Snakes Around You Quotes & Sayings

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder. — Rae Armantrout

A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frigthtened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid.
Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.
"It looks beautiful", her mother had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. "It is beautiful. But it makes people sick."
To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilles, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.
And then, last week. — Megan Abbott

Out here, the deadly shit seeking your blood and meat is not confined to snakes and bears and weather. Other forces resent your presence too. Ghosts of long-gone wolves and buffalo and Indians and pioneers, dead in the service of implacable history. If you stop and camp early, while it's still early, while it's still daylight
claim your space, plant your flag, build your fire
you push them back into the past. But alone in the dark, the minute you sit your ass down they circle close around. Lie on the ground, and the cold seeps up as they try to equalize your temperature with theirs. Get quiet, and you hear the voices. A few words in English, but mostly in other languages. The ones that came before the Indians. Words the long-gone animals thought to one another. Words flowing against you. Wishing you ill. Yet, somehow, all gentle as an outbreath. — Charles Frazier

think maybe I only know one thing in this world. One thing for sure. And that is that the truth does not set you free. Not like I have heard it said and not like I have said it myself the countless times I sat in small rooms and jail cells and urged ragged men to confess their sins to me. I lied to them, tricked them. The truth does not salvage you or make you whole again. It does not allow you to rise above the burden of lies and secrets and wounds to the heart. The truths I have learned hold me down like chains in a dark room, an underworld of ghosts and victims that slither around me like snakes. It is a place where the truth is not something to look at or behold. It is the place where evil waits. Where it blows its breath, every breath, into your mouth and nose until you cannot escape from it. — Michael Connelly

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash was almost too novel for its inexpressibly dangerous nature to be at once realized, and they could only comprehend the magnificence of its beauty. It sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones - dancing, leaping, striding, racing around, and mingling altogether in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined undulating snakes of green, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. Simultaneously came from every part of the tumbling sky what may be called a shout; since, though no shout ever came near it, it was more of the nature of a shout than of anything else earthly. — Thomas Hardy

Athena's sacred plant was the olive tree, since that was her big gift to the Athenians. Her sacred animals were the owl and the snake. Supposedly, the owl was a symbol of wisdom from the heavens. The snake symbolized wisdom from the earth. Me, I never understood that. If owls were so wise, why would they go around asking Who? all the time, like they couldn't remember their own names? Snakes have never struck me as very smart, either; but apparently the Greeks thought that when snakes hissed, they were whispering important secrets. Yeah, that's right, Mr. Greek Dude. Hold that rattlesnake a little closer to your ear. He's got something to tell you. — Rick Riordan

The rather uncomfortable feeling most of us have when we're around snakes is evidence of how this ancient experience continues to influence us today. Throughout the long prehistory of our species and those that preceded it, snakes were a mortal threat. And so we learned our lesson. Others didn't, but that had a nasty habit of dying. So natural selection did its work and the rule
beware of snakes
was ultimately hardwired into every human brain. It's universal. Go anywhere on the planet, examine any culture. People are wary of snakes. Even if
as in the Arctic
there are no snakes. Our primate cousins shared our long experience and they feel the same way: Even monkeys raised in laboratories who have never seen a snake will back away at the sight of one. — Daniel Gardner

Let the ceiling split in two, let electricity dance like burning snakes between the gaps, let it writhe and wrap its tendrils around men's flesh, let them for a moment be seared with blazing light and the earth has opened beneath them and those who did not flee are trapped. Some are impaled on the foundation rods that lanced up from the ground itself - him upon a spike that has passed straight through his belly, pushing him off the ground like a doll [that's just disgusting]. — Kate Griffin

The day Stamp Paid saw the two backs through the window and then hurried down the steps, he believed the undecipherable language clamoring around the house was the mumbling of the black and angry dead. Very few had died in bed, like Baby Suggs, and none that he knew of, including Baby, had lived a livable life. Even the educated colored: the long-school people, the doctors, the teachers, the paper-writers and businessmen had a hard row to hoe. In addition to having to use their heads to get ahead, they had the weight of the whole race sitting there. You needed two heads for that. Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. — Toni Morrison

I meant that the hatred of that July day in Nashville was alive and well on that horrible day in Pittsburgh. People hate others so they strike like snakes. It's all connected - we're all connected, bumping around into each other, some of us good, some bad, most a mixture. Every thought acted upon has consequences. Every one. — Laura Anderson Kurk

