Quotes about zebra

A collection of quotes on the topic of zebra, life, time, timing.

Quotes about zebra

“Pointless but intense excitement holds us in TV dramas. We hear threatening music. A killer with a gun steals into the bedroom of a sleeping woman. More subliminal sounds of danger, pointlessly ominous. The woman wakes and runs into the kitchen for a knife. The cops are on the case. We watch as the criminal is pursued through night streets; shots, a death; a body falls from a roof. Then time is up, another drama begins. Now we are in a church. No, we are in a lecture hall; no again — a drawer opens in a morgue. A woman is looking for her kidnapped child. Then that ends, and we are on the veld with zebras and giraffes. Then with Lenin at a mass meeting. And suddenly we flash away to a cooking school; we are shown how to stuff a turkey. Next the Berlin Wall comes down. Or flags are burning. Or a panel is worrying about the rug crisis. More and more public themes, with less and less personal consciousness. Clearly, personal consciousness is shrinking.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

"The Distracted Public" (1990), pp. 159-160
It All Adds Up (1994)

Death, School, Music, Sleep

“Well she's walking through the clouds
With a circus mind, that's running round.
Butterflies and Zebras, and moonbeams, and fairytales-
That's all she ever thinks about. Riding with the wind.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Little Wing
Song lyrics, Axis: Bold as Love (1967)

Fairytale, Thinking

“One wants to move through life with elegance and grace, blossoming infrequently but with exquisite taste, and perfect timing, like a rare bloom, a zebra orchid… One wants… But one so seldom gets what one wants, does one?”

Tony Kushner Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

Source: Angels in America

Life, Time, Perfection

“We'd just released a zebra in Las Vegas.”

Rick Riordan book The Lightning Thief

Source: The Lightning Thief

“There's no limit to how much you'll know, depending how far beyond zebra you go.”

Dr. Seuss (1904–1991) American children's writer and illustrator, co-founder of Beginner Books

Dependency

“I finally got around to reading the dictionary. Turns out the Zebra did it.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

Reading

“Everytime I look at a zebra, I can't figure out whether it's black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.”

Jodi Picoult book House Rules

Source: House Rules

“I suddenly realized. The zebra. It is not something outside of us. The zebra is something inside of us. Our fears. Our own self-destructive nature. The zebra is the worst part of us when we are face-to-face with our worst times. The demon is us!”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Fear, Nature, Time, Parting

“Butterflies and zebras
And moonbeams and fairy tales
That's all she ever thinks about
Riding with the wind.”

Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970) American musician, singer and songwriter

Thinking

“Somewhere, the zebra is dancing.”

Garth Stein The Art of Racing in the Rain

Source: The Art of Racing in the Rain

Dance

“Iggy: "I'll grab a zebra; Gaz, you fill all the bubbles with your trademark scent. so people are choking and gagging; and let's throw beef jerky in their eyes! Now, that's a plan!”

James Patterson (1947) American author

People

“Across the history of life on Earth, animals and birds of many species have routinely colonized new country. That's enough a marker of adaptive success that biologists apply the term "cosmopolitan" to species that are especially flexible regarding… habitats… Evolving in America, the ancestors of horses spread across Asia, Europe, and Africa, where they became zebras and quaggas. Bovine evolution in Southeast Asia eventually brought bison to North America… But the range expansion of a wild animal [i. e., the coyote] for thousands of miles in every direction, often through dense settlements of humans who in recent history have been committed to that animal's eradication, is truly remarkable. A suite of factors must be involved.”

Dan Flores (1948) American historian

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (2016)

Life, History, Bird, Success

“A zebra can't drive a moon-buggy. Or any other sort of car for that matter.”

Steve Purcell (1959) American cartoonist, animator, film director and game designer

Sam, in Bad Day on the Moon
Sam and Max comics

Cars

“The way you can go to Paris or Beijing, Oyster says, and everywhere there's a McDonald's hamburger, this is the ecological equivalent of franchised life-forms. Every place is the same place. Kudzu. Zebra mussels. Water hyacinths. Starlings. Burger Kings. The local natives, anything unique gets squeezed out.. He says, "We're landscaping the whole world one stupid mistake at a time."”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 19

Life, Stupidity, World, Way

“A healthy ocean is an ocean with sharks. Take away an apex predator and it’s like removing the lions from the Serengeti. It won’t be long before the gazelle, zebras and wildebeest have multiplied and eaten all the grass. And when the land is laid bare the grazers will starve to death. Predators are crucial for a healthy ecosystem – be it on land or in the water.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

24 September 2014, Op-ed in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/opinion/swimming-through-garbage.html?_r=0 <br class="br">Speaking & Features

Death, Grass, Water

““That’s how it went, wasn’t it Zebra?”
“It might,” she said. “If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.””

