Liquid Snake Quotes

Identity was a liquid state, ever interchangeable, and adaptable to its surroundings... It was better to not have favourites - a snake didn't mourn when it had to shed its skin.

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!

Most people are afflicted with an inability to say what they see or think. They say there’s nothing more difficult than to define a spiral in words; they claim it is necessary to use the unliterary hand, twirling it in a steadily upward direction, so that human eyes will perceive the abstract figure immanent in wire spring and a certain type of staircase. But if we remember that to say is to renew, we will have no trouble defining a spiral; it’s a circle that rises without ever closing. I realize that most people would never dare to define it this way, for they suppose that defining is to say what others want us to say rather than what’s required for the definition. I’ll say it more accurately: a spiral is a potential circle that winds round as it rises, without ever completing itself. But no, the definition is still abstract. I’ll resort to the concrete, and all will become clear: a spiral is a snake without a snake, vertically wound around nothing. All literature is an attempt to make life real. All of us know, even when we act on what we don’t know, life is absolutely unreal in its directly real form; the country, the city and our ideas are absolutely fictitious things, the offspring of our complex sensation of our own selves. Impressions are incommunicable unless we make them literary. Children are particularly literary, for they say what they feel not what someone has taught them to feel. Once I heard a child, who wished to say that he was on the verge of tears, say not ‘I feel like crying’, which is what an adult, i.e., an idiot, would say but rather, ’ I feel like tears.’ And this phrase -so literary it would seem affected in a well-known poet, if he could ever invent it - decisively refers to the warm presence of tears about to burst from eyelids that feel the liquid bitterness. ‘I feel like tears’! The small child aptly defined his spiral. To say! To know how to say! To know how to exist via the written voice and the intellectual image! This is all that matters in life; the rest is men and women, imagined loves and factitious vanities, the wiles of our digestion and forgetfulness, people squirming- like worms when a rock is lifted - under the huge abstract boulder of the meaningless blue sky.

What’s up with your hair?’ I ask. ‘Aren’t you worried you’ll be spotted by angels flying above with all that blue?’ ‘War paint,’ says Dee, fastening his seatbelt. ‘Except it’s in our hair instead of on our faces,’ says Dum, starting the engine. ‘Because we’re original like that.’ ‘Besides, are poisonous frogs worried about being spotted by birds?’ asks Dee. ‘Are poisonous snakes? They all have bright markings.’ ‘You’re a poisonous frog now?’ I ask. ‘Ribbit.’ He turns and flicks out his tongue at me. It’s blue. My eyes widen. ‘You dyed your tongue too?’ Dee smiles. ‘Nah. It’s just Gatorade.’ He lifts up a bottle half-full of blue liquid. ‘Gotcha.’ He winks. ‘“Hydrate or Die,” man,’ says Dum as we turn onto El Camino Real. ‘That’s not Gatorade’s marketing,’ says Dee. ‘It’s for some other brand.’ ‘Never thought I’d say this,’ says Dum, ‘but I actually miss ads. You know, like “Just Do It.” I never realized how much of life’s good advice came from ads. What we really need now is for some industrious soul to put out a product and give us a really excellent saying to go with it. Like “Kill ’Em All and Let God Sort ’Em Out.”’ ‘That’s not an advertising jingle,’ I say. ‘Only because it wasn’t good advice back in the day,’ says Dum. ‘Might be good advice now. Attach a product to it, and we could get rich.

One snake wasn’t enough. Time for Perl’s suggestion. I handed everyone two capsules and a pin. “Get as close to the guards as you can. Poke a small hole in the capsule and squirt the liquid near them. Don’t get it on you,” I instructed. “Why not?” Leif asked. “You’ll have a necklace snake trying to mate with you.” “Gee, Yelena. I’m so glad you’re home,” Leif grumbled. “It’s good to know Mother is doing something useful with her time.” “I thought your mother madeperfumes,” Moon Man said. “It all depends on how you look at it

