Fish Quotes

“Expectations are at war, if good feeling and discomfort clash. When we are expecting zest and joy, our good karma may be ousted by distress and frustration, if negative downbeat waves are emitted. Just with a feel of realism, without prejudice, should we step into the future. What will be, will be. Only the fortune of war will tell, since life may be war or peace. ("Fish for silence.")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Doc was collecting marine animals in the Great Tide Pool on the tip of the Peninsula. It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide goes out the little water world becomes quiet and lovely. The sea is very clear and the bottom becomes fantastic with hurrying, fighting, feeding, breeding animals. Crabs rush from frond to frond of the waving algae. Starfish squat over mussels and limpets, attach their million little suckers and then slowly lift with incredible power until the prey is broken from the rock. And then the starfish stomach comes out and envelops its food. Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers. And black eels poke their heads out of crevices and wait for prey. The snapping shrimps with their trigger claws pop loudly. The lovely, colored world is glassed over. Hermit crabs like frantic children scamper on the bottom sand. And now one, finding an empty snail shell he likes better than his own, creeps out, exposing his soft body to the enemy for a moment, and then pops into the new shell. A wave breaks over the barrier, and churns the glassy water for a moment and mixes bubbles into the pool, and then it clears and is tranquil and lovely and murderous again. Here a crab tears a leg from his brother. The anemones expand like soft and brilliant flowers, inviting any tired and perplexed animal to lie for a moment in their arms, and when some small crab or little tide-pool Johnnie accepts the green and purple invitation, the petals whip in, the stinging cells shoot tiny narcotic needles into the prey and it grows weak and perhaps sleepy while the searing caustic digestive acids melt its body down.
Then the creeping murderer, the octopus, steals out, slowly, softly, moving like a gray mist, pretending now to be a bit of weed, now a rock, now a lump of decaying meat while its evil goat eyes watch coldly. It oozes and flows toward a feeding crab, and as it comes close its yellow eyes burn and its body turns rosy with the pulsing color of anticipation and rage. Then suddenly it runs lightly on the tips of its arms, as ferociously as a charging cat. It leaps savagely on the crab, there is a puff of black fluid, and the struggling mass is obscured in the sepia cloud while the octopus murders the crab. On the exposed rocks out of water, the barnacles bubble behind their closed doors and the limpets dry out. And down to the rocks come the black flies to eat anything they can find. The sharp smell of iodine from the algae, and the lime smell of calcareous bodies and the smell of powerful protean, smell of sperm and ova fill the air. On the exposed rocks the starfish emit semen and eggs from between their rays. The smells of life and richness, of death and digestion, of decay and birth, burden the air. And salt spray blows in from the barrier where the ocean waits for its rising-tide strength to permit it back into the Great Tide Pool again. And on the reef the whistling buoy bellows like a sad and patient bull.”
― John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

“Silence, I believe, avoids me, as water on the beach avoids stranded fish.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Felice

“So much, then, for the fish.”
― Herodotus, The Histories

“When I was a child I had a fishless aquarium. My father set it up for me with gravel and plants and pebbles before he'd got the fish and I asked him to leave it as it was for a while. The pump kept up a charming burble, the green-gold light was wondrous when the room was dark. I put in a china mermaid and a tin horseman who maintained a relationship like that of the figures on Keat's Grecian urn except that the horseman grew rusty. Eventually fish were pressed upon me and they seemed an intrusion, I gave them to a friend. All that aquarium wanted was the sound of the pump, the gently waving plants, the mysterious pebbles and the silent horseman forever galloping to the mermaid smiling in the green-gold light. I used to sit and look at them for hours. The mermaid and the horseman were from my father. I have them in a box somewhere here, I'm not yet ready to take them out and look at them again.”
― Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary

“The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a popkin when he saw it.”
― Stephen King, The Drawing of the Three

“The most risky day in the world will be the day the bird will decide to swim and the fish will decide to fly. Stay glued to what you can do.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts

“Fish are divided from us by surfaces and silence.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Eating Animals

“When lightning strikes at sea, why don't all the fish die?”
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

“‪The Timingila: A Strange Fish‬

This is the story of an ancient sea,
And the monster, who made everyone flee.
Timingila was a strange fish,
Being free was his only wish.”
― Shon Mehta, The Timingila

“Those less fortunate eat dried fish while the truly destitute fight with the spiny shells of crabs or lobsters. Decades later, my father will find it incomprehensible that Americans crave what in his childhood was considered repugnant fare.”
― Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors

“Farther out beyond the reef, where the coral gives way to the true deep, at a certain time of day a tribe of flat silver fish gather in their thousands. To be there is to be surrounded by living shards of light. At a secret signal, all is chaos, a thousand mirrors shattering about him. Then the school speeds to sea and the boy is left in sedate water, a tug and pull of the body as comfortable as sitting in his father’s outspread sarong being sung to sleep.”
― Nayomi Munaweera, Island of a Thousand Mirrors

“I routinely inform people when I meet them that I am like a real life version of Dory the fish, as I am very forgetful and have problems tracking conversations.”
― Steven Magee

“Into the sea I’d love to sink
When with both eyes a shark can blink
Is he a brave fish or a marine man?
Through those closed eyelids my heart will he scan?”
― Munia Khan

