David Sedaris Quotes

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.

Grizzly bears eat people without the benefit of music.

The sea is a place where every day, half the population eats the other half.

But you can't kill humans It's-- Evil? The world is evil Risika. Wolves hunt the stragglers in a group of deer. Vultures devour the fallen.Hyenas destroy the weak. Humans kill that which they fear. Survive and be strong, or die, cornered by your prey, trembling because the night is dark.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

The duck swallows the worm, the fox kills the duck, the men shoot the fox, and the devil hunts the men.

Nature is one with rapine, a harm no preacher can heal; The Mayfly is torn by the swallow, the sparrow speared by the shrike, And the whole little wood where I sit is a world of plunder and prey.

Nature is a series of murders.

It was a pretty good year for predators.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten.

If you don't hunt it down and kill it, it will hunt you down and kill you.

The perch swallows the grub-worm, the pickerel swallows the perch, and the fisherman swallows the pickerel; and so all the chinks in the scale of being are filled.

In the studio, I always put on National Geographic for inspiration. Looking at lions eating gazelles, all that type of stuff.

[Referring to the birds:] Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him; and how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time.

The whole of nature is a conjugation of the verb to eat, in the active and passive.

The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.

War will exist as long as there's a food chain.

WHEN AUGUSTUS CAME OUT on the porch the blue pigs were eating a rattlesnake—not a very big one. It had probably just been crawling around looking for shade when it ran into the pigs. They were having a fine tug-of-war with it, and its rattling days were over.

Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, planless, endless.

We are like the birds. We adapt. We sing.

I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.

. . . from what he knew about the Creatures of the Dark they wouldn't waste their time laying elaborate traps. They'd just eat someone.

Pacifism is a nice idea but it can get you killed. We're not there yet. Evolution is slow, small pox is fast.

Man wants to see nature and evolution as separate from human activities. There is a natural world, and there is man. But man also belongs to the natural world. If he is a ferocious predator, that too is part of evolution. If cod and haddock and other species cannot survive because man kills them, something more adaptable will take their place. Nature, the ultimate pragmatist, doggedly searches for something that works. But as the cockroach demonstrates, what works best in nature does not always appeal to us.