What does the fish think when he is jerked up by the mouth through the silver limits of existence and into a new universe where the air drowns him and the light is blue madness? Where huge bipeds with no gills stuff it into a suffocating box and cover it with wet weeds to die?
“He did not rate that text at a plucked hen
Which says that hunters are not holy men
And that a monk uncloistered is a mere
Fish out of water, flapping on the pier,
That is to say a monk out of his cloister.
That was a text he held not worth an oyster”
“I’ve memorized all the fish in the sea
I’ve memorized each opportunity strangled and
I remember awakening one morning
and finding everything smeared with the color of
forgotten love and I’ve memorized
that too.”
“You’re like a little wild thing
that was never sent to school.
Sit, I say, and you jump up.
Come, I say, and you go galloping down the sand
to the nearest dead fish
with which you perfume your sweet neck.”
″ ‘If you run after me,’ said the little bunny, ‘I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you.’
‘If you become a fish in a trout stream,’ said his mother, ‘I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.’ ”
“He decided to just keep afloat, treading water and hoping that something- who knows what? – would turn up to save him. But what if a shark, or some big fish, a horse mackerel, turned up? What was he supposed to do to protect himself? He didn’t know.”
“...a huge head burst through the surface of the water and loomed up over him. It was a whale. ‘What sort of fish are you?’ the whale asked. ‘You must be one of a kind!’ ‘I’m not a fish,’ said Amos. ‘I’m a mouse, which is a mammal, the highest form of life. I live on land.’ ‘Holy clam and cuttlefish!’ said the whale. ‘I’m a mammal myself, though I live in the sea. Call me Boris,’ he added.”
“ ‘Are you sure you’re a mammal?’ Amos asked. ‘You smell more like a fish.’ Then Boris the whale went swimming along, with Amos the mouse on his back.”
“She knew that the game serves only to sharpen the appetite for the feast to follow. It is his meal or mine, thought Mowzer, as she looked at the floundering fish in the belly of the boat. Blue, green and silver, they glistened in the greyness. It made her mouth water to look at them.”
“There is a fish tank in our class which no fish in it. A guinea-pig cage with no guinea-pig in it;
A formicarium with no ants in it; and according to Miss Hodge some of our head are empty too.”
“After breakfast, they went out in Grandpa’s boat to check the nets. Sometimes they were full of fish. Sometimes there was nothing but a bit of seaweed.”
“Grandpa kept some of the fish they caught in a net in the water. Every evening Stina pulled it out of the water and chose a fish for dinner. It was always delicious.”
“And into Will’s mind, whirling him up on a wind blowing through and around the whole of Time, came the story of the Old Ones. He saw them from the beginning when magic was at large in the world; magic that was the power of rocks and fire and water and living things, so that the first men lived in it and with it, as a fish lives in the water.”
“Fish can’t close their eyes. They keep them open all the time, even when they’re dead. Most people die when they get too old... when they don’t have the energy to walk around anymore, and when they almost can’t cope in a wheelchair either...”
“There was a Young Lady of Wales,
Who caught a large Fish without scales;
When she lifted her hook, she exclaimed, ‘Only look!’
That ecstatic Young Lady of Wales.”
“When the beautiful Princess Alicia consents to partake of the salmon- as I think she will- you will find she will leave a fish-bone on her plate. Tell her to dry it, and to rub it, and to polish it till it shines like mother-of-pearl, and to take care of it as a present from me.”
“In Montana, ospreys lived in the cottonwoods all along the big rivers, where they dived on trout and whitefish. Roy had been pleasantly surprised to find that Florida had ospreys, too. It was remarkable that the same species of bird was able to thrive in two places so far apart, and so completely different. If they can do it, Roy thought, maybe I can too.”
“She was not as portly as a trout; kinder than a pike; what fish was she?
‘I shall call her the Minnow,’ said David softly, digging deeply with his paddle.”
“The story’s sentiments are confused; both fish and bird seem completely at home in their new worlds. Only at the very last second do either of them experience difficulties that make them switch back.”