Oyster Quotes & Sayings

Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose your temper!' 'Hold your tongue, Ma!' said the young Crab, a little snappishly. 'You're enough to try the patience of an oyster!' 'I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!' said Alice aloud, addressing nobody in particular. — Lewis Carroll

No oyster in the world tastes as good as a Gulf oyster. — Steve Scalise

The world is your oyster when you are successful. That was when I was getting scripts. I was planning for this. I like this business. Parts of it I love, and I didn't want it to just end. The further you get away from your success, the less your phone rings. The next thing you know, it's 20 years later and you're in a mall going, Remember when Al and I used to do something like this ... — Tim Allen

Nonetheless, the oyster, could it fancy, should fancy its excremental equipment a hot item, for what other among Creation's crapping creatures can convert its bodily wastes into treasure? — Tom Robbins

Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues. — Rumi

In Nature nothing; is mean or contemptible, and it is only pride, originating in a false idea of our superiority, which causes our contempt for some of her productions. In the eyes of Nature, however, the oyster that vegetates at the bottom of the sea is as dear and perfect as the proud biped who devours it. — Baron D'Holbach

I want to get one thing straight right from the start: I am not a natural-born jock. I am about as intrinsically athletic as an oyster, with the innate grace and sporty prowess of a brick - a very cute oyster and a very intelligent brick, if I do say so myself, but oysterly and bricklike nevertheless. — Hanne Blank

The world is your oyster. Yes, but in that oyster is the pearl; and to get to the pearl one has to first discard the shell and the flesh. — Ian Gardner

Persistent problems, however unpleasant they may seem, contain the unprocessed and unexamined thoughts and feelings that, if left alone, keep you from your greatness. That's why the pain, emptiness, and longing you feel can be your greatest gift - it can motivate you to examine parts of yourself that have been overlooked, forgotten, or hidden. It's the irritant of sand in the oyster, which is the impetus for the pearl. In walking the conscious life path, you reveal your deepest Reality, layer by layer. You come home. — Jennifer Howard

A man may as well open an oyster without a knife, as a lawyer's mouth without a fee. — Barten Holyday

Charlotte sighed inwardly. She knew her mother was serious when she started referring to shellfish. What did that mean, anyway? What's so great about the world being your oyster? Does that mean it's really hard to open, and when you do, you have something slimy and gross on the inside? — Anne Ursu

Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell. — Jan Morris

A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl. — Stephan A. Hoeller

The child who has no need to feign empirical knowledge about life can wonder and fantasise with great ease. The world is his oyster, or any other thing he wants it to be. — Michael Leunig

the tear of the oyster is a pearl. — G.K. Chesterton

People, when they first come to America, whether as travelers or settlers, become aware of a new and agreeable feeling: that the whole country is their oyster. — Alistair Cooke

The banquet proceeded. The first course, a mince of olives, shrimp and onions baked in oyster shells with cheese and parsley was followed by a soup of tunny, cockles and winkles simmered in white wine with leeks and dill. Then, in order, came a service of broiled quail stuffed with morels, served on slices of good white bread, with side dishes of green peas; artichokes cooked in wine and butter, with a salad of garden greens; then tripes and sausages with pickled cabbage; then a noble saddle of venison glazed with cherry sauce and served with barley first simmered in broth, then fried with garlic and sage; then honey-cakes, nuts and oranges; and all the while the goblets flowed full with noble Voluspa and San Sue from Watershade, along with the tart green muscat wine of Dascinet. — Jack Vance

I just feel like the world is our oyster. I grew up knowing that my mother is a journalist and was one of the first bureau chiefs I think ever at the New York Times. Hearing these stories of how hard it was for her, and yet knowing how easy it is for me right now is just remarkable. — Liz W. Garcia

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster? — C. Day Lewis

Shelly, what is this?"
"What?"
"This." She shook her fork.
"A Rocky Mountain oyster."
"Is it a shellfish?"
"No, it's a testicle."
"Oh, my God!" She dropped the fork as if it had suddenly zapped her. "Whose?"
Dylan burst out laughing. "Not mine."
"They came from the Rocking C. I bought 'em during castration season," Shelly told her.
"You bought them? Oh, my God!"
"Well," Shelly answered as if Hope were the crazy one, "they don't just give away free oysters, you know."
"No, I don't know. I'm from California. We eat real food. We don't eat cow ball. — Rachel Gibson

