Why do you feel so powerless? Go spend an hour with ants. Each of those black specks you see is a life. One whole life that you can save, take, or affect in some way. You have the power to make so many lives better. It is within you. Don’t lose sight of that.

I know that you are a mere flea! I know that you need only be squashed to be done away with! I know that I have fought this same battle a thousand thousand times before...But, perhaps this time I can crush you like the insect you are!

Night was spreading slowly around the spinning Earth. It should have been full of pinpricks of light. It was not. There were five billion people down there. What was going to happen soon would make barbarism look like a picnic - hot, nasty, and eventually given over to the ants.

No one feels good at four in the morning.If ants feel good at four in the morning—three cheers for the ants.

One day we found them. They must of been holding a gook convention or something, cause it seem like the same sort of deal as when you step on a anthill and they all come swarming around.

A harvester ant never quits and she never, ever gives up.

We had no compunction toward our enemies [the ants] and took to increasingly desperate and violent means of dealing with them. If we noticed they'd laid siege to a snack, we might trap them in a circle drawn with water and take away whatever they were eating, then watch them scurry about in confusion before wiping them off the floor with a wet cloth. I took pleasure in seeing them shrivel into black points when burning coals were rolled over them. When they attacked an unwashed pan or cup they'd soon be mercilessly drowned. I suppose initially each of us did these things only when we were alone, but in time, we began to be openly cruel. We came around to Amma's view of them as demons come to swallow our home and became a family that took pleasure in their destruction. We might have changed houses since, but habits are harder to change.

And I stood there and took it because I was an object. We were all objects to Marcus McCoy.

Friends are like ants, they walk into your life unnoticed and take over your life as if its like their own. But unlike ants they leave behind million smiles, uncountable memories.

I had the great idea of using markers to gently color the ants so I could tell them apart, but I learned that this is exactly like somebody trying to gently color on you with a thirty-story building. Without dwelling on the tragedy, I'd just like to say that I'm deeply sorry to Mr. Purple and the surviving Purple family.