Top 100 The Bird That Quotes
#1. And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
Peter Matthiessen
#2. The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.
Kate Chopin
#3. The bird that hath been limed in a bush, with trembling wings misdoubteth every bush.
William Shakespeare
#4. No one has ever built a statue to a critic, it's true. On the other hand, it's only the people with statues that get pooped on by birds flying by.
Seth Godin
#5. I was suffering a divorce, and I was very unhappy because my children were very young. It hit me when a woman, a fan, was chatting with me. She was pleased to meet Big Bird because her children liked him and liked the show, but she didn't know that my face was streamed with tears.
Caroll Spinney
#6. If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body.
Paulo Coelho
#7. A little bird told me that jumping is easy and the falling is fun, right up until you hit sidewalk shivering and stunned.
Ani DiFranco
#8. Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn't live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.
Thomas McGuane
#9. A novel it's different. It's kind of exhilarating not to have to cut to the bone constantly. Oh, well I can go over here for a moment. I can say what I think the guy was thinking or what the day looked like or what the bird was doing. If you do that as a playwright, you're dead.
David Mamet
#10. Credit, that rare bird of security and peace, rested with none, but stood with upraised wings, ready to fly off at the first rumor of suspicion.
Mark Twain
#11. I ain't never seen a creature like that before, she says. He's so smart, he's-
More, like a person than a bird? I says.
Yeah, she says. That's it.
Whatever you do, I says, don't tell him that. I'll never hear the end of it.
Moira Young
#12. Maybe that bird that floats
hill belly on the wind up there,
and that cat
that pats
in this grass,
is the same
Infinite
Worldwide
Angel
Jack Kerouac
#13. I'm the gooney bird that walked to the bank. I'm doing better than most of those guys who said I was crazy.
Jimmy Piersall
#14. I'm catholic in the same way, that if a cow was born in a tree, it's a bird!
Richard Jeni
#15. There is a bird in a poem by T. S. Eliot who says that mankind cannot bear very much reality; but the bird is mistaken. A man can endure the entire weight of the universe for eighty years. It is unreality that he cannot bear.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#16. Mozart's pet starling once revised a phrase he wrote. The bird sang it after he played it on the piano, but changed all the sharps to flats. Mozart described it happening in the margin of the score. 'That was beautiful!' he wrote. When the bird died, he sang at its funeral, and read a poem to it.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#17. Every child should have love, every person should have it. She herself would rather have had her mother's love - the love she still continued to believe in, the love that had followed her through the jungle in the form of a bird so she would not be too frightened or lonely.
Margaret Atwood
#18. To feel myself. Light as a feather free as a bird, though long since fit to be shot down. Unleash the dog with no sense of shame. Become this or that. Awaken the dead. Wear my pal Baldander's rags for a change. Lose my way on a single-minded quest.
Gunter Grass
#19. Well, I don't care," said Bird out loud, said Bird, who cared so much that she couldn't bear to touch the hurt. "I don't care. I ran away from Summer, and I will make my own castle. I will be my own queen.
Katherine Catmull
#20. God is a lion that comes in the night. God is a hawk gliding among the stars
If all the stars and the earth, and the living flesh of the night that flows in between them, and whatever is beyond them Were that one bird. He has a bloody beak and harsh talons, he pounces and tears.
Robinson Jeffers
#21. If I ordered a general to fly from one flower to another like a butterfly, or to write a tragic drama, or to change himself into a sea bird, and if the general did not carry out the order that he had received, which one of us would be in the wrong?' the king demanded. 'The general, or myself?
Antoine De Saint-Exupery
#22. In a cool solitude of trees Where leaves and birds a music spin, Mind that was weary is at ease, New rhythms in the soul begin.
William Kean Seymour
#24. Weddings and funerals have so much in common (except that in Ireland funerals are more fun - better food, better drink): at both, our senses are sharpened and we register much more than usual - a striking face or hair-do, the wind's behaviour, a bird singing.
Michael Longley
#25. Today, candor compels us to admit that our vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation. Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.
Pat Buchanan
#26. A fish cannot drown in water,
A bird does not fall in air.
In the fire of creation,
God doesn't vanish:
The fire brightens.
Each creature God made
must live in its own true nature;
How could I resist my nature,
That lives for oneness with God?
