Ants Quotes

“I had the great idea of using markers to gently color the ants so I could tell them apart, but I learned that this is exactly like somebody trying to gently color on you with a thirty-story building.
Without dwelling on the tragedy, I'd just like to say that I'm deeply sorry to Mr. Purple and the surviving Purple family.”
― Jim Benton, Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers

“it wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
so that nothing but ants
and centipedes and scorpions
can find a living on it
....
what man calls civilization
always results in deserts
....
men talk of money and industry
of hard times and recoveries
of finance and economics
but the ants wait and the scorpions wait
for while men talk they are making deserts all the time
getting the world ready for the conquering ant
drought and erosion and desert
because men cannot learn
....
it wont be long now it wont be long
till earth is barren as the moon
and sapless as a mumbled bone”
― Don Marquis, Archy Does His Part

“One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not.
There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.”
― Neil Gaiman

“And real talk, like, seeing these ants and studying them and respecting them, it’s like, man, they’re in their own community too. They’re trying to survive. They love. They fight. They telling themselves something. We can’t understand, but one day we will.”
― Brandon McCartney

“Ant 1: So, uh, do you ever worry that your itsy little neck is just going to snap under the weight of your head?
Ant 2: Stop asking me that. You ask me that, like, every five minutes.
Ant 1: Sometimes I notice my antennae out of the corner of my eye and I'm all, like: AHH! Something is on me! Get it off! Get it off!
Ant 2: Yeah, the antennae again. Listen, I just remembered, I have to go walk around aimlessly now.”
― Jim Benton, Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers

“I simply cannot see why one would wish to picnic in the nude. There would be ants in dreadful places.”
― Cassandra Clare, Chain of Gold

“I know that you are a mere flea! I know that you need only be squashed to be done away with! I know that I have fought this same battle a thousand thousand times before...but, perhaps this time I can crush you like the insect you are!”
― Marv Wolfman, Fantastic Four: In Search of Galactus

“Red ants that had a sour farty smell when they were squashed.”
― Arundhati Roy

“Pierwszy z rodu jest przywiazany do drzewa, a ostatniego zjadaja mrowki.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad y un homenaje/ One Hundred Years of Solitude and a tribute: Discursos de Gabriel García Márquez y Carlos Fuentes

“Perhaps more importantly, the ants used all the sugar lumps they could steal to build a small sugar pyramid in one of the hollow halls, in which, with great ceremony, they entombed the mummified body of a dead queen. On the wall of one tiny hidden chamber they inscribed, in insect hyeroglyps, the true secret of longevity.
They got it absolutely right and it would probably have important implications for the universe if it hadn't, next time the University flooded, been completely washed away.”
― Terry Pratchett, Equal Rites

“One day we found them. They must of been holding a gook convention or something, cause it seem like the same sort of deal as when you step on a anthill and they all come swarming around.”
― Winston Groom, Forrest Gump

“The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant—commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes—it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven’t killed him, it’s true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it’s also true that this man’s life—his brain!—has been utterly taken over by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees. He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range and spread their message.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“ Look at all the beautiful, delicate layers! It's a perfect mille-feuille!
"Heh. I call it...
...Mushroom Mille-Feuille with Duxelles Filling.
Eat up!"
Incredible!
The exciting flavors of multiple kinds of mushrooms meld together with the crispy, ultrathin layers of piecrust in a moist and magical harmony!
"The main ingredient Rindo Kobayashi chose was shiitake mushrooms! She used olive oil to cook them into a confit, trapping and magnifying their natural umami flavor!"
Wait... this tang!
"Aah. Champignon mushrooms and shallots, sautéed to a golden brown in garlic and butter and then simmered to a paste in broth. Cracked nuts and heavy cream were blended in to make a Duxelles, which she then sandwiched between the Mille-Feuille layers.
*Duxelles is a mushroom paste often used as a base for fillings or sauces.*
A perfectly balanced tart note makes the salty savoriness of the confit stand out...
... while allowing the mellow sweetness of the shiitake to linger on the tongue!
Though I can't put my finger on what this sour flavor is from. What is it?"
"Ants.❤️
I extracted formic acid from ants and mixed it into my Duxelles!"
"WAAAAH?!"
Too much formic acid is poisonous, of course. But in small amounts it can be a wonderful culinary accent. It has no extraneous sweetness, just a sharp, invigoratingly tart tang.
"Not only that, if you add it to a sweet base, it can create deeper, more nuanced flavors than the more commonly used citrus fruits.”
― Yuto Tsukuda, 食戟のソーマ 30 [Shokugeki no Souma 30]

“The road was overgrown with dry, dust-decrepit grass. Whenever Zakhar Pavlovich sat to smoke, he saw pleasant forests on the ground, where the grass was trees. It was a complete little living world, with its own roads, its own warmth, and complete supplies for the everyday needs of the petty, preoccupied creatures. Zakhar Pavlovich kept the ants in his head for about three miles of his way after watching them, and finally thought, If only we were given ant or mosquito reason, then life could be smoothed over right away, without problems. Those minor things are great masters of the harmonious life. A man's a long way from that nimble fellow, the ant.”
― Andrei Platonov, Chevengur

