Skunk Quotes & Sayings

Look," said Whiskey Jack. "This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the earth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who's going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He'd argue with rocks and the rocks would win. "So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it. It gave us salmon and corn and buffalo and passenger pigeons. It gave us wild rice and walleye. It gave us melon and squash and turkey. And we were the children of the land, just like the porcupine and the skunk and the blue jay. — Neil Gaiman

We rested a couple of hours at noon for lunch, and the afternoon's sport was simply a repetition of the morning's, except that we had but one dog to work with; for shortly after mid-day the stub-tail pointer, for his sins, encountered a skunk, with which he waged prompt and valiant battle - thereby rendering himself, for the balance of the time, wholly useless as a servant and highly offensive as a companion. — Theodore Roosevelt

I stopped smoking weed for my kids. One day, we were driving and you could smell it from somewhere. My daughter asked what the smell was so I told her it was a skunk. Then she said, 'Sometimes Daddy smells like that!' to me and my wife. So I knew I had to quit. — Mark Wahlberg

Her hair is ridiculous," I said.
"I know. That was the only thing I said about her that was true. When you say nasty things about people, you should never say the true ones, because you can't really fully and honestly take those back, you know? I mean, there are highlights. And there are streaks. And then there are skunk stripes. — John Green

Ben R. Rich, the ex-president of the famous "Skunk Works," Lockheed-Martin's Advanced Development Programs (ADP) group, revealed the truth just before he died. In an alumni speech at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1993, he said, "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an Act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity . . . Anything you can imagine, we already know how to do. — Len Kasten

Sometimes when you get in a fight with a skunk, you can't tell who started it. — Lloyd Doggett

A skunk is better company than a person who prides himself on being 'frank'. — Robert A. Heinlein

Anyway, my ribs hurt like hell, my vision is still blurry from acceleration sickness, I'm really hungry, it'll be another 211 days before I'm back on Earth, and, apparently, I smell like a skunk took a shit on some sweat socks. This is the happiest day of my life. — Andy Weir

A skunk works does a totally different job. It's a group of people looking for a better hill to climb. — Peter H. Diamandis

It is sometimes very hard to tell the difference between history and the smell of skunk. — Rebecca West

We understand it still that there is no easy road to freedom. We know it well that none of us acting alone can achieve success. We must therefore act together as a united people, for national reconciliation, for nation building, for the birth of a new world. Let there be justice for all. Let there be peace for all. Let there be work, bread, water and salt for all. Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another and suffer the indignity of being the skunk of the world. Let freedom reign. — Nelson Mandela

We're the propaganda monkeys.
The digital download junkies.
The skunk smoking geezers
With an inflatable Jesus.
We're the kitsch and cool.
Divide and rule. — Harry Whitewolf

It's hard to run in a Florida woods, where every square foot not occupied by trees is bristling with thigh-high palmetto spears and nets of entangling skunk vine, but I did my best, — Ransom Riggs

One of my maids forgot the fruit with my breakfast. I became a skunk and sprayed her. — Cynthia Hand

There are some optimists who search eagerly for the skunk cabbage which in February sometimes pushes itself up through the ice, and who call it a sign of spring. I wish that I could feel that way about it, but I do not. The truth of the matter, to me, is simply that skunk cabbage blooms in the winter time. — Joseph Wood Krutch

The lawyers have escaped most criticism [and undeservedly so]. The tax shelters [were approved by lawyers, who got paid huge commissions to do so] and every miscreant had a high-falutin' lawyer at his side. Why don't more law firms vote with their feet and not take clients who have signs on them that say, "I'm a skunk and will be hard to handle?" I've noticed that firms that avoid trouble over long periods of time have an institutional process that tunes bad clients out. Boy, if I were running a law firm, I'd want a system like that because a lot of firms have a lot of bad clients. — Charlie Munger

Everyone does something to be okay, Skunk. That's how the world is. At least the only things you need to muffle to survive are the voices in your head. Some people muffle their hearts. — Hilary T. Smith

This stinks like a roadkill skunk. — Maya Banks

I want to kiss you," I say, "but I seem to be holding this cat."
Skunk lifts his hand and touches it to the side of my face. His fingers are warm from carrying the hot skillet to the table. He regards me very seriously, and for a moment I wonder if he's about to tell me we should Focus on Bicycle Repair. Instead he just looks at me for a very long time.
"You're beautiful," says Skunk, "and completely batshit. — Hilary T. Smith

Low down dirty ornery rotten skunk of a cussed mule-headed soldier! What's he want with my book anyway? And what kind of a way is that to write a congratulations? I am so mad I could walk clear to that fort and take him on single handed. — Nancy E. Turner

Said a skunk to a tube-rose, "See how swiftly I run, while you cannot walk nor even creep."
Said the tube-rose to the skunk, "Oh, most noble swift runner, please run swiftly!" — Khalil Gibran

People cain't help being what they are any more than a skunk can help being a skunk. Don't you think if they had their choice they would rather be something else? Sure they would. People are just weak. — Fannie Flagg

You can be sunk low or as a skunk and still have a joy in your heart. Joy lives like one of those spinning things
a gyroscope in your heart. It doesn't seem to have any connection to circumstance, good or bad. — Polly Horvath

Every man must skin his own skunk, — F. Edward Hulme

I went into the bends. I got drunker and stayed drunker than a shit skunk in Purgatory. I even had the butcher knife against my throat one night in the kitchen and then I thought, easy, old boy, your little girl might want you to take her to the zoo. Ice cream bars, chimpanzees, tigers, green and red birds, and the sun coming down on top of her head, the sun coming down and crawling into the hairs of your arms, easy, old boy. — Charles Bukowski

So a skunk humped my leg earlier. — Jennifer L. Armentrout

that weird sour body odor only monsters have, like a skunk that's been living off Mexican food. Grover — Rick Riordan

Exclusiveness is a characteristic of recent riches, high society, and the skunk. — Austin O'Malley

Daisy picked up the large, limp cat that was almost too heavy for her. "This is Clawed," she said. "C-l-a-w-e-d," she spelled. "Not like a man's name. My brother named him Clawed because he had been clawed by another cat when he found him hiding in a gutter. Daddy says he hopes Jeremy never finds a wounded skunk. — Beverly Cleary

Back in the 1950s, there was a top-secret program code-named SUNTAN being conducted at a top-secret facility called Skunk Works. Its objective? To develop a liquid-hydrogen-powered spy plane. Because liquid hydrogen is incredibly volatile, early experiments were conducted inside a bomb shelter with eight-foot-thick walls. — Annie Jacobsen

Liberals are like dogs: The liberal holds that he is true to the republic when he is true to himself. (It may not be as cozy an attitude as it sounds.) He greets with enthusiasm the fact of the journey, as a dog greets a man's invitation to take a walk. And he acts in the dog's way too, swinging wide, racing ahead, doubling back, covering many miles of territory that the man never traverses, all in the spirit of inquiry and the zest for truth. He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with and he is usually in a better position to discover a skunk. — E.B. White

Oh dear, is that a skunk?" Leonora asked.
"No," Alessandro gasped in horror. "No the smelly cat!"
"I've told you, Alessandro darling, they aren't cats."
"They look like cats. Like the big fluffy cat she's been stepped on and flattened to a big fluffy pancake cat," Alessandro argued. — Lynsay Sands

Ook, though very clever, was the worst fighter in the tribe. That is how he ended up with Grot-Grot as his woman. Grot-Grot had a bald patch on the top of her head, she was missing an eye and she smelled like a dead skunk. She did have a good sense of humour though. — Aussiescribbler

