Mangy Quotes & Sayings

I thought of Sammy Glick rocking in his cradle of hate, malnutrition, prejudice, suspicions, amorality, the anarchy of the poor; I thought of him as a mangy puppy in a dog-eat-dog world. I was modulating my hate for Sammy Glick from the personal to the societal. I no longer even hated Rivington Street but the idea of Rivington Street, all Rivington Streets of all nationalities allowed to pile up in cities like gigantic dung heaps smelling up the world, ambitions growing out of filth and crawling away like worms. I saw Sammy Glick on a battlefield where every soldier was his own cause, his own army and his own flag, and I realized that I had singled him out not because he had been born into the world anymore selfish, ruthless and cruel than anybody else, even though he had become all three, but because in the midst of a war that was selfish, ruthless and cruel Sammy was proving himself the fittest and the fiercest and the fastest. — Budd Schulberg

Kishan spoke intently, "Kelsey is all that a man could ask for. She's perfect for you. She loves poetry and sits endlessly content while listening to you sing and play your guitar. She waited months for you to come after her, and she has risked her life repeatedly to save your mangy white hide. She's sweet and loving and warm and beautiful and would make you immeasurably happy."
There was a pause. Then I heard Ren say incredulously, "You love her."
Kishan didn't answer right away, but then said softly, almost so I couldn't hear it, "No man in his right mind wouldn't, which proves you aren't in your right mind. — Colleen Houck

Gargoyles sat on the battlements- lean they were and the same hideous damp grey as the stone. They looked at her with hollow eyes and rattled their silver chains. They had wings of bats or wings or birds, most of them, and licked their beaks or teeth with forked or double tongues. Two paced restlessly before their platforms; others whined or picked their claws or groomed their mangy fur or feathers or lizard skin or scales. — Meredith Ann Pierce

All right, you mangy bag of bones. One of us will meet the Spirits tonight. - Danel Blackwalker — Daniel Calhoun

RJD was pretty much heavy metal personified, a tiny 5-foot-4-inch sorcerer with a mangy mane, demonic eyes and sly grin, all coupled to a simply huge, operatic voice, a diminutive powerhouse who prowled the stage like a feline elf and who was, it turns out, also finely intelligent and well spoken, an actual gentleman in a genre known all too well for its bombastic, monosyllabic doltbuckets. A rare thing indeed. — Mark Morford

What is life when you come to think upon it, but a most excellent, accurately set, infinitely complicated machine for turning fat playful puppies into old mangy blind dogs, and proud war horses into skinny nags, and succulent young boys, to whom the world holds great delights and terrors, into old weak men, with running eyes, who drink ground rhino-horn? — Isak Dinesen

Size me up and get goosebumps, boys. I'm the widowmaker and the slayer of jungles, the mean-eyed harbinger of desolation! I've ripped a catamount asunder and sprinkled his fragments in my stew; one screech from me makes vultures fly, one glance puts blisters on grizzly bears, devastation rides on my every breath! Where is that stately stag to stamp his hoof or rap his antlers to these proclamations! Where is the mangy lion what will lick the salt off my name! — Ron Hansen

Forty feet long sixty feet high hotel
Covered with old gray for buzzing flies
Eye like mango flowing orange pus
Ears Durga people vomiting in their sleep
Got huge legs a dozen buses move inside Calcutta
Swallowing mouthfuls of dead rats
Mangy dogs bark out of a thousand breasts
Garbage pouring from its ass behind alleys
Always pissing yellow Hooghly water
Bellybutton melted Chinatown brown puddles
Coughing lungs Sound going down the sewer
Nose smell a big gray Bidi
Heart bumping and crashing over tramcar tracks
Covered with a hat of cloudy iron
Suffering water buffalo head lowered
To pull the huge cart of year uphill — Allen Ginsberg

Let's just stand still. Maybe whoever it is won't notice us. It's dark out anyway." Both boys knew it could just be someone from the local village but their hearts were starting to beat faster anyways. Who wound be out at this time of night? Suddenly, out from the darkness came a voice. "I'll get you you mangy little ... " There was the sound of something flying through the air and then a plunk as it landed somewhere nearby. Lionel winced. The voice was female. — Sadie Gray

Samantha sighed. "Then I'll get out of the damned car, figure out which wolf in this damnable forest is you, and beat you until you change back. If that doesn't work, so help me god, I'll collar your mangy ass and sell you on eBay. — R.J. Blain

Why, an old, mangy dog, warming himself at the hearth, and struggling to his feet with a little
whimper to welcome his master home - why, that dog has more memories than I! At least he
recognizes his master. His master. But what can I call mine? — Jean-Paul Sarte

Fine," Strider said tightly. "You can. But you wont. Because you know that if you take the woman out of this home, I'll go gray from worry. And you like my hair the way it is."
"Stridey-man. Are you hitting on my? Trying to get me to run my fingers through those mangy locks?"
Gideon chuckled. "Sweetie pie."
Striders lips even twitched into a grin. "You know I hate when you get mushy like that."
Boy loved it. No question. — Gena Showalter

He led them inside and began explaining the process, but there was a problem. What the boys heard was, "Over here is the clang! and if you clang! carefully you'll notice clang! bang! Can you all see it?" He was met with twenty blank stares. "Sorry Master Skeet," Hadley said. Clang! "Can we see what?" "Weren't you listening? I said this is the clang! bang! bang!" More blank stares Skeet was growing red. He turned a dangerous eye on the nearest striker, raised his voice and tried again, "The cling! bang! Oh for mercy's sake!" He whipped around and bellowed with such force that every hammer froze on its descent. "The next one of you mangy curs who uses his hammer while I'm talking is going to swallow it!" The response was impressive. Hammers were cautiously laid down. Apart from the rumble from the forges, the space was filled with a respectful silence. Aedan guessed that Skeet was known here and that he held an intimidating rank. "Now, as I said, — Jonathan Renshaw

What's going on with your face, by the way?"
Gansey rubbed his chin, rueful. His skin felt reluctantly stubbled. He knew he was being diverted, but he allowed it. "Is it growing?"
"Dude, you aren't really going to do that beard thing, are you? I thought you were joking. You know that stopped being cool in the fourteen century or whenever it was that Paul Bunyan lived." Ronan looked over his shoulder at him. He was sporting the five o'clock shadow that he was capable of growing at any time of the day. "Just stop. You look mangy."
"It's irrelevant. It's not growing. I'm doomed to be a man-child."
"If you keep saying things like 'man-child,' we're done," Ronan said. "Hey, man. Don't let it get you down. Once your balls drop, that beard'll come in great. — Maggie Stiefvater

I'd take cyanide no problem if it was that or throwing a cat out in the street, even a moth-eaten, mangy, caterwauling pain in the ass! I'd rather have the thing in bed with me than see it suffer on my account ... though when it comes to human beings, I'm only interested in the sick ... the ones who can stand up are nothing but mounds of vice and spite ... I don't get mixed up in their schemes ... — Louis-Ferdinand Celine

And slowly the snow began to melt. First, doing a number on children's constructions; Then retreating to the foundations of barns and other buildings. Mangy grass poked through the receding snow. Patches of white were swallowed up in the till of the fields. New shapes emerged. Areas of the forest became INACCESSIBLE now that the snow no longer weighed down the weeds and brier ... Nothing fits together anymore. — Craig Thompson

The lawn mower attends with defeaning shudder to the tonsure; a light odor of fresh hay intoxicates the air; the leveled grass finds again a bristling infancy; but the bite of the blades reveals unevenness, mangy clearings, yellow patches. — Italo Calvino

A book is like a man - clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and
ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy
mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax
cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun. — John Steinbeck

By afternoon, a dense crowd had gathered around the Bedford as word spread that an enormous infidel in brown pajamas was loading a truck full of supplies for Muslim schoolchildren ... Mortenson's size-fourteen feet drew a steady stream of bouncing eyebrows and bawdy jokes from onlookers. Spectators shouted guesses at Mortenson's nationality as he worked. Bosnia and Chechnya were deemd the most likely source of this large mangy-looking man. When Mortenson, with his rapidly improving Urdu, interrupted the speculation to tell them he was American, the crowd looked at his sweat-soaked and dirt-grimed shalwar, at his smudged and oily skin, and several men told him they didn't think so. — Greg Mortenson

A friend told me of visiting the Dalai Lama in India and asking him for a succinct definition of compassion. She prefaced her question by describing how heart-stricken she'd felt when, earlier that day, she'd seen a man in the street beating a mangy stray dog with a stick. "Compassion," the Dalai Lama told her, "is when you feel as sorry for the man as you do for the dog." — Marc Ian Barasch

Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it the time needed for it to love you and you it, then throw it away. — Samuel Beckett

Have I been conditioned to believe that if I am not solicitous, if I am not forthcoming, if I am not a never-ending cornicopia of entertaining delights, they will take their collections of milk-bottle tops and their mangy one-eared teddy bears and go away into the woods by themselves to play snipers? Probably. What my mother things was merely cute may have been lethal. — Margaret Atwood

Colm was a good sleeper. But if there was one sound at night that should wake him, and any sensible man who loved his family, it was the barking of dogs.
The noise was coming from the village. It was not just one or two dogs, but surely every mangy cur and mongrel that lived there. Something was abroad, and in this time of the dying of the year, when fell creatures roamed the countryside as hunger began to bite, it was not likely to be anything good. — Duncan Harper

Now I'm going to have my dinner. Unless you'd like me to further kick your mangy ass. — Nalini Singh

This time I saw. In a blue heaven was coiled an infinite snake of gold and green, with four eyes of fire, black fire and red, that darted rays in every direction; held within its coils was a great multitude of laughing children. And even as I looked, all this was blotted out. Crawling rivers of blood spread over the heaven, of blood purulent with nameless forms - mangy dogs with their bowels dragging behind them; creatures half elephant, half beetle; things that were but a ghastly bloodshot eye, set about with leathery tentacles; women whose skins heaved and bubbled like boiling sulphur, giving off clouds that condensed into a thousand other shapes, more hideous than their mother; these were the least of the denizens of these hateful rivers. — Aleister Crowley

It was almost Christmas, and a Santa Claus in a vacant lot was offering to appear in pictures for five dollars. The trim on his suit was mangy, as if it had been dug out of a dumpster, yet young mothers queued ten deep on the sidewalk, holding the hands of kids waiting to get in. — Garth Risk Hallberg

Finally, a bit of luck. Rat bastard,' I hissed down at Montmartre. 'Mangy dog of a scurvy goat.'
'That doesn't even make sense,' Isabeau murmured.
'Feels good though. Try it.'
She narrowed her eyes at the top of Montmartre's perfectly groomed hair. 'Balding donkey's ass.'
'Nice.'
'Sniveling flea-bitten rabid monkey droppings.'
'Clearly, you're a natural. — Alyxandra Harvey

I'm not a stray," he said. "I'm. Not. Right. In. The. Head." He jabbed his temple, and the bump on my own head seemed to throb. "I'm fucking rabid and mangy, and I'll piss all over your carpets if I stick around long enough. I'll take what you give me, but I'm not nice, Adrian. — C.M. McKenna

A man who is free is like a mangy sheep in a herd. He will contaminate my entire kingdom and ruin my work. — Jean-Paul Sartre

in this you have failed
you have invalidated your dysfunctional efforts
of innocence
of perverted virginity
with a mangy face before the eye of God
not even summations of crawling
not even rust cutters or combustion
as if to test your blue vaginal mirrors
inside a Protestant Crimea
listening to your fallacious absorption neurosis

you've forfeited your flames
you've cast into the moat
salacious bonfire bathing
you've given up the power of deepened torturing rums
of magnetic chromosomal nerves
for a weakly neutered clairaudience of failure — Will Alexander