Quotes About Turtles

“The turtle stands on a turtle, which stands on a turtle. That's the universe in whole, boy. It's turtles all the way down.”

— Bill Willingham

“Kansas is not easily impressed. It has seen houses fly and cattle soar. When funnel clouds walk through the wheat, big hail falls behind. As the biggest stones melt, turtles and mice and fish and even men can be seen frozen inside. And Kansas is not surprised.
Henry York had seen things in Kansas, things he didn't think belonged in this world. Things that didn't. Kansas hadn't flinched.”

— N.D. Wilson

“We can see the mind as a lotus. Some lotuses are still stuck in the mud, some have climbed above the mud but are still underwater, some have reached the surface, while others are open in the sun, stain-free. Which lotus do you choose to be? If you find yourself below the surface, watch out for the bites of fishes and turtles.”

— Ajahn Chah

“What are you doing?" my mom asked. One side of her mouth curled up.
"I'm trying to move that cup."
My parents laughed. I concentrated on the coffee cup, but it didn't budge.
"I guess I'll have to work on this telekinesis thing. It'll come in handy when Ben is hogging the TV remote and forcing me to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for the fifty-millionth time.”

— Michelle K. Pickett

“Every child should have mud pies, grasshoppers, water bugs, tadpoles, frogs, mud turtles, elderberries, wild strawberries, acorns, chestnuts, trees to climb. Brooks to wade, water lilies, woodchucks, bats, bees, butterflies, various animals to pet, hayfields, pine-cones, rocks to roll, sand, snakes, huckleberries and hornets; and any child who has been deprived of these has been deprived of the best part of education.”

— Luther Burbank

“She said, "Daddy thinks that all the world's magic is almost evolved out."
I thought of Roebuck Lake, its swamps and sloughs and loblollies and breaks of cypress and cane, its sunken treetops and stobs and bream beds and sleepy gar rolling over and over and over, its baptizing pools and bridges and mussels and mosquitoes and turkey vultures and, now in the drought, the gray flaking mud-flats and logs crowded with turtles and sometimes a fat snake yawning its tame old cottony mouth like a well-fed dog in a pen.
I said, "Is that what the freak show is?"
She said, "Dirty miracles.”

— Lewis Nordan

“Wild Spanish cattle were easily acquired with a rope - within a year we had a hundred head. Hogs and mustang horses were also for the taking. There were deer, turkey, bear, squirrel, the occasional buffalo, turtles and fish from the river, ducks, plums and mustang grapes, bee trees and persimmons - the country was rich with life the way it is rotten with people today. The only problem was keeping your scalp attached.”

— Philipp Meyer

“Like if Leonardo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles started being all bummed out about everything. How were we going to kick arse if our Leonardo was wearing a black eye-band instead of a blue one?”

— Dougie Poynter

“A turtle without a shell is a very strange thing. Even with shells, turtles are very strange things, with their miniature elephant's feet, parrot's beak and ludicrous tail.
-pg 30”

— Albert Sanchez Pinol

“JOHNNA: When a Cheyenne baby is born, their umbilical cord is dried and sewn into this pouch. Turtles for girls, lizards for boys. And we wear it for the rest of our lives. JEAN: Wow. JOHNNA: Because if we lose it, our souls belong nowhere and after we die our souls will walk the Earth looking for where we belong.”

— Tracy Letts

“The ship started a school of fliers that skipped along the wave tops like shining silver coins.
"These are the ghosts of treasures ost at sea," the cook went on, "the murder things, emeralds and diamonds and gold; the sins of men, committed for them, stick to them and make them haunt the ocean. Ah! It's a poor thing if a sailor will not make a grand tale about it."
Henry pointed to a great tortoise asleep on the surface. "And what is the tale of the turtles?" He asked.
"Nothing; only food ...”

— John Steinbeck

“And the turtles, of course ... all the turtles are free, as turtles and, maybe, all creatures should be.”

— Dr. Seuss

“Pandora, meet my brothers, Leonardo and Michelangelo."
"Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?" she couldn't resist asking.
"Like the Renaissance painters," Leo snapped. He exchanged a snarl with his twin brother. "I seriously hate those damned turtles.”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“Even a mentally challenged shark would figure out that sea turtles did not wear boxer shorts printed in flying piggies, and no sea turtle would be yattering streams of obscenities between chain-smoker gasps of breath.”

— Christopher Moore

“At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: "You think we're slow? Look at that guy." To store up the snail's morale in the same way, there was a rock.”

— Christopher Moore

“Like they'd never seen a hot professor before. You made quite an impression in your turtleneck."
"Ah, yes, the turtleneck. Turtles have that effect on people.”

— Sylvain Reynard

“Your brother?" St. Clair points above my bed to the only picture I've hung up. Seany is grinning at the camera and pointing at one of my mother's research turtles,which is lifting its neck and threatening to take away his finger. Mom is doing a study on the lifetime reproductive habits of snapping turtles and visits her brood in the Chattahoochie River several times a month. My brother loves to go with her, while I prefer the safety of our home. Snapping turtles are mean.
"Yep.That's Sean."
"That's a little Irish for a family with tartan bedspreads."
I smile. "It's kind of a sore spot. My mom loved the name,but Granddad-my father's father-practically died when he heard it.He was rooting for Malcolm or Ewan or Dougal instead."
St. Clair laughs. "How old is he?"
"Seven.He's in the second grade."
"That's a big age difference."
"Well,he was either an accident or a last-ditch effort to save a failing marriage.I've never had the nerve to ask which.”

— Stephanie Perkins

“I don't want to live in a world where I could say to my daughter, 'There used to be turtles that swam in the ocean.'”

— Angela Kinsey

“The whole reason people fill their homes with furry carnivores and not with, say, iguanas and turtles, is because mammals offer something no reptile ever will. They give affection, they want affection, and respond to our emotions the way we do to theirs.”

— Frans De Waal

“Every Halloween for six years, I was a Ninja Turtle, and Mikey was my favorite. The turtles really made me who I am today. They got me into martial arts, meditation, surfing, skateboarding; big time influence on who I am today.”

— Greg Cipes

“'Turtles' was by far my favourite TV show when I was growing up. It would be the show that I would wanna watch more than anything. We'd record it on the big VHS tapes, and I'd watch it before school, after school, on the weekend, wear the costume, have all the weapons.”

— Greg Cipes

“Gradually, the concrete enigma I labored at disturbed me less than the generic enigma of a sentence written by a god. What type of sentence (I asked myself) will an absolute mind construct? I considered that even in the human languages there is no proposition that does not imply the entire universe: to say "the tiger" is to say the tigers that begot it, the deer and turtles devoured by it, the grass on which the deer fed, the earth that was mother to the grass, the heaven that gave birth to the earth. I considered that in the language of a god every word would enunciate that infinite concatenation of facts, and not in an implicit but in an explicit manner, and not progressively but instantaneously. In time, the notion of a divine sentence seemed puerile or blasphemous. A god, I reflected, ought to utter only a single word and in that word absolute fullness. No word uttered by him can be inferior to the universe or less than the sum total of time.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“I have very fond memories of swimming in Walden Pond when we lived in Boston. You'd swim past a log and see all these turtles sunning themselves. Slightly disturbing if you thought about how many more were swimming around your toes, but also rather wonderful.”

— Mark Haddon

“The actual, original 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' I have vague memories of because I was pretty small, but I loved, loved, loved it. I have only those weird, visceral little-kid memories: I remember the extreme flat, two dimensional green that was their skin or the weird pizza with no sauce - it was just like yellow, drippy cheese.”

— Mae Whitman

“I went to a Christian school, and as a kid, we weren't allowed to really watch anything violent, even 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.'”

— Maggie Grace

“I love traveling and seeing new things, learning the histories of different cultures. But I've always wanted to go to the Galapagos to see the giant turtles.”

— Mikaela Shiffrin

“A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on." "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!”

— Anonymous.

“I've been reading titles from IDW for probably as long as they've been in existence. 'Ninja Turtles' is one of my all-time favorite properties ever. I also love, love, love 'Locke & Key.' I also love some of the things they do with pre-existing properties like 'Transformers' and 'Ghostbusters.'”

— Taran Killam

“'Batman Begins' came out and it was really successful, and it had gritty naturalism. And suddenly ... I can't tell you how many movies I was pitched where it was, 'We want to do what you did with 'Batman' but with 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' or whatever.”

— David S. Goyer

“He wanted her to stay, to lie in their boat with him and comfort him, but she vanished when he tried to hold her, and it was getting dark and Green rising, a baleful jade eye. There were water bottles in the racks; but the boat was gone and the salt sea with it, the sea that was a river called Gyoll in which corpses floated, savaged by big turtles with beaks like the beaks of parrots, the river that circled with whorl, the river over which the stars never set. He had come to the end of that river, and it was too”

— Gene Wolfe

“The lesson of every extinction, says the Smithsonian's Doug Erwin, is that we can't predict what the world will be 5 million years later by looking at the survivors.
There will be plenty of surprises. Let's face it: who would've predicted the existence of turtles? Who would ever have imagined that an organism would essentially turn itself inside out, pulling its shoulder girdle inside its ribs to form a carapace? If turtles didn't exist, no vertebrate biologist would've suggested that anything would do that: he'd have been laughed out of town. The only real prediction you can make is that life will go on. And that it will be interesting.”

— Alan Weisman

“To test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved "slowly and insecurely" and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an "ovoid cupola." Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects"-a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased-von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X's inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force”

— Mary Roach

“Tell me something you haven't told anyone else before' 'turtles have the second biggest brain in the world' ' no they don't why did you tell me that' 'because I haven't told that to anyone else”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“Gregori leaned forward. "Can you believe it? We're all a bunch of mutants! Just like the Ninja Turtles."
Angus blinked. "We - we're like ... turtles?"
Gregori burst out lauging.
Ian shook his head, grinning.
Connor snorted. "Nay. We have vampire DNA. No turtles.”

— Kerrelyn Sparks

“Taking care of our families isn't just about putting food on the table today. It's about ensuring that our children and grandchildren will have a habitable world where they can get to know various species of sea turtles.”

— Jane Velez-Mitchell

“Well, I guess we're off, like a herd of mad turtles as my dad used to say.”

— Margaret Weis

“It's turtles all the way down.”

— Lev Grossman

“I loved 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.' It was such a big part of my childhood.”

— Megan Fox

“Most Shadowhunters get their first Marks at twelve. It must have been in your blood."
"Maybe. Although I doubt most Shadowhunters get a tattoo of Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on their left shoulder."
Jace looked baffled. "You wanted a turtle on your shoulder?"
-Jace & Clary, pg. 314-”

— Cassandra Clare

“Maybe. Although I doubt most Shadowhunters get a tattoo of Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on their left shoulder.”

— Cassandra Clare

“Today a child told Santa Ken that he wanted his dead father back and a complete set of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Everyone wants those Turtles.”

— David Sedaris

“Nothing is more important than saving ... the Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels. The humans? The planet does not need humans.”

— James Lee

“What did turtles evolve from? Really, I want to know. And for God's sake, don't say lizards, because turtles are nothing like lizards. They could not be more different.”

— Gwen Stefani

“Whales only get harpooned when they come to the surface, and turtles can only move forward when they stick their neck out, but investors face risk no matter what they do..”

— Charles Jaffe

“Turtles hate heights. They don't even like being a few feet off the ground. It's the main reason they have resisted evolution for so long-fear of heights. Turtle thinking goes thus: Sure, first our scales turn into feathers and the next thing you know we're flying and chirping and perching on trees. We've seen it happen. Thanks, but we're staying right here in the mud where we belong. You're not going to see us flying full-tilt boogie into a sliding glass door.”

— Christopher Moore

“On my door is a cartoon of two turtles. One says, 'Sometimes I would like to ask why he allows poverty, famine and injustice when he could do something about it.' The other turtle says 'I am afraid that God might ask me the same question.'”

— Peter Kreeft

“I wanna put stickers on turtles ... I don't know why.”

— Demetri Martin

“I've got nine dogs, eight birds, turtles, fish and I had wallabies at one point.”

— Gloria Estefan

“Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us ...”

— H.L. Mencken

“If it makes Tom Cruise happy, I don't care if he prays to turtles, ... And I don't think anybody else should.”

— Madonna Ciccone