Quotes about birds
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“A bird doesn't sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song”
The quote has been misattributed to Maya Angelou at times, including on U.S. postage.
This quote by Joan Walsh Anglund (1967 in her book, A Cup of Sun) has been widely used by Maya Angelou without attribution to Walsh Walsh Anglund, and wrongly misattributed to Maya Angelou many, many times, including on U.S. postage. However, the quote belongs to Joan Walsh Anglund, and is from her book "A Cup of Sun" published in 1967. However, Maya Angelou changed the pronoun "He" to "It" but quoted everything else of Joan Walsh Anglund. Why Maya Angelou never attributed her most famous quote as being Joan Walsh Anglund's is still a mystery to this day.
Source: A Cup of Sun: A Book of Poems (1967)

“If you become a bird and fly away from me, I will be a tree that you come home to.”
Source: The Runaway Bunny

“Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.”

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)
Context: There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

“Bird and bear and hare and fish, give my love her fondest wish.”

“I can levitate birds. No one cares.”
Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

“A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?”
Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

“The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.”

“I shot him the bird. (Get it? I shot him the—never mind.)”
Source: The Angel Experiment

“How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?”
Source: Legends of the Fall
“This being-nice crap was for the
birds.”
Source: The Undead Next Door

“A gun gives you the body, not the bird.”
Quoted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson http://books.google.com/books?id=IhA6AQAAIAAJ&q=%22A+gun+he+said+gives+you+the+body+not+the+bird%22&pg=PA86#v=onepage (1890) by Charles Johnson Woodbury
Source: Silver Brumby's Daughter

“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”
Source: A Spy in the House of Love

Source: Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

“Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”
Source: The Old Man and the Sea

“The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.”
The following information is from the following site: http://pt.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talento , the fourth entry, which gives the citation as (( Henry van Dyke quoted in "Handicapped Individuals Services and Training Act: hearing before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress, second session, on HR 6820 … hearing held in St. Paul, Minn., and Loretto, Minn. on September 2, 1982. "-. 223 Page, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Education and Labor. Subcommittee on Select Education - USGPO, 1982 - 257 pages ))
Quoted by Tor Dahl in the document cited https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pur1.32754076335276?urlappend=%3Bseq=229.
A very similar quote appears in an essay entitled "Do What You Can" by "Little Home Body" in the The Phrenological Journal and Life Illustrated, Volumes 62-63 (August 1876): "The woods would be very silent if no birds sang there but those that sang best" but states "I know not who said those beautiful words"
However, the quote may have been misattributed to Henry Van Dyke. In "The Two Vocations or the sisters of mercy at home" by Elizabeth Charles (1858) p.34 the following appears: "'Dear Jean', she said,'the woods would be very silent if no bird sang but those that sing best' "
Attributed
Variant: Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
“Flutter like a hummingbird,
Dive like an eagle,
Ain't no bird that's my equal.
- Twilight”
Source: The Capture
“A bird may love a fish but where would they build a home together?”
Source: Fiddler on the Roof

“It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.”
As quoted in "Ali's Quotes" at BBC Sport : Boxing (17 January 2007)
Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

“The Bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame.”
Source: Hellsing, Vol. 01
Source: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

“I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.”
Source: My Name Is Mina

“At the bottom of every frozen heart there is a drop or two of love―just enough to feed the birds.”
Source: Tropic of Cancer

“I planted some bird seed. A bird came up. Now I don’t know what to feed it.”
Source: Perfected Sinfulness

“The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.”
Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Adverbs (2006), Truly
Context: If you follow the diamond in my mother's ring from Africa to Germany to California to Arizona to Wisconsin, in the heel of a grandmother, in the beak of a magpie, in the gravel of the path, in someone else's novel, in the center of the earth where the volcanoes are from, you would forget the miracle, the reason diamonds end up in people's fingers in the first place. it is not the diamonds or the birds, the people or the potatoes, it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets done despite every catastrophe.

“A fish may love a bird, but where would they live?
- Then I shall build you wings.”
Source: Lothaire