A man might as well hope to fight a swarm of flies with a sword as to master his own thoughts when they are set on by the devil.
But a thought swarmed in me; what if he, this yellow-eyed being – in his ridiculous, dirty bundle of trees, in his uncalculated life – is happier than us?
The only time I mind autographs is when I'm out with my family. You're trying to enjoy kids and grandkids and here comes a swarm, and there go your wife and kids. That happens to every celebrity. It's the price you pay.
The great effort of civilization has been, and still is, the attempt to introduce a principle of control into that casual swarm of impressions which makes up men's thought and of which, especially with swayed by emotion, spontaneous action is the law...
What strange phenomena we find in a great city, all we need do is stroll about with our eyes open. Life swarms with innocent monsters.
Charles Van Doren: I've been swarmed by stockbrokers lately; I feel like a girl with a bad reputation.
I don't know much about kisses, but I can assure you that hers were no less fierce than a swarm of bullets tearing the air
The essential quality that an entity needs, if it is to become an effective gene vehicle, is this. It must have an impartial exit channel into the future, for all the genes inside it. This is true of an individual wolf. The channel is the thin stream...
We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.
Maybe the search for life shouldn't restrict attention to planets like Earth. Science fiction writers have other ideas: balloon-like creatures floating in the dense atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter, swarms of intelligent insects, nano-scale rob...
[Brian is explaining why there's a crowd outside their house] Brian: They must have just popped by! Brian's mother: Popped by? SWARMED by, more like! There's a multitude out there!
There is a number among us, young and old, of all sorts almost among us, that swarm up and down towns, and woods, and fields, whose care and work hitherto hath been like bees, only to get honey to their own hive.
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with...
The Element is about discovering your self, and you can't do this if you're trapped in a compulsion to conform. You can't be yourself in a swarm.
When the last red man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among the white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. The white man will never be alone. Let him be just and deal kindly with...
A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
I like these people swarming on the sidewalks, wedged into a little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs, cold lands, and the sea streaming like a wet wash. I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
For when they see the people swarm into the streets, and daily wet to the skin with rain, and yet cannot persuade them to go out of the rain, they do keep themselves within their houses, seeing they cannot remedy the folly of the people.
I get a little jealous of these actor boys. They walk into a club, and in two seconds flat there are swarms of girls who are wanting so badly to touch them or just say hello. That's not the case with me, or any other girl I know.
[Gun drones swarm around Groot] Watchtower Guard: Prisoner, drop the device immediately and retreat to your cell, or we will open fire! Groot: [roars] I... AM... GROOT! Watchtower Guard: Fire!
He woke once more to external reality, looked round him, knew what he saw- knew it, with a sinking sense of horror and disgust, for the recurrent delirium of his days and nights, the nightmare of swarming indistinguishable sameness.
