“These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough.
No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.”

Moly (l. 9-10)
Collected Poems by Thom Gunn (1994)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof." by Thom Gunn?

Thom Gunn7

English poet 1929–2004

Related quotes

“I have called these animals destriers, borrowing an old word for war-horses. I've given them clawed feet instead of hoofs because I think the genetic engineers will give them claws too. The horse's hoofs seem to be an evolutionary mistake. To speak in Lamarckian terms, the horse has lengthened its legs by standing on its toes until it has ended up standing on one toenail. […] Cheetahs, wolves, and greyhounds all have nonretractile claws that serve them as their spikes serve runners and baseball players. Racehorses could not run as fast as they do if they did not wear aluminum or magnesium shoes.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"Cavalry in the Age of the Autarch", in Castle of the Otter (1982), Reprinted in Gene Wolfe, Castle of Days (1992)
Nonfiction

“Tomorrowland, it seemed, ended up being an empty place where people smart enough to capture the stars got mad and tore each other to shreds with the claws on their feet.”

Stephen King The Tommyknockers

The Tommyknockers (1987)

“But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

"On Truth" in Damn! A Book of Calumny (1918), p. 53
1910s
Context: The final test of truth is ridicule. Very few dogmas have ever faced it and survived. Huxley laughed the devils out of the Gadarene swine. Not the laws of the United States but the mother-in-law joke brought the Mormons to surrender. Not the horror of it but the absurdity of it killed the doctrine of infant damnation. But the razor edge of ridicule is turned by the tough hide of truth. How loudly the barber-surgeons laughed at Huxley—and how vainly! What clown ever brought down the house like Galileo? Or Columbus? Or Darwin?... They are laughing at Nietzsche yet...

“Have you called the alphas?"

"Yes."

"The rats, too?"

He bristled. "What about the rats?"

"They think you're hiding information from them"

"I hide information from everyone. Do they think they're special?”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks