Top 232 Birds Quotes

We go fish, we also catch fighting fish, looking for birds and it was for kampong people, the paddy field was our the play field for the children.

I’m terrified of heights, but I think there’s something really beautiful about birds and soaring, having a bird’s-eye view of the world.

The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects, and a barren land for birds.

People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.

Keratin can be very colorful, as we see in birds. We’d expect dinosaurs to be very colorful because they basically invented the characteristics we see in birds.

Makeup and clothing and all that should be a fun way to be creative and express yourself. Just like in nature, where birds have all the colors. But instead, it’s all focused on the aesthetics of being attractive to men. Even if you really don’t think it is that, that’s what we’re doing.

The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who… looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space… on the infinite highway of the air.

Everyone likes birds. What wild creature is more accessible to our eyes and ears, as close to us and everyone in the world, as universal as a bird?

I used to have this little mouse. I buy birds from the pet store and I let them go.

I studied Hitchcock a little bit at University and knew the famous story about the Birds – that he’d tortured Tippi for a day using real birds. I had no idea that it was a five-day onslaught and that it was the tip of an iceberg that carried on through to another film.

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.

It is no doubt technically possible to study metabolism and respiration of fishes during swimming at a constant rate, and of certain insects and birds during flight, and to obtain information similar to that obtained on man during work on a bicycle ergometer or a treadmill.

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.

I’m usually woken up by the birds and by my schnauzer, Rafa – for me that’s the best start to the day. I jump out of bed, throw on some clothes, and race to the polo ground.

The thing that excites me, and the thing that excited me about Twitter, is the idea of a flock of birds moving around an object in flight.

What a kid I got, I told him about the birds and the bee and he told me about the butcher and my wife.

We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature… In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds.

Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?

Writing songs is like capturing birds without killing them. Sometimes you end up with nothing but a mouthful of feathers.

The Bible tells us that God will meet all our needs. He feeds the birds of the air and clothes the grass with the splendor of lilies. How much more, then, will He care for us, who are made in His image? Our only concern is to obey the heavenly Father and leave the consequences to Him.

The evidence is overwhelming that birds are dinosaurs.

Every day, I get up, and I fill the bird feeders and put out fruit and other food for both the birds and any passing mammals. Is that pointless long-term? I have no idea. All I know is that on this day, in this moment, it makes a difference.

When I was a kid if I was unhappy, I’d stroke my dog. I was into bringing injured birds into the house, RSPCA activities. And the relationship that you have with animals, you can get that from your children: that unquestioning love and adoration and equal need.

I got a lot of flak originally for writing with photographs, because the great cliche in photography is that one photograph is worth a thousand words, and photographers are usually dodo birds anyway.

From medieval tapestries, we know that slingers were capable of hitting birds in flight. They were incredibly accurate.

In almost everything that touches our everyday life on earth, God is pleased when we’re pleased. He wills that we be as free as birds to soar and sing our maker‘s praise without anxiety.

I grew up in a haunting postindustrial landscape where prehistoric ferns grew among tens of railway tracks surmounted by brilliant arc lights where birds nested and sang in the dead of night, because for them, it was day.

Birds are, especially canaries, are super sensitive to hydrogen sulfide and sour gas.

Birds and insects are part of the ecosystem and help in pollination. I don’t see any problem in having fruits and vegetables that birds want to eat, as opposed to the perfect shaped tomato that only you can eat and which, by the way, could also be cancerous.

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.

I noticed that when I touched the ball on the field, you could hear this shrill noise in the crowd with all the birds screaming like at a Beatles concert.

More than just a sobering history lesson, ‘Angry Birds’ is a beautiful game. It’s absolutely lovely.

The sun is always shining. We have oxygen, trees, birds. There’s so much good things on Earth, still. We haven‘t destroyed everything.

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.

If worms had machine guns, then birds wouldn’t be scared of them.

I invented animals and birds – I had about two dozen. After working on them for six months, I sat down and just for fun wrote two dozen poems to accompany the drawings. It was for no one to every see, but a friend sent me in to an editor.

Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree.

Birds themselves are so interesting and intelligent, and they give so many cues without being verbal, so they say such great things. Feathers are superior to fur, even. They’re so beautiful, and nature uses such amazing colors.

If worms carried pistols, birds wouldn’t eat ’em.

How long will we show birds and bees in love scenes? The world has moved on and we should portray intimate scenes realistically.

It is a matter of shame that in the morning the birds should be awake earlier than you.

It was probably my parents who inspired me most. My father was a scientist and answered my scientific questions, while my mother took me on walks and showed me birds and plants. She also took me out at night and showed me the constellations and the aurora.

Even in a less exaggerated description, any verbal account of a person is bound to find itself employing an assortment of waterfalls, lightning rods, landscapes, birds, etc.

League of Legends‘ is banned in my house and rightly so. It is just awful. In the past, I’ve been staying up and playing it. Then all of a sudden, it is 6 A.M., the birds are tweeting and I’m thinking: ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to get up in a couple of hours to take my son Alexander to school. Then I’ve got to practise.’

Because of ‘The Birds’ and ‘Marnie’ I was, as the expression goes, hot in Hollywood and producers and directors wanted to hire me.

The birds never needed passports… We always thought, the birds can go wherever they want, and we couldn’t, really. The birds were very much the symbol of… free movement for me.

Critics should be to actors what ornithologists are to birds: they can write all they want, but it shouldn’t affect them.

Trends suck you in, anywhere in the world, patterns you don’t even see. It’s so easy. Look at Wall Street – look at any sports team in the world – there are trends. Look at exercising. Nothing but patterns and trends, and that’s what I started to see. Like a flock of birds all flying in one direction.

When you have shot one bird flying you have shot all birds flying. They are all different and they fly in different ways but the sensation is the same and the last one is as good as the first.

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.

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.

It’s not an easy thing to captive-breed a falcon. You need to take extreme care of its diet and exercise and keep it close to its natural environment. Whenever the birds take ill, I only use Ayurveda to cure them.

Birds I am fine with – spiders are an entirely different matter.

I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could.

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products?

No one is free, even the birds are chained to the sky.

One of the bibles of my youth was ‘Birds of the West Indies,’ by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, ‘My God, that’s the dullest name I’ve ever heard,’ so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one.

As I get older, I have a very strong urge to know about stuff. I want to learn the names of trees and birds; that’s the sort of knowledge I want to pass on to my son.

Few cities have been more definitely impressed upon the imagination of the world than San Francisco, this gray-hilled city on the peninsula by the hospitable bay, where Saint Francis protects the ships as he protected the birds of Assisi.

I carve stone. I’ve got hammers and chisels and I carve from sandstone. I just did a big mural of birds and trees.

It’s a warm wind, the west wind, full of birds’ cries.

Predators make it much more difficult to find consensus. It’s a lot easier to agree about birds and plants than about animals that endanger people and livestock.

Animal substance seems to be the first food of all birds, even the granivorous tribes.

Having done something like The Thorn Birds gives you enormous longevity. You can keep picking and choosing the roles for a bit longer.

I am normally afraid of birds and have never dreamt of any bird in my life.

Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, ‘The Birds’ – it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.

I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees their forms move like stick storks, like great birds. They come close up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it. Their fingers hook round the mesh.

Geese always support each other. When a goose gets injured two birds always accompany it down to the ground. Just as geese do, we must support each other.

I like a good mono track, it’s right up front. I don’t need all the surrounds telling me there are birds in the neighbourhood.

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.

The Thorn Birds’ by Colleen McCullough. I took it on a holiday to Greece and just fell in love with it.

I don’t eat four-legged animals, but I eat birds, I eat cheese, I eat dessert. I eat everything.

We should not put additional stressors on God’s creatures through irresponsible trade practices in wild birds.

The cool wind blew in my face and all at once I felt as if I had shed dullness from myself. Before me lay a long gray line with a black mark down the center. The birds were singing. It was spring.

