Tortoise Shell Quotes & Sayings

A gigantic tortoise with a jewel-encrusted shell was glittering near the window. — J.K. Rowling

Runners and yogis are alike in lots of ways, and not just because some of us need yoga to unkink what running jams. Runners and yogis are also alike because of this tortoise shell idea, this 'home' we can access inside ourselves. — Kristin Armstrong

This commissary was a man of very repulsive mien, with a pointed nose, with yellow and salient cheek bones, with eyes small but keen and penetrating, and an expression of countenance resembling at one the polecat and the fox. His head, supported by a long and flexible neck, issued from his large black robe, balancing itself with a motion very much like that of the tortoise thrusting his head out of his shell. — Alexandre Dumas

Down the Peninsula at Cypress Lawn Cemetery, a woman in a paisley turban climbed out of a battered automobile and trudged up the hillside to a new grave.
She stood there for a moment, humming to herself, then removed a joint from a tortoise-shell cigarette case and laid it gently on the grave.
"Have fun," she smiled. "It's Colombian. — Armistead Maupin

Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep. — Josephine Winslow Johnson

There is only one home to the life of a river-mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of man: there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter? — Wole Soyinka

How these humans dispose themselves! Unlike anything else in creation. Or rather like everything else in creation all at once. Legs of one beast. Arms of another. Proportions all awry to a tortoise's eye. Torso too squat. Too little neck. Vastly too much leg. Hands like creatures unto themselves. Senses delicately balanced. And yet each sense dulled by mental acuity. Reason in place of a good nose. Logic instead of a tail. Faith instead of the certain knowledge of instinct. Superstition instead of a shell. — Verlyn Klinkenborg

Deathlessness should be arrived at in a ... haphazard fashion. Loving fame as much as any man, we shall carve our initials in the shell of a tortoise and turn him loose in a peat bog. — E.B. White

Is there some lesson on how to be friends?
I think what it means is that central to living
a life that is good is a life that's forgiving.
We're creatures of contact regardless of whether
we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.
Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more
since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore.
So we make ourselves open while knowing full well
it's essentially saying please, come pierce my shell. — David Rakoff

106When I don't have anything to read, I feel like a tortoise without a shell or a boat without an anchor. There is nothing to hide under. Nowhere to stop and rest. When I don't have a book, there is nowhere good or interesting to be, there is nobody to care about, nothing to hope for, and nothing to puzzle over. When I do have something to read, it keeps me breathing. It's the reward for all the other things. It's the thing to look forward to, the reason for doing my day."
p. 177, Dime — E.R. Frank

He envied Miss Barrace at any rate her power of not being. She seemed, with little cries and protests and quick recognitions, movements like the darts of some fine high-feathered free-pecking bird, to stand before life as before some full shop-window. You could fairly hear, as she selected and pointed, the tap of her tortoise-shell against the glass. — Henry James

Son of a mother! Hazel reached the stern and couldn't believe what she saw. When she heard the word turtle, she thought of a cute little thing the size of a jewelry box, sitting on a rock in the middle of a fishpond. When she heard huge, her mind tried to adjust - okay, perhaps it was like the Galapagos tortoise she'd seen in the zoo once, with a shell big enough to ride on. She did not envision a creature the size of an island. When she saw the massive dome of craggy black and brown squares, the word turtle simply did not compute. Its shell was more like a landmass - hills of bone, shiny pearl valleys, kelp and moss forests, rivers of seawater trickling down the grooves of its carapace. — Rick Riordan

I took my lyre and said: come now, my heavenly tortoise shell: become a speaking instrument. — Sappho

The world has different owners at sunrise ... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Whenever he's tried to dig out such secrets from her behind her mother's back, she has retreated like a tortoise into her child's shell. Children are quick to sense a threat. (From "Crows" by Mrinal Pande) — Keerti Ramachandra

Giving the tortoise a little wave, I kind of felt stupid afterward for doing so. It just stuck its head back in its green and brown shell. "That's a very interesting pet."
"And those are very interesting shorts." His gaze dropped. "What are they?" Leaning forward his eyes narrowed and I stiffened. "Pizza slices?"
Heat swamped my cheeks. "They're ice cream cones."
"Huh. I like them." Straightening, his gaze drifted up me slowly, leaving an unfamiliar wake of heat behind. "A lot. — J. Lynn

It was a small tortoise with Julia's initials set in diamonds in the living shell, and this slightly obscene object, now slipping impotently on the polished boards, now striding across the card-table, now lumbering over a rug, now withdrawn at a touch, now stretching its neck and swaying its withered, antediluvian head, became a memorable part of the evening, one of those needlehooks of experience which catch the attention when larger matters are at stake. — Evelyn Waugh

A friend had told him that a man carried his pain like a tortoise carried his shell. — Anonymous

Considering Lymond, flat now on the bed in wordless communion with the ceiling, Richard spoke. "My dear, you are only a boy. You have all your life still before you."

On the tortoise-shell bed, his brother did not move. But there was no irony for once in his voice when he answered. "Oh, yes, I know. The popular question is, For what? — Dorothy Dunnett

When assaulted, the tortoise withdraws into his shell. If then assaulted with a weapon, harm is managed gradually until the turtle is slaughtered. Notwithstanding, it is conceivable to "accumulate" the tortoise. On the other hand, harm could just apply when the turtle is out of his shell. Any strikes to his shell would go toward social event the tortoise, paying little mind to device. — Dave H

What anguish! Cincinnatus, what anguish! What stone anguish, Cincinnatus - the merciless bong of the clock, and the obese spider, and the yellow walls, and the roughness of the black wool blanket. The skim on the chocolate. Pluck it with two fingers at the very center and snatch it whole from the surface, no longer a flat covering, but a wrinkled brown little skirt. The liquid is tepid underneath, sweetish and stagnant. Three slices of toast with tortoise shell burns. A round pat of butter embossed with the monogram of the director. What anguish, Cincinnatus, how many crumbs in the bed! — Vladimir Nabokov

[My kitten] is dressed in a tortoise-shell suit, and I know you will delight in her. — William Cowper

He obliterates things, she realized. He shatters them. They think they've won because he's a bit vague and he waffles, but that only goes so far. It's his shell, like a tortoise, if a tortoise was soft on the outside and dangerous on the inside. That's how the Time War ended: he got to the bottom of his patience, and he took two entire civilisations out of the universe and lock them away, and one of them was his own. That's how sharp his sense of obligation is.
And he lives like that. He does it all the time. — Nick Harkaway