Sorrow, it is said, will make even an oyster feel poetical. I never tried my hand at that sort of writing but on this particular occasion such was my state of feeling, that I began to fancy myself inspired; so I took pen in hand, and as usual I went ahead. — Davy Crockett

My mother was an oyster, And I'm the pearl. — Leigh Bardugo

The pearl only weighs the oyster down. — Marty Rubin

Famous Quotes on: Honesty, Wisdom, Thomas Jefferson
Rich honesty dwells like a miser, sir, in a poor house; as your pearl in a foul oyster. — William Shakespeare

The world was her oyster, except she didn't care for oysters. Better yet, the world was her raspberry. She liked raspberries. — Kevin J. Anderson

The oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger. — M.F.K. Fisher

I remember I was always enamored by and loved motorcycles as a kid. My grandfather had motorcycles and I remember going for a ride and then after that I was hooked. And then in first or second grade, I ganked (stole) a book from the library just because it had a dirt bike with trails. It was one of those things where as a kid, the world is your oyster as far as what you can do, and you don't associate jobs and things with making money. — Taylor Kinney

Eating a raw oyster is like french kissing a mermaid. — Tom Robbins

The shock of standing again under the wide pale sky, completely exposed. This must be what the oyster feels when the lemon juice falls. — Edward St. Aubyn

Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he's become tight-lipped as an oyster. But he can feel the worlds pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward. — Karen Russell

In early cultures, it was thought pearls were born when a single raindrop fell from the heavens and became the heart of the oyster. For me, ye have become the pearl, the beat of me heart. The sapphires and emeralds signify me tartan and how I will always surround ye with love, Creigh. — Vonnie Davis

I think the word despair is much too small to encompass the magnitude of all it defines. For me, right then, despair meant that everything within me-my organs, my spirit, my hope-plunged down into a place of utter density, of blackness so heavy and bleak I had no idea how to lift any of it up again.
I can't do this. I'm just Lora Jones. I can't even remember how to tell a shrimp fork from an oyster fork. I can barely find middle C. I can't save Jesse and Armand and the castle. I can't defeat them all.
But I had to. We were going to die unless I did. — Shana Abe

And Nerites told her what virginity was all about.He said that his sisters were all virgins before they coupled with the Gods, Dactyls & Cabiri & that those who were thus deflowered had lost their maidenheads with their maidenhood. And he told her that his sisters, Melite, Thalia & Polynoe were still virgins. The flesh within their little cups looked more like the meat of oysters, rather than flowers, & he opined that calling the maidenhead a flower was probably a misnomer.It should be called an oyster. — Nicholas Chong

My role in life is that of the grain of sand to the oyster-it irritates the oyster and out comes a pearl. — Ross Perot

Jun Do was thinking about all the popular definitions of love, that it was a pair of bare hands clasping an ember to keep it alive, that it was a pearl that shines forever, even in the belly of the eel that eats the oyster, that love was a bear that feeds you honey from its claws. — Adam Johnson

To describe our growing up in the lowcountry of South Carolina, I would have to take you to the marsh on a spring day, flush the great blue heron from its silent occupation, scatter marsh hens as we sink to our knees in mud, open an oyster with a pocketknife and feed it to you from the shell and say, 'There. That taste. That's the taste of my childhood.' — Pat Conroy

I'm a firm believer that the world should be your oyster when you're cooking. People should open themselves to other cuisines - there are a lot of hidden secrets all over the world. — Yotam Ottolenghi

I wonder if we might pledge ourselves to remember what life is really all about - not to be afraid that we're less flashy than the next, not to worry that our influence is not that of a tornado, but rather that of a grain of sand in an oyster! Do we have that kind of patience? — Fred Rogers

He's not a rough diamond - a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. — Emily Bronte

Here, I meant to put you at your ease but instead I've got you closed up against me again like a pretty little clam."
He stroked a finger over her cheek and watched the color rise once more beneath her skin.
"Or are you an oyster, hiding your pearls?" He slid his finger across her other cheek, then along her throat. She swallowed convulsively as he moved lower, his fingertip moving in a leisurely downward slide.
"Perhaps I can make it up to you." Bending, he dusted a kiss against her cheek, one side and the other. Then he continued on, planting a line of unhurried kisses against the skin he'd just stroked with his finger.
He heard her breathing quicken and smiled as he pressed his mouth into the curve of her throat. He licked her there in a tiny circle, savoring the fragrant taste of her skin and enjoying the hard beat of her pulse where it throbbed erratically nearby.
He suckled there, sure he would leave his mark. — Tracy Anne Warren

