Quotes About Jellyfish

“Some lessons you learn gradually and some you learn in a sudden moment, like a flash going off in a dark room. I sift and rake and dig around in my vivid recollections of young Sean on the floor in summer, and I try to see what makes him tick, but I know a secret about young Sean, I guess, that he kind of ends up telling the world: nothing makes him tick. It just happens all by itself, tick tick tick tick tick, without any proximal cause, with nothing underneath it. He is like a jellyfish adrift in the sea, throbbing quietly in the warm waves of the surf just off the highway where the dusty white vans with smoked windows and indistinct decals near their wheel hubs roll innocently past.”

— John Darnielle

“Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ... Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.”

— Daniel Quinn

“But maybe that is not possible; maybe, in fact, the brainlessness of the box jellyfish is a direct consequence of its tremenous powers of sight. Perhaps neither the animal nor the prophet has been invented who could process so thorough a vision. It is disquieting enough to be hyperacute or hypersensitive; perhaps being both would very soon melt your brain and leave you quiescent, hanging transparently in the giant dancing green waters of the world.”

— Amy Leach

“I'd chosen this spot. We'd tried to get out in the water once, but it was summer and people were everywhere. Even at night, there were bonfire parties and midnight surfers. We'd all snuck out and come here at three in the morning a few weeks ago, but nothing had worked right. It was too hard to concentrate and work to stay afloat offshore. Plus, there were jellyfish everywhere, and once Eli got stung, he refused to go back in.”

— Elizabeth Norris

“Whereupon a strange euphoria came over me. Not only was I exiled, paralyzed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.”

— Jean-Dominique Bauby

“[Jellyfish] are 97% water or something, so how much are they doing? Just give them another 3% and make them water. It's more useful.”

— Karl Pilkington

“How remarkable we are in our ability to hide things from ourselves - our conscious minds only a small portion of our actual minds, jellyfish floating on a vast dark sea of knowing and deciding.”

— Andrew Sean Greer

“Who's going to rob us? A crackhead crab? A jellyfish junkie?”

— Kathy Reichs

“Some plants, some small water creatures give a sort of jellyfish sort of birth by breaking apart, by separating themselves from themselves.”

— H.D.

“Jellyfish do not respond to reason, they usually don't respond to kindness, and they will always show up to ruin a fun party if possible.”

— Kelly Williams Brown

“The U.S. was the immigration country of choice even for alien jellyfish things that turned humans into scary monsters. It made you proud, really.”

— Gini Koch

“Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman's life ...”

— Arundhati Roy

“... imagine that the earth-four thousand six hundred million years old-[were] a forty-six-year-old woman ... . It had taken the whole of the Earth Woman's life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The Earth Woman was eleven years old ... when the first single-celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty-five-just eight months ago-when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it began only two hours ago in the Earth Woman's life ... . It was an awe-inspiring and humbling thought ... that the whole of contemporary history, the World Wars, the War of Dreams, the Man on the Moon, science, literature, philosophy, the pursuit of knowledge-was no more than a blink of the Earth Woman's eye.”

— Arundhati Roy

“A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frigthtened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid.
Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.
"It looks beautiful", her mother had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. "It is beautiful. But it makes people sick."
To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilles, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.
And then, last week.”

— Megan Abbott

“I scoop a clattering cascade of green apple Jelly Bellys into the white paper bag and remember when we were seven. I got stung by a jellyfish. Tim cried because his mother, and mine, wouldn't let him pee on my leg, which he'd heard was an antidote to the sting.”

— Huntley Fitzpatrick

“As I pulled into the parking lot, I reflected that odds were that not a lot of clandestine meetings involving mystical assassination, theft of arcane power, and the balance of power in the realms of the supernatural had taken place in a Wal-Mart Super Center. But then again, maybe they had. Hell, for all I knew, the Mole Men used the changing rooms as a place to discuss plans for world domination with the Psychic Jellyfish from Planet X and the Disembodied Brains-in-a-Jar from the Klaatuu Nebula. I know I wouldn't have looked for them there.”

— Jim Butcher

“[Australia] is the home of the largest living thing on earth, the Great Barrier Reef, and of the largest monolith, Ayers Rock (or Uluru to use its now-official, more respectful Aboriginal name). It has more things that will kill you than anywhere else. Of the world's ten most poisonous snakes, all are Australian. Five of its creatures - the funnel web spider, box jellyfish, blue-ringed octopus, paralysis tick, and stonefish - are the most lethal of their type in the world. This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes go for you ... If you are not stung or pronged to death in some unexpected manner, you may be fatally chomped by sharks or crocodiles, or carried helplessly out to sea by irresistible currents, or left to stagger to an unhappy death in the baking outback. It's a tough place.”

— Bill Bryson

“It would be spiteful to put a Jellyfish in a trifle.”

— Karl Pilkington

“I think life's a bit of what you make it and a little smidgen of you being the jellyfish, and the tide's just gently helping you along.”

— Andrew Buchan

“Jellyfish," Riaz said, after considering the other inhabitants of the sea. "Seriously, there cannnot be jellyfish changelings."
Hawke turned to look over his shoulder. "What the hell have you been smoking?"
Riaz shruged, his mood undampened. "It was green and leafy.”

— Nalini Singh

“What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get in the habit of thinking, this is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is a much darker and deeper place than this, and much of it is occupied by jellyfish and things.”

— Haruki Murakami

“Why do you like jellyfish so much?" I asked.
"I don't know. I guess I think they're cute," she said. "But one thing did occur to me when I was really focused on them. What we see before us is just one tiny part of the world. We get into the habit of thinking, This is the world, but that's not true at all. The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to forget all that. Don't you agree? Two thirds of the earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see of it with the naked eye is the surface: the skin. We hardly know anything about what's beneath the skin.”

— Haruki Murakami

“The real world is in a much darker and deeper place than this, and most of it is occupied by jellyfish and things. We just happen to to forget all that. Don't you agree? Two-thirds of earth's surface is ocean, and all we can see with the naked eye is the surface: the skin.”

— Haruki Murakami

“I am a disaster magnet. I came home from our first anniversary vacation with jellyfish stings, a puncture wound from a wrought iron pineapple and a cork-shaped bruise in my cleavage.”

— Molly Harper

“I don't like jellyfish, they're not a fish, they're just a blob.
They don't have eyes, fins or scales like a cod.
They float about blind, stinging people in the seas,
And no one eats jellyfish with chips and mushy peas.
Get rid of 'em!”

— Karl Pilkington

“The prize was really for the molecule. In 1962, Osamu Shimomura discovered a protein in a jellyfish that caused it to glow bright green. With colleagues, 30 years later, I was able to insert this G.F.P. gene into bacteria and make them turn green.”

— Martin Chalfie

“'SpongeBob SquarePants' is a great show, and it centers on a character that is courageously nice. Why is SpongeBob interesting? It's because he has passion. He has a passion for chasing jellyfish.”

— Vince Gilligan

“He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence.”

— Don DeLillo

“The body is so easily damaged, so easily disposed of, water and chemicals is all it is, hardly more to it than a jellyfish drying on sand.”

— Margaret Atwood

“It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water.”

— Margaret Atwood

“He slides off into half-sleep and dreams of Oryx, floating on her back in a swimming pool, wearing an outfit that appears to be made of delicate white tissue-paper petals. They spread out around her, expanding and contracting like the valves of a jellyfish. The pool is painted a vibrant pink. She smiles up at him and moves her arms gently to keep afloat, and he knows they are both in great danger.”

— Margaret Atwood

“They have no harsh edges with each other, no spiny conflicts, they ride through life like conjoined jellyfish - expanding and contracting instinctively, filling each other's spaces liquidly.”

— Gillian Flynn

“A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes - as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

“Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.”

— Jeffrey Kluger

“I've never been hurt by a sea creature, except for jellyfish and sea urchins.”

— Peter Benchley

“It was the emotional equivalent of being stung in the pride by a jellyfish.”

— Sarah Rees Brennan

“I'd really like to go with you, Agachak. Truly I would ... but I just can't."
"I don't understand. Why not?"
"I'm not allowed to leave home. My mother'd punish me something awful if I did ... "
"But you're the king."
"That doesn't change a thing. I still do what mother says. She tells everybody that I'm the best boy ever when it comes to that."
Agachak resisted a powerful urge to change this half-wit into a toad or perhaps a jellyfish.”

— David Eddings

“Only I still had a problem. The problem was my parents. Of the many things I was afraid of in those days - spiders, insomnia, fish hooks, school dances, hardball, heights, bees, urinals, puberty, music teachers, dogs, the school cafeteria, censure, older teenagers, jellyfish, locker rooms, boomerangs, popular girls, the high dive - I was probably most afraid of my parents.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“Beverly once read a science magazine article about bioluminescence, the natural glow emitted by organisms like fireflies and jellyfish, but she knows the dead also give off a strange illumination, a phosphor that can permanently damage the eyes of the living. Necroluminescence - the light of the vanished. A hindsight produced by the departed body. Your failings backlit by the death of your loved ones.”

— Karen Russell

“Each night I am nailed into place
and forget who I am.
Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkeningly bends over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark,
my father thick upon me
like some sleeping jellyfish.
What voyage is this, little girl?
This coming out of prison?
God help -
this life after death?”

— Anne Sexton

“Nest of Soviet fellow travelers clacking busybodies in a Soviet jellyfish front, sitting here in Leesburg oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.”

— Lyndon LaRouche

“Cautiously, the mouth applied to the valve, I breathe. The gas still creeps over the ground and sinks into all hollows. Like a big, soft jellyfish it floats into our shell-hole and lolls there obscenely.”

— Erich Maria Remarque

“What better way to learn about life in the ocean
and how we are changing it
than through stories of blind zombie worms, immortal jellyfish, and unicorns of the sea? The Extreme Life of the Sea is an insightful book that inspires awe and wonder about our ocean, and brilliantly shows us the immense possibilities of life on Earth.”

— Enric Sala

“Today I saw cancer, cigarettes, and shortness of breath. This is why I walk to the ocean. Swim with sharks and jellyfish. I may never get this chance again. This is why if you want to kiss, you should kiss. If you want to cry, you should cry. And if you want to live, you should live. You don't have to love me. You already did.”

— Ryan Ross

“Nature has provided two great gifts: life and then the diversity of living things, jellyfish and humans, worms and crocodiles. I don't undervalue the investigation of commonalities but can't avoid the conclusion that diversity has been relatively neglected, especially as concerns the brain.”

— Theodore Holmes Bullock

“We need to encourage an attitude of constant questioning, which is a genuine part of our potential as students. If students were required to drop their questions, that would create armies of zombies- rows of jellyfish ... The questioning mind is absolutely necessary.”

— Chogyam Trungpa

“Without fake tan I have the skin tones of a dead jellyfish.”

— Jenny Eclair

“I'd like to be a jellyfish, 'cause jellyfish don't pay rent.”

— Jimmy Buffett

“Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish.”

— Bill Bailey

“A person without conviction is a weak, jellyfish type of individual who mindlessly follows the crowd.”

— Rick Warren