Top 69 An Oyster Quotes
#1. On writers' workshops: It is the dab of grit that seeps into an oyster's shell that makes the pearl, not pearl-making seminars with other oysters.
Stephen King
#2. Once I had it free, I gobbled the sandwich like a nature-film otter cracking an oyster on its stomach: knees up in the wiring under the dashboard, my elbows jammed against the steering wheel, my chest serving as a table, my shirt as a tablecloth.
Jonathan Lethem
#3. A man may as well open an oyster without a knife, as a lawyer's mouth without a fee.
Barten Holyday
#4. Venice is a cheek-by-jowl, back-of-the-hand, under-the-counter, higgledy-piggledy, anecdotal city, and she is rich in piquant wrinkled things, like an assortment of bric-a-brac in the house of a wayward connoisseur, or parasites on an oyster-shell.
Jan Morris
#5. Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he's become tight-lipped as an oyster. But he can feel the worlds pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.
Karen Russell
#6. It was like we were two halves of an oyster shell, and when you put us together, it hid the gray gunk inside.
Alex Flinn
#8. Through the mind like an oyster labors on and on, / A grain of sand is all we have
Sylvia Plath
#10. You're enough to try the patience of an oyster!
Lewis Carroll
#11. The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
David Hume
#12. Like a grain of sand that gets into an oyster's shell. What if the grain doesn't want to become a pearl? Is it ever asked to climb out quietly and take up its old position as a bit of ocean floor?
Robin McKinley
#13. I had rather be an oyster than a man, the most stupid and senseless of animals.
George Berkeley
#14. The zoo is a prison for animals who have been sentenced without trial and I feel guilty because I do nothing about it. I wanted to see an oyster-catcher, so I was no better than the people who caged the oyster-catcher for me to see.
Russell Hoban
#15. Do you appreciate that an oyster has, among its other organs, a heart?
Padgett Powell
#16. For memory, we use our imagination. We take a few strands of real time and carry them with us, then like an oyster we create a pearl around them.
John Banville
#17. Now, see there. Just because I'm wearing my Super-Dike sweatshirt, you think I'm a lesbian. I guess if I were wearing a string of pearls, you'd think I was an oyster.
Florynce Kennedy
#18. If from the beginning you always believed that a ticket was only one-way, then you wouldn't have to try so vainly to cling to the sand like an oyster to a rock.
Kobo Abe
#19. A lot of trouble has been caused by memoirs. Indiscreet revelations, that sort of thing. People who have been close as an oyster all their lives seem positively to relish causing trouble when they themselves shall be comfortably dead.
Agatha Christie
#20. To talk of 'prizing her open' as if she were an oyster, to use any but the finest and subtlest and most pliable tools upon her was impious and absurd.
Virginia Woolf
#21. I've always tried to face life like an oyster does--when given grit, give back a pearl. Ted Miller Brogden
Ted Miller Brogden
#22. Even a grain of sand united with an oyster can make a pearl.
Truth Devour
#23. This is not that, and that is certainly not this, and at the same time an oyster stew is not stewed, and although they are made of the same things and even cooked almost the same way, an oyster soup should never be called a stew, nor stew soup.
M.F.K. Fisher
#24. If that a pearl may in a toad's head dwell, And may be found too in an oyster shell.
John Bunyan
#25. We build a shell around it, like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function , day in, day out. Immune to others' pain and loss.
Neil Gaiman
#26. He and I suddenly saw the whole country like an oyster for us to open; and the pearl was there, the pearl was there.
Jack Kerouac
#28. It being a part of Mrs. Pipchin's system not to encourage a child's mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by force like an oyster.
Charles Dickens
#29. It was odd to see her stepping out of that gloomy place, like a pearl coming out of an oyster.
Sarah Waters
#31. Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and puff toward him and he breathed some of it in.
It built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster.
Stephen King
#32. The world is an oyster but you don't crack it open on a mattress
Arthur Miller
#33. I live in the country. I'm a bird-watcher, an oyster-raiser. You know, I'll do anything that - raise dogs for the blind as a volunteer.
Isabella Rossellini
#34. We are bound to our bodies like an oyster to its shell.
Plato
#35. She had an English boyfriend who called her more often than she needed to hear from him, a savings account, a mobile phone, an Oyster Card, and a place to live that made her feel as if she was in a movie. She was a London girl.
Rosie Thomas
#36. Poor Britons, there is some good in them after all - they produced an oyster.
