elephant quotes

He thought he saw an Elephant, That practised on a fife: He looked again, and found it was A letter from his wife. 'At length I realize,' he said 'The bitterness of life!'

-Dodgson
  Sylvie and Bruno, ch.5.

Nature's great masterpiece, an Elephant.

-John Donne
c.1595^1605  'The Progress of the Soul', stanza 39, collected in Songs and Sonnets (1633).

And the elephant sings deep in the forest-maze About a star of deathless and painless peace But no astronomer can find where it is.

-Ted (Edward James) Hughes
  'Crow's Elephant Totem Song'.

But there was one Elephanta new Elephantan Elephant's Childwho was full of 'satiable curtiosity, and that means he asked ever so many questions.

- (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
  Just So Stories,'The Elephant's Child'.

One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got into my pyjamas I don't know.

- Groucho originally Julius Henry Marx Marx
  Line delivered in  Animal Crackers (screenplay by George Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind).

You canteach anelephant to dance, butthe likelihood of its stepping on your toes is very high.

- Gary Moss
  On the decline of the advertising agencies' monopoly in marketing. In Forbes,15 Mar.

We all three got up on our elephant which brought us hither. For my own part I found [it] very uneasy riding, being badly seated and not accustomed (he had such a shuffling, jogging justling pace), sitting hindermost on the ridge of his monstrous massy chine bones, and nothing at all under me (nor they neither) that I wished myselfonfoot and would havelet myselffall off butthat it was somewhat too high. In fine, we alighted off from his back into the upper galleries of the house and saved the labour going upstairs.

- Peter Mundy
c.1620  On riding on an elephant. Travels (pubished c.1650).

   God is really onlyanother artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things.

- Pablo Ruiz y Picasso
Quoted in F Gilot and C Lake Life with Picasso (1964), pt.1.

Living next to you is like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.

- Pierre Elliott Trudeau
  Of the US. Speech, National Press Club,Washington DC, 25 Mar. Quoted in Lawrence Martin The Presidents and the Prime Ministers (1982).