Beaks Quotes - Page 2

• Night was falling. Birds were singing. Birds were, it occurred to me to say, enacting a frantic celebration of day's end. They were manifesting as the earth's bright-colored nerve endings, the sun's descent urging them into activity, filling them individually with life nectar, the life nectar then being passed into the world, out of each beak, in the form of that bird's distinctive song, which was, in turn, an accident of beak shape, throat shape, breast configuration, brain chemistry: some birds blessed in voice, others cursed; some squeaking, others rapturous.

  George Saunders

  Song, Blessed, Fall

  George Saunders (2013). “Tenth of December: Stories”, p.57, Random House

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• It took me three weeks to stuff the turkey. I stuffed it through the beak.

  Phyllis Diller

  Thanksgiving, Turkeys, Three

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• The child is born speaking the languages of birds; the child has horns and scales and wings; it has a beak; it has a cloven hoof. He is the sum of all creatures: the ones that swim, the ones that soar, the ones that leap, the ones that maze the earth with burrows.

  Rikki Ducornet

  Love, Children, Wings

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• A collection of bad love songs, tattered from overuse, has to touch us like a cemetery or a village. So what if the houses have no style, if the graves are vanishing under tasteless ornaments and inscriptions? Before an imagination sympathetic and respectful enough to conceal momentarily its aesthetic disdain, that dust may release a flock of souls, their beaks holding the still verdant dreams that gave them an inkling of the next world and let them rejoice or weep in this world.

  Marcel Proust

  Dream, Song, Dust

  Marcel Proust, Joachim Neugroschel, Roger Shattuck (2003). “The Complete Short Stories of Marcel Proust”, p.127, Rowman & Littlefield

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• What birds were they? (...) He listened to the cries: like the squeak of mice be- hind the wainscot : a shrill twofold note. But the notes were long and shrill and whirring, unlike the cry of vermin, falling a third or a fourth and trilled as the flying beaks clove the air. Their cry was shrill and clear and fine and falling like threads of silken light unwound from whirring spools.

  James Joyce

  Fall, Light, Air

  James Joyce (1996). “James Joyce: The Poems in Verse and Prose”, Trafalgar Square

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• I abide in a goodly Museum, Frequented by sages profound: 'Tis a kind of strange mausoleum, Where the beasts that have vanished abound. There's a bird of the ages Triassic, With his antediluvian beak, And many a reptile Jurassic, And many a monster antique.

  May Kendall

  Museums, Profound, Bird

  May Kendall (1887). “Dreams to Sell”

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• Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. They were like seeds in the beak of a bird, waiting to fall to earth, or the notes of a song laid out on a sheet, yearning for an instrument to bring their music into being.

  John Connolly

  Song, Real, Lying

  "The John Connolly Reader's Companion: A Collection of Excerpts".

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• The hawk's cry is as sharp as its beak.

  Edward Abbey

  Hawks, Cry

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.47, RosettaBooks

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• As for your doctrines I am prepared to go to the Stake if requisite ... I trust you will not allow yourself to be in any way disgusted or annoyed by the considerable abuse & misrepresentation which unless I greatly mistake is in store for you... And as to the curs which will bark and yelp - you must recollect that some of your friends at any rate are endowed with an amount of combativeness which (though you have often & justly rebuked it) may stand you in good stead - I am sharpening up my claws and beak in readiness.

  Thomas Huxley

  Mistake, Science, Annoyed

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• Thoth's beak! You are impossibley stubborn." "Yeah, it's a gift.

  Rick Riordan

  Stubborn, Yeah

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• I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They'd like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven't. We haven't.

  Gloria E. Anzaldúa

  Thinking, Blind Spots, Justice

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• Her, cheer up. Zoey's grandma didn't say the Raven Mockers actually ate people. She said they just picked them up with their humongous beaks and threw them against a wall or whatever over and over again until every bone in their body was broken." - Aphrodite LaFonte

  P. C. Cast

  Cheer, Wall, Grandma

  P. C. Cast, Kristin Cast (2010). “Hunted: A House of Night Novel”, p.17, Macmillan

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• That particular octopus committed suicide, didn't he? He stabbed himself with his own beak.

