed to think." "About what?" Beatrix demanded. "What is there to think about? Why is it taking him so long to make a decision?" "He's a man, dear," Amelia explained kindly. "Sustained thinking is very difficult for them. — Lisa Kleypas

Evan chuckled and shook his head. "I should have known it would be another owl. What is it with you and owls? I'm surrounded by the bloody things. There's more of them than the spider plants."
"Don't listen to him," Rai said, standing and swivelling around to take in all his menagerie. Owlery? I made a mental note to Google the collective noun for owls later. "You're all precious snowflakes, my lovelies. — Josephine Myles

Menagerie. Personally, — J.K. Rowling

This is a madhouse!" said Horace. Deirdre laughed. "No, doveling. It's a menagerie. — Ransom Riggs

In the year 1257, an elephant died in the Tower menagerie and was buried in a pit near the chapel. But the following year he was dug up and his remains sent to Westminster Abbey. Now, what did they want at Westminster Abbey, with the remains of an elephant? If not to carve a ton of relics out of him, and make his animal bones into the bones of saints? — Hilary Mantel

Just as I was turning fifteen, in the spring of 1946, my parents took me to see 'The Glass Menagerie,' well into its year-long run. I had seen a number of shows on Broadway by then, but nothing like this - because there was nothing like this on Broadway. — Robert Gottlieb

He saw her draw closer in the mirror. Her black hair was an ink splash against the white tile walls. She paused behind him. "You protected me, Kaz."
"The fact that you're bleeding through your bandages tells me otherwise."
She glanced down. A red blossom of blood had spread on the bandage tied around her shoulder. She tugged awkwardly at the strip of towel. "I need Nina to fix this one."
He didn't mean to say it. He meant to let her go. "I can help you."
Her gaze snapped to his in the mirror, wary as if gauging an opponent. I can help you. They were the first words she'd spoken to him, standing in the parlor of the Menagerie, draped in purple silk, eyes lined in kohl. She had helped him. And she'd nearly destroyed him. Maybe he should let her finish the job. — Leigh Bardugo

A frightening menagerie, my emotions are
Too many and varied to number
Like creatures they crawl and they fly above
Tearing my body asunder. — Maggie Stiefvater

It was the first smile of my life. Of course, that is a ridiculous thing to say; I had been smiled at often, the big man had smiled at me not a minute since. And yet I say: it was the first smile, because it was the first that ever went straight into me like a needle too thin to be seen. — Carol Birch

The problem with growing up in a cafe was the cafe never closed, my parents worked every day of the year from morning to night. So it was a big menagerie of kids, business and cooking! — Anthony Minghella

Snorkel through our vibrant menagerie of fish and marine life, each one of which has been clearly tagged and labeled for your convenience. Do you think the jokers at Sandals would do that for you? We've stocked our ivory reef with disparate creatures from all over the world, creating a lavishly unbalanced ecosystem that you have to see to believe. Often the things that nature never intended are the most fun to look at. — Colin Nissan

What is the importance of human lives? Is it their continuing alive for so many years like animals in a menagerie? The value of a man cannot be judged by the number of diseases from which he escapes. The value of a man is in his human qualities: in his character, in his conscience, in the nobility and magnanimity, of his soul. Torturing animals to prolong human life has separated science from the most important thing that life has produced - the human conscience. — John Cowper Powys

In 20 years I want to look back and see a collection of crazy characters that I made - a menagerie. — Dan Fogler

Things have a way of turning out so badly. — Tennessee Williams

When I was a boy, I had a baseball team of my own. We played on a vacant lot between Ninetieth and Ninety-second streets. I had a little menagerie of my own, some pigeons, guinea pigs, and so on. On Saturday mornings, I had to take my music lesson. Then the members of my team used to come see my menagerie. — Jacob Ruppert

'Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.' — John Lahr

Perhaps because my background is theatrical, I have a great affinity with the classics. Hamlet has always been a character of great interest to me and a character I would really love to play. Or a character in a Tennessee Williams play, maybe Tom in 'The Glass Menagerie.' — Adhir Kalyan

The context for music is varied and profound. If their fantasy is to be awakened-so that their sounds may be incisive or ravishing-then the menagerie of saints and dragons must be faithfully recalled. — Russell Sherman

Each man's soul is a menagerie where Conscience, the animal-tamer, lives with a collection of wild beasts. — Austin O'Malley

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. — Pat Conroy

When dreams become more important than reality, you give up travel, building, creating; you even forget how to repair the machines left behind by your ancestors. You just sit living and reliving other lives left behind in the thought records.
Vina, "The Menagerie" ("The Cage"), Star Trek, 1966 — Gene Roddenberry

