Quotes & Sayings About White-tailed Deer

Now the deer moved through snow, snow that blew sideways, frosting the perfectly upright walls of Detroit's dead and monumental heart, vast black tines of brick reaching up to vanish in the white sky.
They made a lot of nature shows there. — William Gibson

There were photos of steel grappling hooks in the meat shed where the Watt Lake Killer had hung, gutted, flayed, and bled out his victims like slaughtered deer. Photos — Loreth Anne White

The deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony and man - all belong to the same family ... The White Man must treat the beasts of this land as his brothers. — Chief Seattle

Cold Mountain is hidden in white clouds It's peaceful to be cut off from the busy world I use dry grass for cushions in my mountain home My only light is the round moon My bed is the rock beside the green pool Tigers and deer are my companions I delight in this happy peaceful life Forever beyond the world of men — Hanshan

Girls, be good to these spirits of music and poetry
that breast your threshold with their scented gifts.
Lift the lyre, clear and sweet, they leave with you.
As for me, this body is now so arthritic
I cannot play, hardly even hold the instrument.
Can you believe my white hair was once black?
And oh, the soul grows heavy with the body.
Complaining knee-joints creak at every move.
To think I danced as delicate as a deer!
Some gloomy poems came from these thoughts:
useless: we are all born to lose life,
and what is worse, girls, to lose youth.
The legend of the goddess of the dawn
I'm sure you know: how rosy Eos
madly in love with gorgeous young Tithonus
swept him like booty to her hiding-place
but then forgot he would grow old and grey
while she in despair pursued her immortal way. — Sappho

Indians chase the vision, white men chase the dollar, — John Fire Lame Deer

A pine needle fell in the forest. The hawk saw it. The deer heard it. The white bear smelled it — Edith Pattou

We Sioux spend a lot of time thinking about everyday things which in our minds are mixed up with the spiritual. We see in the world around us many symbols that teach us the meaning of life. We have a saying that the white man sees so little, he must see with only one eye. We see a lot that you no longer notice. You could notice if you wanted to, but you are usually too busy. We Indians live in a world of symbols and images where the spiritual and commonplace are one ... We try to understand them not with the head but with the heart — John Fire Lame Deer

Love was a magic fairy spell. Didn't the girls in my books hunt after love like it was a deer with a white tail? Didn't love wake the dead? Didn't that lady love the beast so hard he turned into a good-looking white fellow? That was what love did. It turned you into something else. — Catherynne M Valente

Zoom out and what you see is one species--us--struggling to keep all others in their appropriate places, or at least in the places we've decided they ought to stay. In some areas, we want cows but not bison, or mule deer but not coyotes, or cars but not elk. Or sheep but not elk. Or bighorn sheep but not aoudad sheep. Or else we'd like wolves and cows in the *same* place. Or natural gas tankers swimming harmoniously with whales. We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic. — Jon Mooallem

Benedicto: May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you
beyond that next turning of the canyon walls. — Edward Abbey

You goin' to get your deer?" I am asked by every man I meet - and they all wait for an answer. My deer-slaying program is a matter of considerable local concern, much to my surprise. It is plain that I now reside in a friendly community of killers, and that until I open fire myself they cannot call me brother. — E.B. White

Minutes passed by. A little blue butterfly landed on my nose. I blinked at it and it fluttered to my ear. A big yellow butterfly gently floated over and landed on my paw. Soon a whole swarm of them floated up and down around me, like a swirl of multicolored petals. It happened in my backyard, too, if the magic was strong enough. Butterflies were small and light, and very magic sensitive. For some reason I made them feel safe and they gravitated to me like iron shavings to a magnet. They ruined my ferocious badass image, but you'd have to be a complete beast to swat butterflies.
If a baby deer frolicked out from between the buildings trying to cuddle up, I would roar. I wouldn't bite it, but I would roar. I had my limits. — Ilona Andrews

Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?
I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;
I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns ... — William Butler Yeats

These ears aren't to be trusted.
The keening in the night, didn't you hear?
Once I believed all the stories didn't have endings,
but I realized the endings were invented, like zero,
had yet to be imagined.
The months come around again,
and we are in the same place;
full moons, cherries in bloom,
the same deer, the same frogs,
the same helpless scratching at the dirt.
You leave poems I can't read
behind on the sheets,
I try to teach you songs made of twigs and frost.
you may be imprisoned in an underwater palace;
I'll come riding to the rescue in disguise.
Leave the magic tricks to me and to the teakettle.
I've inhaled the spells of willow trees,
spat them out as blankets of white crane feathers.
Sleep easy, from behind the closet door
I'll invent our fortunes, spin them from my own skin.

