Quotes from The Swarm

Frank Schätzing ·  881 pages

Rating: (12.1K votes)


“I'm a reasonable kind of guy. If I hear something that seems to make sense, I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. If the alternative explanation has to be pounded into shape before it fits the mould of our experience, it seems to me that it's unlikely to be true.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


“And yet most people would be lost without the idea that life increases in value the more it resembles our own.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


“It was the mystery that biologists from Darwin onwards had been longing to solve. How could we understand the ability of fish and seals to survive in the cold dark waters of the Antarctic? How could humans see inside a biotope that was sealed with layers of ice? What would the Earth look like from the sky, if we crossed the Mediterranean on the back of a goose? How did it feel to be a bee? How could we measure the speed of an insect’s wings and its heartbeat, or monitor its blood pressure and eating patterns? What was the impact of human activities, like shipping noise or subsea explosions, on mammals in the depths? How could we follow animals to places where no human could venture?”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


“Los pueblos originarios siempre viven dosificadamente de algo que los blancos luego despilfarran. Una vez que lo han despilfarrado, se frotan los ojos y quieren protegerlo. Entonces lo protegen de aquellos de quienes nunca fue necesario protegerlo, y presumen de ello.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


“People are learning to grasp the diversity of nature, to understand its unifying principles and to sweep away the hierarchies and see the real connections.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm



“For us to perceive intelligence, it has to fit within our behavioural framework.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


“Averages might mean something to bureaucrats and engineers, but the sea had no truck with statistics: it was a succession of unpredictable circumstances and extremes. A particular stretch of water might have an average wave height of ten metres, but if you were hit by a one-off thirty-metre monster that statistically didn’t exist, the average would be of precious little comfort: you would die.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


“Gli scienziati ritenevano che il limite inferiore delle dimensioni corporee per un essere intelligente fosse dieci centimetri, e quindi la possibilità di trovare un Aristotele che zampettava era praticamente pari a zero. Figuriamoci un Aristotele unicellulare.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


“He shrugged. ‘Worms. Two big ones.”
― Frank Schätzing, quote from The Swarm


About the author

Frank Schätzing
Born place: in Cologne, Germany
Born date May 28, 1957
See more on GoodReads

Popular quotes

“Crows don’t take from you,” Dean said. “They give your soul wings.”
― Caitlin Kittredge, quote from The Iron Thorn


“If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars.”
― P.D. James, quote from The Private Patient


“We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.

I think maybe we learn a few things each time that we don't forget. A few things that stick with us. It's just hard to pass those things on to those who come after us because if they didn't live through it, they don't view it the same way we do. If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept. Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff, p 89”
― Terry Brooks, quote from Bearers of the Black Staff


“Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers.”
― C.G. Jung, quote from The Red Book: Liber Novus


“As far as the language instinct is concerned, the correlation between genes and languages is a coincidence. People store genes in their gonads and pass them to their children through their genitals; they store grammars in their brains and pass them to their children through their mouths. Gonads and brains are attached to each other in bodies, so when bodies move, genes and grammars move together. That is the only reason that geneticists find any correlation between the two.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language


Interesting books

A Murder in Time
(11.2K)
A Murder in Time
by Julie McElwain
The Dance in the Dark
(459)
The Dance in the Dar...
by Sophie Cleverly
Blachart
(13)
Blachart
by Christina Engela
Auguries of Innocence
(135)
Auguries of Innocenc...
by William Blake
The Terrible Two Get Worse
(1.1K)
The Terrible Two Get...
by Mac Barnett
The Metamorphoses
(50.6K)
The Metamorphoses
by Ovid

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.