Migratory Birds Quotes

We must force the government to stop the bird migration. We must shoot all birds, field all our men and troops ... and force migratory birds to stay where they are. ~ Vladimir Zhirinovsky

Changes in a person's feelings aren't regulated by custom, logic, or the law. They're fluid, unstable, free to spread their wings and fly away. Like migratory birds have no concept of borders between countries. ~ Haruki Murakami

I had no particular problem about getting divorced. For all intents and purposes we already were divorced. And I had no emotional hang up about signing and sealing the official documents. If that's what she wanted, fine. It was a legal formality, nothing more.

But when it came to why, and how, things had turned out this way, the sequence of events was beyond me. I understood, of course, that over time, and as circumstances changed, a couple could grow closer, or move apart. Changes in a person's feelings aren't regulated by custom, logic, or the law. They're fluid, unstable, free to spread their wings and fly away. Like migratory birds have no concept of borders between countries.

But these were all just generalizations, and I couldn't easily grasp the individual case here-that this woman, Yuzu, refused to love this man, me, and chose instead to be loved by someone else. It felt terribly absurd, a horribly ugly way to be treated. There wasn't any anger involved (I think). I mean, what was I supposed to be angry with? What I was feeling was a fundamental numbness. The numbness your heart automatically activates to lessen the awful pain when you want some-body desperately and they reject you. A kind of emotional morphine. ~ Haruki Murakami

You want to kiss her, right?"

"What?" I have lost track of our conversation. I was thinking about how if Kit called me her friend, then I would have multiplied my number of them by a factor of two. And then I considered the word flirting, how it sounds like fluttering, which is what butterflies do. Which of course looped me back to chaos theory and my realization that I'd like to have more information to provide Kit on the topic.

"Do. You. Want. To. Kiss. Her?" Miney asks again.

"Yes, of course I do. Who wouldn't want to kiss Kit?"

"I don't want to kiss Kit," Miney says, doing that thing where she imitates me and how I answer rhetorical questions. Though her intention is to mock rather than to educate, it's actually been a rather informative technique to demonstrate my tendency toward taking people too literally. "Mom doesn't want to kiss Kit. I don't know about Dad, but I doubt it."

My father doesn't look up. His face is buried in a book about the mating patterns of migratory birds. It's too bad our scholarly interests have never overlapped. Breakfast would be so much more interesting if we could discuss our work.

"So if you want to kiss Kit, that means you want her to see you like a real guy," Miney says, and points at me with her cup of coffee. She's drinking it black. Maybe there's nothing wrong with Miney. Maybe she's just tired.

"I am a real guy." How come even my own sister sees me as somethin ~ Julie Buxbaum

'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains ... ~ Bill Jay

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

Life is the blossoming of flowers in the spring, the ripening of fruit in the fall, the rhythm of the earth and of nature. Life is the cry of cicadas signalling the end of summer, migratory birds winging south in a transparent autumn sky, fish frolicking in a stream. Life is the joy beautiful music installs in us, the thrilling sight of a mountain peak reddened by the rising sun, the myriad combinations and permutations of visible and invisible phenomena. Life is all things. ~ Daisaku Ikeda

So, you are now talking to birds?"
Hanlon glanced back from looking up at the tree the crow sat in and said, "Not all birds, just crows, oh, and hawks and eagles, sometimes ospreys, but never vultures."
She laughed at his attempt at humor, "Why don't you talk to vultures?"
"Well, Sassy, because vultures aren't very good conversationalists. Doug Hiser -Montana Mist coming soon 2010 ~ Doug Hiser

Helicopters - "ghetto birds," as the other residents called them - ~ Duff McKagan

My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

He went on for months, hardly eating or drinking, until he had rolled the boulder to the very peak of the high mountain. There he stopped and surveyed the world. Now he could see more of the world than anyone. This was the place he would live - where no grass grew, where no birds flew. For water, he could only lick the ice and frost. For food, he could only gnaw on moss. Be he had no regrets, because now he could look out over the whole world. ~ Haruki Murakami

Why were there no cries of birds, no sounds of life, other than the incessant murmur of the brooding pines? ~ Karl Edward Wagner

I wonder if when birds are new they ever try to land on clouds? And if so is it like when you think you've gone down the last stair but there's still another one and you step off and make that weird "oof" noise and everyone looks at you? That would suck. But at least birds are hidden when they fuck up and fall through clouds. ~ Jenny Lawson

