Lizard Marvel Quotes

You have lost your reason and taken the wrong path. You have taken lies for truth, and hideousness for beauty. You would marvel if, owing to strange events of some sorts, frogs and lizards suddenly grew on apple and orange trees instead of fruit, or if roses began to smell like a sweating horse; so I marvel at you who exchange heaven for earth. I don't want to understand you.

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.

Nevertheless, there are many respects, in tiny and contemptible matters, where our curiosity is provoked every day. How often do we slip, who can count? How many times we initially act as if we put up with people telling idle tales in order not to offend the weak, but then gradually we find pleasure in listening. I now do not watch a dog chase a rabbit when this is happening at the circus. But if by chance I am passing when coursing occurs in the countryside, it distracts me perhaps indeed from thinking out some weighty matter. The hunt turns me to an interest in the sport, not enough to lead me to alter the direction of the beast I am riding, but shifting the inclination of my heart. Unless you had proved to me my infirmity and quickly admonished me either to take the sight as the start for some reflection enabling me to rise up to you or wholly to scorn and pass the matter by, I would be watching like an empty-headed fool. When I am sitting at home, a lizard catching flies or a spider entrapping them as they rush into its web often fascinates me. The problem is not made any different by the fact that the animals are small. The sight leads me on to praise you, the marvellous Creator and orderer of all things; but that was not how my attention first began. It is one thing to rise rapidly, another thing not to fall.

She looked at me with gentle indignation. She was what we have after sixty million years of the Cenozoic. There were a lot of random starts and dead ends. Those big plated pea-brain lizards didn’t make it. Sharks, scorpions and cockroaches, as living fossils, are lasting pretty well. Savagery, venom and guile are good survival quotients. This forked female mammal didn’t seem to have enough tools. One night in the swamps would kill her. Yet behind all that fragility was a marvelous toughness. A Junior Allen was less evolved. He was a skull-cracker, two steps away from the cave. They were at the two ends of our bell curve, with all the rest of us lumped in the middle. If the trend is still supposed to be up, she was of the kind we should breed, accepting sensitivity as a strength rather than a weakness. But there is too much Junior Allen seed around.

Even in the dry heat of summer's end, the great forest was never silent. Along the ground – soft, bare soil, twigs and fallen branches, decaying leaves black as ashes – there ran a continuous flow of sound. As a fire burns with a murmur of flames, with the intermittent crack of exploding knots în the logs and the falling and settling of coal, so on the forest floor the hours of dusky light consumed away with rustlings, patterings, sighing and dying of breeze, scuttlings of rodents, snakes, lizards and now and then the padding of some larger animal on the move. Above, the green dusk of creepers and branches formed another realm, inhabited by the monkeys and sloths, by hunting spiders and birds innumerable -creatures passing all their lives high above the ground. Here the noises were louder and harsher –chatterings, sudden cacklings and screams, hollow knockings, bell-like calls and the swish of disturbed leaves and branches. Higher still, in the topmost tiers, where the sunlight fell upon the outer surface of the forest as upon the upper side of an expanse of green clouds, the raucous gloom gave place to a silent brightness, the province of great butterflies flitting across the sprays in a solitude where no eye admired nor any ear caught the minute sounds made by those marvellous wings.

Kotov looked like an abandoned statue on the beach in the Plaza de Cataluna. The spring was at is height and the warm un bathed the city. The adviser, with his face slightly raised, was receiving the heat like a lizard slothful from the rays that were injecting him with life. He had even taken off his jacket and the printed kerchief he regularly wore after Ramon sat down at his side. 'What a marvelous country!' he said at last, and smiled. 'I could live here for the rest of my life.' 'Despite the Spaniards?' 'Precisely because of you. Where I come from, the people are like stones. You are all flowers. My country smells like smoked herring and hops; here it smells of olive oil and wine.' 'Your pals say we're primitive and practically dumb.' 'Don't pay too much attention to those lunatics. They confuse ideology with mysticism, and they are no more than walking machines - worse still, they're fanatics. Here they make themselves look tough, but you should see them when Moscow calls for them... Na khuy. They shit themselves. Don't look to them as an example; you don't want to be like them. You can be so much more.' p. 162