Vultures

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.

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• 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 in: John F. Mongillo, Bibi Booth Environmental Activists, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001, p. 4.

• The bearded vulture [...] kills wild bulls in the foothills, and it kills the stags in the high mountains.
  • Anonymous, Nanshe and the Birds (Nanshe C), The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature.

• There is a path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye hath not seen.
  • Book of Job 28:7 (KJV)

• The Vulture is a Patient Bird
  Like a Hole in the Head
  An Ace Up My Sleeve
  Want to Stay Alive
  
  • James Hadley Chase, The Vulture is a Patient Bird (Hachette UK, 2013), p. 143

• 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.
  • Cicero, as quoted by Tedd Adamovich The Price of Liberty: Benjamin Franklin Wept (AuthorHouse, 2000), p. 209

• I started all over again on page 1, circling the 262 pages like a vulture looking for live flesh to scavenge.
  • John Gregory Dunne, Crooning: A Collection (Simon and Schuster, 1991), p. 266

• What flocks of critics hover here to-day,
  As vultures wait on armies for their prey,
  All gaping for the carcass of a play!
  • John Dryden, All for Love (1677), Prologue

• 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 José Farmer, "In Common" in Starlanes, no. 14 (April 1954); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)

• 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.
  • Stephen Jay Gould, Leonardo's Mountain of Clams (Random House, 2010), p. 124.

• I'm a culture vulture, and I just want to experience it all.
  • Debbie Harry, in Details, vol. 25, nos. 8-10 (2007)

• 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.
  • Homer, Iliad, I, as translated by Alexander Pope; the Greek is οἰωνοῖσί, lit. 'every bird'

• The vultures that once wheeled over our heads must be buried with their prey.
  • Oliver Wendel Homes Jr., in Ian Frederick Finseth, The American Civil War: An Anthology of Essential Writings (Taylor & Francis, 2006), p. 526

• 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, in Investors Chronicle, vol, 148, nos. 1878-1890 (Financial Times Business Pub., 2004), p. 82

• 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.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha (1855), XIX: The Ghosts

• I am ... a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures.
  • H. P. Lovecraft, describing himself as a Nordic. Quoted by Timo Airaksinen, The Philosophy of H.P. Lovecraft: The Route to Horror (Peter Lang Pub. Inc., 1999), p. 40

• 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.
  • Martin Lowney, in Lawrence Winkler, Westwood Lake Chronicles (2012), p. 15.

• 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.
  • Groucho Marx, in The Groucho Letters: Letters from and to Groucho Marx (Simon and Schuster, 2007), p. 211

• 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, quoted in On Melville (Duke University Press, 1988), p. 35

• 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.
  • Roger Tory Peterson, in Lisa W. Foderaro "In The Studio With Roger Tory Peterson; Reluctant Earthling", The New York Times (26 August 1993)

• Live with vultures, become a vulture; live with crows, become a crow
  • Laotian proverb, in Jon R. Stone The Routledge Book of World Proverbs (2006), p. 230

• 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, in "I am American Business", CNBC.com (n.d.)

• The vultures to the conqueror’s banner true
  Who feed where Desolation first has fed,
  And whose wings rain contagion.
  • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais (1821), st. 28, l. 246

• I will love you ... as a corpse loves the beak of the vulture.
  • Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters (2006)

• 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.
  • Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), p. 334

• 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.
  • Virgil, Aeneid, vi, 268-751 & 893-8, as translated by Robert Bridges, Ibant Obscuri: An Experiment in the Classical Hexameter (Oxford, 1916)

• Spain stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey. Every thing was force. Territories were acquired by fire and sword.
  • Daniel Webster, reported in The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster: With an Essay on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style (Little, Brown, & Co., 1879), p. 145.

• 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.
  • P. G. Wodehouse, Pigs Have Wings (1952)