Black Birds Quotes

“Books. They tumbled from the bleeding sky like wounded birds. The spines snapping open and the pages fanning white. Black letters slipping off the slanted pages and falling, falling to the ground where they ... Shatter.”

— Natasha Mostert

“Khaemwaset's eyes remained on the riverbank as the green confusion of spring glided by. Beyond the fecund, brilliant life of the bank with its choked river growth, its darting, piping birds, its busy insects and occasionally its sleepy grinning crocodiles, was a wealth of rich black soil in which the fellahin were struggling, knee-deep, to strew the fresh seed.”

— Pauline Gedge

“At the Moor
Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper
In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky
A flock of wild birds follows;
Slanting over gloomy waters.
Turmoil. In decayed hut
The spirit of putrescence flutters with black wings.
Crippled birches in the autumn wind.
Evening in deserted tavern. The way home is scented all around
By the soft gloom of grazing herds;
Apparition of the night; toads plunge from brown waters.”

— Georg Trakl

“What exists beneath the sea?
I'd always pictured it in colors of emerald and aquamarine, where black velvet fish with sequined eyes swim among plankton.
But, when my eyes adjust, I see gray stones, lost anchors, wet wood, buttons, hooks, and eyes, the salem witches who wouldn't float, stars and stripes, missing vessels, windup toys, the souls of Romeo and Juliet, peaches, cream, pistons, screams, cages of ribs and birds, tunnels, nutcracker soldiers, satin bows, drugstore signs, Pandora box ripped open at its hinges.”

— Kelly Easton

“Today is Sunday
It will be Sunday forever
Black birds fly over
In this one instance
May we never recover
From this one new something
We are just starting to discover”

— Lourd Ernest H. De Veyra

“What a night it was! The jagged masses of heavy dark cloud were rolling at intervals from horizon to horizon, and thin white wreaths covered the stars. Through all the rush of the cloud river the moon swam, breasting the waves and disappearing again in the darkness.
I walked up and down, drinking in the beauty of the quiet earth and the changing sky. The night was absolutely silent. Nothing seemed to be abroad. There was no scurrying of rabbits, or twitter of the half-asleep birds. And though the clouds went sailing across the sky, the wind that drove them never came low enough to rustle the dead leaves in the woodland paths. Across the meadows I could see the church tower standing out black and grey against the sky. ("Man Size In Marble")”

— E. Nesbit

“The earth is black in front of the cliff, and no orchids grow.
Creepers crawl in the brown mud by the path.
Where did the birds of yesterday fly?
To what other mountain did the animals go?
Leopards and pythons dislike this ruined spot;
Cranes and snakes avoid the desolation.
My criminal thoughts of those days past
Brought on the disaster of today.”

— Wu Cheng'en

“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

“Could I be your girl, too?" I asked quickly.
The large, broad-shouldered man looked away before he answered. "Well, now," he said, as though he had given it deep thought, "I sure do think I would like that."
"But," I said, concerned that he hadn't noticed, "I don't look like your other girls."
"You mean because you white?"
I nodded.
"Abinia," he said, pointing toward the chickens, "you look at those birds. Some of them be brown, some of them be white and black. Do you think when they little chicks, those mamas and papas care about that?”

— Kathleen Grissom

“Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven's gate.”

— Ned Hayes

“Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.”

— Mary Renault

“A day, a livelong day, is not one thing but many. It changes not only in growing light toward zenith and decline again, but in texture and mood, in tone and meaning, warped by a thousand factors of season, of heat or cold, of still or multi winds, torqued by odors, tastes, and the fabrics of ice or grass, of bud or leaf or black-drawn naked limbs. And as a day changes so do its subjects, bugs and birds, cates, dogs, butterflies and people.”

— John Steinbeck

“Mr Willy Wonka can make marshmallows that taste of violets, and rich caramels that change colour every ten seconds as you suck them, and little feathery sweets that melt away deliciously the moment you put them between your lips. He can make chewing-gum that never loses its taste, and sugar balloons that you can blow up to enormous sizes before you pop them with a pin and gobble them up. And, by a most secret method, he can make lovely blue birds' eggs with black spots on them, and when you put one of these in your mouth, it gradually gets smaller and smaller until suddenly there is nothing left except a tiny little DARKRED sugary baby bird sitting on the tip of your tongue.”

— Roald Dahl

“A nurse's aid threw the contents of a patient's water glass out a window, the mass of water hitting the ground dislodging a pebble which rolled across the angled pavement and fell with a click on a stone culvert in the ditch below, startling a squirrel having at some sort of nut right there on the concrete pipe, causing the squirrel to run up the nearest tree, in doing which it disturbed a slender brittle branch and surprised a few nervous morning birds, of of which, preparatory to flight released a black-and-white glob of droppings, which glob fell neatly on the windshield of the tiny car of one Lenore Beadsman, just as she pulled into a parking space. Lenore got out of the car while birds flew away, making sounds.”