Migratory birds connect people, ecosystems, and nations. They are symbols of peace and of an interconnected planet.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate, but it’s not quite the same thing.

I love puffins. They are small, round gothic birds, and their babies are called pufflings.

The dispersal of juniper seeds is effected by the plum and cherry plan of hiring birds at the cost of their board, and thus obtaining the use of a pair of extra good wings.

I became completely addicted to ‘Angry Birds’ for a while.

When people chat to me about my childhood and getting into horses, they’re like, ‘Was it like the birds sang and the sun came out? Was it an amazing experience?’ I’m like, ‘No, it was rubbish. I was frightened. I was pretty unbalanced, and most ponies took advantage of me.’

Hempseed produces no observable high for humans or birds.

I don’t care how many times I play ‘Angry Birds.’ When you have the world’s cares on your shoulders and you fling those little birds at those rotten pigs, then the whole world just melts away.

We all have our preferences – some people go for birds – but for me, there’s just something about the wolf; the design of it is really aesthetically pleasing.

I go home and take all of my make-up off. Then I sit in my pants or a tracksuit and watch ‘Birds Of A Feather.’ That’s most nights of my life.

Wax myrtle: The birds love this stuff.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

I’m killing two birds at once, so to speak. Animal-based food kills people. This way, by going vegan… we get healthy and save animals. I’m being selfish, too, because if I can get my employees healthier, we cut down on sick days and gain more productivity.

My mom has this ugly Santa ornament, and one year, I took it off the tree and clipped it to her pillow. We’ve been trading it back and forth ever since – 16 years now. I wore it to the Golden Globes and even put it in her bird feeder. As the birds eat, it’s slowly revealed.

The stress response is incredibly ancient evolutionarily. Fish, birds and reptiles secrete the same stress hormones we do, yet their metabolism doesn’t get messed up the way it does in people and other primates.

All birds are incipient or would-be songsters in the spring. I find corroborative evidence of this even in the crowing of the cock.

Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.

What I am interested in with birds, just as I am with spiders or monkeys, is what they do and why they do it.

Beyond individual intelligence, nature has also cultivated intelligence through swarms. For example, bees, birds and fish act in a more intelligent way when acting together as a swarm, flock or school.

There is a whole generation of romance readers and writers who suffer from what I like to think of as ‘Thorn Birds’ Fever.

After spending time with the rescued turkeys at Farm Sanctuary‘s shelter and seeing how similar they are to my furry companion animals at home, I knew I needed to do everything in my power to protect these friendly and curious birds from the daily pain and suffering they endure on factory farms.

Nature promotes mutualism. The flower nourishes the bee. The river waters quench the thirst of all living beings. And trees provide a welcoming home to so many birds and animals. There is a rhythm to this togetherness.

They’ve made it a felon to drive from Florida to Louisiana with any fighting birds, so I’ve had to get rid of most of my chickens. I only got about a hundred left now, which I just keep for colour and breeding. I love those birds as much as anything.

In order to arrive at knowledge of the motions of birds in the air, it is first necessary to acquire knowledge of the winds, which we will prove by the motions of water in itself, and this knowledge will be a step enabling us to arrive at the knowledge of beings that fly between the air and the wind.

But Hopes are Shy Birds flying at a great distance seldom reached by the best of Guns.

I am not into the unrealistic realm of magic realism where birds talk.

Many of the birds Audubon painted are now extinct, and still we go on killing them, more or less casually, with our pesticides and wires and machinery.

Every time I decide I want a child I get another pet. I have 3 dogs, 13 birds and 3 horses, what does that tell you?

The impression left after watching the motions of birds is that of extreme mobility – a life of perpetual impulse checked only by fear.

The Rio de Contas, a wide, almost delta-like river, was startling, a sudden big sky and a feeling of openness, and very bright. It was noisy with birds. The rain forest houses most of the earth’s plant and animal population. I hadn’t anticipated it would be so loud.