“Когато е влюбен, мъжът, дори да не е бил никога рибар, хвърля въдица. Закача на нея собственото си желание, слага за всеки случай щипка искреност и неизменно оставя дъх на мускус. После замята. Понякога жената, към която е насочено цялото това усилие, долавя стръвта. Друг път я вижда, но се прави, че я няма. Случва се на кукичката да се хване съвсем различна риба, неочаквана и със сигурност изненадваща за рибаря. Мъжът обаче е упорит. Мъжът и милионите мъже преди него, които са скрили последния си дъх в костите му, са изкусни в този занаят - чакането. Майсторството им е филигранно. Нали така са предавали гените си ден след ден, век след век…”
― Radostina A. Angelova, Афиши в огледалото

“Well, clearly not. Goodness boss, just look at those filthy paws. I’ve never seen any fish carry paws like those. Usually they are cleaner.”
― H.S. Crow, Lunora and the Monster King

“Only foolish fishes wish to fly!”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Six Words Inspiration

“Atheism is the philosophical equivalent of a fish denying the existence of land because he lacks the means to experience it.”
― J.Adam Snyder

“We all know the saying that if you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. What we don’t know is that if we teach a man to teach another how to fish, we feed a whole tribe for lifetimes to come.”
― Charbel Tadros

“At the kneading trough in the bakehouse, he and Philip pummeled maslin dough until the dull-skinned clods stretched and sprang. A scowling Vanian showed them how to make the airy-light manchet bread that the upper servants ate, then the pastes for meat-coffins and pie crusts. They baked flaking florentine rounds and set them with peaches in snow-cream or neats' tongues in jelly. They stood over the ovens to watch cat's tongue biscuits, waiting for the moment before they browned. John mixed the paste for dariole-cases, working the mixture with his fingertips, then filled them with sack creams and studded them with roasted pistachio nuts. In the fish house across the servants' yard, the two boys scaled and cleaned the yellow-green carp from the Heron Boy's ponds, unpacked barrels of herrings and hauled sides of yellow salt-fish onto the benches and beat them with the knotted end of a rope.”
― Lawrence Norfolk, John Saturnall's Feast

“Always know that at the end of any break up; there’s plenty of fish in the sea, Just go to the edge and catch another one; or dive in to swim with the beautiful one, and tie it to yourself forever.”
― S.O'Sade

“For the gaming fishermen there was the Whatoosie River and its native cocka-snoek, the main game fish of the resident Skegg’s Valley Dynamite Fishing Club. Cocka-snoek were wily and tough and rather too bright for mere fish. You wouldn’t catch much with a rod around here. Many inexperienced visitors would find the bait stolen from their hooks, which punctuated the discovery that their lines had somehow got snagged and tangled irretrievably around some underwater obstruction – sometimes tied together with neat little bows. Often, several direct hits with hand grenades were needed to stun the creatures long enough just to catch them, gut them and fry them, but these former military types had become experts at it. For a modest fee, tours could be arranged via the booking office, which included an overnight stay on the banks of the river where one could drop off to a great night’s sleep after a satisfying meal of cocka-snoek done on an open fire, and the sound the bits of shrapnel made rattling in your stomach.”
― Christina Engela, Loderunner

“If you are trying to look clean, neat and avoid casting your nets in trouble waters, you will catch no fish.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Become a Better You

“A dream without an action is like a fish without gills. It can’t survive.”
― Israelmore Ayivor, Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts

“She parted her lips as though she were going to scold him, but, after a moment of sitting with her mouth agape like a fish, thought the better of it.”
― Kelsey Brickl, Paint

“Science can't prove everything! Say, a scientist saw a fish splashing in the pond. On the next day he shared it with someone. But, the listener wanted proof. How would the scientist prove that he was speaking the truth?”
― Md. Ziaul Haque

“It’s a shame that sex is not all about pretty girls, flowers, and white lingerie. When it comes down to it, it’s more like a sweaty visit to the abattoir, followed by a salty fish market.”
― Robert Black

“The pearlfish swims up a sea cucumber's anus, makes itslef comfortable, and eats its host's gonads.”
― Matt Simon, The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar: Evolution's Most Unbelievable Solutions to Life's Biggest Problems

“Do you guys have any questions?" she asked after they popped their first tastes.
"Is there butter in this branzino al sala?" asked a ruddy-cheeked guy who was the latest addition to the team, his mouth full of fish.
"First, 'sala' is a room. It's 'sale'- as in 'salt.' But only tell people that if they specifically ask, otherwise they'll assume it's too salty. And tell them the salt, which dries into a hard crust that's cracked open at the end, preserves the fish's natural flavors and juices as it cooks so it's moist and tender. And no butter, just olive oil, fresh thyme, chervil, and lemon."
"Push this one, guys. We're selling it at thirty-three bucks a pop," Bernard said without looking up from his clipboard.
"Really?" Georgia said. "A little high for my taste, but almost worth it."
"So, it's rich and flavorful?" the new guy continued hopefully.
She shook her head. "Subtle and delicate. Tell them we only serve this when the branzino is really top-notch. Say that and it'll fly.”
― Jenny Nelson, Georgia's Kitchen

“There were rumours of underwater cities, subterranean caves dripping with the blood of human sacrifice and even the odd story about natives interbreeding with some of the more attractive fish.”
― David Grimstone, Shoal: A Thanet Writers Anthology