Vultures

From Wikiquote
(Redirected from Vulture)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Vulture, getting ready to strike

Vulture is the name given to two groups of convergently evolved, usually scavenging birds of prey: the New World vultures, including the Californian and Andean condors; and the Old World vultures, including the birds that are seen scavenging on carcasses of dead animals on African plains. New World vultures are found in North and South America; Old World vultures are found in Europe, Africa and Asia, meaning that between the two groups, vultures are found on every continent except Australia and Antarctica.


CONTENT : A - F , G - L , M - R , S - Z , See also , External links

Quotes[edit]

Quotes are arranged alphabetically by author

A - F[edit]

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.
  • 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.
  • I imagine that some one there is declaiming a great poem, that some one is speaking of Prometheus. He has stolen light from the gods. In his entrails he feels the pain, always beginning again, always fresh, gathering from evening to evening, when the vulture steals to him as it would steal to its nest. And you feel that we are all like Prometheus because of desire, but there is neither vulture nor gods.
  • An Extremely Goofy Movie current culture that those with large stature are overlooked-except by vultures-with no regard to the depth of their souls, the height of their passion. Here is a list of fearful things: The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings, The rabid bite of the dog's of war, The voice of one who went before. But most of all, the mirror’s gaze, which counts us out our numbered days.
Egyptian vulture - ...and the gier eagle, and the cormorant,
And the stork, and the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. - Bible.
Ravana cuts Jatayu's wings, painting by Raja Ravi Varma - Jatayu, a divine bird, the king of the vultures. He was Sampati. According to Ramayana and Mahabharata, he was the son of Aruna and Shyeni. In the Ramayana he tried to prevent Ravana from carrying away Sita, but was wounded and killed. Rama and Lakshmana performed his last rites, and he ascended to heaven in a chariot of fire. In the Puranas, he helped the King Dasharatha, and saved him from being consumed by Shani. In some text he is described as son of Garuda. -Roshen Dalal
  • What flocks of critics hover here to-day,
    As vultures wait on armies for their prey,
    All gaping for the carcass of a play!

G - L[edit]

  • There you are! Dad always said that milk is good for your eyesight. Vultures are good for one thing and one thing only - their talons. They make great mental acuity that I would care to call consciousness. But I am also confident—without wrapping myself in unresolvable arguments about definitions—that vultures and sloths, as close evolutionary relatives with the same basic set of organs.
  • If your friend is already dead, and being eaten by vultures, I think it's okay to feed some bits of your friend to one of the vultures, to teach him to do some tricks. But only if you're serious about adopting the vulture.
*Andean Condor (Vultur gryphus) has a moderately small global population which is suspected to be declining significantly owing to persecution by man...BirdLife International.
The eagle, soaring, clear-eyed, competitive, prepared to strike, but not a vulture. Noble, visionary, majestic, that people can believe in and be inspired by, that creates such a lift that it soars. I can see that being a good logo for the principled company. Ira Jackson.
  • Vultures are one of the few bird species that are afraid of their own dead. But only when they're hung at the roost site. If you hang them anywhere else then they'll eat them.

M - R[edit]

Prometheus - 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 for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.- Herman Melville.
  • Understand this, tell others: in my dream vultures chase me into my burning house. There, they pick out the brains of my family, dismember them, devour. I emerge from my home and I am burning, skin falling away like a snake as the structure crumbles into a black skeleton. I cannot fight off the vultures. A young man or woman emerges from the ashes. He/she doesn't save me, because he/she is holding my cracked and swollen heart in one hand and a piece of paper in the other. I can read it. It discusses and compares in great detail the differences between me and the vultures. He wraps my heart in the paper and tosses it to the ground. Can you see?
Parsee Tower of Silence with vultures on the roof top - Vultures, which are brought to the brink of extinction by exposure to veterinary drugs, are proposed to be conserved by building two aviaries so that the ancient tradition [of Parsis] of leaving corpses in so-called Towers of Silence to be picked apart by the giant scavenging birds can resume. - Mat McDermott.
w;Condor:Conde is the largest by far of the vultures who have begun to gather around the ailing Conte regime. - Olly Owen
  • I think it was his eye, yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture— a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees - very gradually - I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus myself rid of the eye forever.
...To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
And driven the Hamadryad from the wood...Edgar Allan Poe.
  • Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!
    Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
    preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
    Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
    How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,
    Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering,
    To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,
    Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
    Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car?
    And driven the Hamadryad from the wood
    To seek a shelter in some happier star?
    Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,
    The Elfin from the green grass, and from me
    The summer dread beneath the tamarind tree?
  • 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.

S - Z[edit]

  • Great was the stench of death. After our fathers and grandfathers succumbed, half of the people fled to the fields. The dogs and the vultures devoured the bodies. The mortality was terrible. Your grandfathers died, and with them died the son of the king and his brothers and kinsmen. So it was that we became orphans, oh, my sons. We were born to die.
A vulture on board; bald, red, queer-shaped head, featherless red places here and there on his body, intense great black eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed flesh;...Mark Twain.
  • A vulture on board ; bald, red, queer-shaped head, featherless red places here and there on his body, intense great black eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed flesh ; dissipated look ; a business-like style, a selfish, conscienceless, murderous aspect — the very look of a professional assassin, and yet a bird which does no murder. What was the use of getting him up in that tragic style for so innocent a trade as his ? For this one isn't the sort that wars upon the living, his diet is offal — and the more out of date it is the better he likes it. Nature should give him a suit of rusty black ; then he would be all right, for he would look like an undertaker and would harmonize with his business ; whereas the way he is now he is horribly out of true.
  • It seems that it had been destined before that I should occupy myself so thoroughly with the vulture, for it comes to my mind as a very early memory, when I was still in the cradle, a vulture came down to me, he opened my mouth with his tail and struck me a few times with his tail against my lips.

Carrion Dreams 2.0: A Chronicle of the Human-Vulture Relationship[edit]

Turkey vulture -New World vulture.
Lappet-faced vultures (left) and a white-backed vulture - Old World vulture.

Benjamin Jeol Wilkinson in: Carrion Dreams 2.0: A Chronicle of the Human-Vulture Relationship, Abominationalist Productions, 15 November 2013

  • The vulture is the highest flying of all birds...It depends on nothing and no one, coming and going at will, soaring above the clouds for miles on end, alighting on the highest peaks. It has an imperturbable and strong will to live.
    • Pan Gongkai in Art and China’s revolution translated by Phil Tinari quoted in p. 11.
  • ...he will always be for most persons, just a plain old buzzard up there in the sky.
    • In: P.11.
  • When a vulture is perched or grounded, the airfoils must be stowed away; and their great size can make them a bit cumbersome... many vultures regularly fight members of their own or other species at carcasses, and loose, coarse feathers provide better protection against blows than would tight, fine plumage.
    • In: p. 32.
  • The existence [Vultures in Pre-history] of such a large raptorial bird in company with the “Pigmy Elephant” . . . is certainly suggestive that the old fable of the “Roc” carrying off the Elephant may possibly have had a foundation in fact.
    • Richard Lydekker, “On Some Large Extinct Birds From Malta”(1890), quoted in p. 38.
  • Among the many interesting forms of Vertebrates taken from the Quaternary asphalt of the rancho La Brea beds in Southern California, there have appeared several specimens of a very large bird [Vultures in Pre-history]... a raptorial bird of gigantic size...
    • Loye Holmes Miller in “Teratornis, A New Avian Genus From Rancho La Brea,” , (1909} quoted in: p. 38.

External links[edit]

Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about: