Quotes about porcupine (12 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“A few said they'd be horses. Most said they'd be some sort of cat. My friend said she'd like to come back as a porcupine. I don't like crowds, she said.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Cats , Horse

“Oh yeah, this was so comforting. Like a porcupine in a condom factory.’ (Danger)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Sins of the Night

“What! Would you slap the Porcupine?
Unhappy child — desist!
Alas! That any friend of mine
Should turn Tupto-philist.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

"The Porcupine"
More Beasts for Worse Children (1897)

“I listen back to some of Porcupine now and… well, not blush exactly, we were great and all that… but we could have been just anyone, you know?”

Ian McCulloch (1959) singer, musician

Q magazine (1992)

“Any hound a porcupine nudges
Can't be blamed for harboring grudges.
I know one hound that laughed all winter
At a porcupine that sat on a splinter.”

Ogden Nash (1902–1971) American poet

"The Porcupine" http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-porcupine/

Winter

“The Deer don't dine
When a Wolf's about,
And the Porcupine
Sticks his quill-points out.”

Arthur Guiterman (1871–1943) United States writer

Safety First https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/html/1807/4350/poem3072.html

Wolf

“Obama’s manner in dealing with other people and acting in the world fully exemplifies the cheerful impersonal friendliness—the middle distance—that marks American sociability. (Now allow me to speak as a critic. Remember Madame de Staël’s meetings that deprive us of solitude without affording us company? Or Schopenhauer’s porcupines, who shift restlessly from getting cold at a distance to prickling one another at close quarters, until they settle into some acceptable compromise position?) The cheerful impersonal friendliness serves to mask recesses of loneliness and secretiveness in the American character, and no less with Obama than with anyone else. He is enigmatic—and seemed so as much then as now—in a characteristically American way…. Moreover, he excelled at the style of sociability that is most prized in the American professional and business class and serves as the supreme object of education in the top prep schools: how to cooperate with your peers by casting on them a spell of charismatic seduction, which you nevertheless disguise under a veneer of self-depreciation and informality. Obama did not master this style in prep school, but he became a virtuoso at it nevertheless, as the condition of preferment in American society that it is. As often happens, the outsider turned out to be better at it than the vast majority of the insiders…. Together with the meritocratic educational achievements, the mastery of the preferred social style turns Obama into what is, in a sense, the first American elite president—that is the first who talks and acts as a member of the American elite—since John Kennedy …. Obama's mixed race, his apparent and assumed blackness, his non-elite class origins and lack of inherited money, his Third-World childhood experiences—all this creates the distance of the outsider, while the achieved elite character makes the distance seem less threatening.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Quoted in David Remnick, The Bridgeː The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010), p. 185-6
On Barack Obama

Money , People , Secret , World

“About a hundred and ninety-four feet away from our house [Gorky was born in Armenia] on the road to the spring, my father had a little garden with a few apple trees which had retired from giving fruit. There was a ground constantly in shade where grew incalculable amounts of wild carrots, and porcupines had made their nests. There was a blue rock half buried in the black earth with a few patches of moss placed here and there like fallen clouds. But from where came all the shadows in constant battle like the lancers of w:Paolo Ucello's painting? This garden was identified as the Garden of Wish Fulfilment and often I had seen my mother and other village women opening their bosoms and taking out their soft breasts in their hands to rub them on the rock. Above this all stood an enormous tree all bleached under the sun, the rain, the cold, and deprived of leaves. This was the Holy Tree. I myself don't know why this tree was holy but I had witnessed many people, whoever did pass by, that would tear voluntarily a strip of their clothes and attach this to the tree. Thus through many years of the same ac, like a veritable parade of banners under the pressure of wind all these personal inscriptions of signatures, very softly to my innocent ear used to give echo to the sh-h—h-sh—h of silver leaves of the poplars.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: posthumous, Astract Expressionist Painting in America, p. 124, (in Gorky Memorial Exhibition, Schwabacher pp. 22,23

Women , People , Spring , Tear

“If you have a choice of selling shoes to ladies or giving birth to a flaming porcupine… look into that second, less painful career.”

Richard Jeni (1957–2007) American comedian

Platypus Man

Pain , Shoe , Birth

“I'm a little hoarse tonight. I've been living in Chicago for the past two months, and you know how it is, yelling for help on the way home every night. Things are so tough in Chicago that at Easter time, for bunnies the little kids use porcupines.”

Fred Allen (1894–1956) comedian

Much Ado About Me (1956).

Way , Home , Time , Past

“Our society, it turns out, can use modern art. A restaurant, today, will order a mural by Míro in as easy and matter-of-fact a spirit as, twenty-five years ago, it would have ordered one by Maxfield Parrish. The president of a paint factory goes home, sits down by his fireplace—it looks like a chromium aquarium set into the wall by a wall-safe company that has branched out into interior decorating, but there is a log burning in it, he calls it a firelace, let’s call it a fireplace too—the president sits down, folds his hands on his stomach, and stares at two paintings by Jackson Pollock that he has hung on the wall opposite him. He feels at home with them; in fact, as he looks at them he not only feels at home, he feels as if he were back at the paint factory. And his children—if he has any—his children cry for Calder. He uses thoroughly advanced, wholly non-representational artists to design murals, posters, institutional advertisements: if we have the patience (or are given the opportuity) to wait until the West has declined a little longer, we shall all see the advertisements of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner, and Smith illustrated by Jean Dubuffet.
This president’s minor executives may not be willing to hang a Kandinsky in the house, but they will wear one, if you make it into a sport shirt or a pair of swimming-trunks; and if you make it into a sofa, they will lie on it. They and their wives and children will sit on a porcupine, if you first exhibit it at the Museum of Modern Art and say that it is a chair. In fact, there is nothing, nothing in the whole world that someone won’t buy and sit in if you tell him it is a chair: the great new art form of our age, the one that will take anything we put in it, is the chair. If Hieronymus Bosch, if Christian Morgenstern, if the Marquis de Sade were living at this hour, what chairs they would be designing!”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Taste of the Age”, pp. 19–20
A Sad Heart at the Supermarket: Essays & Fables (1962)

Children , Lie , Age , World

“If you start throwing hedgehogs under me, I shall throw a couple of porcupines under you.”

Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

As quoted in The New York Times (7 November 1963)