Pig Quotes

“Seventeen, eh!" said Hagrid as he accepted a bucket-sized glass of wine from Fred.
"Six years to the day we met, Harry, d’yeh remember it?"
"Vaguely," said Harry, grinning up at him. "Didn’t you smash down the front door, give Dudley a pig’s tail, and tell me I was a wizard?"
"I forge’ the details," Hagrid chortled.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“Only five books tonight, Mommy," she says.
No, Olivia, just one."
How about four?"
Two."
Three."
Oh, all right, three. But that's it!”
― Ian Falconer, Olivia

“He's a pig and I don't allow livestock in the house.”
― Erin McCarthy, My Immortal

“Aunt Petunia often said that Dudley looked like a baby angel — Harry often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

“so, what are you in for? MANSLAUGHTER!!! I SLAUGHTERED A MAN!! JUST LIKE A PIG!!! PUT HIM ON A SPIT AND PUT AN APPLE IN HIS MOUTH!!!!”
― Brian Regan, Funny Business: The Best of Uproar Comedy Vol. II

“Always remember, a cat looks down on man, a dog looks up to man, but a pig will look man right in the eye and see his equal.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“I remember an hypothesis argued upon by the young students, when I was at St. Omer's, and maintained with much learning and pleasantry on both sides, 'Whether supposing that the flavour of a big who obtained his death by whipping (per flagellationem extremem) superadded a pleasure upon the palate of a man more intense than any possible suffering we can conceive in the animal, is man justified in using that method of putting an animal to death?' I forget the decision.”
― Charles Lamb

“A pig is a jolly companion,
Boar, sow, barrow, or gilt--
A pig is a pal, who'll boost your morale,
Though mountains may topple and tilt.
When they've blackballed, bamboozled, and burned you,
When they've turned on you, Tory and Whig,
Though you may be thrown over by Tabby or Rover,
You'll never go wrong with a pig, a pig,
You'll never go wrong with a pig!”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

“People have a famously soft spot for pigs. Intelligent, inquisitive, imperious, myopic, sociable, gluttonous, grunting, ungainly, it is easy to recognize ourselves in them.”
― Isabella Tree, Wilding

“You're a pig.'

'Oh, most definitely. But look at you- you read that whole sentence, licked me out of your mind, and shielded. Excellent work.'

'Don't condescend to me.'

'I'm not. You're reading at a level much higher than I anticipated.'

The burning returned to my cheeks. 'But mostly illiterate.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“Even a blind pig can find an acorn at times! I actually don't know what that saying means, but I saw it on Reddit.”
― JJ Maybank

“I hit him playfully on the shoulder. “You make me sound like such a pig.”

He threw his hands up in the air. “Well, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck— ”

“—it’s a pig?” I finished for him.

“Exactly.”
― Amanda Abram, The Importance of Getting Revenge

“- I'm tired. It's been a hell of a week and I came in here through a damned pig! I don't have the energy to lie!
Alfie wondered if "coming in through a pig" was some sort of slang he had yet to hear.”
― Maya Motayne, Nocturna

“A ‘cause’ that serves our purpose is, in reality, an ‘agenda’ that we’ve attempted to make noble by dressing it up in the finery of a cause. But as my Dad used to say, 'you can’t put perfume on a pig.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“I killed her pets!” Vidrol exclaimed happily, while the others just stared at him with wide, disbelieving eyes.

All of them except Helki, who just shook his head again. “Total psychopath,” he muttered. He raised his voice over the sound of Banshee screaming.
“Could you maybe put that thing outside?”

“He just died,” Vidrol defended. “Cut him some slack.”

