Fish Quotes

“When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money.”
― Native American Saying

“Fish in another man's pond and you will catch crabs.”
― Habeeb Akande

“Some of the young ladies even ate the salmon without concern to vital humors--when everyone knew colored fish flesh could bring on an attack of hysteria.”
― Gail Carriger, Curtsies & Conspiracies

“Fish is the only food that is considered spoiled once it smells like what it is.”
― P. J. O'Rourke

“The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead...

...When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin.

It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair.

Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus...

...Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.”
― Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

“The setting of the sun is a difficult time for all fish.”
― Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

“Go forth and mutilate fish.”
― Janice Hardy, The Shifter

“He looked steadily in my eyes, and held my hand affectionally. “Narissa, let me take you away to a world that you have never known to exist.”
― Keira D. Skye

“Did you ever get the feeling that everything was too perfect? Like the moment was so good that something had to be wrong? Kind of like the way a fish sees that bright, shiny lure just before it chomps down and gets hauled out of water to become someone's lunch.”
― Neal Shusterman, Red Rider's Hood

“In the river swam the gleaming fish, which were meant for water, just as humankind is meant for love.”
― David Paul Kirkpatrick, The Address Of Happiness

“Grandma Donna passed the oyster stuffing and asked my father straight out what he was working on, it being so obvious his thoughts were not with us. She meant it as a reprimand. He was the only one at the table who didn't know this, or else he was ignoring it. He told her he was running a Markov chain analysis of avoidance conditioning. He cleared his throat. He was going to tell us more.
We moved to close off the opportunity. Wheeled like a school of fish, practiced, synchronized. It was beautiful. It was Pavlovian. It was a goddamn dance of avoidance conditioning.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

“But it hadn't just been Sebastian who had been watching me. Rather, it had been tribes of merman and mermaids, who had been curious about this newcomer in town that could outswim any school of small fish.”
― Keira D. Skye

“If you want a fried fish to fly and enter your mouth, you must keep waiting till the unending time ends. Dead fish doesn't fly. If you want to eat it, your own hands must carry it.”
― Israelmore Ayivor

“Did you know in the sea you can find a fish called, SWEETLIPS?"

Ted and Raymond's Sea Adventure”
― Rhonda Patton

“The Pike is the meanest and most vicious of fresh-water fishes. This is caused by heredity and environment, or unfortunate social conditions in the water.”
― Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct

“When I'm in the water I feel as though nothing bad has happened. I think about the fish, how they don't know what's going on. Their world is unchanged. Actually it's probably better now to be a tuna or a sardine or a salmon. Less chance of ending up as somebody's lunch.”
― Susan Beth Pfeffer, Life As We Knew It

“We wouldn't eat an important person like you. Sometimes we'll take a sailor, but —" He shrugged. "— so would you if it was always fish.”
― Clive Barker, Abarat

“It's hard to love a place that's outlawed smoking but finds it perfectly acceptable to serve raw fish in a bath of chocolate.”
― David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

“Pike spawn in February, March, and April because they cannot wait until May.”
― Will Cuppy, How to Become Extinct

“Count the inspirations. The exquisite inspirations that have whispered in the night. And swum away like fish in the cool of morning. Would any of them have altered the patterns of your life? The precise arrangement of your atoms?”
― Jay Woodman, COUNT

“The corridor couldn't have smelled more strongly of fish guts if we had actually been inside a fish.”
― Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

“It was one of those rare moments where one has a vision of the scope of the wild ocean. Not just small cylinders firing to keep a tiny engine running, but rather the giant, massive gears of nature, each one with its own reasoning, its own meta-logic, spinning in its particular circle in competition or in confluence with the gear below it. We zeroed in on the school, but our progress was painfully slow, It would have been foolish to speed into the tumult-we would have ruined our baits in the process and doomed our chances of hooking a tuna.
But luckily, the commotion did not subside. If anything it only grew more frantic and exhuberant on our approach. Beneath the birds, beneath the dolphins, beneath the menhaden, there should have been an equally vast school of giant bluefin tuna, collaborating with vertebrates of the so-called higher orders of life to form the floor of the prey trap, sealing the baitfish in from below, while the dolphins and birds made up the trap's walls and ceiling. A strike from a giant tuna seemed inevitable.....as the boat moved forward, I saw seabirds gathering up ahead into a cloud, the size and violence of which I had never seen before. Gannets - big, albatross-like pelagic birds - flew hundreds of feet above the churning surface of the water. In a flock of many thousands, they whirled in unison and then, as if on command from some brigadier general of bird life, dropped in an arc, bird after bird, into the water beneath. The gyre of gannets turned in a clockwise direction, and down below, spinning counterclockwise, was the largest school of dolphins I'd ever seen. There in the angry blue-green sea, the dolphins had corralled a vast school of menhaden-small herringlike creatures that, when bitten, release globules of oil that float on the surface. Oil slicks flattened the water everywhere as the dolphins swirled around, using their exceptional intelligence and wolf-pack cooperation to befuddle and surround the fish, which in turn whirled in a clockwise direction.”
― Paul Greenberg, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food

“Traveling on, the shaft of his light reached now a great, dully shining oblong, and he stopped, surprised. Then, through the glass sides, he saw bright shapes of fish wheel in schools down the opaque water, startled by the illumination. Coming at last, and so suddenly, on life like his own, Mr. Lecky moved closer. The fixed flood of his light enveloped these small fish dimly, glowed back on him. They came sliding, drifting, mouths in motion, gills rippling, up the light, against the glass. Their senseless round eyes stared at Mr. Lecky. Idling with great grace, the extravagant products of selective breeding - fringetails, Korean, calico - passed, swayed about, came languidly back. Moving faster, stub-finned, crop-tailed danios from the Malabar coast appeared, hovered, taking the light on their fat flanks, now spotted, now iridescent pearl or opal.

Seeing so many of them, so eager and attentive, Mr. Lecky felt an unexpected compunction. He was their only proprietor; and soon, trapped unnaturally here in the big tank, they would starve to death. His light went back to a counter he had just passed, showing him again the half-noticed packages - food for birds and pet animals, food, too, for fish. Returning to the tank, his light found many of the fish still waiting, the rest rushing back. He went and took a package, tore the top off, and poured the contents onto the rectangle of open water. It would perhaps postpone the time when, having eaten each other, the sick remainder must die anyway.”
― James Gould Cozzens, Castaway

“Don’t worry,” I say. “There’s plenty more fish in the sea.”
“But I don’t want a fish,” Davey says. He really did say that and he wasn’t even trying to be funny.
“I mean there’ll be other girls,” I say. “And anyway I’ve been thinking about all this and I’m wondering if we’re a bit too young to be worried about girls. You know, Davey, there are actually loads of boys who haven’t got girlfriends at our school. And even the ones who have don’t really go out with them. They just hang around school and maybe outside Morrisons. What sort of relationship is that? I think we’ve been fooled into submitting to peer pressure and we should just stop and say no! No, I will not feel inferior. I refuse to feel like a loser just because some bimbo isn’t trying to lick my tonsils... And besides, a girl will come along in her own good time. Probably when we're least expecting it!”
― J.A. Buckle, Half My Facebook Friends Are Ferrets

“When there is abundance of fish, we need help to pull the nets.”
― JA Perez

“The fish does not know it is wet. America is immersed in violence. The violence is in our souls. The enemy is within.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“Yes sir, the fish was left in place of the crystal ball. It's been bagged and tagged for analysis.”
Great. Now we have another red herring on our hands.”
― A.F. Stewart, Fairy Tale Fusion

“Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace.”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque