66 Quotes About Insects

If locusts are ravenous sociopaths, cicadas are more like frat boys - clumsy, loud, and obsessed with sex.

Insects all business all the time.

It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science.

. . . the great British entomologist Sir Vincent Wigglesworth (wonderful name for an insect man, I always thought) . . .

dragonflies circled me, the sun knifing off the brilliant blues and yellows of their bodies.

Dung beetles follow the Milky Way; the Cataglyphis desert ant dead-reckons by counting its paces; monarch butterflies, on their thousand-mile, multigenerational flight from Mexico to the Rocky Mountains, calculate due north using the position of the sun, which requires accounting for the time of day, the day of the year, and latitude; honeybees, newts, spiny lobsters, sea turtles, and many others read magnetic fields. - Kim Tingley, The Secrets of the Wave Pilots

Adult ant-lions come in a variety of sizes and, for the most part, rather drab colouring. They look like extremely untidy and demented dragon-flies. They have wings that seem out of all proportion to their bodies and these they flap with a desperate air, as though it required the maximum amount of energy to prevent them from crashing to the earth.

Flies struggled from her mouth, only to ignite into brilliant golden sparks. Hundreds of them, thousands of them burst from her into their individual pinprick of fire which then was gone for ever, like the distant implosion of a dying star...

Come the rains and the beerbahutis appeared all over the green. From where do they emerge, so perfect in shape and colour, and where do they go?