From the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of them exists in some man, sometimes several at the time. Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to our eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought. — Victor Hugo

So, have you heard about the oyster who went to a disco and pulled a mussel? — Billy Connolly

Everyone has secret.
Like the oyster with its grain of sand, we bury it deep within, coating it with opalescent layers, as if that could heal our mortal wound. Some of us devote our entire lives to keeping our secret hidden, safe from those who might pry it from us, hoarding it like the pearl, only to discover that it escapes us when we least expect it. revealed by a flash of fear in our eyes when caught unawares, by a sudden pain, a rage or hatred, or an all-consuming shame. — C.W. Gortner

We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell. — Plato

Seasons don't fear the Reaper, nor do the Sun, the Wind or the Rain.
We can be like they are.
Come on, baby, don't fear the Reaper. — Blue Oyster Cult

It was odd to see her stepping out of that gloomy place, like a pearl coming out of an oyster. — Sarah Waters

I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from, they ask. Does it matter, I answer.
But it does. Because how can you truly know yourself, and how can you know other place and people, if you don't even know where you come from? — Kapka Kassabova

It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin's system not to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster. — Charles Dickens

An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for him; but that would be just like an oyster, which is the most conceited animal there is, except man. And anyway, this one could not know, at that early date, that he was only an incident in a scheme, and that there was some more in the scheme yet. — Mark Twain

They luxuriated in the feeling of deep and all pervading satisfaction, a feeling of knowing absolutely that all was well with the world and them and that the world was not only their oyster it was also their linguine with clam sauce. Not only were all things possible, but all things were theirs. — Hubert Selby Jr.

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. — M.F.K. Fisher

4. Q: What did the oyster say to the crab when he took his pearl? A: Don't be so shellfish! — Wally Pleasant

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster. — David Hume

Diane is my spiritual guide. She is a Duke- and Harvard-educated oyster fisherman in Cape Cod. Now there's something you don't hear every day. Like Jackie and Doug, she does not seek the spotlight. — Megyn Kelly

The problem: If you've an antique for sale, then, sad to relate, the world isn't your oyster. It's not that easy. Even if somebody gives you the National Gallery, your options are still very, very limited. Okay, you can sell the Old Masters, set up a trust, buy your favorite brewery. But that's strictly it. You're limited by honesty on one hand and law - that hobble of sanity - on the other. — Jonathan Gash

Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith. (Br. Cadfael) — Ellis Peters

Do you appreciate that an oyster has, among its other organs, a heart? — Padgett Powell

Everyone is so afraid of death, but the real sufis just laugh: nothing tyrannizes their hearts. What strikes the oyster shell does not damage the pearl — Rumi

I've always tried to face life like an oyster does--when given grit, give back a pearl. Ted Miller Brogden — Ted Miller Brogden

The world is my oyster. I can do whatever I like. — J.K. Rowling

In the United States, there one feels free ... Except from the Americans - but every pearl has its oyster. — Randall Jarrell

We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster. — Mark Twain

On writers' workshops: It is the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters. — Stephen King

The pearls weren't really white, they were a warm oyster beige, with little knots in between so if they broke, you only lost one. I wished my life could be like that, knotted up so that even if something broke, the whole thing wouldn't come apart. — Janet Fitch

But the slice-of-life novel is really not so much a world apart as an interlude - like the conference or the film set, the holiday hotel or the voyage by sea or air. You enter it, you live there for a while, you leave again. Perhaps it will alter you; usually it will not. I suspect that the book which takes you into a world apart must also _trouble_ you, at least a little. And the troubling stays with you, like the grit in the oyster, and afterwards you are changed. — Susan Cooper

As a teacher, Tengo pounded into his students' heads how voraciously mathematics demanded logic. Here things that could not be proven had no meaning, but once you had succeeded in proving something, the world's riddles settled into the palm of your hand like a tender oyster. — Haruki Murakami

It's a great thing when a man knows how to dance, she said. When a man can dance, the world is his oyster.
Adele, Henry's Mother — Joyce Maynard

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. — Charles Dickens

Seasons don't fear the reaper. — Blue Oyster Cult

Life's funny. Sometimes it's your oyster, and sometimes you're it's bitch-slapped man-whore. — Lois Greiman

