Vulture Quotes

So tired of this straight line, and everywhere you turn
There's vultures and thieves at your back
The storm keeps on twisting, you keep on building the lies
That you make up for all that you lack.
It don't make no difference, escaping one last time
It's easier to believe
In this sweet madness, oh this glorious sadness
That brings me to my knees. ~ Sarah McLachlan

The name Prometheus has always caused me particular annoyance, for my breast still aches from the everlasting beak of the vulture from which Alcides set me free. ~ Gerard De Nerval

Atticus, I think we're being stalked by the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock. First it was a Vulture adn now two giant ravens are coming our way. Oberon ~ Kevin Hearne

I am willing to believe that my unobtainable sixty seconds within a sponge or a flatworm might not reveal any mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident [ ... ] that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs, lie on our side of any meaningful (and necessarily fuzzy) border and that we are therefore not mistaken when we look them in the eye and see a glimmer of emotional and conceptual affinity. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Brother Preptil, the master of the music, had described Brutha's voice as putting him in mind of a disappointed vulture arriving too late at the dead donkey. ~ Terry Pratchett

There's a real difference between venture capitalism and vulture capitalism. Venture capitalism we like. Vulture capitalism, no. And the fact of the matter is that he's going to have to face up to this at some time or another, and South Carolina is as good a place to draw that line in the sand as any. That's not what we're looking for in a president of the United States. We're looking for someone that knows how to build jobs, create jobs. And that's what I've done in the state of Texas. So there's no use trying to paper this over. That is a problem for Mitt, and he's going to have to face it. ~ Rick Perry

Author:
A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape with wanton disregard. His days are spent picking up all the stray free words he can handle and squirreling them away for later use.
Subsequently, (days, months or years later) working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture.
Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit. ~ Leopold Throckmorton

Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass? ~ Chinua Achebe

Death was the greatest villain, no matter how it got you; it always had the same outcome. It chewed you up and spit you out. It went on a war path, destroying everything. No one was ever happy after death came around. there was always sadness and pain. Death was the most selfish and heartbreaking vulture. Death disgusted me. ~ Holly Hood

(By the way, I would not recommend stuffing your pillow with vulture feathers. They're not very comfy.) ~ Rick Riordan

Ten feet to my left, Sadie smacked a vulture with her staff. The bird exploded into white sand. Annabeth jogged toward us, giving me one of those annoyed expressions like, If you get yourself killed, I'm going to murder you. Carter, being invisible, was nowhere to be seen. ~ Rick Riordan

Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime? Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime! ~ Lord Byron

The undiscriminating vulture is not our real danger: open scandal would simply drive him into profitless exile again, and would be no possible advantage to us. Neither should we fear our sturdy patriots who, like your father, are busy with their loyalties in queer and crooked ways. Our danger lies with the men who want to take this country by trunk and limb and wreak it into such a shape that it will fit them and their children for hose and jerkin in their old age."

"Some of them are sincere," said Lymond.

"I know: and such men will wreck us yet. Preserve us above all from the honest clod and the ambitious fanatic. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Culture is a vulture but there's also vulture culture and cultured vultures and cultured yougurt (cherry, peach, pear, pineapple, grape, vanilla, plain, cherry vanilla, pineapple orage, cranberry, orange, mandarin orange, coffee, apricot, raspberry, blueberry, boysenberry, prune). And speaking of vulture culture there's counter-culture and under-the-counter culture, too. But whether you call it kulchur with a k and a ch and without the e it's still the same thing and you can't disguise it with pretty frills and a gallon of dog sweat. It still has two syllables and TWO-SYLLABLE WORDS SUCK so you can just forgetit, man. It's no fun at all and even fun wouldn't be fun if it was called funjure or funion or funching. But somehow fucking is still loads of fun even though there's that extra 3-letter cluster of vowels and consonants. Proof positive that there are exceptions everywhere you look. But don't look too hard, you might get eyestrain. ~ Richard Meltzer

Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vultures wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days. ~ Clive Barker

I once saw a snake having sex with a vulture, and I thought, It's just business as usual in Washington DC. ~ Jarod Kintz

Gravity's Rainbow"

Come on with me through ruined liplock
Across Tangian deserts we'll flock
Madcap Medusa flank my foghorn
We'll change four seasons with our first born.

All ships of sense on hyper ocean
All kinds of chaos still in motion
My culture vulture such a dab hand
I'll steal you from the year 4000

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love

Your tears leave trails of Tick fall blur room
Autonoma the room is bloom groom
Those crippled lines that I can't get to
You'd slip through time but I won't let you

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love

Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
Come with me, come with me
We'll travel to infinity
I'll always be there
Uh-oh my future love
I'll always be there
For you, my future love< ~ The Klaxons

Boredom looms over the liveliest lessons, seeking to destroy. ~ Marina Leigh Duff

I noticed that she left her office door open, too.So she could keep an eye on me, no doubt, in case I decided to grab the andirons and make a run for it.
I stood for a minute, taking it all in. Not what I'd expected at all. And Edward hadn't been any help: "Heavens, how should I know what's there? Whatever was left after my collective vulture of a family descended,I assume..."
The first thing I did was to sit down on the sofa. The old leather creaked loudly enough to make me flinch. But it was worth risking the return of Dr. Rothaus to sit where Edward had sat. Only, it didn't feel very significant. Just cold and little slippery. ~ Melissa Jensen

He looked like a vulture dissatisfied with its breakfast corpse. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

It disturbs me no more to find men base, unjust, or selfish than to see apes mischievous, wolves savage, or the vulture ravenous. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Nothing could ever stop Kiss. I've seen the band in down times where critics were like vultures circling overhead saying things like, 'Well, you know it's the end of your career.' ~ Paul Stanley

A dream, just a dream. Damn it. How had it gotten in? Lurking vulture dreams, circling, just waiting for her to nod off. ~ Laini Taylor

The Spirit continued to stir and declare, You cannot be afraid to face the wolf at the door. Don't let the fear paralyze you. When you get in fear and get paralyzed, sometimes somebody has to come and get you. Whatever is swarming around you that thinks you are dead. you tell it that you are not dead! Tell the vultures you are not dead and that they have to move on! Say, 'Vultures, I am not the meal you thought I was going to be! ~ Chuck Pierce

When you become an animal, a vulture, in the ghetto, as I had become, you enter a world of animals and vultures. It becomes truly the survival of only the fittest. ~ Malcolm X

I want you to be my black vulture:forever monogamous! ~ Munia Khan

Patience will be on our side."
"I once heard that patience is a vulture in wait to take out its prey when all seems safe. ~ Cyndi Goodgame

Over nine whole acres while a huge, horrendous Vulture puddles forever with hooked beak In his liver and entrails teeming with raw pain. It burrows deep below the breastbone, feeding And foraging without respite, for the gnawed-at Gut and gutstrings keep renewing. ~ Virgil

Policing. You think you've got it tough. You don't have any idea how it was when I joined the force. The whole cake was divided down to the last crumb. The big boss got seventy percent, and the portions got smaller as you descended the totem pole. And no complaining. You learned to keep your mouth shut at all times - you wouldn't have survived the first week.
You see, what nobody tells you about capitalism is that its warlordism in disguise. That leaves the only job in the jungle worth having an apex feeder - the rest is slavery at various levels of discomfort. Socially, psychologically, we're still in the rain forest. - Colonel Vikorn ~ John Burdett

I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge. ~ John Gregory Dunne

You wait for the war to happen like vultures. If you want to help, prevent the war. Don't save the remnants. Save them all. ~ Isaac Asimov

The Mystery of Amergin;

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am a wild boar in valour,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of the lance of battle,
I am the God who creates in the head [i.e. of man] the fire [i.e. the thought].
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?
Who announces the ages of the moon [If not I]?
Who teaches the place where couches the sun [If not I]?