The Loneliness of the Military Historian Confess: it's my profession that alarms you. This is why few people ask me to dinner, though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary. I wear dresses of sensible cut and unalarming shades of beige, I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's: no prophetess mane of mine, complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters. If I roll my eyes and mutter, if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene, I do it in private and nobody sees but the bathroom mirror. In general I might agree with you: women should not contemplate war, should not weigh tactics impartially, or evade the word enemy, or view both sides and denounce nothing. Women should march for peace, or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery, spit themselves on bayonets to protect their babies, whose skulls will be split anyway, or,having been raped repeatedly, hang themselves with their own hair. There are the functions that inspire general comfort. That, and the knitting of socks for the troops and a sort of moral cheerleading. Also: mourning the dead. Sons,lovers and so forth. All the killed children. Instead of this, I tell what I hope will pass as truth. A blunt thing, not lovely. The truth is seldom welcome, especially at dinner, though I am good at what I do. My trade is courage and atrocities. I look at them and do not condemn. I write things down the way they happened, as near as can be remembered. I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same. Wars happen because the ones who start them think they can win. In my dreams there is glamour. The Vikings leave their fields each year for a few months of killing and plunder, much as the boys go hunting. In real life they were farmers. The come back loaded with splendour. The Arabs ride against Crusaders with scimitars that could sever silk in the air. A swift cut to the horse's neck and a hunk of armour crashes down like a tower. Fire against metal. A poet might say: romance against banality. When awake, I know better. Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters, or none that could be finally buried. Finish one off, and circumstances and the radio create another. Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently to God all night and meant it, and been slaughtered anyway. Brutality wins frequently, and large outcomes have turned on the invention of a mechanical device, viz. radar. True, valour sometimes counts for something, as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right - though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition, is decided by the winner. Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades and burst like paper bags of guts to save their comrades. I can admire that. But rats and cholera have won many wars. Those, and potatoes, or the absence of them. It's no use pinning all those medals across the chests of the dead. Impressive, but I know too much. Grand exploits merely depress me. In the interests of research I have walked on many battlefields that once were liquid with pulped men's bodies and spangled with exploded shells and splayed bone. All of them have been green again by the time I got there. Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day. Sad marble angels brood like hens over the grassy nests where nothing hatches. (The angels could just as well be described as vulgar or pitiless, depending on camera angle.) The word glory figures a lot on gateways. Of course I pick a flower or two from each, and press it in the hotel Bible for a souvenir. I'm just as human as you. But it's no use asking me for a final statement. As I say, I deal in tactics. Also statistics: for every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

The home of the young bride and her widower groom lies in Travancore, at the southern tip of India, sandwiched between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats—that long mountain range that runs parallel to the western coast. The land is shaped by water and its people united by a common language: Malayalam. Where the sea meets white beach, it thrusts fingers inland to intertwine with the rivers snaking down the green canopied slopes of the Ghats. It is a child’s fantasy world of rivulets and canals, a latticework of lakes and lagoons, a maze of backwaters and bottle-green lotus ponds; a vast circulatory system because, as her father used to say, all water is connected. It spawned a people—Malayalis—as mobile as the liquid medium around them, their gestures fluid, their hair flowing, ready to pour out laughter as they float from this relative’s house to that one’s, pulsing and roaming like blood corpuscles in a vasculature, propelled by the great beating heart of the monsoon.

In the evenings after dinner, I set myself before Daedalus’ loom. It took me some time to understand it, for it was like no loom I had ever known in the halls of the gods. There was a seat, and the weft was drawn down rather than up. If my grandmother had seen, she would have offered her sea snake for it; the cloth it produced was finer than her best. Daedalus had guessed well: that I would like the whole business of it, the simplicity and skill at once, the smell of the wood, the shush of the shuttle, the satisfying way weft stacked upon weft. It was a little like spell-work, I thought, for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free. Yet my favorite part was not the loom at all, but the making of the dyes. I went hunting for the best colors, madder root and saffron, the scarlet kermes bug and the wine-dark murex from the sea, and alum powder to hold them fast in the wool. I squeezed them, pounded, soaked them in great bubbling pots until the stinking liquids foamed up bright as flowers: crimson and crocus yellow and the deep purple that

John Vernall lifted up his head, the milk locks that had given him his nickname stirring in the third floor winds, and stared with pale grey eyes out over Lambeth, over London. Snowy's dad had once explained to him and his young sister Thursa how by altering one's altitude, one's level on the upright axis of this seemingly three-planed existence, it was possible to catch a glimpse of the elusive fourth plane, the fourth axis, which was time. Or was at any rate, at least in Snowy's understanding of their father's Bedlam lectures, what most people saw as time from the perspective of a world impermanent and fragile, vanished into nothingness and made anew from nothing with each passing instant, all its substance disappeared into a past that was invisible from their new angle and which thus appeared no longer to be there. For the majority of people, Snowy realised, the previous hour was gone forever and the next did not exist yet. They-were trapped in their thin, moving pane of Now: a filmy membrane that might fatally disintegrate at any moment, stretched between two dreadful absences. This view of life and being as frail, flimsy things that were soon ended did not match in any way with Snowy Vernall's own, especially not from a glorious vantage like his current one, mucky nativity below and only reefs of hurtling cloud above. His increased elevation had proportionately shrunken and reduced the landscape, squashing down the buildings so that if he were by some means to rise higher still, he knew that all the houses, churches and hotels would be eventually compressed in only two dimensions, flattened to a street map or a plan, a smouldering mosaic where the roads and lanes were cobbled silver lines binding factory-black ceramic chips in a Miltonic tableau. From the roof-ridge where he perched, soles angled inwards gripping the damp tiles, the rolling Thames was motionless, a seam of iron amongst the city's dusty strata. He could see from here a river, not just shifting liquid in a stupefying volume. He could see the watercourse's history bound in its form, its snaking path of least resistance through a valley made by the collapse of a great chalk fault somewhere to the south behind him, white scarps crashing in white billows a few hundred feet uphill and a few million years ago. The bulge of Waterloo, off to his north, was simply where the slide of rock and mud had stopped and hardened, mammoth-trodden to a pasture where a thousand chimneys had eventually blossomed, tarry-throated tubeworms gathering around the warm miasma of the railway station. Snowy saw the thumbprint of a giant mathematic power, untold generations caught up in the magnet-pattern of its loops and whorls. On the loose-shoelace stream's far side was banked the scorched metropolis, its edifices rising floor by floor into a different kind of time, the more enduring continuity of architecture, markedly distinct from the clock-governed scurry of humanity occurring on the ground. In London's variously styled and weathered spires or bridges there were interrupted conversations with the dead, with Trinovantes, Romans, Saxons, Normans, their forgotten and obscure agendas told in stone. In celebrated landmarks Snowy heard the lonely, self-infatuated monologues of kings and queens, fraught with anxieties concerning their significance, lives squandered in pursuit of legacy, an optical illusion of the temporary world which they inhabited. The avenues and monuments he overlooked were barricades' against oblivion, ornate breastwork flung up to defer a future in which both the glorious structures and the memories of those who'd founded them did not exist.

A man’s penis and a snake share some similarities : both are long; both are flexible; both change in shape and in size when roused; both stretch longer and become firmer when in action; both spit out liquid (the former spits out urine and sperm, the latter spits out venom); both cannot do without holes (the former goes into a hole for maximum pleasure, the latter for safety); both recoil after sufficiently striking their targets.

I punched him in the mouth to shut him up. His lip split and his tongue snaked out to taste the crimson liquid. He grinned seductively, and I climbed off him, rolling my eyes. Vamps. One minute they’re trying to kill you, the next minute they’re trying to screw you.

Annella frantically searched through the sea of people, afraid she was about to drown. Then relief washed over her when she met her father's gaze and made her way back to him. But as she stepped closer, all pleasure left her. A crimson liquid pooled over the fingers that he held to his throat. "Anne," he choked out.... A piercing scream traveled through the streets of Venice.

When the falling nipa-fruits smashed on the jungle floor, they, too, exuded a liquid the colour of blood, a red milk which was immediately covered in a million insects, including giant flies as transparent as the leeches. The flies, too, reddened as they filled up with the milk of the fruit... all through the night, it seemed, the Sundarbans had continued to grow. Tallest of all were the sundri trees which had given their name to the jungle; trees high enough to block out even the faintest hope of sun. The four of us, them, climbed out of the boat; and only when they set foot on a hard bare soil crawling with pale pink scorpions and a seething mass of dun-coloured earthworms did they remember their hunger and thirst. Rainwater poured off leaves all around them, and they turned their mouths up to the roof of the jungle and drank; but perhaps because the water came to them by way of sundri leaves and mangrove branches and nipa fronds, it acquired on its journey something of the insanity of the jungle, so that as they drank they fell deeper and deeper into the thraldom of that livid green world where the birds had voices like creaking wood and all the snakes were blind.

Well, while you were off serenading the moon or whatever the hell you were doing, we ran around in a panic looking for him, only to find him back with the Mystican. Apparently, they enjoyed quite the conversation, which included her handing him a vial of liquid and telling him to put it in his waterskin ‘on the morning of the ninth day,’ and that he was to use it ‘when the snake strikes.

Raven is the most stubborn fucking girl I’ve ever known. She’s venom in the water. Not the snake itself, but the fatal liquid that floats across the top. No matter where you step, if even twenty feet away, she’s finding her way inside. She’s in me. She’s in my brothers.

Something inside the mug. Small and whip thin. It lashed against my upper lip before scraping my front teeth, slimy and foul-tasting. I jerked the mug away from my mouth. The coffee I hadn’t been able to swallow streamed down my chin. The liquid I did swallow came back up in a gurgling, choking cough. I peered into the mug. A circular ripple spread across the coffee’s surface and splashed against the mug’s rim. I tilted the mug, and the thing inside breached the surface—a slick shimmer of gray rising and falling in the mud-brown liquid. I dropped the mug and backed away from the table as coffee rushed across its surface. Riding the wave, like some small sea serpent washing ashore, was a baby snake. It

Much as the din and the feeling of being an unwilling insect carrier wore on my nerves, I still loved the Brood V hatch experience, the way I love big surf, thunderstorms, and oversized rat snakes. They're all reminders that nature is bigger, far bigger, and more powerful than we usually care to admit. Just as the hatch was starting, I stood in line at my favorite garden center behind a young man who was buying two gallons of a deadly liquid insecticide. He was hoping to stop the cicada hatch, to save his trees from what he was sure would be the death of them. The nursery manager rang up the sale, and his eyes met mine as the young man handed over his money. We shook our heads and smiled. I went home to watch the celebration.

Small non-combat pet (Coffee Elemental). Brown liquid flowed up Joe’s arm like a snake, resolving into a small creature that smiled at him with huge, brown eyes. It spoke in a tiny, high-pitched voice, “Drink me?

My insides, They churnin' its burnin' These spirits, they liftin' my spirit I'm leavin' my body, uplifted This liquid, a gift this, it's snake bit It's poison, I know it To hell with, just pour it, just pour it Just pour it, just pour it Just pour it