Quotes about birds
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“Take a good rest, small bird," he said. "Then go in and take your chance like any man or bird or fish.”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

Fish, Chance

“I can levitate birds. No one cares.”

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“A bird doesn't sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song”

Joan Walsh Anglund (1926) American poet and children's book author

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)

Singing

“How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way,
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

World, Way, Sense

“A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Guy, Feeling, Girl, Waiting

“The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.”

Eric Berne book Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships

Games People Play: the Psychology of Human Relations (1964)

Boy, Singing

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

Margaret Wise Brown The Runaway Bunny

Source: The Runaway Bunny

Home, Tree, Flying

“So you have you price," I said with a mouthful of crumbs. "Your soul for a cookie." Fang made sure Dr. Martinez wasn't looking and then shot me the bird.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports

Soul

“Beyond the window, some kind of small, black thing shot across the sky. A bird, possibly. Or it might have been someone's soul being blown to the far side of the world.”

Haruki Murakami book 1Q84

Source: 1Q84

World, Soul

“It was one of those days you sometimes get latish in the autumn when the sun beams, the birds toot, and there is a bracing tang in the air that sends the blood beetling briskly through the veins.”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

Autumn, Sun

“The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Time, Waiting, Heart, Night

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

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) writer and activist

Tree

“See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner," "A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?" "Because when he sings… even the birds stop to listen.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Girl, Singing

“In every message she spoke of birds, of flight, of the world away. Even back then, she flew against what was presented to her. I wanted to cling to her wings and soar, no matter how intimidated I was.”

Lisa See book Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

Source: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

World

“We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

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.

Fish, Learning, Sea

“His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck's nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan's egg.”

Hans Christian Andersen The Ugly Duckling

Fairy Tales (1835)
Source: The Ugly Duckling

Beauty

“These flowers will be rotten in a couple hours. Birds will crap on them. The smoke here will make them stink, and tomorrow a bulldozer will probably run over them, but for right now they are so beautiful.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Survivor

Source: Survivor

Beauty, Flowers

“Laistrygonians. Cannibals. Northern Giants. Sasquatch legend. Yep, yep. They are not birds. Not birds of North America.”

Rick Riordan book The Son of Neptune

Source: The Son of Neptune

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

Stephen King (1947) American author

Love, Fish

“And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life, Heart

“My face felt like my normal face, as if that part of me hadn’t transformed into a bird. [Fine, Sadie. Call me the Carter-headed chicken. Happy? ]”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Parting, Happiness

“People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.”

Charles Bukowski book Hollywood

Source: Hollywood

People, Understanding, Animals

“When she saw him face to face their eyes met and brushed like birds’ wings. After that everything was all right, everything was wonderful, she knew that he was beginning to fall in love with her.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book Tender Is the Night

Source: Tender Is the Night

Love

“Marrying a woman for her beauty makes no more sense than eating a bird for its singing. But it's a common mistake nonetheless.”

Charles Frazier book Cold Mountain

Source: Cold Mountain

Beauty, Sense, Singing

“I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

“I can levitate birds. No one cares.”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

“She decided to free herself, dance into the wind, create a new language. And birds fluttered around her, writing “yes” in the sky.”

Monique Duval (1924–2014) Canadian journalist

Dance

“Once upon a time, when women were birds, there was the simple understanding that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk was to heal the world through joy. The birds still remember what we have forgotten, that the world is meant to be celebrated.”

Terry Tempest Williams (1955) American writer

Source: When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice

Women, World, Understanding, Singing

“A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live?”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Source: Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

Love, Fish

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

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Friendship, For Friend, Friendship

“I shot him the bird. (Get it? I shot him the—never mind.)”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Angel Experiment

“It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Life, Death, Age

“How can a bird that is born for joy
Sit in a cage and sing?”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Singing, Joy

“Okay. I picked up a movie to watch tonight. You can watch it with me if you like. It's a chick movie. Merri Lee said that means girls like it, not that there are small birds in it.”

Anne Bishop book Murder of Crows

Source: Murder of Crows

Girl

“This is wonderful, wonderful! Be the bird. You are the bird. Sacrifice yourself to abandoned family values….”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Family

“You cannot save every fallen bird," said Woosley, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms. "Even the handsome ones." "One will do," said Magnus, and, as Will was no longer within his sight, he let the front door fall shut.”