— David Foster Wallace

“I kiss him like the fairytale prince that every girl wants. His horse might be black instead of white and he isn't blonde haired and blue eyed, but damn, he has butterflies inked into his skin and birds on his back, an eyebrow and a lip ring and words of wisdom peppered with the foulest fucking language known to man. I would take Ty McCabe over a knight in shining armor any day.”

— C.M. Stunich

“Jessamin!" He kneels beside me, hands hovering as though he isn't sure what to do with them. "You must want me to explain everything." "No." I watch in horror as a massive plume of smoke shoots out of the chimney and transforms into a cloud of black birds so thick it obscures the sun. "I want to run away from here as fast as possible.”

— Kiersten White

“Nodded to the birds, a dozen of them in a black line, wise-eyed and watching. The town-square ran red. Blood in the gutters, blood on the flagstones, blood in the fountain. The corpses posed as corpses do. Some comical, reaching”

— Mark Lawrence

“She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of black birds. Her husband had moved people, and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them, was not hers, was now theirs.”

— Lauren Groff

“We've all seen chicken portrayed as the low-fat, heart-healthy alternative to red meat for years, but it no longer adds up. You might want to lean away from eating birds and lean toward more plant-based options of protein like black beans, lentils, tofu, chickpeas and whole grains.”

— Kathy Freston

“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.”

— Burl Ives

“Secret Stories, which advertised name-brand lingerie at discount prices, had nothing to worry about: the same kind of shops were doing fine in the malls of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Neither, for that matter, did Chantal Thomass or La Perla. Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless. All”

— Michel Houellebecq

“Hidden all day in impenetrable black burkas, rich Saudi women transformed themselves by night into birds of paradise with their corsets, their see-through bras, their G-strings with multicolored lace and rhinestones. They were exactly the opposite of Western women, who spent their days dressed up and looking sexy to maintain their social status, then collapsed in exhaustion once they got home, abandoning all hope of seduction in favor of clothes that were loose and shapeless.”

— Michel Houellebecq

“Malcolm was the first political pragmatist I knew, the first honest man I'd ever heard. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief. If he was angry, he said so. If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. He would not turn the other cheek for you. He would not be a better man for you. He would not be your morality. Malcolm spoke like a man who was free, like a black man above the laws that proscribed our imagination.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen's plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.
From the dim woods on either bank, Night's ghostly army, the grey shadows, creep out with noiseless tread to chase away the lingering rear- guard of the light, and pass, with noiseless, unseen feet, above the waving river-grass, and through the sighing rushes; and Night, upon her sombre throne, folds her black wings above the darkening world, and, from her phantom palace, lit by the pale stars, reigns in stillness.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

“We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing.”

— Mark Twain

“But the thought arrived inside her like a train: Marya Morevna, all in black, here and now, was a point at which all the women she had been met-the Yaichkan and the Leningrader and the chyerti maiden; the girl who saw the birds, and the girl who never did-the woman she was and the woman she might have been and the woman she would always be, forever intersecting and colliding, a thousand birds falling from a thousand oaks, over and over.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“Think of the following event: A collection of hieratic persons (from Harvard or some such place) lecture birds on how to fly. Imagine bald males in their sixties, dressed in black robes, officiating in a form of English that is full of jargon, with equations here and there for good measure. The bird flies. Wonderful confirmation! They rush to the department of ornithology to write books, articles, and reports stating that the bird has obeyed them, an impeccable causal inference. The Harvard Department of Ornithology is now indispensable for bird flying. It will get government research funds for its contribution.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb

“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.”

— Walter Mosley

“The necropolis has never seemed a city of death to me; I know its purple roses (which other people think so hideous) shelter hundreds of small animals and birds. The executions I have seen performed and have performed myself so often are no more than a trade, a butchery of human beings who are for the most part less innocent and less valuable than cattle. When I think of my own death, or the death of someone who has been kind to me, or even of the death of the sun, the image that comes to my mind is that of the nenuphar, with its glossy, pale leaves and azure flower. Under flower and leaves are black roots as fine and strong as hair, reaching down into the dark waters.”