Sallust
#37. Power tasted like an oyster, like I'd swallowed the sea, all it's memories and calm and rot and brutality.
Jillian Lauren
#38. The sublime beauty was almost hidden withing the castle walls. She believed that the treasured things in life were often hard to find - a pearl in an oyster shell, a kind word in the heat of the moment.
F.C. Malby
#39. My mother was an oyster," he said with a wink. "And I'm the pearl.
Leigh Bardugo
#40. Now I lay me down to sleep In mud that's many fathoms deep. If I'm not here when you awake Just hunt me up with an oyster rake
Shelby Foote
#41. Sorrow, it is said, will make even an oyster feel poetical. I never tried my hand at that sort of writing but on this particular occasion such was my state of feeling, that I began to fancy myself inspired; so I took pen in hand, and as usual I went ahead.
Davy Crockett
#42. A conclusion is simply the point at which you give up thinking. He gave up, and as he rose stiffly to his feet, found that a conclusion had indeed formed itself in his mind, much as a pearl forms inside an oyster.
Diana Gabaldon
#43. I never was much of an oyster eater, nor can I relish them 'in naturalibus' as some do, but require a quantity of sauces, lemons, cayenne peppers, bread and butter, and so forth, to render them palatable.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#44. Listen! Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell, for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend. When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.
Rumi
#45. I will not be sworn but love may transform me to an oyster; but I'll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me he shall never make me such a fool.
William Shakespeare
#47. An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? The exterior is not persuasive.
Henry Ward Beecher
#48. Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.
Charles Dickens
#49. You speculate on the luxury of wearing out a whole existence in bed, like an oyster in its shell, content with the sluggish ecstasy of inaction.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#50. If you don't love life you can't enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes. [They] shiver you for a split second.
Eleanor Clark
#51. Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster.
Eleanor Clark
#52. After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper.
Michael Cox
#53. Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.
Theodore Roosevelt
#54. Ah, my dear! Let this be a lesson to you never to lose your temper!' 'Hold your tongue, Ma!' said the young Crab, a little snappishly. 'You're enough to try the patience of an oyster!' 'I wish I had our Dinah here, I know I do!' said Alice aloud, addressing nobody in particular.
Lewis Carroll
#55. The real writer learns nothing from life. He is more like an oyster or a sponge.
Gore Vidal
#56. Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#57. Life is hard, we say. An oyster's life is worse. She lives motionless, soundless, her own cold ugly shape her only dissipation ...
M.F.K. Fisher
#58. When my father passed, I was still an unsuccessful cook with a drug problem. I was in my mid-thirties, standing behind an oyster bar, cracking clams for a living when he died. So, he never saw me complete a book or achieve anything of note. I would have liked to have shared this with him.
Anthony Bourdain
#60. You can make an oyster surrender its pearl," Clara says. "All you need is persistence and a sharp enough knife.
John Langan
#62. I wonder if we might pledge ourselves to remember what life is really all about - not to be afraid that we're less flashy than the next, not to worry that our influence is not that of a tornado, but rather that of a grain of sand in an oyster! Do we have that kind of patience?
Fred Rogers
#63. I go into town every day on the tube. I've got an Oyster card.
Jason Flemyng
#64. I managed to convince myself that I'd left Bulgaria behind for good. I chose to see emigration and globe-trotting as an escape, not as a loss. Nowhere to call home? No problem, the world is my oyster. Where are you from? they ask. Does it matter? I answer.
But it does.
Kapka Kassabova
#65. A pearl is a beautiful thing that is produced by an injured life. It is the tear [that results] from the injury of the oyster. The treasure of our being in this world is also produced by an injured life. If we had not been wounded, if we had not been injured, then we will not produce the pearl.
Stephan A. Hoeller
#66. Jun Do was thinking about all the popular definitions of love, that it was a pair of bare hands clasping an ember to keep it alive, that it was a pearl that shines forever, even in the belly of the eel that eats the oyster, that love was a bear that feeds you honey from its claws.
Adam Johnson
#67. I look so fondly back on that time in my life when you first got an agent and you were in your mid-twenties and the world was your oyster.
Katie Lowes
#68. You're nothing but an intruder. A germ. A piece of sand agitating my oyster. But you're not a pearl; you're a tumor or a wart or a cyst.
Ainslie Hogarth
#69. I can't think of anyone I admire who isn't fuelled by self-doubt. It's an essential ingredient. It's the grit in the oyster.
Richard Eyre