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 29 (p. 479).

“Zebras are reactionaries,
Antelopes are missionaries,
Pigeons plot in secrecy,
And hamsters turn on frequently.”

Paul Simon (1941) American musician, songwriter and producer

At The Zoo
Song lyrics, Bookends (1968)

“With each tentative tiptoe and stumble, I had to inwardly assure myself that I was a good comedian and that my life was not pointless. “I am addicted to comfort,” I thought as I tumbled into the wood chips. I have become divorced from nature; I don’t know what the names of the trees and birds are. I don’t know what berries to eat or which stars will guide me home. I don’t know how to sleep outside in a wood or skin a rabbit. We have become like living cutlets, sanitized into cellular ineptitude. They say that supermarkets have three days’ worth of food. That if there was a power cut, in three days the food would spoil. That if cash machines stopped working, if cars couldn’t be filled with fuel, if homes were denied warmth, within three days we’d be roaming the streets like pampered savages, like urban zebras with nowhere to graze. The comfort has become a prison; we’ve allowed them to turn us into waddling pipkins. What is civilization but dependency? Now, I’m not suggesting we need to become supermen; that solution has been averred before and did not end well. Prisoners of comfort, we dread the Apocalypse. What will we do without our pre-packed meals and cozy jails and soporific glowing screens rocking us comatose? The Apocalypse may not arrive in a bright white instant; it may creep into the present like a fog. All about us we may see the shipwrecked harbingers foraging in the midsts of our excess. What have we become that we can tolerate adjacent destitution? That we can amble by ragged despair at every corner? We have allowed them to sever us from God, and until we take our brothers by the hand we will find no peace.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Life, God, Peace, Food

“Consider Every Battle a Life and Death Struggle. This principle focuses on commitment and determination. When your life is at stake, you make an absolute commitment of all your power to your survival. For a shaman, the proper way to approach every task it with absolute commitment. The shaman realizes that a predator is not automatically successful because it is equipped with sharper teeth or stronger muscles. A predator can be seriously injured or even killed during the hunt. The lion kicked in the jaw by a zebra might be unable to hunt and die of starvation. So in every hunt, the hunter must be prepared to die. But this threat gives the hunter the advantage because it ensures that they will operate at peak performance level, completely at attention, keenly observant of everything in their environment, and fully in charge at the moment of action.”

Jose Stevens

The Power Path: The Shaman's Way to Success in Business and Life. Dr. Jose Stevens and Lena Stevens. ISBN 978-1577312178.

Life, Death, Way, Success

“The Zebra is striped all over so that the Lion can see him and eat him. Some people say he is striped so that the Lion can not see him. These people believe that the stripes of the Zebra simulate the bars of sunlight falling through the tall jungle grasses and that therefore the Zebra is invisible and that the earth is flat.”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Zebra
How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes (1931)

People, Grass

“Perfectly coloured to be camouflaged totally in a 60's living room, the zebra has powerful legs and a thirst for blood!”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Fight or Flight?
Fully Ramblomatic, Features

Fight

“That’s how it went, wasn’t it Zebra?”

Alastair Reynolds book Chasm City

“It might,” she said. “If I happened to be colluding in your own delusions.”
Source: Chasm City (2001), Chapter 29 (p. 479).

“Long story, but the point is that if you hear hoofbeats in the distance, your first guess is that they’re horses, not zebras. And you’re hearing hoofbeats and jumping straight to unicorns.”
“So what are you saying?”

Daniel Abraham (1969) speculative fiction writer from the United States

“I’m saying let’s go see if we can find some horses or zebras before we start a unicorn hunt.”
Source: Nemesis Games (2015), Chapter 8 (p. 86)

Horse

“No matter what I do I could never become an English man. If you paint stripes on a donkey, that doesn’t make it a zebra.”

Imran Khan (1952) Prime Minister of Pakistan

Quoted while explaining about his early days in Britain, Former Pakistan PM Imran Khan’s ‘donkey’ reference creates waves on Twitter https://www.firstpost.com/world/watch-former-pakistan-pm-imran-khans-donkey-reference-creates-waves-on-twitter-10644561.html (May 7, 2022)

Painting