Urchin Quotes & Sayings

I like the way the morning can be stormy and the afternoon clear and sparkly as a jewel in the water. Put your hand in the water to reach for a sea urchin or a sea shell, and the thing desired never quite lies where you had lined it up to be. The same is true of love. In prospect or contemplation, love is where it seems to be. Reach in to lift it out and your hand misses — Jeanette Winterson

True loyalty is that quality of service that grows under adversity and expands in defeat. Any street urchin can shout applause in victory, but it takes character to stand fast in defeat. One is noise - the other, loyalty. — Fielding H. Yost

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and in this hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman. — John Berger

The fisherman fishes as the urchin eats cream buns, from lust. — T.H. White

Wonder. At last one took the other aside, and said, 'That little urchin — Jacob Grimm

Sir William was also startled, but when Vicky smiled at him, rather in the manner of an engaging street-urchin, his countenance relaxed slightly, and he asked her what she was doing with herself now that she had come home to live.

"Well it all depends," she replied seriously.

Sir William had no daughters, but only his memories of his sisters to guide him, so he said that he had no doubt she was a great help to her mother, arranging flowers, and that kind of thing.

"Oh no, only if it's that sort of a day!" said Vicky.

Sir William was still turning this remark over in his mind when the butler came in to announce that dinner was served. — Georgette Heyer

Indeed Christianity passes. Passes - it has gone! It has littered the beaches of life with churches, cathedrals, shrines and crucifixes, prejudices and intolerances, like the sea urchin and starfish and empty shells and lumps of stinging jelly upon the sands here after a tide. A tidal wave out of Egypt. And it has left a multitude of little wriggling theologians and confessors and apologists hopping and burrowing in the warm nutritious sand. But in the hearts of living men, what remains of it now? Doubtful scraps of Arianism. Phrases. Sentiments. Habits. — H.G.Wells

I loathe the urchin's cruelty to the cat, but I will not loathe the urchin. I loathe Hitler's mass-torturing, but not Hitler; and the money-man's heartlessness, but not the man. I love the swallow's flight, and I love the swallow; the urchin's gleam of tenderness, and the urchin. — Olaf Stapledon

Don't say I'm lucky. Ever. — Faith Erin Hicks

For dinner I want real sushi - not the Americanized kind. My parents are American Samoan so I don't go for any of those rolls. I'll have raw prawn or sea urchin or octopus. I love it. — Junior Seau

Ego is like a street urchin, born of fear and wanting and left to its own devices.... — Kathleen Dowling Singh

But these are sad times, the 'prentices wanting to be masters, and every little tradesman wanting to be a Senator, and every dirty little urchin thinking he can give
impudence to his betters! — Hope Mirrlees

In debate, especially when the dispute is hot and supercharged and freighted with ill will, I have always been the flabbiest of contenders. My voice breaks, becomes shrill; I sweat. I get a sloppy half-grin on my face. Worse, my mind wanders and then takes flight while the logic I possess in fair measure under more placid circumstances abandons my brain like an ungrateful urchin. — William Styron

SCHISMATRIX is a creeping sea-urchin of a book - spikey and odd. It isn't very elegant, and it lacks bilateral symmetry, but pieces of it break off inside people and stick with them for years. — Bruce Sterling

With the exception of octopus, I don't think I've met any food that I didn't like. And by the way, sometimes I do like octopus. I'm just not crazy about it by itself. I love sea urchin. I love uni. If I'm going to die of anything, it's going to be gluttony. — Justin Timberlake

My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies. — Frank Gehry

Tell me, Peppone, what other talents do you have besides erasing undesirables?"
"I enjoy a fair bit of sneaking, sir. I also enjoy pilfering and killing as a professional courtesy."
"What a delightfully horrid urchin you are."
"Thank you, sir. — Michelle Franklin

And I'll gaze across the chasm to the other side of the island, where I can still sometimes catch sight of a curly-haired urchin running joyously through the tall purple grass, her faithful dog at her heels. — Michelle Cooper

I would have done well as a gypsy child, I think. A circus baby. I coulda played a great street urchin or ragamuffin. Or just been one. I certainly liked entertaining people and making jokes, but I don't know necessarily if that's what your child is prone to that you should necessarily put them in a real working industry at six years old. — Natasha Lyonne

It's certainly nice to have my options open." He looked back out at the city. "Can this possibly work, Mister Brekker? Or am I risking the fate of Ravka and the world's Grisha on the honor and abilities of a fast-talking urchin?"
"More than a bit of both," said Kaz. "You're risking a country. We're risking our lives. Seems a fair trade."
The king of Ravka offered his hand. "The deal is the deal?"
"The deal is the deal."
They shook.
"If only treaties could be signed so quickly," he said, his easy privateer's mien sliding back in place like a mask purchased on West Stave. "I'm going to have a drink and a bath. One can take only so much mud and squalor. As the rebel said to the prince, it's bad for the constitution."
He flicked an invisible speck of dust from his lapel and sauntered out of the solarium. — Leigh Bardugo