It's not the skunk's fault that he's a skunk or that he gives off this really bad stink. If I am a skunk, I want to live as a skunk, I want to know what my truth is, to know the person I am without fear. — Hrithik Roshan

Wilderness trails constitute a rare space in America marked by economic diversity. Lawyers and construction workers get bitten by the same mosquitoes and sip from the same streams; there are none of the usual signals about socioeconomic status, for most hikers are in shorts and a T-shirt and enveloped by an aroma that would make a skunk queasy. — Nicholas Kristof

Let's face it, we're skunk drunk and it's because of money. It's almost like we all need to enter Betty Ford Clinic 2.0 together. This time, it's not stock market money but private equity, M&A, VCs and to some degree the reckless abandonment of logic by some advertisers who are perpetuating what is sure to end badly when the economy turns. Hubris is back my friends. — Steve Rubel

Elizabeth waited until he had left and then promptly burst into laughter. She couldn't help it, she had been soaked, threatened by a skunk, attacked by a dog and now given a moral lesson by a man that had threatened her with a Winchester earlier.
She couldn't remember ever having a better day. — Grace Willows

He squinted up at the straining muscular backs of the stone men supporing the dome. "You'll have to take me to some museums," he said. He was being the young man on the road, following the sun because gray weather made him suicidal, writing his poetry in his mind in diners and gas station men's rooms across the country. "But I did see a show of Hopper once. And I like his light. It was kind of lonely or something.
Or, "The world's a mess, it's in my kiss,' like John and Exene say," he mumbled. We were in a leather store on Market Street being punks on acid with skunk-striped hair and steel-toed boots. — Francesca Lia Block

I am the skunk killer. — Libby Fischer Hellmann

That's the tricky thing about love. It walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and smells like a duck. But after you sleep with it a month or so, or get dumped at the altar by it, it starts smelling more like a skunk. — C.C. Hunter

There was a part of me that wanted to be liked, and despite all my years of reporting, I never quite adjusted to the role of skunk at the garden party. — Andrea Mitchell

I will not get into a pissing contest with that skunk [Joseph McCarthy]. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Many people lack the basic equipment to be in a relationship and there's nothing you can do to change it. You can't take a skunk and dip it in perfume and hope it becomes a puppy. Eventually, the perfume will wear off and you'll still have a skunk on your hands. — Sherry Argov

Full moons, skunk weed all up in the room;
You got the munchies, baby? Ice cold milk and Lorna Doones. — Ghostface Killah

What kills a skunk is the publicity it gives itself. — Abraham Lincoln

Beautiful, I think to myself as I float back into sleep, my whole body thrumming with a tender, exhausted state of exhilaration. Beside me, Skunk's body is warm under his T-shirt. The last thing I see before falling asleep is the Kali painting on Skunk's wall. Her blue-gold body is draped in equal parts flowers and severed heads - as if beauty and horror were interchangeable and what matters most is trusting in the dance. — Hilary T. Smith

Even though I was drunk as a skunk at the time, I still remembered what happened after that. Less than two seconds later he was inside me and I was waving good-bye to my virginity. I wanted it to last forever. I saw stars, came three times that night and it was the most beautiful experience of my life. Yeah right. Are you kidding me? Have you lost your virginity lately? It hurts like a mother effer and it's awkward and messy. Anyone that tells you she had anything even close to resembling an orgasm during the actual event itself is a lying sack of sh*t. The only stars I saw were the ones behind my eyelids as I squeezed them shut and waited for it to be over. — Tara Sivec

Do you know the real secret of how Presidents become Presidents?" Before I can answer, he explains, "It's because they're good at getting people to do things for them. In fact, they're not just good at it. They're maestros. Virtuosos. To get that title of President, you need thousands of people doing thousands of different things, all for your benefit. It's a massive churning machine. And y'know what feeds that machine?" he asks. "People like you, Beecher. It's fed with your life, and your family, and your reputation. Because when things go wrong ... and they always go wrong ... the President isn't allowed to have that skunk smell around him. So when that happens, he doesn't just replace you. He crumples you up, tosses you out back, and ... chomp goes the woodchipper. — Brad Meltzer