Ancient Author Unknown for certain: an ancient Druidic incantation ~ Unknown Ancient Celt

The perturbations, anxieties, depravations, deaths, exceptions in the physical or moral order, spirit of negation, brutishness, hallucinations fostered by the will, torments, destruction, confusion, tears, insatiabilities, servitudes, delving imaginations, novels, the unexpected, the forbidden, the chemical singularities of the mysterious vulture which lies in wait for the carrion of some dead illusion, precocious & abortive experiences, the darkness of the mailed bug, the terrible monomania of pride, the inoculation of deep stupor, funeral orations, desires, betrayals, tyrannies, impieties, irritations, acrimonies, aggressive insults, madness, temper, reasoned terrors, strange inquietudes which the reader would prefer not to experience , cants, nervous disorders, bleeding ordeals that drive logic at bay, exaggerations, the absence of sincerity, bores, platitudes, the somber, the lugubrious, childbirths worse than murders, passions, romancers at the Courts of Assize, tragedies,-odes, melodramas, extremes forever presented, reason hissed at with impunity, odor of hens steeped in water, nausea, frogs, devilfish, sharks, simoon of the deserts, that which is somnambulistic, squint-eyed, nocturnal, somniferous, noctambulistic, viscous, equivocal, consumptive, spasmodic, aphrodisiac, anemic, one-eyed, hermaphroditic, bastard, albino, pederast, phenomena of the aquarium, & the bearded woman, hours surfeited with gloomy discouragement, fantasies, acrimonies, monsters, demoral ~ Comte De Lautreamont

An original thought would crack your feeble skull like a thunderbolt, you craven vulture. ~ Christopher Moore

Prometheus, I have no Titan's might,
Yet I, too, must each dusk renew my heart,
For daytime's vulture talons tear apart
The tender alcoves built by love at night. ~ Philip Jose Farmer

Benedict Arnold was appointed to the rank of general in the Continental Army by George Washington during the American War of Independence. It was up to him to protect the fortifications at West Point, New York, which in 1802 became the U.S. Military Academy. Arnold however planned to surrender his command to the British forces. When his treasonous act was discovered Arnold fled down the Hudson River to the British sloop-of-war Vulture, avoiding capture by the forces of George Washington, who had previously been alerted to the plot. Arnold was hailed a hero by the British, who gave him a commission in the British Army as brigadier general. In the winter of 1782, after the war, he moved to London with his wife where he was received as a hero by King George III. In the United States his name "Benedict Arnold" became synonyms for the words "TRAITOR & TREASON."
Cohorting with a foreign power to overthrow the government or purposely aiding the enemy is an act of Treason! ~ Hank Bracker

Readers like SapphicDerrida, who reeled off statistics and used words like "reify" in their comments, made Ifemelu nervous, eager to be fresh and to impress, so that she began, over time, to feel like a vulture hacking into the carcasses of people's stories for something she could use. Sometimes making fragile links to race. Sometimes not believing herself. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Savage Sam Tarly, whose sword, Heartsbane, was said to be red from hilt to point after the dozens of Dornishmen he cut down in the course of the Vulture Hunt, as the chase after the Vulture King became known. ~ George R R Martin

Milton's Eve! Milton's Eve! ... Milton tried to see the first woman; but Cary, he saw her not ... I would beg to remind him that the first men of the earth were Titans, and that Eve was their mother: from her sprang Saturn, Hyperion, Oceanus; she bore Prometheus" --

"Pagan that you are! what does that signify?"

"I say, there were giants on the earth in those days: giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence: the stregth which could bear a thousand years of bondage, -- the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, -- the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth a Messiah. The first woman was heaven-born: vast was the heart whence gushed the well-spring of the blood of nations; and grand the undegenerate head where rested the consort-crown of creation. ...
I saw -- I now see -- a woman-Titan: her robe of blue air spreads to the outskirts of the heath, where yonder flock is grazing; a veil white as an avalanche sweeps from hear head to her feet, and arabesques of lighting flame on its borders. Under her breast I see her zone, purple like that horizon: through its blush shines the star of evening. Her steady eyes I cannot picture; they are clear -- they are deep as lakes -- they are lifted and full of worsh ~ Charlotte Bronte

Time can move quickly when it loses its memory, or when there are no new memories to create. Reality's vulture flies down and picks at the bones of our dreams. ~ John Dolan

I'd felt the pop of the needle sliding into my veins, like a fang into flesh. I'd been enveloped in the golden haze where nothing is wrong even when everything is falling apart. A dance with a hypodermic fiend, my hands in the claws of a vulture. ~ Taylor Rhodes

