Common Wasp

Famous quotes containing the words common and/or wasp:

    There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
    Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge.
    Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
    In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
    Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
    But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind.
    James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)

    Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphinx wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before we began to live consciously on our own accounts?
    Samuel Butler (1835–1902)