Bird Quotes - Page 33

• Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

  Ellen Glasgow

  Form, Engaging

  Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, Pamela R. Matthews (2005). “Perfect Companionship: Ellen Glasgow's Selected Correspondence with Women”, p.232, University of Virginia Press

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• People are like birds - from a distance, beautiful: from close up, those sharp beaks, those beady little eyes.

  Richard J. Needham

  Beautiful, Distance, Eye

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• Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.

  Anne Lamott

  Butterfly, Perfect, Creation

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• Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.

  Camille Paglia

  Writing, Ideas, Hands

  "Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson". Book by Camille Paglia, 1990.

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• With mimicry, with praises, with echoes, or with answers, the poets have all but outsung the bell. The inarticulate bell has found too much interpretation, too many rhymes professing to close with her inaccessible utterance, and to agree with her remote tongue. The bell, like the bird, is a musician pestered with literature.

  Alice Meynell

  Echoes, Musician, Utterance

  Alice Meynell (2013). “The Essential Alice Meynell Collection”, p.225, eBookIt.com

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• It is a bird-flight of the soul, when the heart declares itself in song. The affections that clothe themselves with wings are passions that have been subdued to virtues.

  William Gilmore Simms

  Music, Song, Passion

  William Gilmore Simms (1853). “Egeria: Or Voices of Thought and Counsel, for the Woods and Wayside”, p.22

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• Many children fly like birds, guess other people's dreams, and speak with ghosts, but ... they all outgrow it when they lose their innocence.

  Isabel Allende

  Dream, Children, People

  Isabel Allende (2015). “The House of the Spirits: A Novel”, p.9, Simon and Schuster

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• To rise above treeline is to go above thought, and after, the descent back into bird song, bog orchids, willows, and firs is to sink into the preliterate parts of ourselves.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Song, Nature, Orchids

  Gretel Ehrlich (1992). “Islands, the universe, home”, Penguin Group USA

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• A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.

  Gretel Ehrlich

  Animal, Light, Wind

  Gretel Ehrlich (2017). “Islands, the Universe, Home: Essays”, p.84, Open Road Media

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• The only creative power I know is that of what might roughly be called 'love'; not of course a sentimental love: a far more impersonal and less individual emotion. I sometimes think that migratory birds may have it for each other. They fly in the same direction, and have never been seen to interfere with each other's flights.

  Phyllis Bottome

  Thinking, Creative, Might

  Phyllis Bottome (1943). “Survival”, Boston : Little, Brown

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• Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.

  Augustus William Hare

  Shadow, Findings

  Julius Charles Hare, Augustus William Hare (1861). “Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers: From the Fifth London Ed”, p.161

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• Call me names, dearest! Call me thy bird
  That flies to thy breast at one cherishing word,
  That folds its wild wings there, ne'er dreaming of flight,
  That tenderly sings there in loving delight!
  Oh! my sad heart keeps pining for one fond word,--
  Call me pet names, dearest! Call me thy bird!

  Frances Sargent Osgood

  Dream, Heart, Names

  Frances Sargent OSGOOD, Felix Octavius Carr DARLEY (1850). “Poems ... Illustrated by ... Darley, etc”, p.365

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• 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

  Music, Sweet, Soul

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• I know there will be spring, as surely as the birds know it when they see above the snow two tiny, quivering green leaves. Spring cannot fail us.

  Olive Schreiner

  Spring, Two, Snow

  Olive Schreiner (2003). “Dreams”, p.56, A&C Black

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• The sun had not risen, but the vault of heaven was rich with the winning, softness that "brings and shuts the day," while the whole air was filled with the carols of birds, the hymns of the feathered tribe.

  James F. Cooper

  Winning, Hymns, Air

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• 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

  Mother, Dream, Hands

  Susan Griffin (2016). “Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her”, p.164, Counterpoint

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• It may be that to eat and be eaten are the same thing in the end. My wisdom tells me that this is probably so. We are all made of the same stuff, remember, we of the Jungle, you of the City. The same substance composes us-the tree overhead, the stone beneath us, the bird, the beast, the star-we are all one, all moving to the same end. Remember that when you no longer remember me, my child.

  P. L. Travers

  Stars, Children, Moving

  P. L. Travers (2014). “Mary Poppins: 80th Anniversary Collection”, p.174, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• No matter. The dead bird does not leave the nest.

  Winston Churchill

  Fashion, Doe, Nests

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• What we discover is it was not the waves or the birds or the wind that were standing out and being separate from existence; it was we who were standing out and being separate from existence.

  Frederick Lenz

  Buddhism, Wind, Suffering

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• High in the sky is a bird on a wing
  Please carry me with you
  Far far away from the mad rushing crowd
  Please carry me with you.

  Tom Springfield

  Sky, Wings, Rushing

  "Song: 'Island of Dreams'". 1961.

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• I have brightness in my soul, which strains toward Heaven. I am like a bird!

  Jenny Lind

  Heaven, Soul, Brightness

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• There must be something beyond man in this world. Even on attaining to his highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against his cage. There is something beyond, O deathless like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the ocean to which you belong!

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Ocean, Men, Sea

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• The wild bird that flies so lone and far has somewhere its nest and brood. A little fluttering heart of love impels its wings, and points its course. There is nothing so solitary as a solitary man.

  Edwin Hubbel Chapin

  Heart, Men, Wings

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• A popular saying in Alderson went as follows: 'They work us like a horse, feed us like a bird, treat us like a child, dress us like a man - and then expect us to act like a lady.

  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

  Horse, Children, Work

  Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1963). “The Alderson story: my life as a political prisoner”, Intl Pub

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• Boredom!!! Shooting!!! Shelling!!! People being killed!!! Despair!!! Hunger!!! Misery!!! Fear!!! That's my life! The life of an innocent eleven-year-old schoolgirl!! A schoolgirl without a school, without the fun and excitement of school. A child without games, without friends, without the sun, without birds, without nature, without fruit, without chocolate or sweets, with just a little powdered milk. In short, a child without a childhood.

  Zlata Filipović

  Sweet, Children, Fun

  Zlata Filipović (1994). “Le journal de Zlata”, Viking Adult

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