I don't want to hide. I don't want to be alone. I don't want to wander off into the desert in shame and die and become vulture food. Or end up keeling over just because I'm too self-conscious to leave the house. Cause of Death: Unnecessary Loneliness. ~ Anne Clendening

Remember that I'm old enough to give advice, and the advice I'm giving you now is exactly right, and a bird in the hand is better than a vulture in the air, ... ~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

Man's hope can paint a purple picture, can transform a soaring vulture into a noble eagle or moaning dove. ~ Ralph Ellison

We make our journey in the company of others; the deer, the rabbit, the bison, and the quail walk before us, and the lion, the eagle, the wolf, the vulture, and the hyena walk behind us. All our paths lie together in the hand of god and none is wider than any other or favored above any other. The worm that creeps beneath your foot is making its journey across the hand of god as surely as you are. ~ Daniel Quinn

Themes of descent often turn on the struggle between the titanic and the demonic within the same person or group. In Moby Dick, Ahab's quest for the whale may be mad and "monomaniacal," as it is frequently called, or even evil so far as he sacrifices his crew and ship to it, but evil or revenge are not the point of the quest. The whale itself may be only a "dumb brute," as the mate says, and even if it were malignantly determined to kill Ahab, such an attitude, in a whale hunted to the death, would certainly be understandable if it were there. What obsesses Ahab is in a dimension of reality much further down than any whale, in an amoral and alienating world that nothing normal in the human psyche can directly confront.
The professed quest is to kill Moby Dick, but as the portents of disaster pile up it becomes clear that a will to identify with (not adjust to) what Conrad calls the destructive element is what is really driving Ahab. Ahab has, Melville says, become a "Prometheus" with a vulture feeding on him. The axis image appears in the maelstrom or descending spiral ("vortex") of the last few pages, and perhaps in a remark by one of Ahab's crew: "The skewer seems loosening out of the middle of the world." But the descent is not purely demonic, or simply destructive: like other creative descents, it is partly a quest for wisdom, however fatal the attaining of such wisdom may be. A relation reminiscent of Lear and the fool develops at the end between Ahab and the little ~ Northrop Frye

What's that sound?" Fran said.
Then something as big as a vulture flapped heavily down from one of the trees and landed just in front of the car.It shook itself.It turned its long neck toward the car, raised its head, and regarded us.

"Goddamn it," I said.I sat there with my hands on the wheel and stared at the thing.
"Can you believe it?" Fran said."I never saw a real one before."

We both knew it was a peacock, sure,but we didn't say the word out loud.We just watched it.The bird turned its head up in the air and made this harsh cry again.It had fluffed itself out and looked about twice the size it'd been when it landed.

"Goddamn," I said again. We stayed where we were in the front seat.
The bird moved forward a little.Then it turned its head to the side and braced itself.It kept its bright, wild eye right on us.Its tail was raised, and it was like a big fan folding in and out.
There was every color in the rainbow shining from that tail.

"My God," Fran said quietly.She moved her hand over to my knee.
"Goddamn," I said. There was nothing else to say.

The bird made this strange wailing sound once more. "May- awe, may-awe!" it went.If it'd been something I was hearing late at night and for the first time, I'd have thought it was somebody dying, or else something wild and dangerous. ~ Raymond Carver

অদ্ভুত আঁধার এক এসেছে এ-পৃথিবীতে আজ,
যারা অন্ধ সবচেয়ে বেশি আজ চোখে দেখে তারা;
যাদের হৃদয়ে কোনো প্রেম নেই - প্রীতি নেই - করুণার আলোড়ন নেই
পৃথিবী অচল আজ তাদের সুপরামর্শ ছাড়া।
যাদের গভীর আস্থা আছে আজো মানুষের প্রতি
এখনো যাদের কাছে স্বাভাবিক ব'লে মনে হয়
মহৎ সত্য বা রীতি, কিংবা শিল্প অথবা সাধনা
শকুন ও শেয়ালের খাদ্য আজ তাদের হৃদয়।

A strange darkness has come upon the world today.
They who are most blind now see,
Those whose hearts lack love, lack warmth, lack pity's stirrings,
Without their fine advice, the world today dare not make a move.
They who yet possess an abiding faith in man,
To whom still now high truths or age-old customs,
Or industry or austere effort all seem natural,
Their hearts are victuals for the vulture and the jackal.

