Best 288 quotes in «birds quotes» category

A bird alone could have extricated himself from that place.

Above humanity, where the airplanes fly and birds circle the thermals, silence stretches for eternity....

A bird, unable to fly, is still a bird; but a human unable to love is an inexpensive stone: like a piece of uric acid stone

A bush-warbler, Coming to the verandah-edge, Left its droppings On the rice-cakes.

Alice haunted the mossy edge of the woods, lingering in patches of shade. She was waiting to hear his Austin-Healey throttle back when he careened down the utility road separating the state park from the cabins rimming the lake, but only the whistled conversation of buntings echoed in the branches above. The vibrant blue males darted deeper into the trees when she blew her own 'sweet-sweet chew-chew sweet-sweet' up to theirs. Pine seedlings brushed against her pants as she pushed through the understory, their green heads vivid beneath the canopy. She had dressed to fade into the forest; her hair was bundled up under a long-billed cap, her clothes drab and inconspicuous. When at last she heard his car, she crouched behind a clump of birch and made herself as small as possible, settling into a shallow depression of ferns and leaf litter.

A few moments later, a group of white birds landed on the steps to watch her. "Hello there!" she said and removed some birdseed from her pocket, laying it on the steps for them to eat. When they were finished, they stayed to watch her work. She didn't mind. It helped to have company, even if they couldn't talk. She found herself talking to them sometimes. True, some might call her mad for conversing with animals, but who was paying attention?

A goose flies by a chart the Royal Geographic Society could not improve.

A hungry cat does no favour to a trapped bird!

All he could do was wait like this, patiently, until it grew light out and the birds awoke and began their day. All he could do was trust in the birds, in all the birds, with their wings and beaks.

All praise and honor! I confess That bread and ale, home-baked, home-brewed Are wholesome and nutritious food, But not enough for all our needs; Poets-the best of them-are birds Of passage; where their instinct leads They range abroad for thoughts and words And from all climes bring home the seeds That germinate in flowers or weeds. They are not fowls in barnyards born To cackle o'er a grain of corn; And, if you shut the horizon down To the small limits of their town, What do you but degrade your bard Till he at last becomes as one Who thinks the all-encircling sun Rises and sets in his back yard?

A flash of harmless lightning, A mist of rainbow dyes. The burnished sunbeams brightening From flower to flower he flies; While wakes the nodding blossom But just too late to see What lip hath touched her bosom And drained her rosary.

A glimpse of my feathers. Show too much and they’ll tear you apart Bird of Paradise Born in the trenches Facing the mouth of a gun.

A human being can only endure depression up to a certain point; when this point of saturation is reached it becomes necessary for him to discover some element of pleasure, no matter how humble or on how low a level, in his environment if he is to go on living at all. In my case these insignificant birds with their subdued colourings have provided just sufficient distraction to keep me from total despair. Each day I find myself spending longer and longer at the window watching their flights, their quarrels, their mouse-quick flutterings, their miniature feuds and alliances. Curiously enough, it is only when I am standing in front of the window that I feel any sense of security. While I am watching the birds I believe that I am comparatively immune from the assaults of life. The very indifference to humanity of these wild creatures affords me a certain safeguard. Where all else is dangerous, hostile and liable to inflict pain, they alone can do me no injury because, probably, they are not even aware of my existence. The birds are at once my refuge and my relaxation.

All trees and birds sky and stars bosoms and bangles were seeing everything.

A magpie can be happy or sad: sometimes so happy that he sits on a high, high gum tree and rolls the sunrise around in his throat like beads of pink sunlight; and sometimes so sad that you would expect the tears to drip off his beak. This magpie was like that.

A man swallowed a bird every day but still couldn't fly.

A marsh pheasant has to walk ten paces for a bite to eat and a hundred for a sip of water. But still it wouldn't want to be tamed and put into a cage. Even treated like a king, it could never be happy and content.

...a murder of crows gormandized until they were satiated.

And do you see how beautiful and graceful the birds are when they are flying and soaring? The ground has many comforts for them to enjoy... But in the sky they are truly what a bird is meant to be. So it is with the human heart.

