Snakes Quotes

“Favorite Quotations.
I speak my mind because it hurts to bite my tongue.
The worth of a book is measured by what you carry away from it.
It's not over till it's over.
Imagination is everything.
All life is an experiment.
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly.”
― Pat Frayne, Tales of Topaz the Conjure Cat: Part I Topaz and the Evil Wizard & Part II Topaz and the Plum-Gista Stone

“That was the only decision there was once upon a time: what to do with the night.”
― Harry Crews, A Feast of Snakes

“When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.”
― Stacy Schiff, Cleopatra: A Life

“It's good to see the snakes revealing themselves. They weren't actually hidden at all. People hide behind the masks, but eventually you see them for who they truly are.”
― Amaka Imani Nkosazana, Heart Crush

“Racists are snakes. Their minds are closed but their mouths are wide open, full of venom, ready to sting and destroy people around them.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Human beings and snakes can both kill you, with one major difference:
Human beings will then walk in your funeral, the snakes won't!”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“Le serpent qui danse

Que j'aime voir, chère indolente,
De ton corps si beau,
Comme une étoffe vacillante,
Miroiter la peau!

Sur ta chevelure profonde
Aux acres parfums,
Mer odorante et vagabonde
Aux flots bleus et bruns,

Comme un navire qui s'éveille
Au vent du matin,
Mon âme rêveuse appareille
Pour un ciel lointain.

Tes yeux où rien ne se révèle
De doux ni d'amer,
Sont deux bijoux froids où se mêlent
L’or avec le fer.

A te voir marcher en cadence,
Belle d'abandon,
On dirait un serpent qui danse
Au bout d'un bâton.

Sous le fardeau de ta paresse
Ta tête d'enfant
Se balance avec la mollesse
D’un jeune éléphant,

Et ton corps se penche et s'allonge
Comme un fin vaisseau
Qui roule bord sur bord et plonge
Ses vergues dans l'eau.

Comme un flot grossi par la fonte
Des glaciers grondants,
Quand l'eau de ta bouche remonte
Au bord de tes dents,

Je crois boire un vin de bohême,
Amer et vainqueur,
Un ciel liquide qui parsème
D’étoiles mon coeur!”
― Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal

“One morning as I closed the cyclone-fence gate / to begin a slow drift / down to the cookhouse on foot / (because my truck wheels were glued / in deep mud once again), / I walked straight into / the waiting non-arms of a snake, / its tan beaded-bag skin / studded with black diamonds.

Up it coiled to speak to me a eye level. / Imagine! that sleek finger / rising out of the land's palm / and coiling faster than a Hindu rope. / The thrill of a bull snake / startled in the morning / when the mesas lie pooled / in a custard of light / kept me bright than ball lightning all day.

Praise leapt first to mind / before flight or danger, / praise that knows no half-truth, and pardons all.”
― Diane Ackerman, I Praise My Destroyer: Poems

“The older a wizard grows, the more silent he becomes, like a woody vine growing over time to choke a garden path, deep and full of moss and snakes, running everywhere, impenetrable.”
― F.T. McKinstry, Crowharrow

“I am working on a new book about a boa constrictor and a litter of hyenas. The boa constrictor swallows the babies one by one, and the mother hyena dies laughing.”
― E.B. White

“I'd rather meander through a pit of vipers than love one more person, but since I'm on the subject of snakes, we all know one, or are one.”
― Donna Lynn Hope

“Round and round they went with their snakes, snakily...”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“A snake was never called by its name at night, because it would hear. It was called a string.”
― Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

“A dozen cobras moved as one, shattering their bottles. Wine and glass sprayed the room. The snakes sprang for Isyllt's attacker with fangs unfolded. He screamed high and sharp as they uncoiled, long slick bodies whipping through the air. She wasn't sure if their venom could survive death and pickling, but it didn't seem to matter. After several bites, he curled on the floor, weeping and trying to bat the undead snakes away.”
― Amanda Downum, Kingdoms of Dust

“Four snakes gliding up and down a hollow for no purpose that I could see - not to eat, not for love, but only gliding.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals

“The one area that Winkleman avoided was dealing in contemporary art, which Memling described as "shooting poisonous snakes with a water pistol.”
― Hannah Mary Rothschild, The Improbability of Love

“Copulation of serpents determined my destiny. Boyish, unmanly, I ventured, adventured my way into forests primeval; glanced down in the dirt, in the dirt-trodden path, where I witnessed the scaly sinews of snakes intertwining in love...”
― Phillip Andrew Bennett Low, Monsters in a Mirror: Strange Tales from the Chapel Perilous

“The Aelfinn are not evil, but they are so different from humanity they may as well be so. They are not to be trusted."
—Birgitte Silverbow”
― Robert Jordan, The Complete Wheel of Time

“Insignificance by Stewart Stafford

From the emerald Draco star,
Fell the coiled Rosslyn figure,
Unwinding into elongated form,
The golden crozier of St Patrick.

