When I was a kid reading Huxley's Brave New World, I remember one line that changed the way I thought about bugs. Linda was forced to leave the (rather sterile) civilization she grew up in, and was living in a primitive village with her son John who's never known civilization. The line that affected me was
"He remembered the first time she found those little animals in his hair, how she screamed and screamed."
To her they were an infestation of awful bugs; to him they were just little animals. That really pointed out to me that the way we view things has a lot more to do with how we're trained to look at them, and what we're already used to, than with the way they necessarily are. "Little animals" feels so cute!
