Gazelles

Thomson's Gazelle at Masai Mara, Kenya

Gazelles are any of many antelope species currently or formerly in the genus Gazella. They are known as swift animals – some are able to maintain speeds as high as 50 miles per hour (80 km/h) for extended periods of time. Gazelles are mostly found in the deserts, grasslands and savannas of Africa, but they are also found in southwest and central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. They tend to live in herds and will eat less coarse, easily digestible plants and leaves.

Quotes

• All you gotta do is to use your instincts. How do you think a tiger knows how to tackle a gazelle? It's written, it's code written in their DNA, says "Tackle the gazelle." Believe it or not, in every man there's a code written that says "Tackle drunk bitches."
  • Judd Apatow and Steve Carell, The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005).

• Norville Barnes: That kind of person would come back as a wildebeest, or a warthog. No, I think it more likely that you were a gazelle, with long, graceful legs, gamboling through the underbrush. Perhaps we met once, a chance encounter in a forest glade. I must have been an antelope or an ibex. What times we must have had. Foraging together for sustenance, snorfling water from a forest stream, picking the grubs and burrs from one another's coats. Or perhaps we simply touched our horns briefly and went our separate ways.
  Amy Archer: I wish it were that simple, Norville. I wish I was still a gazelle, and you were an antelope or an ibex.
  Norville Barnes: Well, can I at least call you deer?
  • Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, and Sam Raimi, The Hudsucker Proxy (1994).

• Then, cleaving the grass, gazelles appear
  (The gentler dolphins of kindlier waves)
  With sensitive heads alert of ear;
  Frail crowds that a delicate hearing saves.
  • Thomas Sturge Moore, "The Gazelles", line 13; from The Centaur's Booty (London: Duckworth, 1903) p. ix.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 307-08.

• I never nursed a dear Gazelle to glad me with its soft black eye, but when it came to know me well, and love me, it was sure to marry a market-gardener.
  • Charles Dickens, Old Curiosity Shop, Chapter LVI, saying of Dick Swiveller.

• The gazelles so gentle and clever
  Skip lightly in frolicsome mood.
  • Heinrich Heine, Book of Songs, Lyrical, Interlude No. 9.

• I never nurs'd a dear gazelle,
  To glad me with its soft black eye,
  But when it came to know me well
  And love me, it was sure to die.
  • Thomas Moore, The Fire Worshippers.

• I never had a piece of toast particularly long and wide,
  But fell upon the sanded floor,
  And always on the buttered side.
  • Parody of Moore, probably by James Payn; appeared in Chambers' Journal.