Elephants Quotes - Page 9

• You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Art, Hands, Tradition

  4 Copy quote

• This is newness: every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.

  Sylvia Plath

  Shoes, White, Glasses

  Sylvia Plath (2015). “Collected Poems”, p.156, Faber & Faber

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Now he saw another elephant emerge from the place where it had stood hidden in the trees. Very slowly it walked to the mutilated body and looked down. With its sinuous trunk it struck the huge corpse; then it reached up, broke some leafy branches with a snap, and draped them over the mass of torn thick flesh. Finally it tilted its massive head, raised its trunk, and roared into the empty landscape.

  Lois Lowry

  Tree, Body, Branches

  Lois Lowry (1993). “The Giver”, Laurel Leaf

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Mythologically speaking, if there's anything I hate worse than trios of old ladies, it's bulls. Last summer, I fought the Minotaur on top of Half-Blood Hill. This time what I saw up there was even worse: two bulls. And not just regular bulls - bronze ones the size of elephants. And even that wasn't bad enough. Naturally they had to breathe fire, too.

  Rick Riordan

  Summer, Hate, Fire

  Rick Riordan (2008). “Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters”, p.34, Penguin UK

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• A man would rather be trampled by elephants on fire than tell you he's just not that into you.

  Greg Behrendt

  Men, Fire

  4 Copy quote

• Her life was a slow realization that the world was not for her and that for whatever reason she would never be happy and honest at the same time. She felt as if she were brimming always producing and hoarding more love inside her. But there was no release. table ivory elephant charm rainbow onion hairdo violence melodrama honey...None of it moved her. She addressed the world honestly searching for something deserving of the volumes of love she knew she had within her but to each she would have to say I don't love you.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Love You, Ivory, Rainbow

  10 Copy quote

• There's a lot of films that have relatively rigid road maps because they have a script and others that are less rigid because they have less of a script, like 'Elephant.' The road map becomes more interpretive, maybe, than one with a detailed script. Editing-wise, they all have their problems.

  Gus Van Sant

  Wise, Editing, Maps

  7 Copy quote

• I wanted to work with an elephant.

  Robert Pattinson

  Wanted

  4 Copy quote

• Recently I stood in the desert, far out side of L. A., and watched the sun set on a circus tent from 1930. Every where stood animals: elephants, tigers that should be loaded into a steam train. 300 extras in costumes raced around, the modern world had disappeared totally. Although that was totally fake, it still happened directly before my eyes! That was my perfect day. I would be gladly experience that every day. It happens continually to me: It calls itself work. That is wonderful and more than enough.

  Robert Pattinson

  Eye, Animal, Perfect Days

  4 Copy quote

• The truth is a fog, in which one man sees the heavenly host and the other one sees a flying elephant.

  Terry Pratchett

  Men, Fog, Flying

  Terry Pratchett (2012). “Dodger”, p.132, Random House

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Of all footprints, that of the elephant is supreme. Similarly, of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.

  Gautama Buddha

  Death, Buddhist, Meditation

  19 Copy quote

• Ghostface, catch the blast of a hype verse,
  My glock bursts, leave in a hearse, I did worse.
  I come rough, tough like an elephant tusk,
  Ya head rush, fly like Egyptian musk.

  Ghostface Killah

  Rap, Hype, Hip Hop

  82 Copy quote

• With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.

  John von Neumann

  Four, Fit, Trunks

  Attributed to John von Neumann by Enrico Fermi in "A meeting with Enrico Fermi" by Freeman Dyson in "Nature", Issue 427 (p. 297), www.nature.com. January 22, 2004.

  125 Copy quote

  Show source

• I could not extrapolate some emotion from any song after 1997 so I bought a drum machine and popped pills. The pink ones make me funny like elephants!

  Thom Yorke

  Song, Pills, Machines

  5 Copy quote

• Patriarchy is like the elephant in the room that we don't talk about, but how could it not affect the planet radically when it's the superstructure of human society?

  Ani DiFranco

  Rooms, Planets, Elephant In The Room

  "'I'm considering a revolution'". Interview with Kira Cochrane, www.theguardian.com. October 9, 2007.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• As the elephant is powerless to think in the terms of the ant, in spite of the best intentions in the world, even so is the Englishman powerless to think in the terms of, or legislate for, the Indian.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Thinking, World, Intention

  Mahatma Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi, Homer A. Jack (2005). “The Wit and Wisdom of Gandhi”, p.109, Courier Corporation

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• This man, lady, hath robb'd many beasts of their particular additions: he is as valiant as a lion, churlish as the bear, slow as the elephant-a man into whom nature hath so crowded humours that his valour is crush'd into folly, his folly sauced with discretion.

  William Shakespeare

  Crush, Men, Stupidity

  William Shakespeare, George Steevens, Samuel Johnson, Isaac Reed (1793). “The Plays of William Shakspeare: In Fifteen Volumes : with the Corrections and Illustrations of Various Commentators”, p.229

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A capacity for inferiority in the growing adult is threatened by the temptation by squander that capacity ruthlessly, to revel in hallowness. The syndrom especially plaques anyone who lives behind a mask. An elephant in her disquise as a human princess, a scarecrow with painted features, a glittering tiara under which to glow and glide in anonymous glamour. A witch's hat, a wizards stole, a scholars gown, a soldiers dress sartorials. A hundred ways to duck the question: how will I live with myself now that I nkow what I know.

  Gregory Maguire

  Princess, Ducks, Temptation

  4 Copy quote

• What you newspaper and magazine writers, who work in rabbit time, don't understand is that the practice of architecture has to be measured in elephant time.

  Eero Saarinen

  Practice, Rabbits, Magazines

  Eero Saarinen (1962). “Eero Saarinen on His Work: A Selection of Buildings Dating from 1947 to 1964 with Statements by the Architect”, New Haven : Yale University Press

  80 Copy quote

  Show source

• Race in this country is still the elephant in the room that no one wants to discuss.

  Lenny Kravitz

  Country, Race, Want

  6 Copy quote

• I saw David Lynch’s “The Elephant Man” (1980) when I was 15. I was completely bowled over. I found it so beautiful, strange and mesmerizing that I went back to the cinema every night for a week to see it.

  Ben Daniels

  Beautiful, Night, Men

  4 Copy quote

• So often we talk about saving the planet, but what we really mean is to save the planet the way it is, so we can live here. So that is can sustain us. Because the planet doesn't need to be saved. It doesn't care if all the squirrels, elephants, and trees die and there's just a couple of amoebas floating around at the poles.

  Dave Matthews

  Couple, Mean, Squirrels

  4 Copy quote

• I had a really good time at MGM. And we had no quarrels much, except once in a while, I'd go up to the front office and say I thought I should be doing something big, like washing elephants ... All my life I wanted to have talent ... Finally I had to admit there was nothing there.

  Marion Davies

  Office, Good Times, Talent

  14 Copy quote

• The world is hollow. It's a lot to take in. Like cracking an egg and finding nothing inside. Or a full grown elephant.

  Geraldine McCaughrean

  Eggs, World, Findings

  4 Copy quote

• China cares about its reputation and doesn't want to be known as the nation whose preferences drove the extinction of elephants.

  Wayne Pacelle

  Care, Want, Extinction

  "Making Progress Against Animal Cruelty: An interview with Wayne Pacelle". Interview with Karen Dawn, progressive.org. July 20, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source