I’m not perfect and I know it. I’ve done all sorts of things that are frowned upon these days – big-game hunting, fishing. I still enjoy fishing but I don’t kill warm-blooded animals any more – I make an exception with birds sometimes.

I live in London, where you’re assaulted, from the minute you wake up. Your head becomes like a hive of bees, with all the noises being thrown at you, all the time. And then, you go somewhere like Shetland and you start to hear birds, wind, and natural sounds.

My very shy Punjabi father never taught me about the birds and bees. So shy was he that he may have thought he would get arrested for even talking about it.

Working is bad enough in the winter, but in the summer it can become completely intolerable. Stuck in airless offices, every fibre of our being seems to cry out for freedom. We’re reminded of being stuck in double maths while the birds sing outside.

Most of us live for the critic, and he lives on us. He doesn’t sacrifice himself. He gets so much a line for writing a criticism. If the birds should read the newspapers, they would all take to changing their notes. The parrots would exchange with the nightingales, and what a farce it would be!

If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

Nature is full of drama. I know nothing about biology, about birds, about insects, about the details of politics. I just make movies about human interest stories.

The show is being changed right now, by the way. Jeff Burke is doing it for the Magic Kingdom. And I think it will be better, with new birds, master of ceremonies, etc.

The white men in the East are like birds. They are hatching out their eggs every year, and there is not room enough in the East, and they must go elsewhere; and they come out West, as you have seen them coming for the last few years.

As millions of people know, one of the great pleasures of walking in areas of the uplands managed for grouse is to see and hear large numbers of curlew, lapwing and golden plover – all ground-nesting birds largely absent or in rapidly declining numbers elsewhere.

I feel like ‘Birds in the Trap‘ seem united; it’s just metaphor for ones in their box that are stuck and can’t get their creative idea out.

Ninety-five percent of the eggs produced in America come from factory-farmed birds. Even if free-range farms were hugely more humane, the sheer number of animals raised to satisfy people’s desire for eggs, meat, and milk makes it impossible for us to raise them all on small, free-range farms.

Comedy is an indoors thing, so I take every opportunity to go outside. A lot of that involves finding places that are remote, or places where you can look at birds, or do mountain biking or paddle boarding or walking.

I always told my children that if they want to be pilot, go ahead and do it, or if they wanted to get into agriculture, I told them that I will support them. But when they chose music, you feel as if those birds have come back home to the nest.

Look, we have long known that birds and pigs are mortal enemies. That’s just the way of the world. Birds hate pigs.

The cyber threat has evolved dramatically since I left DOJ in 2005, partly just reflecting how much the digital world has itself evolved over that time. Back then, ‘tweeting’ was something only birds did.

Learn from nature. Stuff lives and stuff dies all the time, you know. Animals and birds and flowers. Trees come and go, and we come and go. That’s it. So we should all seize life and make the most of what we have while we can.

There was very little art in my childhood. I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn’t aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

North Korea was pretty insane. Like the first thing my mom taught me was don’t even whisper, the birds and mice could hear me. She told me the most dangerous thing that I had in my body was my tongue.

Birds have wings; they’re free; they can fly where they want when they want. They have the kind of mobility many people envy.

I use a lot of utility apps on my iPad, and I have four kinds of ‘Angry Birds’ games! I also use GarageBand to create demos.

The structure of a play is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.

I grew up in Mobile, Alabama – somebody‘s got to be from Mobile, right? – and Mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers, forming this beautiful delta. And the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes, birds of every flavor.

I really like birds. Everyone always wants me to say that I can’t stand to go near them, just like they want Janet Leigh to confess that she can’t bear to take a shower. Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds – the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

By the time I was 10 or 12, I had discovered the lure of the romance genre – and the dusty copy of ‘The Thorn Birds’ on my parents’ bookshelf.

I remember the absolute joy I used to get out of writing. The purity of imagining something and then putting it down on paper – it was such a pleasure. I read whatever I could get my hands on, from ‘Great Expectations‘ to ‘The Thorn Birds.’

