Praying Mantis Boxing

Famous quotes containing the words praying, mantis and/or boxing:

    they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,
    Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,
    Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships, and praying hands.
    Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)

    The mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the oriole lurking behind it.
    Chinese proverb.

    I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing—for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)