Quotes & Sayings About Rattlesnakes

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake. — Ross Macdonald

Everybody knew that you should never provoke a rattlesnake, much less tie it into a bow. But that didn't stop Judd. What did stop him was the rattlesnake. — Demetri Martin

We're all terrified by rattlesnakes, but the spider we brush off our sleeve with hardly a thought is far more likely to hurt us. — Greg Iles

Rattlesnakes would be a lot more dangerous if they didn't have the rattle. — Louis Sachar

It's not so bad," Bast said. "We just climb our way down to the river through a few miles of sand, cacti, and rattlesnakes, looking out for the Border Patrol, human traffickers, magicians, and demons - and summon Nephthys."
Sadie whistled. "Well, I'm excited!"
"Agh," Khufu agreed miserably. He sniffed the air and snarled.
"He smells trouble," Bast translated. "Something bad is about to happen."
"Even I could smell that," I grumbled, and we followed Bast down the mountain. — Rick Riordan

There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done. — J.R.R. Tolkien

RATTLESNAKE, n. Our prostrate brother, "Homo ventrambulans". — Ambrose Bierce

The creatures who act as though they belong to the world follow the peace-keeping law, and because they follow that law, they give the creatures around them a chance to grow toward whatever it's possible for them to become. That's how man came into being. The creatures around Australopithecus didn't imagine that the world belonged to them, so they let him live and grow. How does being civilized come into it? Does being civilized mean that you have to destroy the world?" "No." "Does being civilized make you incapable of giving the creatures around you a little space in which to live?" "No." "Does it make you incapable of living as harmlessly as sharks and tarantulas and rattlesnakes?" "No." "Does it make you incapable of following a law that even snails and earthworms manage to follow without any difficulty?" "No." "As I pointed out some time ago, human settlement isn't against the law, it's subject to the law - and the same is true of civilization. — Daniel Quinn

Crikey means gee whiz, wow! Crikey, mate. You're far safer dealing with crocodiles and western diamondback rattlesnakes than the executives and the producers and all those sharks in the big MGM building. — Steve Irwin

The woods were full of peril - rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex; rabies-crazed skunks, raccoons, and squirrels; merciless fire ants and ravening blackfly; poison ivy, poison sumac, poison oak, and poison salamanders; even a scattering of moose lethally deranged by a parasitic worm that burrows a nest in their brains and befuddles them into chasing hapless hikers through remote, sunny meadows and into glacial lakes. — Bill Bryson

Avoid Arguments Like Rattlesnakes And Earthquakes — Dale Carnegie

We angels are misconceived in the human world. People perceive us as kindly and bountiful; when, in truth, we are about as fluffy, as gentle, as yielding, as rattlesnakes. — Rebecca Lim

A prickle of porcupines, a cackle of hyenas, a pounce of cats, a slither of snakes. But it's a nest of vipers, a quiver of cobras, and a rhumba of rattlesnakes. They also have a parliament of owls and a congress of baboons, which I find insulting to baboons myself. — Abigail Roux

A wolf will growl to warn you that it's angry and a bull will paw the ground before charging. Rattlesnakes rattle, cats moan and hiss, and hyenas grunt and cackle. But a man will smile right in your face as he drives a knife into your heart. — Rachel Vincent

Thousands of grasshoppers were jumping everywhere; I felt like I was walking through popping popcorn. These critters made me conscious of my surroundings, since many snakes eat grasshoppers. When it comes to rattlesnakes and copperheads, the locals there have a saying that the "Third person gets bit." The theory is: the first person gets the snake's attention, the second person gets the snake aggravated, and the third person gets bit. There were only two of us, but I didn't feel like testing the theory. — Dennis R. Blanchard

Refrigerators are good for keeping homemade moonshine less gross. Freezers are good for keeping rattlesnakes less angry. Garages are good to hide in when your wife finds either. — Jenny Lawson

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for 'Serena.' — Ron Rash

Rattlesnakes are only too plentiful everywhere; along the river bottoms, in the broken, hilly ground, and on the prairies and the great desert wastes alike ... If it can it will get out of the way, and only coils up in its attitude of defence when it believes that it is actually menaced. — Theodore Roosevelt

My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants. — Jim Fowler

I ran across a rattlesnake once in New Mexico, you know what I did with it, chopped its head off and we ate it. — Joe Teti

I've sat looking down into a volcano that could blow at any moment; I've helped catch a shark and several rattlesnakes; I let a tarantula walk across my hand, and I ate rat soup. — Alan Alda

The only reason, for example, that you are not a rattlesnake is that your mother and father weren't rattlesnakes. You deserve very little credit for being what you are — Dale Carnegie

