Quotes about spider
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Ray Comfort photo
Daniel Handler photo

“At this point in the dreadful story I am writing, I must interrupt for a moment and describe something that happened to a good friend of mine named Mr. Sirin. Mr. Sirin was a lepidoptrerist, a word which usually means "a person who studies butterflies." In this case, however, the word "lepidopterist" means "a man who was being pursued by angry government officials," and on the night I am telling you about they were right on his heels. Mr. Sirin looked back to see how close they were--four officers in their bright-pink uniforms, with small flashlights in their left hands and large nets in their right--and realized that in a moment they would catch up, and arrest him and his six favorite butterflies, which were frantically flapping alongside him. Mr. Sirin did not care much if he was captured--he had been in prison four and a half times over the course of his long and complicated life--but he cared very much about the butterflies. He realized that these six delicate insects would undoubtedly perish in bug prison, where poisonous spiders, stinging bees, and other criminals would rip them to shreds. So, as the secret police closed in, Mr. Sirin opened his mouth as wide as he could and swallowed all six butterflies whole, quickly placing them in the dark but safe confines of his empty stomach. It was not a pleasant feeling to have these six insects living inside him, but Mr. Sirin kept them there for three years, eating only the lightest foods served in prison so as not to crush the insects with a clump of broccoli or a baked potato. When his prison sentence was over, Mr. Sirin burped up the grateful butterflies and resumed his lepidoptery work in a community that was much more friendly to scientists and their specimens.”

Lemony Snicket
The Hostile Hospital (2001)

Devendra Banhart photo
Amir Khan (boxer) photo

“I was a mummy's boy; I still am. My mum still gets rid of the spiders off my walls. She comes over, picks them up and chucks them outside. There may be one in my bedroom, and I'll never sleep.”

Amir Khan (boxer) (1986) British boxer

Interview in Daily Telegraph 2 Dec 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/boxing/8928423/Im-never-scared-its-in-the-blood-Amir-Khan-interview.html

Tad Williams photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo
John Dryden photo

“Our souls sit close and silently within,
And their own web from their own entrails spin;
And when eyes meet far off, our sense is such,
That, spider-like, we feel the tenderest touch.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Mariage à la Mode, Act ii, scene 1.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Cormac McCarthy photo

“…and he is as eitherhanded as a spider,…”

Blood Meridian (1985)

“To change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot.”
“What about?”
“Free will.”
“Free will?”
“Yeah,” he said, trying not to fidget, a weird feeling in his head. “I reckon free will is bullshit.”
“You need to get some sleep, Spider.”
“No, no, I feel okay, more or less.”
“Free will,” she said, shaking her head.
“It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. Everything is already sorted out, every decision, every possibility, it’s all determined, scripted, whatever.”
Iris was looking at him as if she was worried. “Where’d all this come from?”
“I’ve been to the End of bloody Time, Iris. From that perspective, everything is done and settled. Basically, everything that could happen has happened. It’s all mapped out, documented, diagrammed, written up in great big books, and ignored.”
“You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Spider?”
“Maybe not crazy enough,” he said.
Iris was still struggling for traction on the conversation. “You think everything is predetermined? Is that it? But what about—”
“No. You just think you have free will.”
“So, according to you,” Iris said, looking bewildered, “a guy who kills his wife was always going to kill her. She was always going to die.”
“From his point of view, he doesn’t know that, and neither does she, but yeah. She was always a goner, so to speak.”
“There is no way I can accept this,” she said. “It’s intolerable. It robs individual people of moral agency. According to you nobody chooses to do anything; they’re just following a script. That means nobody’s responsible for anything.”
“I said free will is an illusion. We think we’ve got moral agency, we think we make choices. It’s a perfect illusion. It just depends on your point of view.”
“It’s a bloody pathway to madness, I reckon,” Iris said.
“I dunno,” he said. “Right now, sitting here, thinking about everything, I think it makes a lot of sense. Kinda, anyway.””

“Think you’ll find that’s just an illusion,” she said, and flashed a tiny smile.
Source: Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008), Chapter 22 (pp. 271-272)

Tryon Edwards photo
Edward Thomas photo
Ray Bradbury photo
John Keats photo
Brandon Boyd photo

“She is a girl so I wouldn’t slap her. I would lock her in a room full of spiders and let her think about what she’s doing to the youth of America.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

On what he would do if he met Britney Spears

Mitch Albom photo
Nina Kiriki Hoffman photo
Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas photo

“Or almost like a spider, who, confin'd
In her web's centre, shakt with every winde,
Moves in an instant if the buzzing flie
Stir but a string of her lawn canapie.”

Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544–1590) French writer

First Week, Sixth Day. Compare: "Much like a subtle spider which doth sit In middle of her web, which spreadeth wide; If aught do touch the utmost thread of it, She feels it instantly on every side", John Davies, The Immortality of the Soul.
La Semaine; ou, Création du monde (1578)

Derren Brown photo
John Davies (poet) photo
Colley Cibber photo
Margaret Cavendish photo
Harry Harrison photo

“We live on the circumference of a hollow circle. We draw the circumference, like spiders, out of ourselves: it is all criticism of criticism.”

Laura Riding Jackson (1901–1991) poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer

"The Corpus", from Anarchism Is Not Enough (London: Jonathan Cape, 1928)

Michel Foucault photo

“Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide.”

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

Charles Churchill (satirist) photo

“There webs were spread of more than common size,
And half-starved spiders prey’d on half-starved flies.”

Charles Churchill (satirist) (1731–1764) British poet

The Prophecy of Famine: A Scots Pastoral (1763), line 327

Adam Mickiewicz photo

“Monsters merge and welter through the water's mounting
Din. All hands, stand fast! A sailor sprints aloft,
Hangs, swelling spider-like, among invisible nets,
Surveys his slowly undulating snares, and waits.”

Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) Polish national poet, dramatist, essayist, publicist, translator, professor of Slavic literature, and polit…

"The Crossing" http://www.ap.krakow.pl/nkja/literature/polpoet/mic_crim.htm.
Crimean Sonnets

“It's really two movies crammed into one, the first of which is a lot better than the second. Spider-Man 3 starts out strong but before it finishes, many viewers will desperately wish it had called it quits an hour earlier.”

James Berardinelli (1967) American film critic

Review http://www.reelviews.net/php_review_template.php?identifier=573 of Spider-Man 3 (2007).
Two star reviews

Robert E. Howard photo

“The spider spinning his web for the unwary fly. The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield.”

Garrett Fort (1900–1945) screenwriter

Dracula, speaking to Harker at his castle
Dracula (1931)

Imre Kertész photo

“Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.”

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) Hungarian writer

Liquidation (2003)
Context: But I believe in writing — nothing else; just writing. Man may live like a worm, but he writes like a god. There was a time when that secret was known, but now it has been forgotten; the world is composed of disintegrating fragments, an incoherent dark chaos, sustained by writing alone. If you have a concept of the world, if you have not yet forgotten all that has happened, that you have a world at all, it is writing that has created that for you, and ceaselessly goes on creating it; Logos, the invisible spider’s thread that holds our lives together.

“No more spider,
No more leaf,
No more me,
No more belief.”

Brownish Spider.
Brother Sun, Sister Moon (2006)

“The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

From a letter published in The Merry Heart : Reflections on Reading Writing, and the World of Books (1996).
Context: To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.

Katie Melua photo
Francis Bacon photo

“Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own.”

Aphorism 95
Novum Organum (1620), Book I
Context: Those who have handled sciences have been either men of experiment or men of dogmas. The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own. Not unlike this is the true business of philosophy; for it neither relies solely or chiefly on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it, but lays it up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been made), much may be hoped.

Bill Bailey photo

“Even if you’re not particularly religious, then you have to admit that religion surrounds us even in the most mundane aspects of our lives. I was trying to rent a car, and the bloke said to me: "You’re not covered for acts of God."
I said: "What do you mean by that?", he said: [waving arms] "Woooooh!"
I said, "Can you be a bit more specific?", and he went, [vaguely gesticulating] "Eh… ooooh… uh?"
I said, "I’m intrigued because you said 'acts of God', and not gods, or spirits, or jinn, or nymphs, but 'God', a capital God, a monotheistic religion, maybe a Judeo-Christian religion, which would imply a belief system, which would perhaps lead to free-will and determinism, so logically anything that man does directly or indirectly is in fact an act of God, so I’m not covered for anything!"
He said, "I’ll get the manager."
Then I said, "What do you mean by an act of God? What do you mean by that?"
He said, "I dunno, a plague of locusts or something."
"'A plague of locusts'? They swarm round the vehicle, rip the wing mirrors off, and I’m liable for a fifty pound excess?”
And he said, "No, like, rain or something."
I said, "Yeah, but how much rain? It’s drizzling a bit now, is that an act of God? At what point does the rain reach a certain level beyond which it takes on the more apocalyptic mantle of the water-based punishment of the Lord!?"
And he said, [despairing] "I just work Saturdays."
I said "You can’t answer me, can you? Your policy is riddled with theological inconsistency. You disgust me. You twist and turn. You remind me of the Siberian hunting spider, which adopts a highly-convincing limp in three of its eight legs in order to attract its main prey, the so-called Samaritan squirrel, which takes pity on the spider, and then the spider jumps on it and injects the paralysing venom, and the squirrel remains bafflingly philosophical about the whole thing. Not to be confused with the Ukrainian hunting spider, which actually has got a limp and is, as such, completely harmless, and a little bit bitter about the whole thing: [imitating spider] 'Siberian spider have good leg, have nice day, can catch fly, can make web, can catch fly for family, I can do nothing, my leg, it drags behind! It drags! [audience laughs] And you laugh! You make fun! Oh, ha, big joke! I am failure! I am freak! [singing] But in my dreams I can fly, I'm the greatest spider in town. But I wake and it's cold, and I feel so old, and my legs are dragging me down.'"
And then the manager came out, and he said: “Stop all that spider singing."”