( ... ) I let go, crying and unable to stop because God was such a dirty crook, contemptible skunk, that's what he was for doing that thing to that woman. Come down out of the skies, you God, come on down and I'll hammer your face all over the city of Los Angeles, you miserable unpardonable prankster. If it wasn't for you, this woman would not have been so maimed, and neither would the world, ( ... ) — John Fante

The power of the silent filibuster to distort Senate politics is now accepted on Capitol Hill and by the press as normal and not worth mentioning. Let me be the skunk at this political garden party and say this stinks. Representative government was not designed to work this way by the Founding Fathers. — Juan Williams

Like a skunk that's been living off Mexican food. — Rick Riordan

He's sitting alone at the kitchen table, a half-emptied bottle of white liquor in one fist, his knife in the other. Drunk as a skunk. — Suzanne Collins

I was once the snake woman
the only person, it seems, in the whole place
who wasn't terrified of them
I used to hunt with two sticks
among milkweed and under porches and logs
for this vein of cool green metal
which would run through my fingers like mercury
or turn to a raw bracelet
gripping my wrist:
I could follow them by their odor
a sick smell, acid, and glandular
part skunk, part inside
of a torn stomach,
the smell of their fear — Margaret Atwood

She's as drunk as a skunk! — M.L. Gardner

In England if something goes wrong
say, if one finds a skunk in the garden
he writes to the family solicitor, who proceeds to take the proper measures; whereas in America, you telephone the fire department. Each satisfies a characteristic need; in the English, love of order and legalistic procedure; and here in America, what you like is something vivid, and red, and swift. — Alfred North Whitehead

It's like fishing
you got to get that first one in the boat. Once you get that first one, the skunk is off the boat and everything's cool from then on. You've got to get that first one. Once he gets the first one, I know he'll be fine. — Dusty Baker

When the picture your girlfriend conjures up in your head is of a cartoon skunk, reconsider the relationship. — Jackson Galaxy

Wednesday is pizza day at Chadham High. The lunchroom smells like a cross between a sewer and a dead skunk. Chadham High pizza consists of a cardboard crust and sauce made of mud, topped with some kind of fungus that looks suspiciously like phlegm pretending to be cheese. — Huston Piner

He was out of his mind," said Atticus. "Don't like to contradict you, Mr. Finch - wasn't crazy - mean as hell. Low-down skunk with enough liquor in him to make him brave enough to kill children. He'd never have met you face to face. — Harper Lee

The only difference between a dead skunk lying in the road and a dead lawyer lying in the road is that there are skid marks around the skunk. — Patrick Murray

When she twisted around to face Steven, he was grinning at her. "What?" she demanded. "Never mind." She realized she'd displayed her derriere, after a fashion, and the blood flowed to her face again. "Skunk," she said. "You're crazy about me," Steven retorted with an impish grin. "Get into the water," Emma said impatiently. "I'm due back at the library and I haven't had anything to eat." Steven got to his feet painfully and started untying the belt of Big John's blue flannel robe. Emma whirled away, her hands over her eyes, and Steven laughed. "Sorry," he said. Emma did not turn around, but stood hugging herself, her chin high. — Linda Lael Miller

I love the smell of skunks. Driving down a back road and you smell a skunk that's sprayed or been hit. I love that. It reminds me of home. — Dustin Lynch

Theolonious frowned. "So is a werewolfskunkdeer a person who changes into something that's a wolf, skunk, and deer all at once, like it has fur and Bambi eyes and sprays skunk spray, or is it a person who can change into a wolf or a skunk or a deer? — Blake Crouch

What did John Ashcroft say about moderates, he said, quote, there are two things you find in the middle of the road, a moderate and a dead skunk and I don't want to be either, — John Ashcroft

