Pheasant Quotes & Sayings

The bigger the sin, the rarer and more expensive the bird that is needed to erase it. Is that how the bird pardoner conducts his business? A sparrow for a small deception, but a paradise flycatcher and a monal pheasant for allowing a doubt about His existence to enter the mind. — Nadeem Aslam

I should have hoped to have trained him, my lady, to understand the rules of discretion."
"Trained! Train a barn-door fowl to be a pheasant, Mr. Horner! That would be the easier task. But you did right to speak of discretion rather than honour. Discretion looks to the consequences of actions - honour looks to the action itself, and is an instinct rather than a virtue. After all, it is possible you might have trained him to be discreet. — Elizabeth Gaskell

Don't lose your head, screamed the pheasant. And at the same time his voice broke in a whistling gasp and, spreading his wings, he flew up with a loud whir. Bambi watched how he flew straight up, directly between the trees, beating his wings. The dark metallic blue and greenish-brown marking son his body gleamed like gold. His long tail feathers swept proudly behind him. A short crash like thunder sounded sharply. The pheasant suddenly crumpled up in mid-flight. — Felix Salten

Without another word, we began to eat. I was hungry, but no appetite would excuse the way we set upon those dishes. We shoveled food into our mouths in a manner ill befitting our fine attire. Bears would have blushed to see us bent over our plates. The pheasant, still steaming from the oven, its dark flesh redolent with the mushroom musk of the forest floor, was gnawed quickly to the bone. It was a touch gamy - no milk-fed goose, this - but it was tender, and the piquant hominy balanced that wild taste as I had hoped it would. The eggs, laced pink at the edges and floating delicately in a carnal sauce, were gulped down in two bites. The yolks were cooked to that rare liminal degree, no longer liquid but not yet solid, like the formative moment of a sun-colored gem. — Eli Brown

To prepare for a race there is nothing better than a good pheasant, some champagne and a woman. — Jacques Anquetil

It made me feel good to know that we had such a great country like Canada where even a poor Indian from the Red Pheasant reserve could make it to the top. — Allen Sapp

Head-keeper Hudson, we believe, has been now told to receive all orders for fly-paper and for preservation of your hen-pheasant's life. — Arthur Conan Doyle

Whereas other clubs served the eternal beefsteak and apple tart, the lavish buffet at Jenner's was constantly replenished with ever-more artful dishes... hot lobster salad, casserole of pheasant, prawns on pillowy beds of pureed celery root, quail stuffed with grapes and goat cheese and served in pools of cream sauce. And Evie's favorite- a sticky flourless almond cake topped with raspberries and a thick layer of meringue. — Lisa Kleypas

Fresh October brings the pheasant, The to gather nuts is pleasant. — Sara Coleridge

She leveled Penelope with a look. "Penelope, you must think, darling! When your father dies! What then?" Lord Needham looked up from his pheasant. "I beg your pardon?" Lady Needham waved one hand in the air as though she hadn't time to think about her husband's feelings, instead prodding, "He shan't live forever, Penelope! What then?" Penelope could not think of why this was in any way relevant. "Wel , that shal be very sad, I imagine. — Sarah MacLean

See! From the brake the whirring pheasant springs,
And mounts exulting on triumphant wings;
Short is his joy! He feels the fiery wound,
Flutters in blood, and panting beats the ground. — Alexander Pope

It was a curious thing about the past
how it lay in wait for you, quietly, invisibly, almost as though it weren't there. You might be tempted to think it was gone, no longer existed. Then, like a pheasant flushed from cover, it would roar up in an explosion of sound, color, motion
shockingly alive. — John Verdon

I see there's more cooking out here than the pheasant." Valten leaned over to turn the roasting birds on the spit and mumbled, "Not anymore. — Melanie Dickerson

When you father dies! What then?"
Lord Needham looked up from his pheasant. "I beg your pardon?"
Lady Needham waved one hand in the air as though she hadn't time to think of her husband's feelings, instead prodding, "He shan't live forever, Penelope! What then?"
Penelope could not think of why this was in any way relevant. "Well, that shall be very sad, I imagine."
Lady Needham shook her head in frustration. "Penelope!"
"Mother, I honestly have no idea what you are implying."
"Who will take care of you? When your father dies?"
"Is Father planning to die soon?"
"No," her father said.
"One never knows!" Tears were welling in the marchioness' eyes.
"Oh, for God's-" Lord Needham had had enough. "I'm not dying. And I take no small amount of offence in the fact the thought simply rolled off your tongue. — Sarah MacLean

In the vast archipelago of the east, where Borneo and Java and Sumatra lie, and the Molucca Islands, and the Philippines, the sea is often fanned only by the land and sea breezes, and is like a smooth bed, on which these islands seem to sleep in bliss,
islands in which the spice and perfume gardens of the world are embowered, and where the bird of paradise has its home, and the golden pheasant, and a hundred others of brilliant plumage, whose flight is among thickets so luxuriant, and scenery so picturesque, that European strangers find there the fairy land of their youthful dreams. — Frederick Marryat

Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn. — Helen Macdonald

Very hesitantly, the pheasant started pecking at the dung, and lo on the very first day it reached the first branch of the tree. In a fortnight's time, it reached the topmost branch of the tree. It just went and sat on the topmost branch and just enjoyed the scenery. The old farmer saw a fat old pheasant on the top of the tree. He took out his shotgun and shot him off the tree. So the moral of the story is: even bullshit can get you to the top, but never lets you stay there. [Everybody laughs] So — Jaggi Vasudev

But even if, as Johnson argues, power and dominance serve no meaningful purpose, they always incur costs. In biology, the cost can be painfully visible. During courtship, the argus cock pheasant spreads his large secondary wing feathers, which are decorated with beautiful eye spots; the bigger they are, the more they stimulate the female. And the longer the feathers, the more progeny the cock will produce. So the more beautiful cocks produce more descendants. That should be a competitive advantage. But the evolution of the argus pheasant has run itself into a blind alley because the most gorgeous cock has feathers so huge and unwieldy that they may cause him to be eaten by a predator, because he can't fly away fast enough. Oskar Heinroth, the teacher of Konrad Lorenz, commented: 'Next to the wings of the argus pheasant, the hectic life of western civilized man is the most stupid product of intra-specific selection! — Margaret Heffernan

Of course he enticed them!" "Well now," said the sergeant, propping his bicycle carefully against one of our pumps. "This is a very hinterestin' haccusation, very hinterestin' indeed, because I hain't never 'eard of nobody hen-ticin' a pheasant across six miles of fields and open countryside. 'Ow do you think this hen-ticin' was performed, Mr. 'Azell, if I may hask?" "Don't ask me how he did it because I don't know!" shouted Mr. Hazell. "But he's done it all right! The proof is all around you! All my finest birds are sitting here in this dirty little filling station when they ought to be up in my own wood getting ready for the shoot!" The words poured out of Mr. Hazell's mouth like hot lava from an erupting volcano. "Am I correct," said Sergeant Samways, "am I habsolutely haccurate in thinkin' that today is the day of your great shootin' party, Mr. 'Azell? — Roald Dahl

Was a little embarrassed after I dressed and sat down to review my schoolwork. She had a large tumbler of imported sherry and poured me a small glass. The Jerez sherry was an indulgence she had learned during the two years she had lived in Barcelona and Ibiza. She pushed the schoolwork aside and started to talk, more a slangish monologue than a lecture: "I certainly don't believe that story about you screwing a pheasant-hunter but that's your business, and right now it should matter to no one except you. You're going to have a hard time, because you are lovely and your body is as fine as I've seen." I objected to this as ugly and irrelevant but she went on: "You have to study extremely hard and find some subject or profession you're obsessed with because in our culture it has been very hard on the attractive women I know. They are leered at, teased, abused, set on a pedestal, and no one takes them seriously, so you have to use all your energies to develop — Jim Harrison

So Bill thought she was being whiny. She couldn't help it.She was inches away from a breakdown.
"I hate this job.I hate this place. I hate this stupid solstice party and this stupid pheasant souffle-"
"Lucinda will be at the party tonight," Bill said suddenly. His voice was infuriatingly calm. "She happens to adore the Constances' pheasant souffle. — Lauren Kate