“He’s screaming because he hates you,” Helki corrected, following Vidrol outside. “Even more so now that you’ve killed him.”
― Jane Washington, A World of Lost Words

“I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it”
― George Bernard Shaw

“I told the twins, as tactfully as possible, that Hamlet was never barrowed in infancy, as he should have been. I had no idea the procedure was necessary, or I would have made certain it was done."
"Barrowed?" Kathleen asked, perplexed.
West made a scissoring gesture with two fingers.
"Oh."
"Remaining, er... intact," West continued, "has made Hamlet unfit for future consumption, so there's no reason to fear he'll end up on the dinner table. But he'll become increasingly aggressive as he goes through pubescence. It seems he'll become malodorous as well. He's now suited for only one purpose."
"Do you mean-" Kathleen began.
"Might this wait until after breakfast?" Devon asked from behind a newspaper.
West sent Kathleen an apologetic grin. ""I'll explain later."
"If you're going to tell me about the inconvenience of having an uncastrated male in the house," Kathleen said, "I'm already aware of it."
West choked a little on his toast. There was no sound from Devon's direction.”
― Lisa Kleypas, Cold-Hearted Rake

“Suddenly and without warning, one of the men stepped around and, with the beast's nether regions regrettably all too apparent, plunged his bare hand up to the elbow in the pig's rectum, then removed it, holding a fistful of steaming pig shit - which he flung, unceremoniously, to the ground with a loud splat before repeating the process.”
― Anthony Bourdain, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines

“Failing to notice a lack of Latino and African-American representation in congress is a result of systemic oppression – racism. General indifference to the fact that white men dominate large corporations is part of the invisibility of both racism and sexism. A lack of concern about the plight of a “breeding” sow on a factory farm is also a result of normative systematic oppression – speciesism.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Sister Species: Women, Animals and Social Justice

“My favorite idea to come out of the world of cultured meat is the 'pig in the backyard.' I say 'favorite' not because this scenario seems likely to materialize but because it speaks most directly to my own imagination. In a city, a neighborhood contains a yard, and in that yard there is a pig, and that pig is relatively happy. It receives visitors every day, including local children who bring it odds and ends to eat from their family kitchens. These children may have played with the pig when it was small. Each week a small and harmless biopsy of cells is taken from the pig and turned into cultured pork, perhaps hundreds of pounds of it. This becomes the community's meat. The pig lives out a natural porcine span, and I assume it enjoys the company of other pigs from time to time. This fantasy comes to us from Dutch bioethicists, and it is based on a very real project in which Dutch neighbourhoods raised pigs and then debated the question of their eventual slaughter. The fact that the pig lives in a city is important, for the city is the ancient topos of utopian thought.
The 'pig in the backyard' might also be described as the recurrence of an image from late medieval Europe that has been recorded in literature and art history. This is the pig in the land of Cockaigne, the 'Big Rock Candy Mountain' of its time, was a fantasy for starving peasants across Europe. It was filled with foods of a magnificence that only the starving can imagine. In some depictions, you reached this land by eating through a wall of porridge, on the other side of which all manner of things to eat and drink came up from the ground and flowed in streams. Pigs walked around with forks sticking out of backs that were already roasted and sliced. Cockaigne is an image of appetites fullfilled, and cultured meat is Cockaigne's cornucopian echo. The great difference is that Cockaigne was an inversion of the experience of the peasants who imagined it: a land where sloth became a virtue rather than a vice, food and sex were easily had, and no one ever had to work. In Cockaigne, delicious birds would fly into our mouths, already cooked. Animals would want to be eaten. By gratifying the body's appetites rather than rewarding the performance of moral virtue, Cockaigne inverted heaven.
The 'pig in the backyard' does not fully eliminate pigs, with their cleverness and their shit, from the getting of pork. It combines intimacy, community, and an encounter with two kinds of difference: the familiar but largely forgotten difference carried by the gaze between human animal and nonhuman animal, and the weirder difference of an animal's body extended by tissue culture techniques. Because that is literally what culturing animal cells does, extending the body both in time and space, creating a novel form of relation between an original, still living animal and its flesh that becomes meat. The 'pig in the backyard' tries to please both hippies and techno-utopians at once, and this is part of this vision of rus in urbe. But this doubled encounter with difference also promises (that word again!) to work on the moral imagination. The materials for this work are, first, the intact living body of another being, which appears to have something like a telos of its own beyond providing for our sustenance; and second, a new set of possibilities for what meat can become in the twenty-first century. The 'pig in the backyard' is only a scenario. Its outcomes are uncertain. It is not obvious that the neighbourhood will want to eat flesh, even the extended and 'harmless' flesh, of a being they know well, but the history of slaughter and carnivory on farms suggests that they very well might. The 'pig in the backyard' is an experiment in ethical futures. The pig points her snout at us and asks what kind of persons we might become.”
― Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California Studies in Food and Culture)