Translated by: Clinton B. Seely ~ Jibanananda Das

Apophis the god of Chaos Anubis the god of funerals and death Babi the baboon god Bast the cat goddess Bes the dwarf god Disturber a god of judgement who works for Osiris Geb the earth god Gengen-Wer the goose god Hapi the god of the Nile Heket the frog goddess Horus the war god, son of Isis and Osiris Isis the goddess of magic, wife of her brother Osiris and mother of Horus Khepri the scarab god, Ra's aspect in the morning Khonsu the moon god Mekhit minor lion goddess, married to Onuris Neith the hunting goddess Nekhbet the vulture goddess Nut the sky goddess Osiris the god of the Underworld, husband of Isis and father of Horus Ra the sun god, the god of order; also known as Amun-Ra Sekhmet the lion goddess Serqet the scorpion goddess Set the god of evil Shu the air god, great-grandfather of Anubis Sobek the crocodile god Tawaret the hippo goddess Thoth the god of knowledge ~ Rick Riordan

John Galt is Prometheus who changed his mind. After centuries of being torn by vultures in payment for having brought to men the fire of the gods, he broke his chains - and he withdrew his fire - until the day when men withdraw their vultures. ~ Ayn Rand

Will he travel tomorrow?'

They both gazed, united in fascination, at the insensible and manhandled person of the sacrosanct Voevoda Bolshoia. 'I doubt it,' said Ludovic d'Harcourt.

But he did. He stirred some time after that conversation, and if his awakening took rather less time than was obvious, the effect was to cheat Danny Hislop's expectant ears of whatever uncouth revelations he was hoping for. Without warning, his eyes closed, Lymond said, 'Hislop?'

'Yes sir?' said Danny, jumping. Then he said sympathetically, 'How are you, sir?'

'Well enough to guess which vulture would be present,' said Lymond pleasantly. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

Carter wagged the Yankees cap at me. 'Nekhbet wants Percy to be her host. That's one way the Egyptian gods maintain a presence in the mortal world. They can inhabit mortals' bodies.'

My stomach jackknifed. 'You want her –' I pointed at the frazzled old vulture goddess – 'to inhabit me? That sounds …'

I tried to think of a word that would convey my complete disgust without offending the goddess. I failed. ~ Rick Riordan

Won't you introduce us to your friend?" Thomasina swept an unsubtly flirtatious glance up Gabriel's armored figure. "What a fine figure you must strike at the Round Table."
"At any table." Tansy giggled.
Penny seethed. "It wouldn't be a masquerade if I gave him away, now would it?"
"I suppose we'll have to tease it out of him," Thomasina said.
Was it Penny's imagination, or did her gaze linger on his cod-piece?
Get your eyes off him, you vulture.
She chastened herself for entertaining a thought so mean. It was unkind to vultures. ~ Tessa Dare

Women are one and all a set of vultures. ~ Petronius

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; the vulture the very creature he creates. ~ Herman Melville

There was a barber and his wife
and she was beautiful...
a foolish barber and his wife.
She was his reason for his life...
and she was beautiful, and she was virtuous.
And he was naive.
There was another man who saw
that she was beautiful...
A biased vulture of the law
who, with a gesture of his claw
removed the barber from his plate!
And there was nothing but to wait!
And she would fall!
So soft!
So young!
So lost and oh so beautiful!

Antony (spoken)

The lady, sir...did she succumb?

Sweeney Todd (sung)

Ah, that was many years ago...
I doubt if anyone would know.
(spoken)
Now leave me, Antony.
There is somewhere I must go,
something i must find out.
Now, and alone.

Antony (spoken)

But surely we will meet again before I am off to Plymouth?

