Birds Quotes
When things fall apart, the children of the land scurry and scatter like birds escaping a burning sky.
Elizabeth Zandile Tshele
Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.
Barnett Newman
Birds that love high trees and winds and riding flailing branches hate ledges as gripless and narrow, so that a tail is not just no advantage but ridiculous, mashed vertical against the wall. You will have seen the way a bird who falls on skimpy places lifts into the air again in seconds – a gift denied the rest of us when our portion isn't generous.
Kay Ryan
Once the Funk Island birds had been salted, plucked, and deep-fried into oblivion, there was only one sizable colony of great auks left in the world, on an island called the Geirfuglasker, or great auk skerry, which lay about fifty kilometres off southwestern Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula. Much to the auk’s misfortune, a volcanic eruption destroyed the Geirfuglasker in 1830. This left the birds one solitary refuge, a speck of an island known as Eldey. By this point, the great auk was facing a new threat: its own rarity. Skins and eggs were avidly sought by gentlemen, like Count Raben, who wanted to fill out their collections. It was in the service of such enthusiasts that the very last known pair of auks was killed on Eldey in 1844.
Elizabeth Kolbert
I am decidedly of the opinion that in very many instances we can trace such a necessary connexion, especially among birds, and often with more complete success than in the case which I have here attempted to explain.
Alfred Russel Wallace
Much talking is the cause of danger. Silence is the means of avoiding misfortune. The talkative parrot is shut up in a cage. Other birds, without speech, fly freely about.
Saskya Pandita
Simplest of blossoms! To mine eye
Thou bring'st the summer's painted sky;
The May-thorn greening in the nook;
The minnows sporting in the brook;
The bleat of flocks; the breath of flowers;
The song of birds amid the bowers;
The crystal of the azure seas;
The music of the southern breeze;
And, over all, the blessed sun,
Telling of halcyon days begun.
David Macbeth Moir
How helpless we are, like netted birds, when we are caught by desire!
Belva Plain
Suspicion amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they never fly by twilight.
Francis Bacon
The wren and the nightingale sound nothing alike, but think how dull the world would be without the songs of both birds.-Miss Kanagawa.
Kirby Larson
Never to have seen anything but the temperate zone is to have lived on the fringe of the world. Between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer live the majority of all the plant species, the vast majority of the insects, most of the strange ... quadrupeds, all of the great and most of the poisonous snakes and large lizards, most of the brilliantly colored sea fishes, and the strangest and most gorgeously plumaged of the birds.
David Fairchild
The respiratory mechanisms of birds are definitely adapted to the function of flight, as evidenced by the fact that birds which do not fly (Apteryx, Penguins) show these adaptations in a greatly reduced form.
August Krogh