There were rockets like a flock of scintillating birds singing with sweet voices. There were green trees with trunks of dark smoke: their leaves opened like a whole spring unfolding in a moment, and their shining branches dropped glowing flowers down upon the hobbits, disappearing with a sweet scent just before their touched their upturned faces. There were fountains of butterflies that flew glittering into the trees; there were pillars of coloured fires that rose and turned into eagles, or sailing ships, or a phalanx of flying swans; there was a red thunderstorm and a shower of yellow rain; there was a forest of silver spears that sprang suddenly into the air with a yell like an embattled army, and and came down again into the Water with a hiss like a hundred hot snakes. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

And so they parted. And though the Lord of the Eagles became in after days the King of All Birds and wore a golden crown, and his fifteen chieftains golden collars (made of the gold that the dwarves gave them), Bilbo never saw them again - except high and far off in the battle of Five Armies. But as that comes in at the end of this tale we will say no more about it just now. ~ Anonymous

All were glad, the plants, the birds, the insects, and the children. But men, grown-up men and women, did not leave off cheating and tormenting themselves and each other. ~ Leo Tolstoy

They drank from a spring which filled an ancient stone trough behind the ruin. Beyond it lay overgrown beds and plants John had never set eyes on before: tall resinous fronds, prickly shrubs, long grey-green leaves hot to the tongue. Nestling among them he found the root whose scent drifted among the trees like a ghost, sweet and tarry. He knelt and pressed it to his nose.
'That was called silphium.' His mother stood behind him. 'It grew in Saturnus's first garden.'
She showed him the most ancient trees in the orchards, their gnarled trunks cloaked in grey lichen. Palm trees had grown there too once, she claimed. Now even their stumps had gone.
Each day, John left the hearth to forage in the wreckage of Belicca's gardens. His nose guided him through the woods. Beyond the chestnut avenue, the wild skirrets, alexanders and broom grew in drifts. John chased after rabbits or climbed trees in search of birds' eggs. He returned with mallow seeds or chestnuts that they pounded into meal then mixed with water and baked on sticks. The unseasonal orchards yielded tiny red and gold-streaked apples, hard green pears and sour yellow cherries. ~ Lawrence Norfolk

...Stella's tiny butt stuck in the air as she stretched to reach a weed. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a button-down pink and white checked shirt that was tucked into the elastic waistband of her pants. She reminded Rusty of an elf. "Excuse me, Stella?" "You stop right there if you have trouble on your mind. As you can see, I have plenty of birds, and I'll knock you out with one of them," Stella said without looking up. Rusty wanted to say that she'd yank up her own plastic flamingo and work Stella over with it in a heartbeat. Instead, she took a calming breath and said, "I made something you might like to have." "If it's a grenade launcher, I'm listening, Achmed. ~ Robin Alexander

It was not without a certain wild pleasure I ran before the wind, delivering my trouble of mind to the measureless air-torrent thundering through space. Descending the laurel walk, I faced the wreck of a chestnut-tree; it stood up, black and riven: the trunk, split down the centere, gasped ghastly. The cloven halves were not broken for each other, for the firm base and strong roots kept them unsundered below; through communtiy of vitality was destroyed -- the sap could flow no more: their great boughs on each side were dead, and next winter's tempests would be sure to fell one or both to earth: as yet, however, they might be said to form one tree -- a ruin, but and entire ruin.

'You did right to hold fast to each other,' I said: as if the monster splinters were living things, and could hear me. 'I think, scathed as you look, and charred and scorched, there must be a little sense of life in you yet, rising out of that adhesion at the faithful, honest roots: you will never have green leaves more -- never more see birds making nests and singing idylls in your boughs; the time of pleasure and love is over with you; but you are not desolate: each of you has a comrade to sympathize with him in his decay.' As I looked up at them, the moon appeared momentarily in that part of the sky which filled their fissure; her disc was blood-red and half overcast; she seemed to throw on me one bewildered, dreary glance, and buried herself again instantly in the deep drift of cloud. T ~ Charlotte Bronte

All the birds that fly hold the thread of infinity in their claws. Germination ~ Victor Hugo

