Quotes about tentacle (26 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“This striving becomes understood completely as an end in itself—to such an extent that it appears as fully outside the normal course of affairs and simply irrational, at least when viewed from the perspective of the "happiness" or "utility" of the single individual. Here, people are oriented to acquisition as the purpose of life; acquisition is no longer viewed as a means to the end of satisfying the substantive needs of life. Those people in possession of spontaneous, fun-loving dispositions experience this situation as an absolutely meaningless reversal of a "natural" condition (as we would say today). Yet this reversal constitutes just as surely a guiding principle of [modern] capitalism as incomprehension of this new situation characterizes all who remain untouched by [modern] capitalism's tentacles.”

Max Weber book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

Source: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905; 1920), Ch. 2 : The "Spirit" of Capitalism

Love , Life , People , Nature

“It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

Unfaithfulness , Disease , Imagination

“I know that an author must be brave enough to chop away clinging tentacles of good taste for the sake of a great work. But this is no great work, you see.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

“I feel like I'm lost in an anime movie" I said, as Coyote picked the thing up. "One of the tentacle-monster ones." Most of them were X-rated and ended up with a lot of dead people.”

Patricia Briggs book River Marked

Source: River Marked

People , Feeling , Animals , Dead

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U. S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”

Junot Díaz book The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Source: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Color , Feeling , Boy

“To me it is quite credible that the Martians may be descended from beings not unlike ourselves, by a gradual development of brain and hands (the latter giving rise to the two bunches of delicate tentacles at last) at the expense of the rest of the body. Without the body the brain would, of course, become a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being.”

H. G. Wells book The War of the Worlds

Book II, Ch. 2 (Ch. 19 in editions without Book division): What We Saw from the Ruined House
The War of the Worlds (1898)

Intelligence , Selfishness

“It was indeed a dead grove, made up of the corpses of trees. Even the wood of these corpses was non-living, a deathly grey, silver-green, with peeling bark; and the bark had also flaked, shrivelling and simply sloughing off like dead skin. And arching along all the dead twigs, crawled a supple, clutching, lashing, bold convolvulus-serpent. It was her leaves which glowed a cheerful green on the dead branches, on all their agonizing bifurcations; it was her flowers which hung on the branches from clusters of tiny suckers and tentacles, astonishingly tender and serene. They were so alien to that austere and honest deathly sterility that they seemed almost dazzling. It was like an explosion of something splendid, like the sombre and magical secret of that dead river and its dry valley. There was something about that copse reminiscent of the hut on chickens' legs, or Koschei's hoard, or the field sown with dead men's bones.”

Yury Dombrovsky book The Faculty of Useless Knowledge

tr. Alan Myers, The Harvill Press, 1996, Part 1, Chapter 2, pp. 100-101
cited and discussed in Peter Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii: Freedom Under Totalitarianism, Routledge, 2000, p. 145 https://books.google.com/books?id=MoLCsjaQT08C&lpg=PA145&ots=ekC9_khOAS&dq=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&pg=PA145#v=onepage&q=%22It%20really%20was%20a%20dead%20grove%22&f=false
The Faculty of Useless Knowledge (1975)

Men , Secret , Flowers , Tree

“How difficult, how extremely difficult for the soul to sever itself from its body the world: from mountains, seas, cities, people. The soul is an octopus and these are its tentacles. … No force anywhere on earth is as imperialistic as the human soul. It occupies and is occupied in turn, but it always considers its empire too narrow. Suffocating, it desires to conquer the world in order to breathe freely.”

Nikos Kazantzakis book Report to Greco

"My Friend The Poet. Mount Athos.", Ch. 19, p. 188
Report to Greco (1965)

People , World , Soul , Mountain

“if a shower of electrons is shot on to a zinc sulfide screen, a number of flashes are produced - one for each electron - and we may picture the electrons as bullet-like projectiles hitting a target. But if the same shower is made to pass near a suspended magnet, this is found to be deflected as the electrons go by. The electrons may now be pictured as octopus-like structures with tentacles or 'tubes of force' sticking out from it in every direction.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

“Ultimately, the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives. The colonies of the United States—and this includes the black ghettoes within its borders, north and south—must be liberated. For a century, this nation has been like an octopus of exploitation, its tentacles stretching from Mississippi and Harlem to South America, the Middle East, southern Africa, and Vietnam; the form of exploitation varies from area to area but the essential result has been the same—a powerful few have been maintained and enriched at the expense of the poor and voiceless colored masses. This pattern must be broken.”