“When Carol arrived at the sanctuary, she had pink spray paint on her back, marking her to be slaughtered. Her muscles were weak from being confined for most of her life to a sow stall, she was given fruit to eat but didn’t know what to do with it, having never seen fruit in her life. But that same day, after a little warming up, she got excited and started running and dancing around the paddock happily. She also had her very first mud bath. Now, a few months on, Carol has settled well into her new sanctuary life. She was introduced to the other pig residents, has established herself within the pecking order, and has seemingly even adopted a son, Iggle Piggle, a younger pig. The two are inseparable and are often found cuddling together. We like to think of Iggle Piggle as the son she never got to keep, having had between 80–120 piglets taken from her in her 4–5 year lifespan.”
― Jason Hannan, Meatsplaining: The Animal Agriculture Industry and the Rhetoric of Denial

“You're a pig.'

'Oh, most definitely. But look at you- you read that whole sentence, kicked me out of your mind, and shielded. Excellent work.'

'Don't condescend to me.'

'I'm not. You're reading at a level much higher than I anticipated.'

The burning returned to my cheeks. 'But mostly illiterate.”
― Sarah J. Maas, A Court of Mist and Fury

“A lady does not confirm or deny idle gossip; doing so is like wrestling with a pig: you both get dirty, but the pig enjoys it.”
― Jamie Ford, Love and Other Consolation Prizes

“Snortorious turns his head and looks straight at me as if to say, I know about that too. I know than I could ever tell you.”
― Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark

“Mom, can I have a pig?" Avery asked, hopeful.
"No," Mrs. Arable replied firmly.
"Can I have a chicken?" he tried again.
"No."
"Can I have a goose?"
"No."
"Can I have a duck?"
"No."
"Can I get my tongue pierced and dye my hair pink?" Avery asked, trying his luck one last time.
"You can have a duck," Mrs. Arable said with a sigh.”
― GLEN NESBITT, SUS: Short Unpredictable Stories

“My pig has become a rat in his own right.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“My rat has become a pig in his own right.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Poll looked at him, thinking of sweets, but there was a real pig poking its snout out of the milkman's coat pocket. It was the tiniest pig she had ever seen. She touched its hard, little head and said, "What's a peppermint pig?"

"Not worth much," Mother said. "Only a token. Like a peppercorn rent. Almost nothing."

"Runt of the litter," the milkman added. "Too small for the sow to raise. He'd only get trampled on in the rush."

Mother took the pig from him and held it firmly while it kicked and squealed piercingly. She tipped it to look at its stomach and said, "Well, he seems strong enough. And even runts grow.”
― Nina Bawden, The Peppermint Pig

“Johnnie, the peppermint pig, gone now like this whole long year of her life, but fixed and safe in her mind, forever and ever.

She said, ‘Johnnie's dead.’

Father looked at her, puzzled but smiling. He cupped her chin in his hand and said, ‘My darling, who's Johnnie?”
― Nina Bawden, The Peppermint Pig

“Pepper-mint pig, peppermint pig, I'm a peppermint boy, so there's two of us, runts in this family.”
― Nina Bawden, The Peppermint Pig