Mechthild Of Magdeburg
#27. You know, don't tell anybody I'm a jail bird, you know, but there were a bunch of us that were years ago involved in the pro-life movement.
Todd Akin
#28. Life without love is like a bird without feathers. Life without love is like a butterfly without wings it's the saddest of things.
"In this life I can live without many things love is not on that list
Charles W. Warner
#29. Glazov...What does it mean, the name you call me--Ptichka?"
"It means: 'Little bird.'"
"And why did you choose that name for me?"
"Because I know if I allowed you, you would fly away.
Suzanne Steele
#30. The peregrine falcon is the swiftest, most adept animal I have ever seen. It is worth noting that, like many bird, the falcon's bones are hollow. Travel light.
Ethan Hawke
#31. I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.
Susan Griffin
#32. The only bird that gives the poor a real tumble is the stork.
Wilson Mizner
#33. And there is no creature on [or within] the earth or bird that flies with its wings except [that they are] communities like you. We have not neglected in the Register a thing. Then unto their Lord they will be gathered." Quran The Cattle 6 : 38.
Qur'an
#34. The Mercy of Allah is an Ocean, Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean.It only has to open it's beak
Leila Aboulela
#35. Get down, get down, little Henry Lee
And stay all night with me
You won't find a girl in this damn world
That will compare with me
And the wind did howl and the wind did blow
La la la la la
La la la la lee
A little bird lit down on Henry Lee ...
Nick Cave
#36. Anyway, she sings like a mad tropical bird, and it's just a fondue of molten wanting and grieving and the sadness of the large naked swinging breasts and soft olive skin and everything that you wish you could remember and feel and know.
Nicholson Baker
#37. Bird, don't sound so crushed. The fact that I had never had sex before can only have been significant for me, if it had any meaning at all-it had nothing to do with you.
Kenzaburo Oe
#38. And wheresoever, in his rich creation,
Sweet music breathes
in wave, or bird, or soul
'Tis but the faint and far reverberation
Of that great tune to which the planets roll!
Frances Sargent Osgood
#39. Brad Bird is fond of saying that music is the easiest thing that can derail a film because if it slightly goes a degree off track it will take the viewer in the wrong emotional direction. To work with people who actually care about that is a good thing.
Michael Giacchino
#40. A rainbow in the sky or a bird that can fly often create Joy that money can't buy!-RVM
R.v.m.
#41. I look at the bird in the cage and see the air, not only the air that is around the bird when it flies, but I see and feel the formative tendency of air in its form. When I do all this, then what lives in the forms becomes enlivened and spiritualized for me.
Rudolf Steiner
#42. Nor bird nor beast
Could make me wish for anything this day,
Being old, but that the old alone might die,
And that would be against God's Providence.
William Butler Yeats
#43. Don't let someone keep putting out the flame God keeps re-lighting, we all have a purpose. As a wing to a bird. As wind that goes the destiny over the sea.
Anthony Liccione
#44. We need new words for what this is, this hunger entering our loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays of hope. we need the flutter that can save us, something that will swirl across the face of what we have become and bring us grace.
Lucille Clifton
#45. With beat of systole and of diastole One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart, And mighty waves of single Being roll From nerveless germ to man, for we are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill. From
Oscar Wilde
#46. Work is my recreation,
The play of faculty; a delight like that
Which a bird feels in flying, or a fish
In darting through the water,
Nothing more.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#47. The deeper men go into life, the deeper is their conviction that this life is not all. It is an unfinished symphony. A day may round out an insect's life, and a bird or a beast needs no tomorrow. Not so with him who knows that he is related to God and has felt the power of an endless life.
Henry Ward Beecher
#48. In order to have good fried chicken, you should wash and season the bird the morning you're preparing it for dinner. Don't wait and do it right before you start cooking. Throw it in the refrigerator, seasoned, that morning, and give it a chance to soak up all the salt and pepper and goodness.
Paula Deen
#49. Just as a little bird cracks open the shell and flies out, we fly out of this shell, the shell of the body. We call that death, but strictly speaking, death is nothing but a change of form.
Swami Satchidananda
#50. A bird awoke in his chest, and it cautiously spread its wings, amazed to find that it was still alive. It wanted out. It wanted to burst from his chest, taking his heart with it, and soar up into the sky.
Nina George
#51. How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake. Let me sit here for ever with bare things, this coffee cup, this knife, this fork, things in themselves, myself being myself.