  Richard Madeley

  Suicide, Octopus, Committed

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• Birds are flyin' south for winter. Here's the Weird-Bird headin' north, Wings a-flappin', beak a-chatterin', Cold head bobbin' back 'n' forth. He says, "It's not that I like ice Or freezin' winds and snowy ground. It's just sometimes it's kind of nice To be the only bird in town.

  Shel Silverstein

  Nice, Winter, Wind

  Shel Silverstein, “Weird-Bird”

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• Old people who live too long come to resemble turtles. As though time turned in a curve, and down they go to the reptiles again. Not the little wet naked frog they were born. But the tortoise. Cold eyes, sagging circles of skin, the nose becomes beak. The shell of sleep.

  Josephine Winslow Johnson

  Sleep, Eye, Curves

  Josephine Winslow Johnson (1996). “The Inland Island”, Writer's Digest Books

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• When strawberries go begging, and the sleek
  Blue plums lie open to the blackbird's beak,
  We shall live well--we shall live very well.

  Elinor Wylie

  Hope, Lying, Blue

  Elinor Wylie, Evelyn Helmick Hively (2005). “Selected Works of Elinor Wylie”, p.18, Kent State University Press

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• Love is both Creator's and Saviour's gospel to mankind; a volume bound in rose-leaves, clasped with violets, and by the beaks of humming-birds printed with peach-juice on the leaves of lilies.

  Herman Melville

  Love, Rose, Bird

  Herman Melville (1971). “Pierre, Or The Ambiguities: Volume Seven, Scholarly Edition”, p.34, Northwestern University Press

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• Come on," I said. "I've got some questions for Thoth. And then I'm going to punch him in the beak.

  Rick Riordan

  Said

  Rick Riordan (2010). “The Kane Chronicles, The, Book One: Red Pyramid”, Hyperion

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• Certain anthropologists hold that man, having discovered tools, ceased to evolve biologically. Animals, never having discovered them, continue to fashion drills out of their beaks, oars out of their hind feet, wings out of their forefeet, suits of armor out of their hides, levers out of their horns, saws out of their teeth. Whether this be true or not, all authorities agree that man is the tool-using animal. It sets him off from the rest of the animal kingdom as drastically as does speech.

  Stuart Chase

  Fashion, Animal, Men

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• It is night,
  And it is vanity, and age
  Blackens the heart of Adam. Fear,
  The yellow chirper, beaks its cage.

  Robert Lowell

  Fear, Heart, Night

  Robert Lowell (1964). “Poems, 1938-1949”

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• Sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak.

  Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

  Kissing, Falcon

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• [Referring to the birds:] Nat listened to the tearing sound of splintering wood, and wondered how many million years of memory were stored in those little brains, behind the stabbing beaks, the piercing eyes, now giving them this instinct to destroy mankind with all the deft precision of machines.

  Daphne du Maurier

  Memories, Eye, Animal

  James A. Michener, Alan C. Collins, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Daphne du Maurier, Sixta, A.J. Cronin, Captain J. Y. Cousteau with Frederic Dumas (1953). “THE BRIDGES AT TOKO-RI, THE STORY OF AVIATION, THE SWIMMING POOL, KISS ME AGAIn, STRANGER, RIVETS, ADVENTURES IN TWO WORLDS, THE SILENT WORLD, SHORT STORIES OF DE MAUPASSANT”

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• Maybe the Snowy Heron is going to come off pretty badly when the planes come together. Maybe. But he's still proud and beautiful. His head is high, and he's got this sharp beak that's facing out to the world.He's okay for now.

  Gary D. Schmidt

  Beautiful, Together, World

  Gary D. Schmidt (2011). “Okay for Now”, p.202, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Give me a hot coal glowing bright red, Give me an ember sizzling with heat, These are the jewels made from my beak. We fly between the flames and never get singed We plunge through the smoke and never cringe. The secrets of fire, its strange winds, its rages, We know it all as it rampages Through forests, through canyons, Up hillsides and down. We track it. We'll find it. Take coals by the pound. We'll yarp in the heart of the hottest flame Then bring back its coals an make them tame. For we are the colliers brave and beyond all We are the owls of the colliering chaw!

  Kathryn Lasky

  Heart, Fire, Glowing

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• People in Washington seem as hypnotized by precedence as though they were hens with their beaks on a chalk line.

  Alice Roosevelt Longworth

  People, Lines, Hens

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