I wondered why it had to be so poisonous. Oleanders could live through anything, they could stand heat, drought, neglect, and put out thousands of waxy blooms. So what did they need poison for? Couldn't they just be bitter? They weren't like rattlesnakes, they didn't even eat what they killed. The way she boiled it down, distilled it, like her hatred. Maybe it was a poison in the soil, something about L.A., the hatred, the callousness, something we didn't want to think about, that the plant concentrated in its tissues. Maybe it wasn't a source of poison, but just another victim. — Janet Fitch

He told Trout about people he'd heard of in the area who grabbed live copperheads and rattlesnakes during church services, to show how much they believed that Jesus would protect them.
"Takes all kinds of people to make up a world," said Trout. — Kurt Vonnegut

Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one. [ There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from the United States ]. — Will Cuppy

From that unremarkable gap in dense northern forest, I could finally see clearly that if I hadn't walked away from school, through devastating beauty alone on the Pacific Crest Trail, met rattlesnakes and bears, fording frigid and remote rivers as deep as I am tall - feeling terror and the gratitude that followed the realization that I'd survived rape - I'd have remained lost, maybe for my whole life. The trail had shown me how to change.

This is the story of how my recklessness became my salvation.

I wrote it. — Aspen Matis

The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy.
She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall.
Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the armed knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity.
Bogies will not scare her in the dark: bullets will not frighten her in the day.
Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.
The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.
A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong turning: but she passes safely through.
He details immortal gods to attend her: upon every road where she must travel.
They take her hand at hard places: she will not stub her toes in the dark.
She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionettes.
He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world's desire. — C.S. Lewis

Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw! - Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen! - and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose! — Mark Twain

If your gonna play with rattlesnakes, you better know what rattlesnakes do. — Smokey Yunick

And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced - mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes - would miraculously vanish from the trail for me? — Rinker Buck

He couldn't think of a good place. At first he thought she hated all living beings equally. Lately he had come to believe he held a special place in her heart, just below rattlesnakes, pederasts, and spirochetes. Definitely a tough place to start from, but determination had always been Conal's strong point. — John Varley

I regarded drugs as somewhat like rattlesnakes - it's possible to pick one up without getting bit, but why bother? — Elizabeth Moon

The worst things I knows of is rattlesnakes and some kinds o' people. And a rattlesnake minds his own matters if he ain't bothered. A man's got a right to kill ary thing, snake or man, comes messin' up with him. — Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

If I had my way we'd sleep every night all wrapped around each other like hibernating rattlesnakes. — William S. Burroughs

Knowing he [Bob Serber] was going to the [first atom bomb] test, I asked him how he planned to deal with the danger of rattlesnakes. He said, 'I'll take along a bottle of whiskey.' ... I ended by asking, 'What would you do about those possibilities [of what unknown phenomena might cause a nuclear explosion to propagate in the atmosphere]?' Bob replied, 'Take a second bottle of whiskey. — Edward Teller

Lots of people leave Pennsylvania limping and bruised. The state also has what are reputed to be the meanest rattlesnakes anywhere along the trail, — Bill Bryson

I don't know about you, but rattlesnake sounds pretty damn good right now. — Joe Teti

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous. — Nevada Barr

When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of flesh. — Edward Abbey

The righteousness of men should be treated with the same respect that one would accord to a rattlesnake. Things are more like they are now than they ever were before. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

I asked Joe if he hated Ivy and Bucky. He said, "That would make as much sense as hating a rattlesnake. You don't hate rattlesnakes; you avoid them. — Maria Semple

People say if you face your worst fear, the rest is easy, but those are people who are afraid of rattlesnakes or enclosed spaces, not of themselves and the horrible things they've done. — Alice Hoffman

The things we do to eat! Running from scorpions the size of small dogs, dodging 10 foot long rattlesnakes and squashing monster spiders - all in a days work — Gail Saunders-Smith

Low branches, dead and snapping against us. On the lookout for rattlesnakes. But the path was short enough, and soon we were on a kind of terrace. Old lawn overgrown by grass and weed, old concrete cracked in discrete chunks, vast areas overrun. An enchanted place for me, and only for me, because I was too young to remember, and so in my mind this place could become more. — David Vann

Well if this be order
give me a wheelbarruh of chaos
and a pop bottle full of shook up rattlesnakes — Bob Henry Baber

With his dripping basket and flip-flapped up the hill. Then a car turned into Cannery Row and Doc drove up to the front of the laboratory. His eyes were red rimmed with fatigue. He moved slowly with tiredness. When the car had stopped, he sat still for a moment to let the road jumps get out of his nerves. Then he climbed out of the car. At his step on the stairs, the rattlesnakes ran out their tongues and listened with their waving forked tongues. The rats scampered madly about the cages. Doc climbed the stairs. He looked in wonder at the sagging door and at the broken window. The weariness seemed to go out of him. He stepped quickly inside. Then he went quickly from room to room, stepping around the broken glass. He bent down — John Steinbeck