I was raised in South Carolina; I wasn’t aware of any art in South Carolina. There was a minor museum in Charleston, which had nothing of interest in it. It showed local artists, paintings of birds.

The tree I had in the garden as a child, my beech tree, I used to climb up there and spend hours. I took my homework up there, my books, I went up there if I was sad, and it just felt very good to be up there among the green leaves and the birds and the sky.

Like dogs in a wheel, birds in a cage, or squirrels in a chain, ambitious men still climb and climb, with great labor, and incessant anxiety, but never reach the top.

Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.

One reason that birds matter – ought to matter – is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They’re the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it.

The best thing you can do when you’re not feeling funny is go out and get more stimuli from the world, get out and walk around, read a book, go talk to some birds or a dog and replenish the well, as it were.

Truth is, I have been scared of birds since I was a little girl. I think it’s genetic because my mom shares this fear with me.

Information is not just something you download from the Web. The way trees grow and where birds choose to live are much better signs of water quality than all the data being collected by the EPA.

Wild geese have so much less fat than their domestic brethren that, as far as the kitchen is concerned, the two birds should be considered different species altogether – so much so that they require opposite roasting methods.

Hear the birds? Sometimes I like to pretend that I’m deaf and I try to imagine what it’s like not to be able to hear them. It’s not that bad.

When I lament and darken over my diminishments, I accomplish nothing. It’s better to sit at the window all day, pleased to watch birds, barns, and flowers.

I happen to have an expensive clothing habit, so, for me, designing clothes is a way to kill two birds with one stone.

The parish I live in is a very abrupt, uneven country, full of hills and woods, and therefore full of birds.

The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. Their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things.

There’s a lovely character in ‘Under Milk Wood’ called Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard and she’s incredibly tidy and clean. She really is unbearably tidy and clean! And I terrorize my husband when he comes in sometimes from shooting and there’s awful dead birds all over the hall that he calls me Mrs. Ogmore Pritchard.

If anybody is interested in listening to good modern music, I would recommend Jim Fassett, ‘Symphony of the Birds.’ It’s really beautiful… with real birds.

My parents never had to tell me about the birds and the bees, you know? It was very out in the open.

My early business ventures included growing Christmas trees and breeding birds.

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.

I grew up really loving old-school horror such as ‘Halloween‘ and ‘The Birds.’

If you see the sunset, does it have to mean something? If you hear the birds singing does it have to have a message?

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

People find birdsong relaxing and reassuring because over thousands of years, they have learnt when the birds sing, they are safe; it’s when birds stop singing that people need to worry.

I do love one-upmanship sometimes, like when you see kids breakdancing and who can do the best tricks. It’s common, it’s in our nature as animals, like the birds of paradise who’ve got the best feathers and that sort of stuff. But it’s fun when it’s impulsive and it’s about fun.

The construction of an airplane is simple compared with the evolutionary achievement of a bird. If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

I’m excited for Christy Marx taking over ‘Birds of Prey’. I adore ‘Rachel Rising’ by the great Terry Moore. I’m also a stone cold Scott Snyder fan; the guy is a joy to read and a pleasure to work with.

I was brought up in the countryside in Ireland and would go bonkers if I couldn’t escape the city. I like to wake and hear birds tweeting, not the low drone of traffic.

I can scarcely manage to scribble a tolerable English letter. I know that I am not a scholar, but meantime I am aware that no man living knows better than I do the habits of our birds.

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousands truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.

As a child, I read a great many books in which animals and birds played significant roles, not only in the narrative itself, but also in creating the emotional and psychological atmosphere of that narrative – the imaginative furniture, as it were, in which any story unfolds.

Another thing I like to do is sit back and take in nature. To look at the birds, listen to their singing, go hiking, camping and jogging and running, walking along the beach, playing games and sometimes being alone with the great outdoors. It’s very special to me.

Use those talents you have. You will make it. You will give joy to the world. Take this tip from nature: The woods would be a very silent place if no birds sang except those who sang best.