And there by the door was a big piece of some kind of woven fabric, neatly framed and under glass, with a pattern of blue leaves and vines and speckled birds and little white flowers, and everything so close and tight that it played with my eyes and made me squint. And the funny thing was, I was almost sure I'd seen that pattern somewhere before... For a minute I looked at it, trying to work out the design. The leaves looked a bit like strawberry-leaves, and there were strawberries in there too, which made me think of my strawberry wood, grown dark and strange under the glass. But there were so many things in there, so many shapes and colors, that it was hard to focus. And the pattern kept repeating, so that it looked like the birds were moving; chasing each other through the leaves, and flowers, and briars, and bunches of strawberries.

...a new day was starting, the things of the garden were not concerned with our troubles. A blackbird ran across the rose-garden to the lawns in swift, short rushes, stopping now and again to stab at the earth with his yellow beak. A thrush, too, went about his business, and two stout, little wagtails, following one another, and a little cluster of twittering sparrows. A gull poised himself high in the air, silent and alone, and then spread his wings wide and swooped beyond the lawns to the woods and the Happy Valley. These things continued, our worries and anxieties had no power to alter them.

As an aside, don’t burn two truckloads of drugs in an area that avians fly over at low altitude.

A shadow appeared on the awnings further up the land, gliding across each rectangle of canvas towards my table, sinking in the sag, rising again at the edge, and moving on to the next with a flicker of dislocation, then gliding onwards. As it crossed the stripe of sunlight between two awnings, it threaded the crimson beak of a stork through the air, a few inches above the gap; then came a long white neck, the swell of snowy breast feathers and the six-foot motionless span of its white wings and the tips of the black flight feathers upturned and separated as fingers in the lift of the air current. The white belly followed, tapering, and then, trailing behind, the fan of its tail and long parallel legs of crimson lacquer, the toes of each of them closed and streamlined, but the whole shape flattening, when the band of sunlight was crossed, into a two-dimensional shadow once more, enormously displayed across the rectangle of cloth, as distinct and nearly as immobile, so languid was its flight, as an emblematic bird on a sail; then sliding across it and along the nearly still corridor of air between the invisible eaves and the chimneys, dipping along the curl of the lane like a sigh of wonder, and, at last, a furlong away slowly pivoting, at a gradual tilt, out of sight. A bird of passage like the rest of us.

Be the celebrators, celebrate! Already there is too much—the flowers have bloomed, the birds are singing, the sun is there in the sky—celebrate it! You are breathing and you are alive and you have consciousness, celebrate it!

Be the Chocolate What if I want to be the bird who eats the Chocolate?

Birds alone can afford to perch on weak branches.

Birds are flying over the garden. What are you doing inside the house? Join them! If you can’t join them, at least open the window and greet them!

Birds have done great jobs for the progression of humanity: They kept alive our love for freedom and they insistently motivated us to reach the skies, to reach the stars!

In Our Woods, Sometimes a Rare Music Every spring I hear the thrush singing in the glowing woods he is only passing through. His voice is deep, then he lifts it until it seems to fall from the sky. I am thrilled. I am grateful. Then, by the end of morning, he's gone, nothing but silence out of the tree where he rested for a night. And this I find acceptable. Not enough is a poor life. But too much is, well, too much. Imagine Verdi or Mahler every day, all day. It would exhaust anyone.

Birds are the eyes of Heaven.

Birds feed; then they nest. Paint them any color you want, send them halfway around the world, but they’ll always find a way back. And eventually they’ll show their true colors again.