For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception. — Terence McKenna

It would be a very naive sort of dogmatism to assume that there exists an absolute reality of things which is the same for all living beings. Reality is not a unique and homogeneous thing; it is immensely diversified, having as many different schemes and patterns as there are different organisms. Every organism is, so to speak, a monadic being. It has a world of its own because it has an experience of its own. The phenomena that we find in the life of a certain biological species are not transferable to any other species. The experiences - and therefore the realities - of two different organisms are incommensurable with one another. In the world of a fly, says Uexkull, we find only "fly things"; in the world of a sea urchin we find only "sea urchin things. — Ernst Cassirer

Why should I copy this owl, this sea urchin? Why should I try to imitate nature? I might just as well try to trace a perfect circle. — Pablo Picasso

The weakest being on earth can accomplish feats of strength. The frailest urchin will ring every doorbell on the street in arctic weather or hoist himself aloft to inscribe his name on a virgin monument. — Honore De Balzac

It wasn't long before people discovered the final horrors of letting an urchin into Parliament. — Bernadette Devlin

ow do I know I can trust you?' said the urchin. 'I don't know,' said Ridcully. 'The subtle workings of the brain are a mystery to me, too. But I'm glad that is your belief. — Terry Pratchett

You who are Prejudice, Abuse, Ignominy, Oppression, Iniquity, Despotism, Injustice, Fanaticism, beware of the wide-eyed urchin. He will grow up. — Victor Hugo

That Jim Crow there in the window," answered the urchin, holding out a cent, and pointing to the gingerbread figure that had attracted his notice, as he loitered along to school; "the one that has not a broken foot. — Nathaniel Hawthorne

Might as well rest the horses," St. Just said, nudging his beast out of the middle of the beaten path. "Westhaven, can you dismount?" "I cannot. My backside is permanently frozen to the saddle; my ability to reproduce is seriously jeopardized." "Anna will be desolated." St. Just waited while Westhaven swung down, then whistled at an urchin shivering in the door to a nearby church. "We'll — Grace Burrowes

If you intend to look like a street urchin and smell like a sow, I shall have to call you something else." He looked Teach over from head to toe, noting his shabby black hair and beard. "You're no dandy. I'll call you Blackbeard. Welcome aboard. — Nicole Castroman

After all, my young Dodger, what exactly are you? A stalwart young man, plucky and brave and apparently without fear? Or, possibly, I suggest, a street urchin with a surfeit of animal cunning and the luck of Beelzebub himself. — Terry Pratchett

Kit opened his eyes.
"Where is she?"
The voice was high and thin and directly by his left ear-also the location of the blade pressed up hard against his jawline.
"Where is she?" the voice demanded again, whispery words nearly spilling over one another in fury. "Tell me, you bastard! I'll kill you!"
Options flitted through his mind: this person was small, this person was young, it smelled like an urchin, the blade felt like a dagger or dirk. He could break its arm or its neck, he could Turn and crush it from behind or more simply rip off its head-and the only thing that kept his body motionless in the bed was the realization that the creature was obviously speaking of Rue.
"Zane," she said then, a single word that broke like a calm dream through the chamber. "Please do not kill the Marquess of Langford."
-Zane, Kit, & Rue — Shana Abe

Love is a religion, and its rituals cost more than those of other religions. It goes by quickly and, like a street urchin, it likes to mark its passage by a trail of devastation. — Honore De Balzac

Affection is like bread, unnoticed till we starve, and then we dream of it, and sing of it, and paint it, when every urchin in the street has more than he can eat. — Emily Dickinson

I instantly thought the guy was cute, in that gaunt, never-sees-the-light-of-day, New York street urchin kind of way. And he never stood still for a second. From across the tracks I read his expression as I have everything on my side except destiny, only his expression clearly hadn't informed his head or heart yet. The guy looked over and caught me staring, and once his eyes met mine they never deviated. He took several cautious steps forward, stopping abruptly at the thick yellow line you weren't supposed to cross. His arms dangled like a puppet and he seemed to skim the ground when he walked, as if suspended over the edge of the world by a hundred invisible strings. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

I knew more about produce from the sea than any of my schoolmates, and my reports in school, from kindergarten on, amused and shocked my classmates and teachers. I told them how we ate with chopsticks, had rice and seaweed for breakfast, raw fish, octopus, and sea urchin eggs for supper, and cakes made from sharks. — Eugenie Clark

One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible. — Daniel Day-Lewis

I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets. — Will Durant

I once had an Early Girl tomato at my friend Jay's house, and I thought that was the best thing I'd ever had. But then I visited friends in Senegal, and I ate sea urchin pulled fresh out of the sea. It tasted like the ocean. — Alice Waters

I'm timeless, I got that Dickensian, London street-urchin look in high school. I'll never be in style, but I'll always be different. — Stevie Nicks