Sweeney Todd (spoken)

If you want you may well find me around Fleet Street. I wouldn't wander.
(sung)
There's a hole in the world like a great black pit
and it's filled with people who are filled with shit!
And the vermin of the world inhabit it! ~ Stephen Sondheim

I eat like a vulture. Unfortunately the resemblance doesn't end there. ~ Groucho Marx

All you can do is involve yourself totally in your own life, your own moment, Lonzi said. And when we feel pessimism crouching on our shoulders like a stinking vulture, he said, we banish it, we smother it with optimism. We want, and our want kills doom. ~ Rachel Kushner

The place was a funeral pyre for the young
who died before knowing the thirst of man
or woman. Furies with snakes in their hair
wept. Tantalus ate pears & sipped wine
in a dream, as the eyes of a vulture
poised over Tityus' liver. ~ Yusef Komunyakaa

Time has no meaning. I feel as if I have been left in the desert to die and am eagerly awaiting the vultures to begin their work and end my misery. ~ Libba Bray

But the future is unknown, and stands before a man like autumnal fogs rising from the swamps; birds fly foolishly up and down in it with flapping wings, never recognizing each other, the dove seeing not the vulture, nor the vulture the dove, and no one knowing how far he may be flying from destruction. ~ Nikolai Gogol

Don't play dead with a vulture. That's exactly what they want. ~ Kevin Nealon

If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture - that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves. ~ Edward Abbey

The blue light is all over. Actually it is within my body. Makes my joints feel all warm.
Vulture thinks I talk too much. ~ Sandra Harner

He was a curious mixture of things to me on that first occasion: he had the general physique of a bull, the tenacity of a vulture, the agility of a leopard, the tenderness of a lamb, and the coyness of a dove. He had a curious overgrown head which fasdnated me and which, for some reason, I took to be singularly Athenian. His hands were rather small for his body, and overly delicate. He was a vital, powerful man, capable of brutal gestures and rough words, yet somehow conveying a sense of warmth which was soft and feminine. There was also a great element of the tragic in him which his adroit mimicry only enhanced. He was extremely sympathetic and at the same time ruthless as a boor. He seemed to be talking about himself all the time, but never egotistically. He talked about himself because he himself was the most interesting person he knew. I liked that quality very much - I have a little of it myself. ~ Henry Miller

Shut up, Four! she says, and I want to yell back that I'm as frustrated as she is, with an
Erudite vulture analyzing my every move, searching for my weak points so he can hit them as hard
as he can. ~ Veronica Roth

We passed through glowering statues of monsters and gods whom I'd fought in person- the vulture Nekhbet, who'd once possessed my Gran (Long story); the crocodile Sobek, who'd tried to kill my cat (longer story); and the lion goddess Sekhmet, whom we'd once vanished with hot sauce (don't even ask) ~ Rick Riordan

The Aristocrat

The Devil is a gentleman, and asks you down to stay
At his little place at What'sitsname (it isn't far away).
They say the sport is splendid; there is always something new,
And fairy scenes, and fearful feats that none but he can do;
He can shoot the feathered cherubs if they fly on the estate,
Or fish for Father Neptune with the mermaids for a bait;
He scaled amid the staggering stars that precipice, the sky,
And blew his trumpet above heaven, and got by mastery
The starry crown of God Himself, and shoved it on the shelf;
But the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't brag himself.

O blind your eyes and break your heart and hack your hand away,
And lose your love and shave your head; but do not go to stay
At the little place in What'sitsname where folks are rich and clever;
The golden and the goodly house, where things grow worse for ever;
There are things you need not know of, though you live and die in vain,
There are souls more sick of pleasure than you are sick of pain;
There is a game of April Fool that's played behind its door,
Where the fool remains for ever and the April comes no more,
Where the splendour of the daylight grows drearier than the dark,
And life droops like a vulture that once was such a lark:
And that is the Blue Devil that once was the Blue Bird;
For the Devil is a gentleman, and doesn't keep his word. ~ G.K. Chesterton

He groaned slightly and winced like Prometheus watching his vulture dropping in for lunch. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. It was absurd to blame any class or any sex, as a whole. [...] They too, the patriarchs, the professors, had endless difficulties, terrible drawbacks to contend with. Their education had been in some ways as faulty as my own. It had bred in them defects as great. True, they had money and power, but only at the cost of harbouring in their breasts an eagle, a vulture, for ever tearing the liver out and plucking at the lungs -- the instinct for possession, the rage for acquisition which drives them to desire other people's fields and goods perpetually; to make frontiers and flags; battleships and poison gas; to offer up their own lives and their children's lives. [...] And as I realised these drawbacks, by degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. ~ Virginia Woolf

