Vultures

"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."

"The [...] kills wild bulls in the foothills, and it kills the stags in the high mountains."

"There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen."

"The Vulture is a Patient Bird Like a Hole in the Head An Ace Up My Sleeve Want to Stay Alive"

"A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble."

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

"What flocks of critics hover here to-day, As vultures wait on armies for their prey, All gaping for the carcass of a play!"

"I'm not sure why many of us have a negative impression of s; perhaps it's their naked heads, or perhaps we find their diet of the dead and desiccated unappealing. ... Instead of defending themselves with s or teeth, they vomit in the general direction of a threat, certainly not the most charming attribute. Above all, I think we dislike turkey vultures because they remind us of our own mortality and that life will continue after we die—and that, as with all animals, something will be waiting to consume our bodies."

"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."

"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."

"I'm a culture vulture, and I just want to experience it all."

"That wrath which hurl’d to Pluto’s gloomy reign The souls of mighty chiefs untimely slain; Whose limbs unburied on the naked shore, Devouring dogs and hungry vultures tore."

"The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey."

"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."

"Never stoops the soaring vulture On his quarry in the desert, On the sick or wounded bison, But another vulture, watching From his high aerial look-out Sees the downward plunge, and follows; And a third pursues the second, Coming from invisible ether, First a speck, and then a vulture , Till the air is dark with pinions."

"I am ... a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures."

"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."

"You have no idea how fortunate you are, because I'm a particularly loathsome guest and I eat like a vulture. Unfortunately, the resemblance doesn't end there."

"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."

"He can wax poetic about pigeons and even has kind words for vultures. Vultures are homely, but they clean up all the garbage and that's good. And they're elegant in the sky."

"Live with vultures, become a vulture; live with crows, become a crow"

"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."

"The vultures to the conqueror’s banner true Who feed where Desolation first has fed, And whose wings rain contagion."

"I will love you ... as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture."

"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."

"There too huge Tityos, whom Earth that gendereth all things, Once foster’d, spreadeth-out o’er nine full roods his immense limbs. On him a wild vulture with hook-beak greedily gorgeth His liver upsprouting quick as that Hell-chicken eateth. Shé diggeth and dwelleth under the vast ribs, her bloody bare neck Lifting anon: ne’er loathes-she the food, ne’er fails the renewal."

"Spain stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey. Every thing was force. Territories were acquired by fire and sword."

"For an author Jerry Vail was rather nice-looking, most authors, as is widely known, resembling in appearance the more degraded types of fish, unless they look like birds, when they could pass as vultures and no questions asked."