Is it really over?" Kurlansky lamented over the dry-docked Massachusetts cod fishermen at the conclusion of his moving, epic book. "Are these the last gatherers of food from the wild to be phased out? Is this the last of wild food? Is our last physical tie to untamed nature to become an obscure delicacy like the occasional pheasant?"
These words stayed with me over the years to come. But histories of environmental wrong doing have a strange way of putting traumatic events in the past, sealing off bad human behavior of former times from the unwritten pages of the present and the future. — Paul Greenberg

But Miss Ferguson preferred science over penmanship. Philosophy over etiquette. And, dear heavens preserve them all, mathematics over everything. Not simply numbering that could see a wife through her household accounts. Algebra. Geometry. Indecipherable equations made up of unrecognizable symbols that meant nothing to anyone but the chit herself. It was enough to give Miss Chase hives.

The girl wasn't even saved by having any proper feminine skills. She could not tat or sing or draw. Her needlework was execrable, and her Italian worse. In fact, her only skills were completely unacceptable, as no one wanted a wife who could speak German, discuss physics, or bring down more pheasant than her husband. — Eileen Dreyer

As our domestic fowls are said to have their original in the wild pheasant of India, so our domestic thoughts have their prototypes in the thoughts of her philosophers. — Henry David Thoreau

The world has different owners at sunrise ... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Nine out of ten humans killed? And you're not bothered."
A look of mysterious thoughtfulness crossed his face. "A virus can be useful to a species by thinning it out," he said.
A scream cut the air. It sounded nonhuman.
He took his eyes off the water and looked around. "Hear that pheasant? That's what I like about the Bighorn River," he said.
"Do you find viruses beautiful?"
"Oh, yeah," he said softly. "Isn't it true that if you stare into the eyes of a cobra, the fear has another side to it? The fear is lessened as you begin to see the essence of the beauty. Looking at Ebola under an electron microscope is like looking at a gorgeously wrought ice castle. The thing is so cold. So totally pure." He laid a perfect cast on the water, and eddies took the fly down. (92) — Richard Preston

The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your ... life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not taking others'. — Brigid Brophy

Thou wretched pillar of syphilitic pheasant-fuck! — Christopher Moore

The horse and the cow, the rabbit and the cat, the deer and the hare, the pheasant and the lark, please us better as friends than as meat. — Elisee Reclus

Park hated football. He cried when his dad took him pheasant hunting. Nobody in the neighbourhood could ever tell who he was dressed as on Halloween. ('I'm Doctor Who.' 'I'm Harp Marx.' 'I'm Count Floyd.') And he kind of wanted his mom to give him blond highlights. — Rainbow Rowell

Well, either way - peasant or pheasant - it tastes like chicken. My patients bring me gifts too. Things like gift cards ... and viruses. — Penny Reid

And if there are no cars or planes, and if no one's Uncle John is out in the wood lot west of town banging away at a quail or pheasant; if the only sound is the slow beat of your own heart, you can hear another sound, and that is the sound of life winding down to its cyclic close, waiting for the first winter snow to perform last rites. — Stephen King

For a while I didn't want to look at the men and their hawks any more and my eyes slipped to the white panels of cut light in the branches behind them. Then I walked to the hedge where the hawk had made her kill. Peered inside. Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn. Reaching through the thorns I picked them free, one by one, tucked the hand that held them into my pocket, and cupped the feathers in my closed fist as if I were holding a moment tight inside itself. It was death I had seen. — Helen Macdonald

When I walk out, I am a great event.
I do not have to think, or even rehearse.
What happens in me will happen without attention.
The pheasant stands on the hill;
He is arranging his brown feathers.
I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.
Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready. — Sylvia Plath

He sent the trained dog that is his talent off in search of a fat glorious pheasant, and it brought back the lower half of a Barbie doll. — George Saunders

The Old Man's prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. You had to be there: the aroma of burnt pheasant rolling through the air, the wide, Kansas prairie about, the smell of buffalo dung, the mosquitoes and wind eating at you one way, and him chawing at the wind the other. He was a plain terror in the praying department — James McBride