Cassandra Clare book Clockwork Prince

Source: Clockwork Prince

“If you added it up, without her there was nothing--but with her even the simplest of gestures of walking a bird dog in the desert, or selecting the ingredients for a meal for two rather than one took on an ineffable charm.

(from the novella,)”

Jim Harrison (1937–2016) American novelist, poet, essayist

Source: Legends of the Fall

Dogs

“This being-nice crap was for the
birds.”

Kerrelyn Sparks (1955) American writer

Source: The Undead Next Door

“I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

“Say I'm a bird! Say it! Say it now!"
"You're a bird."
"Now say you're a bird too."
"If you're a bird, I'm a bird.”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

“A gun gives you the body, not the bird.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) 1817-1862 American poet, essayist, naturalist, and abolitionist

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

“may my heart always be open to little birds who are the secrets of living”

E.E. Cummings Him

Source: Him

Secret, Heart

“Life and summer are fleeting,’ sang the bird. ‘Snow and dark, and the winter comes. Nothing remains the same.”

Elyne Mitchell (1913–2002) Australian writer

Source: Silver Brumby's Daughter

Life, Winter, Summer

“Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.”

Louise Erdrich (1954) writer from the United States

Source: The Painted Drum

Intelligence, Light

“One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

Horse

“If you're a bird… I'm a bird…”

Nicholas Sparks book The Notebook

Source: The Notebook

“Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Dreams

“Nice bird, asshole!”

Scott Lynch The Lies of Locke Lamora

Source: The Lies of Locke Lamora

“I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.”

Anaïs Nin book A Spy in the House of Love

Source: A Spy in the House of Love

Dreams

“You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Flowers, Tree, Help

“Unclose your mind. You are not a prisoner. You are a bird in fight, searching the skies for dreams.”

Haruki Murakami book Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985), Chapter 18:

Dreams, Search, Fight

“Be like the bird that, passing on her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing that she hath wings.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Way, Feeling, Singing

“Look, I guess it's natural, you're teenagers, its springtime, everyone's thoughts are turning to birds and bees and caterpillars and moths…..

- Iggy”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: Fang

Nature, Bee

“If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assisi's shoulders.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

pg 49
Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Part Two: Soul and Body

Love

“Because when he sings… even the birds stop to listen.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Singing

“Felix believed that the answer to every problem involved penguins; but it wasn't fair to birds, and I was getting tired of teleporting them back home. Somewhere in Antarctica, a whole flock of Magellanic penguins were undergoing psychotherapy.”

Rick Riordan book The Throne of Fire

Source: The Throne of Fire

Home, Problem

“Dean's California--wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors.”

Jack Kerouac book On the Road

Source: On the Road

Lovers

“I want to make a memorial for our turkey. Never has a bird been so tortured to provide such a lousy dinner.”

Laurie Halse Anderson Speak

Source: Speak

Memory

“the sweet juices of your mouth
are like castles bathed in honey.
i've never had it done so gently before.
you have put a circle of castles
around my penis and you swirl them
like sunlight on the wings of birds.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

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

“The little things are important, Mr. Wind-Up Bird”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel?”

Ernest Hemingway book The Old Man and the Sea

Source: The Old Man and the Sea

Sea

“The woods would be quiet if no bird sang but the one that sang best.”

Henry Van Dyke (1852–1933) American diplomat

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”

Kathryn Lasky (1944) American children's writer

Source: The Capture

“A bird may love a fish but where would they build a home together?”

Joseph Stein (1912–2010) American playwright

Source: Fiddler on the Roof

Love, Home, Fish

“It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.”

Muhammad Ali (1942–2016) African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

As quoted in "Ali's Quotes" at BBC Sport : Boxing (17 January 2007)

Back To Work, People, Grass, Flying

“The bird is gone, and in what meadow does it now sing?”

Philip K. Dick book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Source: Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

Singing

“I don’t know about birds
nor do I know the history of fire.
But I believe that my solitude should have wings”

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936–1972) Argentinian poet

History, Solitude

“His invitation lingers. So does my question. Why me? I don't know the answer. When I look at myself in the mirror, all I see is a starving, stunted bird who never grew wings and lost all reason to sing.”