Bill Bailey (1965) English comedian, musician, actor, TV and radio presenter and author

Pointed to a sign on the wall: a spider with a line through it. "Oh, fair enough."
He said "I can offer you an upgrade, fifty quid, and we can include in it policies set in place by the Marquis de Laplace, the French scientist who declared that all things in the universe are predetermined, so you would be covered even if time-travel was invented during the period of rental.”
I said, "Nah, probably leave it."
Part Troll (2004)

“She was almost the perfectly typical passionate, revolutionary, intellectual woman — a frailer, even more highly strung Rosa Luxemburg. … She made up her own revolution out of her vitals, like a spider or silkworm.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

"Simone Weil" in The Nation (12 January 1957) http://www.cddc.vt.edu/bps/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm
Context: Simone Weil was one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth, or indeed of any other century. I have great sympathy for her, but sympathy is not necessarily congeniality. It would be easier to write of her if I liked what she had to say, which I strongly do not. …I think Simone Weil had both over- and under-equipped herself for the crisis which overwhelmed her — along, we forget, immersed in her tragedy, with all the rest of us. She was almost the perfectly typical passionate, revolutionary, intellectual woman — a frailer, even more highly strung Rosa Luxemburg. … She made up her own revolution out of her vitals, like a spider or silkworm. She could introject all the ill of the world into her own heart, but she could not project herself in sympathy to others. Her letters read like the more distraught signals of John of the Cross in the dark night.

Annie Dillard photo
Julie Taymor photo

“Spider-Man is a genuine American myth with a dark, primal power … but it’s also got this great superhero, and — hey!”

Julie Taymor (1952) American film and theatre director

he can fly through the theater at 40 miles an hour. It’s got villains, it’s got skyscrapers, it’s colorful, it’s Manhattan. I knew it would be a challenge, but I saw the inherent theatricality in it, and I couldn’t resist.
As quoted in "KA-POW! Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" http://www.vogue.com/magazine/article/ka-pow-spider-man-turn-off-the-dark/ by Adam Green at Vogue.com

Dylan Moran photo
Jerry Seinfeld photo
Antoinette Brown Blackwell photo

“Nature's sturdiest buds and her best-fed butterflies belong to this sex; her female spiders are large enough to eat up a score of her little males; some of her mother-fishes might parody the nursery-song, "I have a little husband no bigger than my thumb."”

Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) American minister

September 1874, Popular Science Monthly Vol. 5, Article: The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction , p. 608
The Alleged Antagonism Between Growth and Reproduction (1874)

“every generation deserves at least 5 movies named "Spider Man 2"”

Dril Twitter user

[ Link to tweet https://twitter.com/dril/status/1250346754194591744]
Tweets by year, 2020

Shelley Winters photo

“I've been away from Hollywood so long, I feel like a spider on a wedding cake.”

Shelley Winters (1920–2006) actress

On the set of Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1960), as quoted in "Rambling Reporter" by Mike Connolly, Hollywood Reporter (December 10, 1958), p. 2

Robert Sheckley photo

“I’ve heard that some of the larger spiders hunt songbirds. I have no objection to that. The spiders belong here, too. Let nature do what it needs to do. We who are people know more than to guide ourselves by nature’s practices.”

Robert Sheckley (1928–2005) American writer

The Tales of Zanthias (published in Weird Tales (July-August, 2003); reprinted in David G. Hartwell (ed.), Year’s Best Fantasy 4 (pp. 400-401))
Short fiction

David Attenborough photo

“A spider. Quite big enough and succulent enough to provide a snack for a Scops.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

"Meat-Eaters"
The Life of Birds (1998)