But I did not return until half past four this morning and I distinctly remember stubbing my toe on the stairs. I am as drunk as a skunk, Drumknott, which of course means skunks are just as drunk as I. I must say the term is unfamiliar to me, and I had not thought hitherto of skunks in this context, but Mustrum Ridcully was kind enough to enlighten me. — Terry Pratchett

A skunk by any other name still stinks. — W. A. Criswell

Shortest straw pulls the skunk's tail. — Samuel Hopkins Adams

It may be that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,' but I should be loath to see a rose on a maiden's breast substituted by a flower, however beautiful and fragrant it might be, that is went by the name of the skunk lily. — Alexander Henry

A skunk is walking by. Skunks don't hurry or hide. The dogs and cats pretend not to notice them. It is best not to. — Alice Provensen

If I stay in Washington for more than 72 hours, I have to bathe myself in the same stuff I use when my dog gets into a fight with a skunk. — Brian Schweitzer

Lewis Mumford was not a planner, but he wrote eloquently of planning. It was a difficult task. Planning is an exercise of power, and in a modern state much real power is suffused with boredom. The agents of planning are usually boring; the planning process is boring; the implementation of plans is always boring. In a democracy boredom works for bureaucracies and corporations as smell works for skunk. It keeps danger away. Power does not have to be exercised behind the scenes. It can be open. The audience is asleep. The modern world is forged amidst our inattention. — Richard White

Not being able to enter a quote of my own stinks worse than a skunk on date night! — Me

If criticism had any power to harm, the skunk would be extinct by now. — Fred Allen

Try it! You might like it !! I wrote this letter to tell you that I am very, very sorry. When you are mad at me, your face looks like Daddy's when he smelled that skunk that was hiding in the garage. And this made me very sad. Your face, not the smelly skunk. Are you still mad? Pleeze circle one: YES NO If you are still mad, pleeze accept my sorryness for taking your clock, calling you a sandwich stealer, playing games on your phone and drawing my very cute face on it, and trying to call Price Princess Sugar Plum. I did not reech her. But I did reech a guy named Moe by mistake, and he was not very polite at all. He said if I reech him again he will call the cops. That would be very bad becuz I do not think they serve chicken nuggets in jail. Then I would starve to death, which would not be a very fun time . Anyway, I made this sandwich just for you because I really care about you. I hope you love it! You are my very best friend! After Miss Penelope and Princess Sugar Plum. — Rachel Renee Russell

Back in the days when American billboard advertising was in flower [said Hemingway], there were two slogans that I always rated above all others: the old Cremo Cigar ad that proclaimed, Spit Is a Horrid Word-but Worse on the end of Your Cigar, and Drink Schlitz in Brown Bottles and Avoid that Skunk Taste. You don't get creative writing like that any more. — A. E. Hotchner

See that falcon? Hear those white-throated sparrows? Smell that skunk? Well, the falcon takes the sky, the white-throated sparrow takes the low bushes, the skunk takes the earth ... I take the woods. — Jean Craighead George

One thing about a skunk - once you recognize the markings, you know things are gonna stink. — Richelle E. Goodrich

....One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare. — Robert Lowell

With every plus there must be a minus; with every tear there must be a smile; and for every skunk there must be a fragrant flower. We live our lives in fear of dying and we overlook the simple truth that living is all we can control. Never too high, never too low will get you stuck in the middle of the road. A sense of equilibrium is needed to see life as it is, not what you would like it to be. — Phil Wohl

Many thanks for the sending me the book Biology of the Striped Skunk ... Frankly, I doubt whether I shall read it or not, unless I happen to have some intimate contact with a skunk which may induce me to learn more about him. — Roger Adams

he left her like a skunk leaves a smell. — Toni Morrison

I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I've never been able to believe it. I don't believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage. — L.M. Montgomery

You're making me feel like a skunk at the garden party. — Ken Starr