Stokely Carmichael (1941–1998) American activist

"What We Want," http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/09/22/what-we-want/ New York Review of Books, Septmber 22, 1966

People , Color , Country

“Tomas stopped and looked at the three Oankali. “Do you believe in spirits?”
“We believe in life,” Ahajas said.
“Life after death?”
Ahajas smoothed her tentacles briefly in agreement. “When I’m dead,” she said, “I will nourish other life.”
“But I mean—”
“If I died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. In perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one.”
“…it would?”
“Yes. Our ancestors have seeded a great many barren worlds that way. Nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. A world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. That’s what we believe in.”
“Nothing more?””

Octavia E. Butler book Imago

Ahajas became smooth enough with amusement to reflect firelight. “No, Lelka. Nothing more.”
Source: Imago (1989), Chapter II, “Exile” section 12 (pp. 662-663)

Life , Death , World , Way

“Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts.”

Charles Fort (1874–1932) American writer

p279
Wild Talents (1932)

Way , Feeling , Science

“For our genius of a father did not limit himself to math. His brain was an octopus, the tentacles of which extended in all directions. He could scan Latin verse and Greek verse as well, and it was as if he were hearing Homer or Theocritus in person. Not to mention the fact that he read Greek from volumes filled with characters which in no way resembled the ones in our Greek grammar or book of excerpts from Greek literature. He also read Sanskrit, with its truly bizarre letters. He spoke Italian like Dante, Spanish like Cervantes, and so for almost every living language.”

André Weil (1906–1998) French mathematician

From At home with André and Simone Weil by Sylvie Weil, pp. 31–32 https://books.google.com/books?id=OdeDlT9-GBUC&pg=PA31
Quote About

Books , Way , Literature , Reading

“It would, however, be wrong to think of an electron as a bullet-like structure with tentacles sticking out from its surface. We can calculate the mass of the bullet, and also the mass of the tentacles. The two masses are found to be identical, each agreeing with the known mass of the electron. Thus we cannot take the electron to be bullet plus tentacles… The two pictures do not depict two different parts of the electron, but two different aspects of the electron. They are not additive but alternative; as one comes into play, the other must disappear.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Thinking , Parting

“…one straggles gracelessly through a wilderness of common sense. It is an experience for which the reader of modern criticism is unprepared: in that jungle through which one wanders, with its misshapen and extravagant and cannibalistic growths, bent double with fruit and tentacles, disquieting with their rank eccentric life, one comes surprisingly on something so palely healthy: a decorous plant, without thorns or flowers, rootless in the thin sand of the drawing room.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

of Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay by Louis MacNiece, “From That Island”, pp. 31–32
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life , Flowers , Sense , Drawing

“Imagine a book of unexplained mysteries written by a contemporary of Shakespeare. It might include the mystery of the falling stars that sweep through the sky foretelling disaster; the mystery of the Kraken, the giant sea devil with 50-foot tentacles; the mystery of monster bones, sometimes found in caves or on beaches. Such a book would be a curious mixture of truth and absurdity, fact and legend. We would all feel superior as we turned its pages and murmured: "Of course, they didn't know about comets and giant squids and dinosaurs." If this book should happen to find its way into the hands of our remote descendants, they may smile pityingly and say: "It's incredible to think that they knew nothing about epsilon fields or multiple psychic feedback or cross gravitational energies. They didn't even know about the ineluctability of time."”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

But let us hope that such a descendant is in a charitable mood, and might add: "And yet they managed to ask a few of the right questions."
Source: Enigmas and Mysteries (1976), p. 142

Truth , Books , Smile , Hope

“Actually the situation is even more complicated, since a separate tentacle picture is needed for each speed of motion of the electron, the speed being measured relative to the suspended magnet or other object on which the moving electron is to act. …When the electron is at rest, the tentacles stick out equally in all directions. But an electron which is at rest relative to one magnet may be in motion relative to another, and to discuss the action of the electron on this second magnet we must picture it as having a belt of tentacles round its waist. This shows that we must have a different picture for every speed of relative motion, so that the total number of pictures is infinite, and we cannot form the picture we need unless we know the speed of the electron relative to the object it is about to meet.”

