Bird Quotes - Page 36

• I cannot help esteem The 'Bird within the Hand' Superior to the one The 'Bush' may yield me Or may not Too late to choose again

  Emily Dickinson

  Yield, Hands, Atheism

  Emily Dickinson, Ralph William Franklin (1999). “The Poems of Emily Dickinson”, p.421, Harvard University Press

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• If you have birds, or if you're a herpetologist and raise reptiles - you look in those eyes, and there is nothing there that's human. I mean, they don't think like us, they don't see the world like us.

  Stephen R. Bissette

  Mean, Eye, Thinking

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2009.

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• 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

  Life, Men, Symphony

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• And wisdom is a butterfly
  And not a gloomy bird of prey.

  William Butler Yeats

  Wisdom, Butterfly, Optimism

  William Butler Yeats (2000). “The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats”, p.116, Wordsworth Editions

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• I am haunted by numberless islands, many a Danaan shore,
  Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;Soon far from the rose and the lily and fret of the flames would we be,
  Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!

  William Butler Yeats

  Flames, Sea, White

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “When You Are Old: Early Poems, Plays, and Fairy Tales”, p.130, Penguin

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• You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhaps;but otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.

  Mark Twain

  Feelings, Humanity, Church

  Mark Twain (1994). “Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches”, p.163, Penguin

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• Old age is as forgetful as youth, and more incorrigible; it displays the same inattentiveness to conditions; its memory becomes self-repeating and degenerates into an instinctive reaction, like a bird's chirp.

  George Santayana

  Memories, Self, Age

  George Santayana (2011). “The Life of Reason: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense”, p.172, MIT Press

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• A married guy is responsible for everything, no matter what. Women, thanks to their having been oppressed all these years, are blameless, free as birds, and all the dirt they do is the result of premenstrual syndrome or postmenstrual stress or menopause or emotional disempowerment by their fathers or low expectations by their teachers or latent unspoken sexual harassment in the workplace, or some other airy excuse. The guy alone is responsible for every day of marriage that is less than marvelous and meaningful.

  Garrison Keillor

  Meaningful, Teacher, Stress

  Garrison Keillor (1994). “The Book of Guys: Stories”, Penguin Group USA

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• There is a certain standard of grace and beauty which consists in a certain relation between our nature, such as it is, weak or strong, and the thing which pleases us. Whatever is formed according to this standard pleases us, be it house, song, discourse, verse, prose, woman, birds, rivers, trees, room, dress, and so on. Whatever is not made according to this standard displeases those who have good taste.

  Blaise Pascal

  Beauty, Song, Strong

  Blaise Pascal (2010). “Thoughts, Letters & Minor Works”, p.16, Cosimo, Inc.

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• There is no word for time.
  Today we will
  not think to number another summer
  or watch its white bird into the ground.

  Anne Sexton

  Summer, Time, Thinking

  Anne Sexton, “The Road Back”

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• The silence is death.
  It comes each day with its shock
  to sit on my shoulder, a white bird,
  and peck at the black eyes
  and the vibrating red muscle
  of my mouth.

  Anne Sexton

  Eye, White, Silence

  Anne Sexton, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George (2000). “Selected Poems of Anne Sexton”, p.181, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It's hard to play with a bagpipe player. It's like an exotic bird. I love the sound, it's like strangling a goose.

  Tom Waits

  Art, Player, Sound

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• In the hollow tree, in the old gray tower,
  The spectral Owl doth dwell;
  Dull, hated, despised, in the sunshine hour,
  But at the dusk--he's abroad and well!
  Not a bird of the forest e'er mates with him--
  All mock him outright, by day:
  But at night, when the woods grow still and dim,
  The boldest will shrink away!
  O, when the night falls, and roosts the fowl,
  Then, then, is the reign of the Horned Owl!

  Bryan Procter

  Fall, Sunshine, Night

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• War wreaked on you his hideous ravishment;
  We, we alone, Nereids inviolate,
  Remain to weep, with the sea-birds to chant:
  Corinth is lost, Corinth is desolate.

  Hilda Doolittle

  War, Loss, Sea

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.338, New Directions Publishing

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• I fear no man, no woman;
  flower does not fear
  bird, insect nor adder.

  Hilda Doolittle

  Fear, Flower, Men

  Hilda Doolittle, Louis L. Martz (1986). “Collected Poems 1912-1944”, p.295, New Directions Publishing

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• Once in a while, God sends a good white person my way, even to this day. I think it's God's way of keeping me from becoming too mean. And when he sends a nice one to me, then I have to eat crow. And honey, crow is a tough old bird to eat, let me tell you.

  Annie Elizabeth Delany

  Nice, Mean, Thinking

  Sarah Louise Delany, Annie Elizabeth Delany, Amy Hill Hearth (1993). “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years”, p.77, Kodansha America

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• A tree is made to live in peace in the color of day and in friendship with the sun, the wind and the rain. Its roots plunge in thefat fermentation of the soil, sucking in its elemental humors, its fortifying juices. Trees always seem lost in a great tranquil dream. The dark rising sap makes them groan in the warm afternoons. A tree is a living being that knows the course of the clouds and presses the storms because it is full of birds' nests.

  Jacques Roumain

  Dream, Nature, Rain

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• My genius from a boy
  Has fluttered like a bird within my heart;
  But could not thus confined her power employ,
  Impatient to depart.

  George Moses Horton

  Heart, Boys, Genius

  George Moses Horton (1997). “The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry”, p.121, Univ of North Carolina Press

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• The best things in life are free, but you can keep them for the birds and bees; I want money.

  John Lennon

  Things In Life, Want, Bees

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• Alaska Governor Sarah Palin pardoned a turkey, though she said she was amazed to find out that, besides being a bird, Turkey is also a country. Did you see that all over the Internet today? While Sarah Palin was pardoning a turkey, right behind her was a guy slaughtering turkeys. But, see, like most Internet stories, a little half-true. Turns out that, after a couple of minutes listening to Sarah Palin's voice, the turkeys said 'Kill us now.'

  Jay Leno

  Country, Couple, Alaska

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• ... Let the cage bird and the cage bird mate and the wild bird mate in the wild.

  William Butler Yeats

  Marriage, Cages, Mates

  William Butler Yeats (2016). “Collected Poems”, p.124, William Butler Yeats

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• I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
  We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fadeand flee;
  And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
  Has awaked in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.

  William Butler Yeats

  Stars, Twilight, Heart

  William Butler Yeats (2013). “Early Poems”, p.30, Courier Corporation

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• somewhere in sands of the desert
  A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
  A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
  Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
  Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

  William Butler Yeats

  Moving, Men, Shadow

  William Butler Yeats (2015). “A Vision: The Revised 1937 Edition: The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats”, p.192, Simon and Schuster

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• There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of head or hands. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Summer, Morning, Taken

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• In all her products, Nature only develops her simplest germs. One would say that it was no great stretch of invention to create birds. The hawk which now takes his flight over the top of the wood was at first, perchance, only a leaf which fluttered in its aisles. From rustling leaves she came in the course of ages to the loftier flight and clear carol of the bird.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Nature, Age, Woods

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.112, Xist Publishing

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