Virginia Woolf
#52. All fresh meat is eaten in a state of decay. The process may not have proceeded so far that the dull human nose can discover it, but a carrion bird or a carrion fly can smell it from afar.
John Harvey Kellogg
#53. the phoenix feather in Harry's wand had come from the same bird that had supplied the core of Lord Voldemort's.
J.K. Rowling
#54. Shreave flicked away the dead mosquito. "Don't these things carry the bird flu too?"
"No Boyd, that would be a bird.
Carl Hiaasen
#55. My fingers are callused from gripping tree limbs, and my nails are short and grubby with bark. They are like the talons of a bird that lives only in trees.
Ned Hayes
#56. I have a friend who says that reviewers are the tickbirds of the literary rhinoceros-but he is being kind. Tickbirds perform a valuable service to the rhino and the rhino hardly notices the birds.
John Irving
#57. The early bird gets the worm that should have slept in.
J.S. Davey
#58. Almost every single thing you hope publication will do for you is a fantasy, a hologram
it's the eagle on your credit card that only seems to soar.
Anne Lamott
#59. Celebration is without any cause. Celebration is simply because we are. We are made out of the stuff called celebration.That's our natural state - to celebrate - as natural as it is for the trees to bloom, for birds to sing, for rivers to flow to the ocean. Celebration is a natural state.
Rajneesh
#60. The carnal contact side by side, from heel to armpit, brings shudders that shake up nature like the flights of nocturnal birds.
Louis Aragon
#61. The saddest birds a season find to sing,The roughest storm a calm may soon allay;Thus with succeeding turns God tempereth all,That men may hope to rise yet fear to fall.
Robert Southwell
#62. Broken wings don't mend that way; the way you think broken wings do. Once that wing has taken time to mend; that bird has forgotten how to fly
S.L. Northey
#63. The owl, that bird of onomatopoetic name, is a repetitious question wrapped in feathery insulation especially for Winter delivery.
Hal Borland
#64. Do you want to see what human eyes have never seen? Look at the moon. Do you want to hear what ears have never heard? Listen to the bird's cry. Do you want to touch what hands have never touched? Touch the earth. Verily I say that God is about to create the world.
Jorge Luis Borges
#65. The 'Bird's Nest' National Stadium, which I helped to conceive, is designed to embody the Olympic spirit of 'fair competition.' It tells people that freedom is possible but needs fairness, courage and strength.
Ai Weiwei
#66. It's when I'm around some people that my entire vocabulary goes on vacation. Like now, when Dave's walking next to me wearing an old black singlet and board shorts and the tattoo of a bird on his wrist, every single word in my head except "no" and "huh" is lying somewhere on a beack getting a suntan
Cath Crowley
#67. When the whistling-thrush released
A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;
Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,
Black rose in the long ago summer,
This was your song:
It isn't time that's passing by,
It is you and I.
Ruskin Bond
#68. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart. It is like a bird that has blundered down the flue and is caught indoors and flutters at the windowpanes. It is like standing a long time on a cold day, knocking at a shut door.
Wendell Berry
#69. Like a flying bird you came into my life. Your love was the strength that let me take the plunge. I didn't think that I would ever be this way but you have changed all things for me.
Kimberly Johnson
#70. Pizza Hut isn't real pizza," I tell them. "The way that balloon of Big Bird they fly in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade isn't the real Big Bird.
Meg Cabot
#71. Thanksgiving was nothing more than a pilgrim-created obstacle in the way of Christmas; a dead bird in the street that forced a brief detour.
Augusten Burroughs
#72. Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power.
Rachel Carson
#73. Buddha also said that the Dharma, like a bird, needs two wings to fly, and that the wing that balances Wisdom is compassion.
Sylvia Boorstein
#74. The bird of paradise alights only upon the hand that does not grasp.
John Berry
#75. When that small Siberian bird fell out of the sky over Gray's River, not once but twice, he brought with him the sweetness of chance in any place, the certainty of wonder in all places. And if that's not grace, I don't know what it.
Robert Michael Pyle
#76. I'm youth, I'm joy!" Peter sang out. "I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg."
This, of course, was nonsense; but it was proof to the unhappy Hook that Peter did not know at all who or what he was. This Hook though to be the best of good manners.
J.M. Barrie
#77. Let your love fly like a bird on a wing
And let your love bind you to all livin' things
And let your love shine and you'll know what I mean
That's the reason.
Lawrence Eugene Williams
#78. Bebop didn't have the humanity of Duke Ellington. It didn't have that recognizable thing. Bird and Diz were great, fantastic, challenging
but that weren't sweet.
Miles Davis
#79. Never till this day Did life disturb the dense eternity Of joyless quiet; never skylark's song, Or storm-bird's prescient scream, or eaglet's cry, Made vital the gross fog. The very light Is but an alien that can find no welcome
Hartley Coleridge
#80. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
Douglas Adams
#81. To make the cross of Jesus just about human salvation is to miss that God is interested in the saving of everything. Every star and rock and bird. All things.
Rob Bell
#82. Thoughts in your head are really no different than the sound of a bird outside. It is just that you decide that they are more or less relevant.
Adyashanti
#83. Somewhere a bird sang, its chant hanging plaintive and melancholy in the still air ... I think it's a sort of lark or something. Our tradition has it that they sing with the voices of lost lovers. If the stars are smiling on them, you will hear its mate call back in a moment.
Jane Johnson
#84. I'm Bertie Byrd. I rent your house since you don't live here anymore." "Did you say Dirty Bird?" He laughed out loud. "Oh, that's a good one, Mr. Fortney. I never heard that one before. A real knee-slapper. Where's the key?
Dolores Wilson
#85. New Rule: A dog is the only animal that can get you laid. No offense, parrot guy, but it's not gonna happen. When women see you, they're not thinking, "I bet that guy is interesting," they're thinking, "That bird better not shit on my dress.
Bill Maher
#86. I spent a long time trying to convince myself you were better off without me. That keeping away from you was the best way to keep you safe. But I can't do it anymore. I won't. See, you and I mated for life about a million years ago, little bird. Without you, there's no music. No love. No life.
Julie Johnson
#87. A bird no one wants. he's mine. my bird of pain. he doesn't sing. that bird swaying on the bough.
Charles Bukowski
#88. It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work.
David Sedaris
#89. Now that I know that each star has its path, each bird is finally feathered and grown in the unbroken shell, each tree in the seed, each song in the life laid down - is the night sky any less strange; should my glance less follow the flight; should the pen shake less in my hand.
Judith Wright
#90. Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.
Rebecca West
#91. He is in love with the land that is always over
The next hill and the next, with the bird that is never,
Caught, with the room beyond the looking glass.
He likes the half-hid, the half-heard, the half-lit,
The man in the fog, the road without an ending ...
A.S.J. Tessimond
#92. One often reads about the art of conversation-how it's dying or what's needed to make it flourish, or how rare good ones are. But wouldn't you agree that the infinitely more valuable rara avis [rare bird] is a good listener.
Malcolm Forbes
#93. You know what kind of a man Lonny Tooker is? The kind of a man that sets broken bird's wings."
"Hitler loved dogs and babies," Dave said.
Joseph Hansen
#94. What bird are you calling?' I ask, finally, when I can't stand it any longer. The bird man stops whistling. He grins, so that I can see all his pebbly teeth. He holds out a hand to me over the broth-thin water. 'You.
Karen Russell
#95. Harry was just thinking that all he needed was for Dumbledore's pet bird to die while he was all alone in the office with it, when the bird burst into flames.
J.K. Rowling
#96. She was so goddamn beautiful, the way things that could end you were. Guns. Knives. The tawny bird of prey she resembled.
Anne Calhoun
#97. A lost bird appeared in the court and was half an hour jumping around between the spikenard. It sang a progressive note, rising an octave at a time, until it became so acute that it was necessary to imagine it.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#98. Since 2001, people have been scared. There's been some really scary stuff that's been happening - 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina, anthrax letters, D.C. sniper, global warming, global financial meltdown, bird flu, swine flu, SARS. I think people really feel like the system's breaking down.
Max Brooks
#99. Yeah," I said. "What is that? A bird? "It's the swan," he said. "Wow. A school with a swan. Wow."
"That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now.
John Green
#100. Do you remember the suburbs and the plaintive flock of landscapes
The cypress trees projected their shadows under the moon
That night when as summer waned I listened
To a languorous bird forever wroth
And the eternal noise of a river wide and dark
(The Voyager)
Pierre Albert-Birot