How absurd it would be if the further development of the menagerie itself would be held back by self-inflicted wounds! — Anonymous

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. — Alastair Reynolds

As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If a am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one: I go forth to fatten myself. — Henry Miller

There's an I in menagerie. - Black Annis — Derek Landy

The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn't pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It's very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of a woman in her late youth. She was sitting in a chair all alone by a window with the moonlight streaming in on her desolate face, and she'd been stood up by the man she planned to marry. — Tennessee Williams

Thoughts of moonlight and silken hair evaporated in a black bolt of fury. Kaz saw Inej tug on the sleeve of her left forearm, where the Menagerie tattoo had once been. He had the barest inkling of what she'd endured there, but he knew what it was to feel helpless, and Van Eck had managed to make her feel that way again. Kaz was going to have to find a new language of suffering to teach that smug merch son of a bitch. — Leigh Bardugo

I'd like to one day play Amanda, the mother, in The Glass Menagerie. — Bernadette Peters

Ned: I figured it was time for a picnic by the menagerie.
Jenny: And you brought me? Why not take the woman you're marrying?
Ned: She's grown up with the Duke of Ware. Lions seem less ferocious. — Courtney Milan

The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart. — Dean Koontz

His rage fed my reckless euphoria. He couldn't stand having his authority challenged, and that made him easy to manipulate.

I was in chains, but he was losing control. — Rachel Vincent

Is enjoyment the goal of life? Were it so, it would be a tremendous mistake to become a man at all. What man can enjoy a meal with more gusto than the dog or the cat ? Go to a menagerie and see the [wild animals] tearing the flesh from the bone. Go back and become a bird! ... What a mistake then to become a man! Vain have been my years - hundreds of years - of struggle only to become the man of sense-enjoyments. — Swami Vivekananda

The platypus, as it turns out, derives its DNA from a menagerie of creatures. When its genome was fully decoded, it was found only to be 80% mammalian, and had genes found previously only in reptilian, bird, amphibian, and fish DNA. — B.C. Chase

Winter was usually the slow season at the menagerie, with so many of the animals hibernating, but that year I was busier than a hen with a double set of chicks. — Patricia C. Wrede

'The Glass Menagerie' by Tennessee Williams is a great play. I had to read it for school when I was younger, but I started writing scripts after that. That's what got me into writing. — Jake T. Austin

Once upon a time, a girl went to see a monster menagerie where all the exhibits were dead. — Laini Taylor

I'm an avid animal lover. When I was 16, I wanted to be a vet or a zookeeper. I grew up with animals. At one time we had between five and eight dogs in the house, with four cats. We're menagerie people. — Misty May-Treanor

Incendiary

That one small boy with a face like pallid cheese
And burnt-out little eyes could make a blaze
As brazen, fierce and huge, as red and gold
And zany yellow as the one that spoiled
Three thousand guineas' worth of property
And crops at Godwin's Farm on Saturday
Is frightening---as fact and metaphor:
An ordinary match intended for
The lighting of a pipe or kitchen fire
Misused may set a whole menagerie
Of flame-fanged tigers roaring hungrily.
And frightening, too, that one small boy should set
The sky on fire and choke the stars to heat
Such skinny limbs and such a little heart
Which would have been content with one warm kiss
Had there been anyone to offer this. — Vernon Scannell

When I was 18 I worked with the Ringling Brothers circus, taking care of menagerie animals. I used to rather deliberately risk my life with the big cats. — Edward Hoagland

If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie. — Sylvia Townsend Warner

An expense of ends to means is fate;Morganization tyrannizing over character. The menagerie, or forms and powers of the spine, is a book of fate: the bill of the bird, the skull of the snake, determines tyrannically its limits. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community more resembles a family than any other human institution. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as "a place where the person you least want to live with always lives." His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning. (p. 64-65, Church: Why Bother?) — Philip Yancey

When I want to go to sleep, I must first get a whole menagerie of voices to shut up. You wouldn't believe what a racket they make in my room. — Karl Kraus

I grew up with a menagerie of dogs, cats, gerbils - not to mention three younger siblings. — K.A. Applegate

...There was a menagerie in which hideous clowns, dressed in rags and come from who knows where, were in 1823 exhibiting to the peasants of Montfermeil one of those hideous Brazilian vultures. — Victor Hugo

People weren't just angry about it. They were still afraid. Fear is a powerful, often irrational emotion, and mass fear... has the power to shake any society to its core. As long as the world remembered, they would live in fear of all cryptids-- regardless of whether or not any individual among us was truly dangerous.