Faded gods upon ruined temples,
All came alive, screeching creeds,
Overwhelming minds and bodies,
Fanatics expiring from confusion.

In the shamanic ritualistic dance,
Of an in-out, Hokey-Cokey culture,
Spins the stained mah-jongg piece,
The missing link apes checkmate.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“I was raised in the desert and always appreciated the way its landscape gives you a chance to see what's coming. In Florida, dangers don't reveal themselves until it's too late. The alligator lurking in the shallow pond, ready to devour your pet or your child. The snake hidden in the underbrush. The riptide slicing across that postcard-perfect Atlantic. Sinkholes. Encephalitis. Brain-destroying bacteria that flourish in overheated lakes. Quicksand.”
― Laura van den Berg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

“Even the friendliest snake will strike.”
― Sabrina Newby

“Now Hawaii’s climate is turning into a Florida climate, snakes will be in its future!”
― Steven Magee

“You know what snakes are loyal to, son? Their stomachs.”
― Nick Oliveri, The Conjurer

“...common phobias of heights and snakes can be cured relatively easily through short-term desensitization therapy.”
― David M. Buss, Evolutionary Psychology : The New Science of the Mind

“Trust is the foundation of any strong relationship. If I have doubts about your intentions, it's difficult for me to trust your actions. Without trust, even the most well-intentioned actions can be perceived as insincere or suspicious. Therefore, it's important for us to be honest and transparent about our intentions so that we can build a strong foundation of trust in our relationships.”
― Carlos Wallace, The Other 99 T.Y.M.E.S: Train Your Mind to Enjoy Serenity

“With starry eyes we forget what is literally the oldest trick in The Book: that the very first 'liberal' was one of deception - a snake in the Garden - and he corrupted paradise.”
― Criss Jami

“At the shoot, the nine-year old kid placed the twenty-foot python around me as I lay at a forty-five-degree angle on a tree, as still as possible. As the snake slithered slowly around me, I could hear the crew oohing and aahing...Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, a few large spiders appeared out of nowhere to join the snake, and I was done. I told the kid to get that damn snake off me. The shoot was over--nothing else would crawl on me that day.”
― Beverly Johnson

“That evening, doodling in her book of True Things in the henhouse, Donkey drew a snake who had eaten another snake just barely smaller than itself and so was entirely full, from tip to tail. Then she decided that this snake-eating snake would actually be inside another snake, a rattlesnake, so she drew a third snake around it. And she knew that a king snake, immune to venom, would eat a rattlesnake, so she put a fourth snake around the others. She considered then that the snake doodle moved back in time. Before the biggest snake could eat the second-biggest snake, all the inside eating had to have happened already. What she had drawn could not logically be older snakes eating younger snakes but precisely the opposite. The younger snake grew up big enough to devour the older snake, who'd already devoured its elder, and so on back in time. The nested dolls Rose Thorn had given her were perhaps not mothers with babies inside them, but babies grown large enough to eat their mothers. All her life she was afraid of Herself eating her, but maybe there was--- also or instead--- an opposite problem.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“It seems quite the trick to tell the friendly snakes from the other ones.'

'Ah,' Oak says. 'They're all friendly snakes until they bite you.”
― Holly Black, The Prisoner’s Throne

“John Deck was a snake fancier. He had only been rattler-bit a few times. At an early age he'd had his own pit full of diamondbacks, a plywood affair out near the garage. Some of the snakes would scootch themselves up vertically along the boards and John, cocky lad, used to knock them back down with his own quick right hand, until one day he presumed against a snake that was readier than he was, and caught a palmload of fangs.”
― David Quammen, The Boilerplate Rhino: Nature in the Eye of the Beholder