— Gene Wolfe

“The Lord Commander had given him his orders when they made their camp on the Fist. "You're no fighter. We both know that, boy. If it happens that we're attacked, don't go trying to prove otherwise, you'll just get in the way. You're to send a message. And don't come running to ask what the letter should say. Write it out yourself, and send one bird to Castle Black and another to the Shadow Tower." The Old Bear pointed a gloved finger right in Sam's face. "I don't care if you're so scared you foul your breeches, and I don't care if a thousand wildlings are coming over the walls howling for your blood, you get those birds off, or I swear I'll hunt you through all seven hells and make you damn sorry that you didn't." And Mormont's own raven had bobbed its head up and down and croaked, "Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

— George R.R. Martin

“Where did you say you found that bird again?"
"In my head." Ronan's laugh was a sharp jackal cry.
"Dangerous place," commented Noah.
Ronan stumbled, all his edges blunted by alcohol, and the raven in his hands let out a feeble sound more percussive than vocal. He replied, "Not for Chainsaw."
Back out in the hard spring night, Gansey tipped his head back. Now that he knew that Ronan was all right, he could see that Henrietta after dark was a beautiful place, a patchwork town embroidered with black tree branches.
A raven, of all the birds for Ronan to turn up with.
Gansey didn't believe in coincidences.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of the Nervous System fattening, deep in twittering nerve-dusk, in preparation for some important message ... .”

— Thomas Pynchon

“Soft you day, be velvet soft,
My true love approaches,
Look you bright, you dusty sun,
Array your golden coaches.
Soft you wind, be soft as silk
My true love is speaking.
Hold you birds, your silver throats,
His golden voice I'm seeking.
Come you death, in haste, do come
My shroud of black be weaving,
Quiet my heart, be deathly quiet,
My true love is leaving.”

— Maya Angelou

“All the strong black birds of promise who defy the odds and gods and sing their sings”

— Maya Angelou

“Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses.”

— Toni Morrison

“He fell upon the bench, and she beside him. They had no words more. The stars were beginning to gleam. How did it come to pass that their lips met? How comes it to pass that the birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that May expands, that the dawn grows white behind the black trees on the shivering crest of hills?”

— Victor Hugo

“The pools had been written onto the fields by the rain. The pools were a magic worked by the rain, just as the tumbling of the black birds against the grey was a spell that the sky was working and the motion of grey-brown grasses was a spell that the wind made. Everything had meaning.”

— Susanna Clarke

“I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds.”

— Michael Chabon

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

— William Shakespeare

“The sun was shining, but Christ had hidden Himself, and all the world was black to you; or it was night, and since the bright and morning star was gone, no other star could yield you so much as a ray of light. What a howling wilderness is this world without our Lord! If once He hideth Himself from us, withered are the flowers of our garden; our pleasant fruits decay; the birds suspend their songs, and a tempest overturns our hopes.”

— Charles Haddon Spurgeon

“WE DASH THE BLACK RIVER, ITS flats smooth as stone. Not a ship, not a dinghy, not one cry of white. The water lies broken, cracked from the wind. This great estuary is wide, endless. The river is brackish, blue with the cold. It passes beneath us blurring. The sea birds hang above it, they wheel, disappear. We flash the wide river, a dream of the past. The deeps fall behind, the bottom is paling the surface, we rush by the shallows, boats beached for winter, desolate piers. And on wings like the gulls, soar up, turn, look back.”

— James Salter

“For you who came so far; for you who held out, wearing a black scarf to signify grief; for you who believe true love can find you amidst this atlas of tears linking one town to its own memory of mortar, when it was still a dream to be built and people moved there, believing, and someone with sky and birds in his heart said this would be a good place for a park.”

— Naomi Shihab Nye

“The American crow is at an all-time low of 82 birds. Others hit by the West Nile, like the black-capped chickadee, have rebounded.”

— Jeff Chapman

“The black crow thinketh her own birds white.”

— Gavin Douglas

“What is Africa to me: Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang?”

— Countee Cullen

“KFC is not black owned, but it sure knows to market heavily to African Americans - obviously hoping we won-t care about what they do the underdog, or in this case, the underchicken - So, if KFC wants to take our money and use it to pay for sloppy practices that hurt animals?I say we send them a message that this is not going to happen. I-m calling on people to boycott KFC until they adopt animal welfare systems recommended by PETA and until they stop the worst abuses of the birds they raise for their restaurants.”

— Bill Vaughan

“Being preoccupied with our self-image is like being deaf and blind. It's like standing in the middle of a vast field of wildflowers with a black hood over our heads. It's like coming upon a tree of singing birds while wearing earplugs.”

— Pema Chodron

“Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening. To come to her directly from Dante, Spenser, Blake, and Baudelaire is to find her sadomasochism obvious and flagrant. Birds, bees, and amputated hands are the dizzy stuff of this poetry. Dickinson is like the homosexual cultist draping himself in black leather and chains to bring the idea of masculinity into aggressive visibility.”

— Camille Paglia

“Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.”

— Rebecca West

“Look, the world's comforter, with weary gait,
His day's hot task hath ended in the west:
The owl, night's herald, shrieks-'tis very late;
The sheep are gone to fold, birds to their nest;
And coal-black clouds, that shadow heaven's light,
Do summon us to part, and bid good night.”

— William Shakespeare