James Jeans (1877–1946) British mathematician and astronomer

Physics and Philosophy (1942)

Speed

“The EU is deeply harmful, it is an anti-democratic monster. I want to prevent it from becoming fatter, from continuing to breathe, from grabbing everything with its paws and from extending its tentacles into all areas of our legislation. In our glorious history, millions have died to ensure that our country remains free. Today, we are simply allowing our right to self-determination to be stolen from us.”

Marine Le Pen (1968) French lawyer and politician

Interview with Marine Le Pen: 'I Don't Want this European Soviet Union', Spiegel (3 June 2014) http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-french-front-national-leader-marine-le-pen-a-972925.html

History , Country

“… cell of a tentacle, showing the various forms successively assumed by the aggregated masses of protoplasm.”

Charles Darwin book Insectivorous Plants

Detractors sometimes claim Darwin thought that the cell was an undifferentiated mass of protoplasm. Anyone reading the passage above will realize that Darwin thought no such thing.
Source: Insectivorous Plants (1875), chapter III: "Aggregation of the Protoplasm within the Cells of the Tentacles", page 40 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=55&itemID=F1217&viewtype=image

Success

“With the tentacles of branding reaching into every crevice of youth culture, leaching brand-image content not only out of street styles like hip-hop but psychological attitudes like ironic detachment, the cool hunt has had to go further afield to find unpilfered space and that left only one frontier: the past.”

Naomi Klein (1970) Canadian author and activist

Source: No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies 1999, Chapter Three, "Alt. Everything"

Youth , Past

““I came," she said, "hoping you could talk me out of a fantasy. "Cherish it!" cried Hilarious, fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be.””

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 5

Hope

“It's the ultimate Boston transportation. On land…all those slow cars get in the way. There's public transit – the T — but if you're in good shape, it's usually faster to walk. Bicycles aren't bad. But on water, nothing stops you and there isn't anything important in Boston that isn't within two blocks of being wet. The harbor and the city are interlocked like wrestling squid, tentacles of water and land snaking off everywhere, slashed with bridges or canals.”

Neal Stephenson book Zodiac

Source: Zodiac (1988), Chapter 4

Cars , Way , Water

“One can read too much into one’s own circumstances. I am reminded of one race who set themselves against us—oh, long ago now, before I was even thought of. Their conceit was that the galaxy belonged to them, and they justified this heresy by a blasphemous belief concerning design. They were aquatic, their brain and major organs housed in a large central pod from which several large arms or tentacles protruded. These tentacles were thick at the body, thin at the tips and lined with suckers. Their water god was supposed to have made the galaxy in their image.
“You see? They thought that because they bore a rough physical resemblance to the great lens that is the home of all of us—even taking the analogy as far as comparing their tentacle suckers to globular clusters—it therefore belonged to them. For all the idiocy of this heathen belief, they had prospered and were powerful: quite respectable adversaries, in fact.”
“Hmm,” Aviger said. Without looking up, he asked, “What were they called?”
“Hmm,” Xoxarle rumbled. “Their name…” The Idiran pondered. “…I believe they were called the…the Fanch.”

Iain Banks Culture series

“Never heard of them,” Aviger said.
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Xoxarle purred. “We annihilated them.”
Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 13 “The Command System: Terminus” (pp. 445-446).

God , Home , Water , Reading

“Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of "know nothing, suspect everything" attitudes.”

Margaret Chase Smith (1897–1995) Member of the United States Senate from Maine

Declaration of Conscience (1950)
Context: Today our country is being psychologically divided by the confusion and the suspicions that are bred in the United States Senate to spread like cancerous tentacles of "know nothing, suspect everything" attitudes. Today we have a Democratic Administration that has developed a mania for loose spending and loose programs. History is repeating itself — and the Republican Party again has the opportunity to emerge as the champion of unity and prudence.

Country

“Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 5, “Lost in Committee” (p. 77)

Training , Suicide

“Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind. Huey Newton is a classical revolutionary figure.”

Eldridge Cleaver (1935–1998) American activist

Post-Prison Writings (1969)
1960s

People , History