(from, The Fox-Wife's Invitation) — Jeannine Hall Gailey

By lunchtime the valley was lightly coated, like a cake with confectioner's sugar ... there was white fur on the antlers of the iron deer and on the melancholy boughs of the Norway spruce. — Elizabeth Enright

Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can't have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a an was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were to uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man's worth couldn't be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn't cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don't know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutly necessary to make a civilized society. — John Lame Deer

Some paintings become famous because, being durable, they are viewed by successive generations, in each of which are likely to be found a few appreciative eyes.
I know a painting so evanescent that it is seldom viewed at all, except by some wandering deer. It is a river who wields the brush, and it is the same river who, before I can bring my friends to view his work, erases it forever from human view. After that it exists only in my mind's eye.
Like other artists, my river is temperamental; there is no predicting when the mood to paint will come upon him, or how long it will last. But in midsummer, when the great white fleets cruise the sky for day after flawless day, it is worth strolling down to the sandbars just to see whether he has been at work. — Aldo Leopold

Before our white brothers arrived to make us civilized men,we didn't have any kind of prison. Because of this, we had no delinquents. We had no locks nor keys and therefore among us there were no thieves. When someone was so poor that he couldn't afford a horse, a tent or a blanket, he would, in that case, receive it all as a gift. We were too uncivilized to give great importance to private property. We didn't know any kind of money and consequently, the value of a human being was not determined by his wealth. We had no written laws laid down, no lawyers, no politicians, therefore we were not able to cheat and swindle one another. We were really in bad shape before the white men arrived and I don't know how to explain how we were able to manage without these fundamental things that (so they tell us) are so necessary for a civilized society. — Lame Deer

God has given the salt lick to the deer; and He has given to man, red-skin and white, the delicious spring at which to slake his thirst. — James F. Cooper

Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man's finger. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt's, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble and taut hero's grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and gouted excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to go do it again, with a bigger beast. — John D. MacDonald

Though large herds of deer do much harm to the neighbourhood, yet the injury to the morals of the people is of more moment than the loss of their crops. — Gilbert White

We have a new joke on the reservation: 'What is cultural deprivation?' Answer: 'Being an upper-middle class white kid living in a split-level suburban home with a color TV.' — John Fire Lame Deer

Ya smell like sun," he murmured. D's voice was raw, like a man under hypnosis. "Ya know that smell? That toasty-skin smell, like ya get after goin' ta the beach?" He nodded a little. "I love that smell." He straightened, eyes lowered to the ground. "Reminds me a workin' on the ranch, when I was a kid. Ridin' with my brother, up in the hills, sun beatin' down turnin' our necks brown, our hands."
Jack didn't dare speak, or breathe, or make the tiniest move to disturb the so-rare Reverie. This glimpse into D's secret mind was like having a skittish deer approach him on a wooded trail; one false move and it would dart away into the brush, leaving him with only a flash of white tail before vanishing. — Jane Seville

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars. — Randall Jarrell

Jasmine shook her head. She had forgotten about the tales of the Jinn that her father warned her about. Now, being here the memories were returning like a slow and purposeful
spider. With its long, black legs the nightmares would creep into her mind each time she closed her eyes. Then, she would see through the creature's murky eyes. She would see the carcass of a deer as it lay in the glistening white. She would watch the hyena tearing at its sweated flesh, blood seeping into the snow forming warm pools of death around her feet. And in that moment, the deer shifted. It shifted into the shape of a young boy. — Shereen Malherbe

Have you seen the careful manner in which deer drink from a lake at sunrise? That is the way she moves. Have you ever heard the sound a shooting star makes as it crosses a cloudy sky? That is the way she breathes. — S.M. White

He told countless tales, all good, of crocodiles and ichneumons in Egypt, gazelles and ghouls in Persia, elephants and tigers in Burmah, deer and monkeys in Siam, badgers and foxes in China and sorcerers and enchanters everywhere. He spoke of the last two in as matter-of-fact a tone as of any of the others. — Edward Lucas White