And her mother still struggled in these white kitchens in town, humming sweet hymns, tiny, mild eyed and bent, her father still labored on the oyster boats; after a lifetime of labor, should they drop dead tomorrow, there would not be a penny for their burial clothes. — James Baldwin

Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster. — Theodore Roosevelt

Now I lay me down to sleep In mud that's many fathoms deep. If I'm not here when you awake Just hunt me up with an oyster rake — Shelby Foote

Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all - they produced an oyster. — Sallust

The world is your oyster...YOU determine the value of the pearl! — Jolene Church

The pearl on my beloved's neck, Afflicted sore the oyster! — Bhartrhari

Oysters open completely when the moon is full; and when the crab sees one it throws a piece of stone or seaweed into it and the oyster cannot close again so that it serves the crab for meat. Such is the fate of him who opens his mouth too much and thereby puts himself at the mercy of the listener. Leonardo da Vinci, 1452-1519 — Robert Greene

If I want my daughter to try something, I eat it in front of her repeatedly without forcing the issue and, with some trial and error, the world is our oyster! — Alexandra Guarnaschelli

If that a pearl may in a toad's head dwell, And may be found too in an oyster shell. — John Bunyan

What will happen to me, as the oyster said when he very inadvertently swallowed the gooseberry bush, nobody can tell. — Edward Lear

Power tasted like an oyster, like I'd swallowed the sea, all it's memories and calm and rot and brutality. — Jillian Lauren

Well, I suppose I've never really had a lifestyle that needs upkeep. I don't get cabs; I'm on the Tube with my Oyster card. — Agyness Deyn

I look so fondly back on that time in my life when you first got an agent and you were in your mid-twenties and the world was your oyster. — Katie Lowes

Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster. — Eleanor Clark

Lavender in the hut, fertility beads under the mattress, a dreamcatcher by the plunge pool, oyster appetizers every afternoon, and a Michael Bolton love mix. — Rachel Van Dyken

Joe Spork opens the door. The man departs. Joe turns to Polly to say something about how they're obviously not going to Portsmouth, and finds an oyster knife balanced on his cheek, just under his eye.

"Can we be very clear," Polly Cradle murmurs, "that I am not your booby sidekick or your Bond girl? That I am an independent supervillain in my own right?"

Joe swallows. "Yes, we can," he says carefully.

"There will therefore be no more 'Say hello, Polly'?"

"There will not. — Nick Harkaway

We are like those oysters in many ways ... Irritants, or foreign objects, infiltrate our lives in the form of bad choices, jealousy, fear, deep loss, and countless other challenges I could name. We choose how to handle things that come, either by rallying our strength and faith and finding a way to go on, or by giving into the pressure and giving up.
When we choose to stand up inside and protect our spirits, our hearts, and the essence of who we are, we produce a substance similar to what the oyster produces to form the layers of the pearl. In us, it's called character, integrity, grace, courage, and the ability to love ourselves and others, with no strings attached. — Stacy Hawkins Adams

The world is my oyster.
The road is my home.
And I know that I'm better off
Alone. — Ani DiFranco

My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid - not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered. — Trevor Noah

Like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor? — Robin McKinley

For years Belpher oysters had been the mainstay of gay supper parties at the Savoy, the Carlton and Romano's. Dukes doted on them; chorus girls wept if they were not on the bill of fare. And then, in an evil hour, somebody discovered that what made the Belpher oyster so particularly plump and succulent was the fact that it breakfasted, launched and dined almost entirely on the local sewage. There is but a thin line ever between popular homage and execration. — P.G. Wodehouse

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper. — Michael Cox

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements. — Christian Nestell Bovee

Some feel as though the world is their oyster; others feel as though they were the oyster itself, plucked from the ocean, cracked open, and robbed of all that is precious to them. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

We are the bird's eggs. Bird's eggs, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, cows, sheep, we are caterpillars; we are leaves of ivy and springs of wildflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl, we are girls. We are woman and nature. And he says he cannot hear us speak. But we hear. — Susan Griffin

This is not that, and that is certainly not this, and at the same time an oyster stew is not stewed, and although they are made of the same things and even cooked almost the same way, an oyster soup should never be called a stew, nor stew soup. — M.F.K. Fisher

OYSTER, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails! The shells are sometimes given to the poor. — Ambrose Bierce

The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see. — Russell Hoban

Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. A cat? Almost certainly. A human? Don't know about you, tovarishch, but I am. — Robert A. Heinlein

The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattress — Arthur Miller