Birds of the Western Front Your mess-tin cover's lost. Kestrels hover above the shelling. They don't turn a feather when hunting-ground explodes in yellow earth, flickering star-shells and flares from the Revelation of St John. You look away from artillery lobbing roar and suck and snap against one corner of a thicket to the partridge of the war zone making its nest in shattered clods. History floods into subsoil to be blown apart. You cling to the hard dry stars of observation. How you survive. They were all at it: Orchids of the Crimea nature notes from the trench leaving everything unsaid - hell's cauldron with souls pushed in, demons stoking flames beneath - for the pink-flecked wings of a chaffinch flashed like mediaeval glass. You replace gangrene and gas mask with a dream of alchemy: language of the birds translating human earth to abstract and divine. While machine-gun tracery gutted that stricken wood you watched the chaffinch flutter to and fro through splintered branches, breaking buds and never a green bough left. Hundreds lay in there wounded. If any, you say, spotted one bird they may have wondered why a thing with wings would stay in such a place. She must have, sure, had chicks she was too terrified to feed, too loyal to desert. Like roots clutching at air you stick to the lark singing fit to burst at dawn sounding insincere above the burning bush: plough-land latticed like folds of brain with shell-ravines where nothing stirs but black rats, jittery sentries and the lice sliding across your faces every night. Where every elixir's gone wrong you hold to what you know. A little nature study. A solitary magpie blue and white spearing a strand of willow. One for sorrow. One for Babylon, Ninevah and Northern France, for mice and desolation, the burgeoning barn-owl population and never a green bough left.

Black hawk down. Black eagle up.

Break out to go out ___________________ The birds dare to break the egg shell It does so in order to get out of that Hell When it finally succeeds, it’ll then fly To its comfort zone it’ll say bye Are you being confined in a small space How long will you remain at that place? Before you can explore more territories, Break away from the former glories. Yesterday’s excellence is today’s average You must strive to be better age after age Never accept the available mediocrity As the only preferable opportunity Decide to grow from below to hero And make it a point to vacate level zero Reach out and arise with power God’s blessings on you, will shower Agree to grow, never attempt to be slow Be not afraid. Never doubt. You’ll flow The grace of God will be your guide Taking you along, side by side.

But in the early 1970s, we were not birdwatching. We were birding, and that made all the difference. We were out to seek, to discover, to chase, to learn, to find as many different kinds of birds as possible — and, in friendly competition, to try to find more of them than the next birder. We became a community of birders, with the complications that human societies always have; and although it was the birds that had brought us together, our story became a human story after all.

But those who caged her in order to protect her from monsters, didn’t notice that they are making a monster out of her too….

Cliff swallows come back to Capistrano Mid-March. It takes them 3 weeks to fly 7,000 miles from Goya, Argentina.

Did morning come? Were there birds singing? That's the only news I care to know.

Every bird has a style and each style has its own fate, just as it is in humans!

Every morning before the birds start trilling me their stories, I give birth to a new love through my same old heart when a lake’s placidity finds life in the swans breath Only for you... From the poem 'Only For You

Every new day Our children's joy is as fresh as roses, Even the birds chatter at dawn.

Everywhere I go, your beauty spills into my day. The trees were never this verdant. The birdsong never this sweet.

Flying is not only the art of the birds, but it is also the art of the artists!

for a poem Needs multitude, multitudes of thoughts, all fierce, all flesh-eaters, musically clamorous Bright hawks that hover and dart headlong, and ungainly Gray hungers fledged with desire of transgression, salt slimed beaks, from the sharp Rock-shores of the world and the secret waters.

For the author as for God, standing outwith his creation, all times are one; all times are now. In mine own country, we accept as due and right – as very meet, right, and our bounden duty – the downs and their orchids and butterflies, the woods and coppices, ash, beech, oak, and field maple, rowan, wild cherry, holly, and hazel, bluebells in their season and willow, alder, and poplar in the wetter ground. We accept as proper and unremarkable the badger and the squirrel, the roe deer and the rabbit, the fox and the pheasant, as the companions of our walks and days. We remark with pleasure, yet take as granted, the hedgerow and the garden, the riot of snowdrops, primroses, and cowslips, the bright flash of kingfishers, the dart of swallows and the peaceful homeliness of house martins, the soft nocturnal glimmer of glow worm and the silent nocturnal swoop of owl.

From birds she learned how to sing; from cats she learned a form of dangerous independence.

Give not thyself up, then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for a time it did me. There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds on the plain, even though they soar.

Happier than a bird with a french fry.

Hark, how the cheerful birds do chaunt their lays, and carol of love's praise.

Headaches were like birds. Starlings. They could be perfectly calm, then a single acorn could drop and send the entire flock to the sky.