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tortoise QUOTES

tortoise QUOTES

1 " Anyway.
I’m not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven’t actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn’t good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, “What you
have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back
of a giant tortoise.” So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing
on. And she said, “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises. "

― Jonathan Safran Foer , Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

2 " We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imagining of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man. For instance, how much more remarkable it is for us all to be stuck-half of us upside down-by a mysterious attraction, to a spinning ball that has been swinging in space for billions of years, than to be carried on the back of an elephant supported on a tortoise swimming in a bottomless sea. "

― Richard P. Feynman , "What Do You Care What Other People Think?": Further Adventures of a Curious Character

3 " Thought and science are therefore raising problems which their terms of study can never answer, many of which are doubtless problems only for thought. The trisection of an angle is similarly an insoluble problem only for compass and straight-edge construction, and Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise so long as their progress is considered piecemeal, endlessly having the distance between them. However, as it is not Achilles but the method of measurement which fails to catch up with the tortoise, so it is not man but his method of thought which fails to find fulfillment in experience. "

― Alan W. Watts , Nature, Man and Woman

4 " But when oxidation nibbles more slowly - more delicately, like a tortoise - at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations. "

― Alan Bradley , A Red Herring Without Mustard (Flavia de Luce, #3)

5 " The hare of history once more overtakes the tortoise of art. "

― Kurt Vonnegut Jr. , Mother Night

6 " He looked from His heavens and saw it was good, the toes and the crows all looked like they should. The bunny was quick, the finch bright as a daisy, the owl flew at night, and the tortoise was lazy. "

― Lois Greiman , Buffalo Knees

7 " She probably fell asleep and was washed away by the tortoise waves!”
-Arista "

― Khalia N. Hades , Ariel's Demise (A Bittersweet Fairytale, #1)

8 " When we were little," the Mock Turtle went on at last, more calmly, though still sobbing a little now and then, " we went to school in the sea. The master was an old Turtle - we used to call him Tortoise -" " Why did you call him Tortoise, if he wasn't one?" Alice asked." We called him Tortoise because he taught us," said the Mock Turtle angrily: " really you are very dull! "

9 " Mary Hepburn was meanwhile murdering herself up in her room, lying on her bed with the polyethylene sheath of her " Jackie dress" swapped around her head. The sheath was now all steamed up inside, and she hallucinated that she was a great land tortoise lying on its back in the hot and humid hold of a sailing ship of long ago. She pawed the air in perfect futility, just as a land tortoise on its back would have done.As she had often told her students, sailing ships bound out across the Pacific used to stop off in the Galàpagos Islands to capture defenseless tortoises, who could live on their backs without food or water for months. They were so slow and tame and huge and plentiful. The sailors would capsize them without fear of being bitten or clawed. then they would drag them down to waiting longboats on the shore, using the animals' own useless suits of armor for sleds.They would store them on their backs in the dark paying no further attention to them until it was time for them to be eaten. the beauty of the tortoises to the sailors was that they were fresh meat which did not have to be refrigerated or eaten right away. "

10 " 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 , Brideshead Revisited

11 " I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?

You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?

Yes.

It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous.

Such as?

Be not in haste, said the tortoise.
There is nothing here but time.
If you live long enough, you will see.
Of course, though, you will see them from your cage.

Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here?

The tortoise chuckled.

The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in.

What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough?

Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough.

How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked. "

― Patrick Jennings , We Can't All Be Rattlesnakes

12 " I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has. Goes to sleep all winter and doesn't eat anything more than grass as far as I know, to live all the summer. Not an interesting life perhaps, but a very peaceful one. "

― Agatha Christie , Postern of Fate (Tommy and Tuppence, #5)

13 " Om rubed his head. This wasn't god-like thinking. It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn't a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We're like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show tortoise how to fly. Then we let go. "

― Terry Pratchett , Small Gods (Discworld, #13)

14 " A woman needs a man like a tortoise needs a crah helmet. "

― Jeanette E. Mathews

15 " 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

16 " The first requirement of politics is not intellect or stamina but patience. Politics is a very long run game and the tortoise will usually beat the hare. "

17 " 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. "