This ferry was taken over by the Yumas and operated for them by a man named Callaghan, but within days it was burned and Callaghan's headless body floated anonymously downriver, a vulture standing between the shoulderblades in clerical black, silent rider to the sea. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Someone said to me, "How's your rabbit food?" I said, "Fine." ... "How's your vulture food?" ~ Doug Graham

Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height. ~ Edward Abbey

I've always believed that most sentient creatures like to be recognized. Whether we are gods, people or slavering ghouls in vulture-feather loincloths, we enjoy others knowing who we are, speaking our names, appreciating that we exist. ~ Rick Riordan

Feature the good culture to never be like the vulture that doesn't have a good posture in the picture, the structure you make from every adventure gives glory to the creator for his creature, and he will give you treasure from the nature to venture for the future. ~ Ego Marvis

Dust webbed the window and the showtrays. Dust darkened the toiling fingers with their vulture nails. Dust slept on dull coils of bronze and silver, lozenges of cinnabar, on rubies, leprous and winedark stones. ~ James Joyce

The Limberlost is life. Here it is a carefully kept park. You motor, sail and golf, all so secure and fine. But what I like is the excitement of choosing a path carefully, in the fear that the quagmire may reach out and suck me down; I even enjoy seeing an old canny vulture eyeing me as if it were saying, 'ware the sting of the rattler, lest I pick your bones as I did old Limber's. I like sufficient danger to put an edge on things. This is all so tame. ~ Gene Stratton-Porter

Doctinaires are the vultures of principle. They feed upon principle after it is dead. ~ David Lloyd George

Man cannot pretend to be higher in ethics, spirituality, advancement, or civilisation than other creatures, and at the same time live by lower standards than the vulture or hyena. ~ H. Jay Dinshah

To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on your way. I am sent. To the wolf or the lion or the vulture or the grasses, I am sent.
My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer. ~ Daniel Quinn

On Broadway money rules. Like a host of vultures, the ticket brokers, the speculators, the craft unions, the agents, the backers, the real estate owners move in on the creative body and take their bite. The world of dreams breathes in an iron lung; and without this mechanical pumping it dies. ~ Marya Mannes

Belial said, "Let us stop wasting time, Nazarene. I know who you are. I saw the entire circus show in the desert. The dreadfully smelly and theatrical Baptizer, the Holy Spirit descending like a vulture, Yahweh blathering from heaven, blah, blah, blah." Jesus drifted off in his memory to a mere month ago, where he had been baptized in the Jordan River not too far from this hellish wasteland. John the Baptizer had left the communal sect of Qumran by the Dead Sea to become a lone voice crying in the wilderness to prepare the way for Messiah's advent. He was baptizing people in preparation for that arrival. But when he saw Jesus, he protested that he was not worthy to tie the thong of Jesus's sandal, and that it should be Jesus who baptized John instead. ~ Brian Godawa

The one term I don't like to be called is a 'vulture.' Because to me, a vulture is a kind of asset-stripper that eats dead flesh off the bones of a dead creature. Our bird should be the phoenix, the bird that reinvents itself, recreates itself from its ashes. And that's much closer to what it is that we really do. ~ Wilbur Ross

At the rate America is decaying morally, we shall have to change our national symbol from an eagle to a vulture. ~ Vance Havner

From Indian vultures to Chinese bees, Nature provides the 'natural services' that keep the economy going ~ Tony Juniper

I want to know:
Why is a horse noble and the dove beloved
but no one keeps a pet vulture in a gilded cage.
Why is the humble clover trodden upon rather than the red tulip.
I want to see anew and wash the words of the world
in wind and rain. ~ Sohrab Sepehri

For Love, to which we may now return, has two faces; one white, the other black; two bodies; one smooth, the other hairy. It has two hands, two feet, two tails, two, indeed, of every member and each one is the exact opposite of the other. Yet, so strictly are they joined together that you cannot separate them. In this case, Orlando's love began her flight towards him with her white face turned, and her smooth and lovely body outwards. Nearer and nearer she came wafting before her airs of pure delight. All of a sudden (at the sight of the Archduchess presumably) she wheeled about, turned the other way round; showed herself black, hairy, brutish; and it was Lust the vulture, not Love, the Bird of Paradise that flopped, foully and disgustingly, upon his shoulders. Hence he ran; hence he fetched the footman. ~ Virginia Woolf

