Hippopotami

From Wikiquote

The hippopotamus is the World's second largest terrestrial animal.

[edit] Sourced

• I shoot the Hippopotamus
  With bullets made of platinum,
  Because if I use leaden ones
  His hide is sure to flatten 'em.
  • Hilaire Belloc, "The Hippopotamus", The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896).
  • Parody: American women shoot the hippopotamus with eyebrows made of platinum.
    • E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (1936), 'Mickey and Minnie'

• The broad-backed hippopotamus
  Rests on his belly in the mud;
  Although he seems so firm to us
  He is merely flesh and blood.
  • T. S. Eliot, "The Hippopotamus"

• Did you ever see the Rhinoceros, and the Hippopotamus, at the Zoological Gardens, trying to dance a minuet together? It is a touching sight.
  • Lewis Carroll, A Selection from the Letters of Lewis Carroll to his Child-Friends (1933) edited by Evelyn M. Hatch, Letter to Gaynor Simpson (27 December 1873), p.91

• He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
  Descending from the bus:
  He looked again, and found it was
  A Hippopotamus:
  'If this should stay to dine,' he said,
  'There won't be much for us!'
  • Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, Chapter 7: The Baron's Embassy

• A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake.
  • G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens ch. 10

• Behold the hippopotamus!
  We laugh at how he looks to us,
  And yet in moments dank and grim,
  I wonder how we look to him.
  • Ogden Nash, The Hippopotamus

• Away on the hilltop sat combing her hair
  His fair Hippopotamine maid.
  The Hippopotamus was no ignoramus
  And sang her this sweet serenade:
  
  Mud! Mud! Glorious mud!
  Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood.
  So, follow me, follow, down to the hollow,
  And there let us wallow in glorious mud.
  • Michael Flanders, The Hippopotamus Song

• There is something about a blurb-writer paying his respects to a funny book which puts one in mind of a short-sighted lord mayor raising his hat to a hippopotamus.
  • Michael Frayn, Introduction, The Best of Beachcomber

• The muckle hippopotamus
  spelders in glaur apo’ his kite.
  A solid fact he seems tae some.
  They arena right.
  
  The hippo’s coorse digestive tract
  erodes through frequent emptying.
  The KIRK’s the only solid fact
  that winna ding.
  • R. Crombie Saunders 'The Scottish Hippo', a parody of T. S. Eliot (sometimes incorrectly attributed to Alasdair Gray, its illustrator)

[edit] Unsourced

• Woman at zoo: Is that a male or a female hippopotamus?
  Keeper: Madam, I don't see how that could interest anybody except another hippopotamus.
  • Attr. variously to Julian Huxley, Sanche de Gramont, and Harold W. Ross

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