Ssh," he almost whisperes. "I heard you Serena." He snakes his arm around my back and rougly pulls me into him. "I get that I scare you and that you don't really like me. I understand that's how you feel, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to accept it. — Beckie Stevenson

A snake will always be a snake, even if you put a chain around its neck and try to make it walk upright. — Lisa Alther

The mind wraps itself around a poem. It is almost sensual, particularly if you work on a computer. You can turn the poem round and about and upside down, dancing with it a kind of bolero of two snakes twisting and coiling, until the poem has found its right and proper shape. — Marge Piercy

All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose ... but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity - because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake ... — Salman Rushdie

Regardless of what happens with the men, you'll have a baby. An amazing little being who will blow your mind and expand your heart and make you think things you never thought and remember things you believed you forgot and heal things you imagined would never heal and forgive people you've begrudged for too long and understand things you didn't understand before you fell madly in love with a tiny tyrant who doesn't give a crap whether you need to pee. You will sing again if you stopped singing. You will dance again if you stopped dancing. You will crawl around on the floor and play chase and tickle and peek-a-boo. You'll make towers of teetering blocks and snakes and rabbits with clay. — Cheryl Strayed

God has allowed some magical reversal to occur,
so that you see the scorpion pit
as an object of desire,
and all the beautiful expanse around it
as dangerous and swarming with snakes. — Rumi

Street politics is what happens in our everyday life, living in the bando. It's the environment around us and what we doing in the streets. We [Migos] talking about how many snakes there are in the grass and talking about how people can hurt you, and talking about how that can help you gain knowledge. — Quavo

The pair stood watching each other, still as statues, moments ticking by like hours as the gale howled about them.
"You have very good ears, sir." she finally said.
"You have better feet, Pale Daughter. I heard nothing."
"Then how?"
The boy offered a dimpled smile. "You stink of cigarillo smoke. Cloves, I think."
"That's impossible. I'm upwind from you."
The boy glanced at the shadows moving like snakes around his feet.
"Seems to be raining impossible in these parts. — Jay Kristoff

A crease of disquiet snakes across his brow. 'Your father plays with fire to gather them together like that. They are too clever. They form alliances. They develop - ambitions.'
He looks so solemn I wish to soothe his fears. 'You worry too much, I am sure,' I say lightly. 'After all, they are still rooted in the ground, are they not? They cannot pull themselves up and march around wrecking havoc, like an invading army.'
'Maybe,' he says, though he sounds unsure. 'I have never met their like before; that is all. It disturbs me.' He gestures around. 'And not only me. The forests, the fields, the moss that grows on the rocks - none of them are happy about that garden. Nature would have kept those plants safely apart, scattered over the continents, separated by oceans. But your father has summoned them from the corners of the earth and locked them together, side by side, hidden behind walls, where they can grow in secret. It is wrong, Jessamine - I fear it is dangerous - — Maryrose Wood

Live snakes?' said one of the scribes. 'You mean-'
'Yeah,' said Locke. 'They've got scales, they slither around - snakes. Keep up. — Scott Lynch

The jogger sighed. He pulled out his phone and my eyes got big, because it glowed with a bluish light. When he extended the antenna, two creatures began writhing around it-green snakes, no bigger than earthworms.
The jogger didn't seem to notice. He checked his LCD display and cursed. "I've got to take this. Just a sec ... " Then into the phone: "Hello?" He listened. The mini-snakes writhed up and down the antenna right next to his ear.
Yeah," the jogger said. "Listen-I know, but ... I don't care if he is chained to a rock with vultures pecking at his liver, if he doesn't have a tracking number, we can't locate his package ... A gift to humankind, great ... You know how many of those we deliver-Oh, never mind. Listen, just refer him to Eris in customer service. I gotta go. — Rick Riordan

I swear, you're a crazy person. You go around up to your eyeballs in snakes and dead people and exploding beavers. It's just not normal. Even when I was a 'ho, my life wasn't that freaky. — Janet Evanovich

Broken Horses is an artistic triumph. Beautifully written, acted and imaged, this film wraps slowly around you like a king snake and squeezes, — James Cameron

What is an adventure? That depends on where you are starting from. Little girls in your country, they hide in the gap between the washing machine and the refrigerator and they make believe they are in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around them. Me and my sister, we used to hide in a gap in the jungle, with green snakes and monkeys all around us, and make believe that we had a washing machine and a refrigerator. You live in a world of machines and you dream off things with beating hearts. We dream of machines, because we see where beating hearts have left us. — Chris Cleave

a dragon, a bear, a wolf, and two snakes entwined around a sword. The crest — Rick Riordan