A Quote by John Updike

The dwelling places of Europe have an air of inheritance, or cumulative possession - a hive occupied by generations of bees.

John Updike

Quote Topics

Air Bees Cumulative Dwelling Dwelling Place Europe Generations Hive Inheritance Places Possession

Quote Author

John Updike
American - Novelist
March 18, 1932 - January 27, 2009

I always feel that I have missed some good fortune if I am away from home when my bees swarm. What a delightful summer sound it is! How they come pouring out of the hive, twenty or thirty thousand bees, each striving to get out first!

John Burroughs

When I heard that the bees were in trouble, the fact that they're disappearing and not coming back to the hive, which is a big issue, since a third of the food we eat comes from plants, I figured you couldn't tell the story of the bees without the story of the flowers and how they basically have evolved together for over 150 years.

Louie Schwartzberg

It is not caving in to the bees to stop poking a stick into their hive.

Llewellyn Rockwell

Sometimes human beings are very much like bees. Bees are fiercely protective of their hive, provided you are outside it. Once you’re in, the workers sort of assume that it must have been cleared by management and take no notice; various freeloading insects have evolved a mellifluous existence because of this very fact. Humans act the same way.

Neil Gaiman

Melancholy held me hostage, and the bees built a hive of sadness in my soul.

Laurie Halse Anderson

The Security Council represents the situation from 1945 - you had the Allies who won the war who occupied that. The defeated guys - the Germans and Japan - were out. The occupied countries had no voice. That was fine in '45, but today, Germany rules Europe, frankly. They are driving Europe but have no voice.

Mo Ibrahim

Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.

Jean Cocteau

You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.

Jean Cocteau

Well for the drones of the social hive that there are bees of an industrious turn, willing, for an infinitesimal share of the honey, to undertake the labor of its fabrication.

Thomas Hood

Take from my palms, to soothe your heart, a little honey, a little sun, in obedience to Persephone's bees. You can't untie a boat that was never moored, nor hear a shadow in its furs, nor move through thick life without fear. For us, all that's left is kisses tattered as the little bees that die when they leave the hive. Deep in the transparent night they're still humming, at home in the dark wood on the mountain, in the mint and lungwort and the past. But lay to your heart my rough gift, this unlovely dry necklace of dead bees that once made a sun out of honey.

Osip Mandelstam

Christianity, democracy, science, education, wealth, and the cumulative inheritance of a thousand years, have not preserved us from the vain repetition of history.

Ralph Adams Cram

We are the bees of the invisible. We madly gather the honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

Katherine Dunn

That which is not good for the bee-hive cannot be good for the bees.

Marcus Aurelius

The beautiful laws of time and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, instead of honey, it will yield us bees.