I love to watch birds and wildlife.

As much as I converse with sages and heroes, they have very little of my love and admiration. I long for rural and domestic scene, for the warbling of birds and the prattling of my children.

I love all animals. I have a fascination with fish, birds, whales – sentient life – insects, reptiles.

I live in Mussoorie. I love my birds and Himalayas. There is always a new mountain to climb and mountains keep coming to me.

What I was trying to convey there was the kind of waste land that was left after the war. It was a bit like one always thinks of war, you know, stark scenery and no birds, no trees, no leaves, nothing living. And just emptiness.

The older I get, the more I think birds are the best musicians on the planet.

Birds are a miracle because they prove to us there is a finer, simpler state of being which we may strive to attain.

One game that I’ve been playing a lot is ‘Super Stick Golf.’ It’s really simple, and it’s similar in a sense to ‘Angry Birds’ because you have to hit the right angle and the right trajectory to complete each hole. That one really hooked me.

Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.

How real can your music be if you wake up in the morning hearing birds and crickets? I never hear birds when I wake up. Just a lot of construction work, the smell of Chinese takeout, children screaming, and everybody knocking a different track from ‘Ready to Die’ as they pass down the street.

In 1999 my father died and my mother was coming to live with me. So I left my Kennington flat and bought a house with a garden because my mother loved watching the birds.

With a few exceptions, birds are not to be trusted; it is not normal to have such soft, vulnerable bodies bookended with slashing beaks and razor-sharp claws. It is as unnatural as an armed marshmallow.

For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds.

Tiny quails may not seem as impressive as a mammoth turkey, but there is something refreshing about a spread of individual birds on the Christmas table.

Closely related species of birds are also chromosomally similar.

I actually carried a Panavision Platinum and a G2 when I was seven months pregnant for a film called ‘Little Birds,’ and the whole movie was handheld. And we were shooting in the desert. That’s a 35-millimeter camera. It’s huge, probably at least 50, 55 pounds, and I did all my own operating.

I think it is the fact that birds are two-legged, like us, which gives them something of our balance and gesture and makes them nearer to us.

I am not a vegetarian. For some time, I tried to be a semi-vegetarian, eating only fish, birds, and no red meat, but… I don’t know if I have an opinion on vegetarianism.

Be grateful for luck. Pay the thunder no mind – listen to the birds. And don’t hate nobody.

Most birds are very stiff-necked, like the robin, and as they run or hop upon the ground, carry the head as if it were riveted to the body. Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.

I love the rabbits and the squirrels and the birds.

Birds of a lawless, bigoted feather bully together.

It ends all things: birds, trees, flowers, mountain tops, and business; it grinds stones to sand, and as terrible as it is, and it’s the most beautiful thing we have in our lives – time.

My nickname was Tarzan: I found my food in the jungle; I hunted birds.

Dealing with environmental lawsuits and grassroots resistance is expensive. Industrial wind and solar developers have to hire lawyers, public relations specialists, and scientists willing to testify that this or that project poses only a modest threat to endangered birds and bats.

I always loved fish for the colors and birds for the plumage. In the same way, I loved those women of the cabaret. They were birds of paradise.

If one bird foraging in a flock on the ground suddenly takes off, all other birds will take off immediately after, before they even know what’s going on. The one who stays behind may be prey.

I listened to birds and crickets, looking for the ways that rhythm appears most naturally in the world. I listened to the Smithsonian‘s field recordings of pygmy choirs from Africa.

It has been suggested that those of us who are fighting to defend liberty – fighting to turn around the out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt in this country, fighting to defend the Constitution, it has been suggested that we are wacko birds.

Sound sounds are terrible in the city, but it’s great to listen and to walk and listen to people talk to each other. There are birds. You hear spring. I like listening to the city.

When the moon covers the sun, we have a solar eclipse. What do you call it when birds do that?

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.

A bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don’t slip from his hands but fly past him through the air, high as birds, high as prices.

