If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon-- you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks.

— Michael Crichton

I know that you are a mere flea! I know that you need only be squashed to be done away with! Furthermore, I know that I have fought this same battle a thousand times before...but, perhaps this time I can crush you like the insect you are!

— Marv Wolfman

I'll stop eating steak when you stop killing spiders." Absurdity: comparing cows to spiders. Arachnids are pure evil. They're like a cigarette manufacturer or a terrorist. They're organized religion on eight legs.

— Davey Havok

Insect life was so loud that when you parked the car and got out it sounded as if you had suddenly tuned into a radio frequency from another planet.

— David Samuels

Insects are major players in nature's recycling effort, and in nature a corpse is simply organic matter to be recycled. Left to its own devices, nature quickly populates a corpse with a diverse community of organisms, all dedicated to reducing the body to its basic components.

— M. Lee Goff

In summer the empire of insects spreads.

— Adam Zagajewski

I've just been bitten on the neck by a vampire... mosquito. Does that mean that when the night comes I will rise and be annoying?

— Vera Nazarian

Life is but a flash of time, a momentous flicker-- in the life that we know and space we live in on earth.© VW

— Virginia Wright

No living thing is ugly in this world. Even a tarantula considers itself beautiful

— Munia Khan

She first peered into its fascinating cases of beetles and butterflies at the age of six, in the company of her father. She recalls her pity at each occupant pinned for display. It was no great leap to draw the same conclusion of ladies: similarly bound and trussed, pinned and contained, with the objective of being admired, in all their gaudy beauty.

— Emmanuelle de Maupassant