Going Bovine Quotes & Sayings

It seemed odd no one had thought of it before but in general there is no accounting for the bovine stupidity of mankind. — Zachary Mason

You ignorant whelp. You dare to warn me away from her? I created her. Without my influence, Charlotte would be a bovine in the country with a half-dozen children at her skirts ... or spreading her legs for every man who dropped a coin between her breasts. I've spent a fortune to make her into something far better than she was ever meant to be."
"Why don't you send me a bill?"
"It would beggar you," Radnor assured him with raw contempt.
"Send it anyway," Nick invited gently. "I'll be interested to learn the cost of creating someone. — Lisa Kleypas

I'm healthy as an ox. And you?" "To compare myself with a bovine would be both ridiculous and insulting, but I'm fit as ever, if that is what you are asking. — Christopher Paolini

The proper condition of the human is not bovine placidity ... the highest degree of tension that can be creatively borne. — Brian Swimme

I knew, for instance, that rooms where people slept exuded peculiarly human smells just as the goat pen smelt goaty and the cattle kraal bovine. It was common knowledge among the younger girls at school that the older girls menstruated into sundry old rags which they washed and reused and washed again. I knew, too, that the fact of menstruation was a shamefully unclean secret that should not be allowed to contaminate immaculate male ears by indiscreet reference to this type of first in their presence. — Tsitsi Dangarembga

One reason milk consumption may lead to cancer risk is insulin-like growth factor, IGF-1 (not to be confused with bovine growth hormone, rBGH). Milk contains IGF-1 for good reason: milk is designed for babies, and IGF-1 helps us grow. IGF-1 affects growth, as well as other functions, and is normally found in our blood. Higher levels of IGF-1, however, appear to stimulate cancer cells. — Alison Stewart

I decided that since my curves aren't going to disappear due to gorging on lettuce, I might as well flaunt them. If men like the bovine appeal, as you said, they're certainly going to get it. — Eloisa James

Oh, I thought that this day and age you maybe would be known as bovine custodial officers. — Tom Robbins

I've never done acid, finding it hard to go willingly to a place that could be frightening, hellish, and totally beyond my control. A place much like high school. — Libba Bray

Wow, you're awesome and The universe loves a winner, so the universe must really love you! — Libba Bray

The Lesson You've Got
to learn is the someday you'll someday
stagger to, blinking in cold light, all tears
shed, ready to poke your bovine head
in the yoke they've shaped.
Everyone learns this. Born, everyone
breathes, pays tax, plants dead
and hurts galore. There's grief enough
for each. My mother
learned by moving man to man,
outlived them all. The parched earth's
bare (once she leaves it) of any who watched
the instants I trod it.
Other than myself, of course.
I've made a study of bearing
and forbearance. Everyone does,
it turns out, and note
those faces passing by: Not one's a god. — Mary Karr

All abilities are paid for with disabilities. perfect health may entail the heavy toll of bovine stupidity. insight into one area involves blind spots in another. i could not have done what i have done as a writer had i been a gifted mathematician or physicist.
honesty wrung out of him by pain, he cried out with a loud voice. — William S. Burroughs

The cow is of the bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other milk. — Ogden Nash

Such inbred, bovine torpor! — David Mitchell

Rand, Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury foresaw much of today's dystopian world: its spiritual and moral emptiness, its culture of consumerism, its flat-souled Last Manishness, its debasement of language, its doublethink, its illiteracy, and its bovine tolerance of authoritarian indignities. But they did not foresee the most serious and catastrophic of today's problems: the eminent destruction of whites, and western culture.

None of them thought to deal with race at all. Why is this? Probably for the simple reason that it never occurred to any of them that whites might take slave morality so far as to actually will their own destruction. As always, the truth is stranger than fiction. — Jef Costello

While greenies and their media flunkies continue to savage the gasoline-powered internal-combustion engine and rhapsodize about hybrids, hydrogen, electrics, natural gas, propane, nuclear, and God-knows-what-other panaceas, perhaps including bovine urine, there are no realistic, economically viable alternatives. None. Zero. Like it or not, as long as we remain dependent on the private automobile for transportation (roughly 80 percent of all movement in the nation is by car), we are harnessed to the IC gas engine. — Brock Yates

Life, with all it's sorrows, cares, perplexities and heart-breaks, is more interesting than bovine placidity, hence more desirable. The more interesting it is, the happier it is. — William Lyon Phelps

Then Jason felt a brief statistical curiosity over how many people died annually because they couldn't move when they should. He couldn't think as far away as his feet, and they weren't going anywhere on their own. It seemed that the internal conflict should have screamed in his head like a sold-out theater on fire, but in practice it felt stupidly bovine, like shoveling in more dull food when you were already full. — Jamie Mason

When you're taxing bovine flatulence emissions, there's nothing left to tax. — Mark Steyn