Julie Anne Peters (1952) American writer

Source: By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead

Question, Singing

“The Bird of Hermes is my name, eating my wings to make me tame.”

Kohta Hirano (1973) Japanese manga artist

Source: Hellsing, Vol. 01

“I pray to the birds because they remind me of what I love rather than what I fear. And at the end of my prayers, they teach me how to listen.”

Terry Tempest Williams book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Source: Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place

Love, Fear

“I sit in my tree
I sing like the birds
My beak is my pen
My songs are my poems.”

David Almond book My Name Is Mina

Source: My Name Is Mina

Tree, Singing

“The caged bird sings with a fearful trill,
of things unknown, but longed for still,
and his tune is heard on the distant hill,
for the caged bird sings of freedom.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Fear, Freedom, Distant, Singing

“This is me apologizing. I am a fool, a bird-brain, a liar and a horse-thief. I wouldn't touch a superlative again with an umbrella.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Fools, Horse

“As birds' wings beat the solid air without which none could fly so words freed by the imagination affirm reality by their flight.”

William Carlos Williams book Spring and All

Source: Spring and All

Imagination, Reality, Flying

“An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.”

Lawrence Durrell The Avignon Quintet

The Avignon Quintet (1974–1985), Monsieur (1974)
Context: The art of prose governed by syncopated thinking; for thoughts curdle in the heart if not expressed. An idea is like a rare bird which cannot be seen. What one sees is the trembling of the branch it has just left.

Idea

“Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.”

Louis De Bernières book Birds Without Wings

Source: Birds Without Wings

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

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer

Love, Heart

“I'm not prepared for Rue's family. Her parents, whose faces are still fresh with sorrow. Her fiver younger siblings, who resemble her so closely. The slight builds, the luminous brown eyes. They form a flock of small dark birds.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Family, Parent, Siblings

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

Steven Wright (1955) American actor and author

“You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labeled bones.”

Margaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin

Source: The Blind Assassin

Truth

“Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.”

Michael Gilbert (1912–2006) Author

Source: Perfected Sinfulness

People, World, Sadness, Singing

“Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again.”

Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary

Source: Madame Bovary

Flying

“The first time Calypso came to check on [Leo], it was to complain about the noise.
“Smoke and fire,” she said. “Clanging on metal all day long. You’re scaring away the birds!”
“Oh, no, not the birds!”

Rick Riordan book The House of Hades

Source: The House of Hades

Time

“Birds are settling down for the night, singing lullabies to their young.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Singing, Night

“Are you listening, little bird?”

Lilith Saintcrow (1976) American writer

Source: Betrayals

“In this place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”

Theodore Roethke (1908–1963) American poet

Light

“199. For to wish to forget how much you loved someone—and then, to actually forget—can feel, at times, like the slaughter of a beautiful bird who chose, by nothing short of grace, to make a habitat of your heart.”

Maggie Nelson (1973) American writer

Source: Bluets

Love, Beauty, Feeling, Time

“I always wonder why birds choose to stay in the same place when they can fly anywhere on the earth, then I ask myself the same question.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

Question, Flying

“This wife you have, Bird said at last, deeply contemplative, did you pay a great deal for her?

She cost me almost everything I had, he said, with a wry tone that made the others laugh. But worth it.”

Diana Gabaldon book A Breath of Snow and Ashes

Source: A Breath of Snow and Ashes

“The birds of night peck at the first stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.”

Pablo Neruda book Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Source: Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

Love, Soul, Star, Night

“More like some small, fierce bird of prey, something with a sharp bite. An owl perhaps, that speaks only when the rest of the world sleeps.
Jenny will do well enough.”

Juliet Marillier book Daughter of the Forest

Source: Daughter of the Forest

World, Sleep

“A wise old owl once lived in a wood, the more he heard the less he said, the less he said the more he heard, let's emulate that wise old bird.”

Flann O'Brien book At Swim-Two-Birds

Source: At Swim-Two-Birds

“The bird that would soar above the plane of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings. It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.”

Kate Chopin book The Awakening

Source: The Awakening (1899)

Sadness, Strong

“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.”

Daniel Handler book Adverbs

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.

Love, People, Way