THEIR BELIEF. IT is a strange revelation to find that the natives believe in a common Creator, and that their race sprang from one man and woman. There is no mistake that this it; their belief. Their Creator's name is GNURKER. They allow that he has a wife, who gave birth to the first couple sent to populate the earth. When their God saw that this earth was fit for man, and that all animal life and fishes were plentiful, He caused an immense whirlwind, which reached from Heaven to earth, and sent down him son and daughter with full instructions in all manner of ceremonies. They were to name their children by four tribal names--Banaka, Boorung, Paljarri, Kymera--and thus observe the marriage laws. They were to strictly follow out His commands, and when they died, their and their children's spirits would be received into heaven. They were given control over the fishes of the waters, the birds of the air, all animals, insects, and every living thing--that ~ John G. Withnell

I am teaching you to live simply. To live with an idea is a very complicated living, it is cunning. To live simply, just like trees and birds ... ~ Rajneesh

Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers. ~ Walter Tevis

A few melancholy birds were pipping and wailing, until the round red sun sank slowly into the western shadows; then an empty silence fell ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

From the corner of the divan of Persian saddle-bags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art ~ Oscar Wilde

The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children. ~ George MacDonald

wind stinging our faces
overhead the birds
shrieking turn back
turn back turn back

behind us, look,
bright fields, the sea
glinting gold!

we've come this far
chasing the rain,
the sun at our heels. ~ Merlie M. Alunan

There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar. ~ Herman Melville

The leaves were still on the trees, but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off. ~ Buchi Emecheta

Scotland is a soggy sort it place, where birds and animals walk around uncooked ~ Peedie William

You grimy as birds shittin' on the top of ya Fords. ~ Curtis Jackson

The sight of a slender young woman sitting in the anaconda exhibit with a 13-foot-long, predatory reptile snuggling in her lap, the tip of a tail coiled lovingly around one leg, provided dramatic evidence of what Scott and Wilson already knew: "Just about every animal," Scott says - not just mammals and birds - "can learn, recognize individuals, and respond to empathy." Once ~ Sy Montgomery

How appropriate it was that Ronan, left to his own devices, manifested beautiful cars and beautiful birds and tender-hearted brothers. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

We need new words for what this is, this hunger entering our loneliness like birds, stunning our eyes into rays of hope. we need the flutter that can save us, something that will swirl across the face of what we have become and bring us grace. ~ Lucille Clifton

Children understand that 'once upon a time' refers not only
not even primarily
to the past, but to the impalpable regions of the present, the deeper places inside us where princes and dragons, wizards and talking birds, impassable roads, impossible tasks, and happy endings have always existed, alive and bursting with psychic power. ~ Stephen Mitchell

Marya watched from the upper floor as once again the birds gathered in the great oak tree, sniping and snapping for the last autumn nuts, stolen from squirrels and hidden in bark-cracks, which every winged creature knows are the most bitter of all nuts, like old sorrows sitting heavy on the tongue. ~ Catherynne M Valente

I slumbered spring's morning and missed the dawn from everywhere, I heard the cry of birds. That night the sound of wind and rain came. Who knows how many petals had fallen? ~ Meng Haoran

The Valley Weeps

Weep softly o mother,
the walls have ears you know...
The streets are awash o mother!
I cannot go searching for him any more.

The streets are awash o mother
with blood and tears, pellets and screams.
that silently remain locked in the air,
while they lock us souless inside.

The guns are out o mother,
while our boys go armed with stones,
I cannot go looking for him o mother,
I have no courage to face what i will find.

They fill the air o mother,
The fragrance of plastic flowers
I will place them beside your grave
if i ever do survive,
flowers that have no soul.
and would never fade with time,

The sun shines glorious o mother
The water sparkles so fine
The buds are closed in terror
and birds have gone silent with fear
There is poison in our heaven o mother
I dread for what more is in store.

They came for him o mother,
yesterday as you slept inside,
He went marching o mother
with all the others beside.
I never told you o mother,
I do not know if he would ever return.
The streets are awash o mother!
I cannot go searching for him any more.

Weep softly o mother,
the walls have ears you know...
If your old blind eyes can see,
You will want to see again no more.