Of course, not everyone supported stripping cryptids of all right. But dissenters were few among a dangerous and violent many, and most ignored the problem.

Submission was the only solution they could conceive of to fix my problem. But with the imprint of Clyde's fist still throbbing in my stomach I was less interested in fixing a problem than in becoming one. — Rachel Vincent

Needless to say, that meant that the Braekbills student body was quite the psychological menagerie. Carrying that much onboard cognitive processing power had a way of distorting your personality. And to actually want to work that hard, you had to be at least a little bit screwed up. — Lev Grossman

Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It's more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. — Jimmy Reid

Watching Temar, I wondered how the animals of the King's menagerie felt, able to kill any of the puny beings that looked into their cages, yet bound back by bars of iron. I felt a strange darkness at the thought. I had no true cage, save my own thoughts. There was nothing to keep me from lashing out at any of the nobles who walked these halls. It seemed like a very thin barrier all of a sudden. — Moira Katson

With his buzz-cut black hair, muscles and menagerie of tattoos, the man looked like he lived in a cave and sanded timber with his head and flung innocent young women down on beds and had his wicked way with them. — Cari Silverwood

If you cut off my hands, I'll write with my feet, and if you cut off my feet, I'll write with my nose, and if you cut that off, you may as well cut my whole head off, because no matter how you slice and dice me, you can't control what I think, or what I feel. You can keep me locked up for the rest of my life, however brief that may be. But you will never, ever own me. — Rachel Vincent

Larry King's show got to be an increasingly lonely outpost of humane civility in a mephitic menagerie of hotheads, saber rattlers, cretins and crackpots. — Tom Shales

Every man carries a menagerie in himself; and, by stirring him up all around, you will find every sort of animal represented there. — Henry Ward Beecher

William!" I turned smiling. "Did they send you over?"
William shook his head. "They're still arguing, and it's spreading. Your professor has opinions."
I rolled my eyes, because it was William. "She's from Vinland. As far as she's concerned, wildlife is something you shoot first and study later. She's been complaining about the menagerie animals since the day she got to Mill City, especially this one. — Patricia C. Wrede

I don't believe every cryptid should be allowed to roam free, just like I don't believe every human should be allowed to roam free. We have psychos, too. People kill their coworkers. Kids kill their classmates. Parents kill their own children. Those people are every bit as monstrous as the worst cryptid predator you can ever point to, yet they're human, just like we are. — Rachel Vincent

Some people have family crests, lions, tigers, unicorns, elephants - a whole menagerie - and if my family had a crest, you know what would be on it? A blintze. I mean it. All the good things in my life are measured in blintzes because by us it's not a party if there isn't a blintze ... — Gertrude Berg

The first time I ever acted was in 'The Glass Menagerie' in high school, and my first line was, 'I didn't know Shakespeare had a sister.' — Bill Hader

Mr. Jamrach led me through the lobby and into the menagerie. The first was a parrot room, a fearsome screaming place of mad round eyes, crimson breasts that beat against bars, wings that flapped against their neighbours, blood red, royal blue, gypsy yellow, grass green. The birds were crammed along perches. Macaws hung upside down here and there, batting their white eyes, and small green parrots flittered above our heads in drifts. A hot of cockatoos looked down from on high over the shrill madness, high crested, creamy breasted. The screeching was like laughter in hell. — Carol Birch

and on the other side for lack of sun there is death perhaps
waiting for you in the uproar of a dazzling whirlwind with a thousand explosive arms
stretched toward you man flower passing from the seller's hands to
those of the lover and the loved
passing from the hand of one event to the other passive and sad parakeet
the teeth of doors are chattering and everything is done with
impatience to make you leave quickly
man amiable merchandise eyes open but tightly sealed
cough of waterfall rhythm projected in meridians and slices
globe spotted with mud with leprosy and blood
winter mounted on its pedestal of night poor night weak and sterile
draws the drapery of cloud over the cold menagerie
and holds in its hands as if to throw a ball
luminous number your head full of poetry — Tristan Tzara

He began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone. — Daniel Quinn

In 1255, Louis IX of France presented an elephant to Henry III of England to add to the menagerie of exotic animals he kept in the Tower of London. — Karen Maitland

Devlin was as sleek and muscular as the black-and-gold tiger she had seen on exhibition at the park menagerie. Divested of his clothes, he seemed even larger, his broad shoulders and long torso looming before her. The texture of his flesh was heavy and tough, covered with skin that seemed hard but silken at the same time. His midriff was scored with rows of muscle. She had seen statues and illustrations of the male body, but nothing had ever conveyed this sense of warm, living strength, this potent virility. — Lisa Kleypas