Or, like the thief of fire from heaven,
Wilt thou withstand the shock?
And share with him, the unforgiven,
His vulture and his rock! ~ Lord Byron

The past plummeting towards me like a vulture-dropped hand to become what-purifies-and-sets-me-free, because now as I look up there is a feeling at the back of my head and after that there is only a tiny but infinite moment of utter clarity while I tumble forwards to prostrate myself before my parents' funeral pyre, a minuscule but endless instant of knowing, before I am stripped of past present memory time shame and love, a fleeting but also timeless explosion in which I bow my head yes I acquiesce yes in the necessity of the blow, and then I am empty and free, because all the Saleems go pouring out of me, from the baby who appeared in jumbo-sized front-page baby-snaps to the eighteen-year-old with his filthy dirty love, pouring out goes shame and guilt and wanting-to-please and needing-to-be-loved and determined-to-find-a-historical-role and growing-too-fast, I am free ~ Salman Rushdie

His large ears
Hear everything
A hermit wakes
And sleeps in a hut
Underneath
His gaunt cheeks.
His eyes blue, alert,
Disappointed,
And suspicious,
Complain I
Do not bring him
The same sort of
Jokes the nurses
Do. He is a bird
Waiting to be fed, -
Mostly beak - an eagle
Or a vulture, or
The Pharoah's servant
Just before death.
My arm on the bedrail
Rests there, relaxed,
With new love. All
I know of the Troubadours
I bring to this bed.
I do not want
Or need to be shamed
By him any longer.
The general of shame
Has discharged
Him, and left him
In this small provincial
Egyptian town.
If I do not wish
To shame him, then
Why not love him?
His long hands,
Large, veined,
Capable, can still
Retain hold of what
He wanted. But
Is that what he
Desireed? Some
Powerful engine
Of desire goes on
Turning inside his body.
He never phrased
What he desired,
And I am

his son. ~ Robert Bly

Teach the student what needs to be taught.
'Cause black and white kids both take shorts
When one doesn't know about the other one's culture,
Ignorance swoops down like a vulture. ~ KRS-One

Change is constant, but no amount of change will turn the attitude of vulture to that of eagle. ~ Bamigboye Olurotimi

Diclofenac, cow aspirin, given to cattle as a muscle relaxant, to ease pain and increase the production of milk, works - worked - like nerve gas on white-backed vultures. Each chemically relaxed, milk-producing cow or buffalo that died became poisoned vulture bait. ~ Arundhati Roy

Last week, our picture window
Produced a half-word,
Heavy and hollow,
Hit by a brown bird.
We stood and watched her gape like a rattlesnake
And pant and labor over every intake.
I said a sort of prayer for some rare grace,
Then thought i ought to take her to a higher place.
Said, dog nor vulture nor cat shall toy with you,
And though you die, bird, you will have a fine view. ~ Joanna Newsom

Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture. ~ Primo Levi

The vulture Nekhbet, who'd one possessed my gran (long story); the crocodile Sobek, who'd tried to kill my cat (longer story); and the lion goddess Sekhmet, whom we'd once vanished in hot sauce ( don't even ask) - page 9 ~ Rick Riordan

A giant vulture with a girl hanging from its feet tends to attract attention. ~ Rick Riordan

Setne stopped chanting when he saw me.

'Awesome!' He grinned. 'You brought the vulture with you. Thanks!'

Not the reaction I'd been hoping for. I keep waiting for the day when the bad guy sees me and screams, I give up! But it hasn't happened yet. ~ Rick Riordan

In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simple enough to tell fortunes if a man dedicated himself to the idea that the future will inevitably be worse than the past and that time is a path leading nowhere but a place of deep and persistent threat. The way Inman saw it, if a thing like Fredericksburg was to be used as a marker of current position, then many years hence, at the rate we're going, we'll be eating one another raw. ~ Charles Frazier

If you ask my dad for help ... he'll help. Like a vulture helps an over-run armadillo on a Texas highway. One peck at the time. ~ Christopher Titus