Our men have lost their spirit
Our women have lost their smile,
Our ~ Srividya Srinivasan

Broadmoor creeps into your blood, the walls touch the sky and the grounds suck you in, they've even got their own burial ground. We called it the 'madman's hole', it smelt of fear; a stillness and even the birds seemed to have a stone face like their eyes were made of marble. So many monsters, men of hell, I don't know how a sane man can keep sane in there. ~ Stephen Richards

When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy, over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year;
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.
The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,
With heigh! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!
Doth set my pugging tooth on edge;
For a quart of ale is a dish for a king. ~ William Shakespeare

In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis ~ Rebecca Solnit

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined
future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or
a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced
that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was
charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and
one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-
loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the
high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so
many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies
in the perfumed heat of summer night. ~ Mark Strand

I carve stone. I've got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees. ~ Peter Weir

I hate that man. I wish I could stab him in the eyeballs and gouge them out and make him choke on them. And then, when he was dead I'd hang him from a tree, letting him rot and get eaten by birds. And when there was nothing left but bones I'd piss all over them. ~ Neel Kay

The beautiful sky will catch the dew
The beautiful sky is always watching you
The beautiful sky no you cannot break through
The beautiful sky so divine and true
The beautiful sky birds only few
The beautiful sky reminds me of you
The beautiful sky gives me no clue
The beautiful sky is wholesome like you ~ Suyasha Subedi

This is what I mean by becoming religious: no guilt, no ego, no trip of any kind ... just being herenow ... being with the trees and the birds and the rivers and the mountains and the stars. ~ Rajneesh

I can feel it, Annie whispered.
The air is heavy with ghosts.
The birds sing only sad songs.
The ground swallowed many tears. ~ Sharon Kernot

If you see birds flying high in the sky, it means clear weather. However, if you see a lot of birds roosting on power lines and trees, this either means they're conspiring against you or falling air pressure and bad weather are on the way. Expect rain and/or a killer seagull attack in the next twelve hours. ~ Brett McKay

Be as the birds" He nodded to his pigeon crates. "Finding grace in how God made you, one with this world and the next. The pigeon does not pine to be a lark, or a cat, or a fish. ~ Umberto Tosi

Researchers studying emerging viruses have noticed an interesting phenomenon. As more human beings are born, there is a consistent spread of human habitation into once undeveloped ecoranges. The previously existing environment is removed, houses are built, people move in. The former populations of plants and animals are displaced. However, one of the major things that has been overlooked is that viruses have also lived in those regions for a very long time - in a healthy symbiotic balance with their hosts, both plant and animal. It is possible to think of them as an invisible herd or pack species, spread with the same kind of density throughout those ecoranges just as deer or birds are. ~ Stephen Harrod Buhner

These words: migrant birds, arriving from distant places with story and metaphor caught in their feathers; ~ Robert Macfarlane

Birds, it must be admitted, are the most exciting and most deserving of the vertebrates; they are perhaps the best entre into the study of natural history, and a very good wedge into conservation awareness. ~ Roger Tory Peterson

The more south we were, the more deep a sky it seemed, till, in the Valley of Mexico, I thought it held back an element too strong for life, and that the flamy brilliance of blue stood off this menace and sometimes, like a sheath or silk membrane, shoed the weight it held in sags. So when later he would fly high over the old craters on the plain, coaly bubbles of the underworld, dangerous red everywhere from the sun, and then coats of snow on the peak of the cones - gliding like a Satan - well, it was here the old priests, before the Spaniards, waited for Aldebaran to come into the middle of heaven to tell them whether or not life would go on for another cycle, and when they received their astronomical sign built their new fire inside the split and emptied chest of a human sacrifice. And also, hereabouts, worshipers disguised as gods and as gods in the disguise of birds, jumped from platforms fixed on long poles, and glided as they spun by the ropes - feathered serpents, and eagles too, the voladores, or fliers. There still are such plummeters, in market places, as there seem to be remnants or conversions or equivalents of all the old things. Instead of racks or pyramids of skulls still in their hair and raining down scraps of flesh there are corpses of dogs, rats, horses, asses, by the roads; the bones dug out of the rented graves are thrown on a pile when the lease is up; and there are the coffins looking like such a rough joke on the female form, sold in the open shops, bl ~ Saul Bellow

In our dreams we have seen another world, an honest world, a world decidedly more fair than the one in which we now live. We saw that in this world there was no need for armies; peace, justice and liberty were so common that no one talked about them as far-off concepts, but as things such as bread, birds, air, water, like book and voice. ~ Subcomandante Marcos

Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew; Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose; They were but sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. ~ William Shakespeare