“My great-grandfather Delmar Thomas is buried beside his wife Lula now. Mount Horeb Cemetery near Bell, FL. As a kid I fell into a fire ant mound. Delmar rescued me. I cried. Covered in bites. He just laughed. Told me that is how you learn. This is what I learned.”
― Damon Thomas, Some Books Are Not For Sale

“Chu considered how to describe his feelings about Nelson. Finally, after digging through his mental storehouse of erudition, he settled on the words he wanted and spoke again.
"There is an American author, Flannery O'Connor. She wrote something about one of her characters that I think may explain this man. To paraphrase . . . he could have been a good man if there had been someone there to shoot him every minute of his life.”
― Jason Bengtson, Sapience

“[An Account of English Ants]
The Subject indeed is small, but not inglorious. The Ant as the Prince of Wisdom is pleased to inform us, is exceeding wise. In this Light it may, without Vanity, boast of its being related to you, and therefore by right of Kindred merits your Protection.”
― William Gould

“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability,
the wandering about, the endless forget fulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”
― Alfred Espinas, Des Sociétés Animales (2e Éd.) (Éd.1878) (Sciences Sociales)

“Ants owe their superiority to their terrestrial life. This assertion may seem paradoxical, but consider the exceptional advantages afforded by a terrestrial medium to the development of their intellectual faculties, compared with an aerial medium! In the air there are the long flights without obstacles, the vertiginous journeys far from real bodies, the instability, the wandering about, the endless forgetfulness of things and oneself. On the earth, on the contrary, there is not a movement that is not a contact and does not yield precise information, not a journey that fails to leave some reminiscence ; and as these journeys are determinate, it is inevitable that a portion of the ground incessantly traversed should be registered, together with its resources and its dangers, in the animal's imagination. Thus here results a closer and much more direct communication with the external world.”
― Alfred Espinas, Des sociétés animales

“Squatting in the coppery mud of the drainage ditch
behind my cousin’s house, we searched for fish,
saw none. We found a speckled frog instead,
unspooling a long, gelatinous thread
of black eggs in the water. Then fire ants—
my feet a blaze of pain, a fumbling dance,
and fact and memory begin to stutter.
What happened next? What curses did I utter?
And how did I ever get back over the fence?

I remember having a kind of reverence
for the whole affair: the pity I got, each bite
growing large and lustrous as a pearl, my tight
and swollen toes. I must have liked the pain.
What else would make me prod again, again?
A whole week hobbling barefoot on the lawn,
and still I missed the welts when they were gone.”
― Chelsea Rathburn

“The best stories never end - they keep on going, inside you.”
― Ursula Dubosarsky, The March of the Ants

“Winter after winter
the ants are waiting
In quest of a splinter
frozen ice hating
the way it is- still unmelted
as cold as war...never been welted.”
― Munia Khan

“From his vantage point on the deck, the commoners were ants.”
― Nick Oliveri, The Conjurer

“Tiny Titans: A Haiku

Ants toil with intent,
Embrace chores they loathe and love,
Unified spirits.”
― Amogh Swamy, On My Way To Infinity: A Seeker's Poetic Pilgrimage

“Because the farming ants have practiced the mutual co-adaptation model during millions of years of relentless natural selection on joint performance, they often surpass us in specific efficiency targets. Not only did ants in general evolve sperm banks at ambient temperature that last a queen’s potential life span of two to three decades (Den Boer et al. 2009), but they also somehow prevented the evolution of resistance by specialized Escovopsis garden pathogens against biocontrol compounds obtained from Actinobacteria that they rear on their cuticles (De Man et al. 2016; Holmes et al. 2016; Heine et al. 2018) (chapter 11, this volume). Recent work has further indicated that the fungus-growing termites are equally efficient in keeping their colonies as free from pathogens as the leaf-cutting ants appear to be (Otani et al. 2019; see also figure 5.1C, D, E). Relative to the extreme specialization of social insect farmers, human farmers are jacks of all trades in their interactions with domesticated crops, and we remain extremely vulnerable to endemic and epidemic diseases of our cultivars.”
― Ted R. Schultz, The Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Humans and Insects

“It occurred to Nelson, in a terrible reverie, that he had greatly underestimated these ants. That there could be dimensions to what was happening that were beyond him and that he couldn't possibly anticipate. That perhaps the ants were possessors of some kind of true intellect, capable of laying plans and responding to surprises in ways that were far more than instinctual. He drew his sidearm and whispered, almost to himself.
"Run.”
― Jason Bengtson, Sapience

“Bothers me? Man, bad weather bothers me. Not having air conditioning in my shack bothers me. But this? This was my job. Now there's a lot of my job that's actually bullshit, but this wasn't. That poor bastard was relying on me and I let him down. I let them all down. Wrong guy, wrong time.”
― Jason Bengtson, Sapience

“I hated the people offering stupid prayers to a creature that wouldn't even notice when it stepped on them. Do you think ants pray to terrans? Do you think they worship the boot that squashes them? No. They're smarter than that, than us. Ants know the inexorable truth of the situation: big thing from sky means danger, get the fuck out of the way.”
― Rob J. Hayes, Sins of the Mother

“Wart discovered there were only two qualifications in the language, Done and Not-Done - which applied to all questions of value.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King