“Daniel's mind is a scorpion stinging itself to death.”

“Poverty is a scorpion; it stings the poor and it also stings the men with high conscience who feel sad about the poverty; the rest is immune to it!”

“This man was truly like a scorpion, a poisonous sting when one least expected it.”

“Insult is a monstrous scorpion, and compliment is a likeable nightingale; one stings mercilessly, and the other sings sweetly.”

“He whom the flame of jealousy encompasses, will at last, like the scorpion, turn the poisoned sting against himself.”

“I looked for it but I found no way out of this wild logical thicket. This was a tangle every bit as unknown and terrifying as that behind the Green Wall These were creatures just as extraordinary and incomprehensible, and they said as much with no words. I imagined that I saw through some kind of thick class the square root of minus one-infinitely huge and at the same time infinitely small, scorpion-shaped, with that hidden but always sensed sting of the minus sign... But maybe that is nothing except my "soul," like the legendary scorpion of the ancients, which would deliberately sting itself with everything that...”