Birds born in cages think that flying is a disease.

I lived in a hut with no roof, and I rode to school on a donkey. I used to shoot birds with a slingshot to cook for dinner. Now I prefer to get my food from KFC.

Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.

Turkeys, quails, and small birds, are here to be seen; but birds are not numerous in desart forests; they draw near to the habitations of men, as I have constantly observed in all my travels.

My school was one of the most beautiful places a child can grow up in. You are surrounded by nature – cats, dogs, birds and buffaloes everywhere.

It’s very likely that most mammals have consciousness, and probably birds, too.

Half of the modern drugs could well be thrown out of the window, except that the birds might eat them.

Fall is my favorite season in Los Angeles, watching the birds change color and fall from the trees.

My roots are African. The birds I remember, the fruits I ate, the trees I climbed, they’re African.

The largest outbreak of bird flu in American history was an H5N2 virus, which led to the deaths of 17 million domestic birds and cost the nation more than $400 million during an outbreak in Pennsylvania that started in 1983.

The real biographies of poets are like those of birds, almost identical – their data are in the way they sound. A poet’s biography lies in his twists of language, in his meters, rhymes, and metaphors.

I hope you love birds too. It is economical. It saves going to heaven.

People think I’m a keen birdwatcher, but I don’t go out of my way to look at birds. I’m not Bill Oddie. But I do know which are which. I keep my eyes open.

I gave away two dogs years ago because I felt guilty at not being able to give them the time and attention they deserved. I now regularly feed an army of squirrels and wild birds around our house.

Our priorities are out of whack. We spend too much to protect birds and fish at the expense of people.

What birds can have their bills more peculiarly formed than the ibis, the spoonbill, and the heron?

The ocean is 20 minutes away. Nature surrounds me 24/7. I wake up to the sounds of birds chirping. I also love that I can go out to dinner in jeans and flip-flops.

There’s an unseen force which lets birds know when you’ve just washed your car.

Often I sit in the lawn and have my morning cuppa amidst the twittering of rare birds.

Some tribes of birds will relieve and rear up the young and helpless, of their own and other tribes, when abandoned.

Dinosaurs are built just like birds – they can squat down, they can get up. Mammals, when we lay down, we throw our legs out to the sides – birds cannot do that. Dinosaurs could not do that either.

I realized that If I had to choose, I would rather have birds than airplanes.

Over 55% of all shots using animals in ‘The Hobbit‘ are in fact computer generated; this includes horses, ponies, rabbits, hedgehogs, birds, deer, elk, mice, wild boars and wolves.

I don’t spend that much time being introspective, believe it or not. All I know is that I grew up not questioning God because that’s how you are. God was there like the birds and the wind.

Romney Marsh remains one of the last great wildernesses of south-east England. Flat as a desert, and at times just as daunting, it is an odd, occasionally eerie wetland straddling the coastal borders of Kent and Sussex, rich in birds, local folklore and solitary medieval churches.

Watching birds has become part of my daily meditation affirming my connection to the earth body.

I’m like Albert Schweitzer and Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein in that I have a respect for life – in any form. I believe in nature, in the birds, the sea, the sky, in everything I can see or that there is real evidence for. If these things are what you mean by God, then I believe in God.

I have dogs and birds as pets.

I haven’t changed. My family and I live as we did in South Spain. I’ve had loud music, chickens, birds, and a bull in my backyard.

How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said.

There’s a lot of us out here that are birds, man. We all need to just fly.

St. Petersburg is a wonderful city. You have wonderful parks, birds singing in the trees, manatees in the water, pelicans. So it’s like this little paradise on Earth.

There is a lot of talk in publishing these days that we need to become more like the Internet: We need to make books for short attention spans with bells and whistles – books, in short, that are as much like ‘Angry Birds’ as possible. But I think that’s a terrible idea.

Birds are indicators of the environment. If they are in trouble, we know we’ll soon be in trouble.

I can find God in nature, in animals, in birds and the environment.