Oh, hello," Dr. M says, shaking Balder's hand. "Wonderful costume. I'm a bit of a role player myself on the weekends. Tell me, where did you get the helmet?"
It was forged in the North, blessed by the hands of Odin, given to me by my mother, Frigg," Balder answers.
Lovely. I got mine on the Internet. — Libba Bray

Maybe there's a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we've ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we're an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we're still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we're all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again - each of us playing our parts in the other's plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it. — Libba Bray

These studies resulted eventually in a complete sequence analysis of the complex from several species, and in the atomic resolution structure of the F catalytic domain of the enzyme from bovine mitochondria, giving new insights into how ATP is made in the biological world. — John E. Walker

If you want a cow to be not just a cow but a milk machine, you can do a very good job at that by creating new hormones like the Bovine Growth Hormone. It might make the cow very ill, it might turn it into a drug addict, and it might even create consumer scares about the health and safety aspects of the milk. But we've gotten so used to manipulating objects and organisms and ecosystems for a single objective that we ignore the costs involved. I call this the "monoculture of the mind." — Vandana Shiva

Those no-sooner-have-I-touched-the-pillow people are past my comprehension. There is something bovine about them. — J.B. Priestley

In America the machine is invading all branches of farm production, from the making of butter to the weeding of wheat. Why, because the American, free and lazy, would prefer a thousand deaths to the bovine life of the French peasant. Plowing, so painful and so crippling to the laborer in our glorious France, is in the American West an agreeable open-air pastime, which he practices in a sitting posture, smoking his pipe nonchalantly. — Paul Lafargue

I figured it out this afternoon, when they let me take a walk around the grounds, that these cows are stupid. Bovine. I knew the word, but I hadn't quite appreciated how literal it could be. I — Jo Walton

For me, boviscopophobia (=the morbid fear of being seen as bovine) is an even stronger motive than semi-agoraphobia for staying on the ship when we're in port. — David Foster Wallace

I thought I was having an existential crisis, but it was nothing.
Please don't tailgate: body in trunk. — Libba Bray

I'm just saying it's not all sand castles and ninjas. — Libba Bray

Connie could make her feel slow and bovine; the way she'd suddenly snap her head around and bark a question that would leave Margie fumbling for an answer. — Liane Moriarty

We all walk in a land of dreams. For what are we but atoms and hope, a handful of stardust and sinew? We are weary travelers trying to find our way home on a road that never ends. Am I a part of your dream? or are you but a part of mine? — Libba Bray

Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. "The Great Bovine City of the World," breathed Lindsey in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in everchanging cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killingfloor. — Thomas Pynchon

How now Mad Cow? — Libba Bray

History, in other words, is just a device to be used by well-paid boobherds to drive the American cattle in bovine content to their pastures or to the abattoir. — Revilo P. Oliver

What exquisite, or rather, what bovine crudity there is in their egoism, an egoism they simply cannot manage to perceive in themselves! — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Heat magazine - the tittering idiot's lunchbreak-pamphlet-of-choice -
has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the
fringes of computer monitors by the magazine's bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature
Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted, Heat-reading lives — Charlie Brooker

I have always voted Labour and I always will. I have got to have one stupid, bovine part of me and that's the part that votes Labour. — Julie Burchill

Apparently the term refugee can be plausibly denied if both - I'm quoting direct from Neil's memo here - if both, a, no homemade wagons piled high with worldly goods are pulled by slow bovine animals with curvy horns, and b, if the percentage of children under six who are either, a, naked, or b, squalling at the top of their lungs, or c, both, is under 20% of the total number of children under six in transit. — David Foster Wallace

CEI in 1992 "advised" the Food and Drug Administration to approve recombinant bovine somatotropin, which is a bioengineered growth hormone. Now surely such recommendation would be accompanied by the further suggestion of labeling the resulting products so that consumer choice- that ultimate driver of market forces-could be openly exercised? Think again: the CEI argued that mandatory labeling of dairy products is "inappropriate" because it violates the First Amendment (which includes the right to free speech-of the cows?). — Massimo Pigliucci

You've never seen surprise until you've looked into the eyes of an ascending bovine. — Maria Dahvana Headley

I've been poked and prodded in places I'd always prided myself on keeping untouched for that one special doctor who gives me a ring and a promise someday. — Libba Bray

Mom's crying a bit, quietly, the way she always does. She never utters a sound even when she's crying, and that makes me a little sad. Doesn't seem right. When you cry, people should hear you. The world should stop. I squeeze Mom's hand and she squeezes back. I don't say anything, but at least she knows I've heard her. (Going Bovine) — Libba Bray

...a book provides for a distillation of our sporadic mind, a record of its most vital manifestations, a concentration of inspired moments that might originally have arisen across a multitude of years and been separated by extended stretches of bovine gazing. To meet an author whose books one has enjoyed must, in this view, necessarily be a disappointment... because such a meeting can only reveal a person as he exists within, and finds himself subject to, the limitations of time. — Alain De Botton

Free the snow globes! — Libba Bray