Taxidermy Quotes

“I ask people why they have deer heads on their walls. They always say because it's such a beautiful animal. There you go. I think my mother is attractive, but I have photographs of her.”
― Ellen DeGeneres

“But when I make a good [taxidermy] mount I feel like I beat God in a small way. As though the Almighty said, Let such critter be dead, and I said, 'Fuck You, he can still play the banjo.”
― Christopher Buehlman, Those Across the River

“I hate it. I hate taxidermy shops and all that crap.”
― Michael Jackson

“I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck at the taxidermy buck hung over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In the car, you kept shaking your head. " I don't understand why they would do that. Can't they see it's a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck forever like that."

I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you - but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won't finish, a death that keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“It was not beautifully remade;
it was awkwardly dead”
― Sharon Kernot, The Art of Taxidermy

“Fresh is best.”
― Die Booth, Re-Vamp

“Imagine Ikea if Ikea sold only stuffed animals.”
― Melisa Milgrom

“Ele prosseguiu: - É possível adquirir uma vasta gama de conhecimento simplismente extraindo nossas camadas externas e examinando o que há no interior. Talvez você suponha que haja uma constante... ou um esquema, se preferir, válido para o que existe na parte interna de todo organismo vivo, independentemente de seu formato e ambiente. Mas sua teoria estaria equivocada. Não existem constantes, só variáveis, e ainda assim todos os organismos se esforçam para alcançar um objetivo comum.
- E que objetivo é esse? - perguntou Eva, olhando para a coleção de plantas e animais na mesa de Zim.
- Entender isso, Eva Nove, é entender um dos maiores mistérios do universo: por que estamos aqui?”
― Tony DiTerlizzi, The Search for WondLa

“Registration Day' by Gavin Gunhold (1899— )
Toronto Review of Poetry, 1947

On registration day at taxidermy school
I distinctly saw the eyes of the stuffed moose
Move.”
― Gordon Korman, A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag

“Yes," said Margaret, smiling. "You don't have three dead cats on your mantlepiece."

Dane stopped short. "DEAD CATS?" he repeated incredulously, taken aback. "Whose were they?"

"Old Mrs. Holloway's."

"How long had they been...DEAD?"

"Oh, years and years," Margaret assured him. "They were stuffed, you see. Taxidermy."

"Right," he said dryly. "Taxidermy.”
― Sarah Brazytis, The House on Harmony Street

“She felt a little clandestine, as if she were ten years old again, sneaking a dead rat past her mother so she could articulate a Rattus norvegicus domestica for her bedroom display.”
― Geraldine Brooks, Horse

“The universal logo for a pizzahut is eight slices painted cross a disc of yellow plywood mounted in the mouth of a taxidermic hippopotapus.”
― Noah Wareness

“The materially reconstructed animal is immune to pain, free from our ability to inflict upon it (further) mental or physical cruelty or violence. Any guilt or concern about the animal's welfare - its confinement, its isolation from its own kind's social structures, and the enforced company of humans - troubles us no longer; the animal is "at rest," while simultaneously prepared to be continually at our behest. Modeled in glass, its eyes are incapable of any disturbingly accusatory stare.”
― Geoffrey N. Swinney

“You are a wonderful, complex, f*cked-up mess,” you once said to me. Sometimes when you passed these judgements I would flinch, as if the words were darts or sharp tools piercing my skin.”
― Polly Hall, The Taxidermist's Lover

“The night is strong in its taxidermy on earth. The parts-dark, parts-bleached.”
― Sneha Subramanian Kanta

“The theme of this exhibition is folk art, and the building, which is usually a typical white-cube space, has been dressed up to look like a circus. The walls are covered in strange murals; level with my head are alligators eating trapeze artists who are, in turn, eating small alligators. In large display cases are arrangements by the famous Victorian taxidermist and artist, Walter Potter. There's a feast being had by little ginger kittens that look like they were once---before dying and being stuffed with hay and then seated on miniature dining chairs and put in front of tiny cakes, pots of tea, and samovars---from the same litter. Their eyes are beautiful, black, glistening marbles. Next to the cat feast is another Walter Potter---rabbits diligently working at desks in a miniature classroom. It's thrilling seeing these works. I've known them for years; I studied them for my A-levels. In photographs, they seem clean and unreal. Up close, I can see the little dimples in the animals' skin where their muscles used to attach; I can smell the tiny, microscopic traces of hundred-year-old-blood inside them.”
― Claire Kohda, Woman, Eating

“He had tried sculpting in other materials - in clay, marble, wood, and bronze - but corpses were the only medium that really sang under his fingers.”
― Noah Medlock, A Botanical Daughter