Quotes About Blackbirds

“You know, your family's exactly like I imagined them. Exactly like you." "What's that supposed to mean?" "You're like the blackbirds. The blondbirds." "Very funny." "They're very nice. You always talk like they're Norwegian hillbillies or something.”

— Jean Thompson

“I don't mind him not talking so much, because you can hear his voice in your heart; the same way you can hear a song in your head even if there isn't a radio playing; the same way you can hear those blackbirds flying when they're not in the sky”

— Adam Rapp

“Suffering sucks. Don't do it. Go home and love your wife. Go home and love yourself. Go home
and base your happiness on one thing and one thing only: freedom. Choose freedom, not suffering. Create a life of freedom, not wanting. Have some really good coffee and listen to the red-winged blackbirds in the marsh. Ignore the mosquitoes.”

— Laura Munson

“On the fences the shiny blackbirds with red epaulets clicked their dry call. The meadowlarks sang like water, and the wild doves, concealed among the bursting leaves of the oaks, made a sound of restrained grieving.”

— John Steinbeck

“Although her book did include compelling recipes for scrapple, ox cheek, and baked calf's head and tips for the preparation of raccoon, possum, snipe, plovers, and blackbirds (for blackbird pie) and "how to broil, fricassee, stew or fry a squirrel," it was much more than just a cookbook.”

— Erik Larson

“Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.”

— Henry David Thoreau

“I love that sound,' he mumbled into her hair. 'Blackbirds at dawn.'
'I hate it. Makes me think I've done something I'll regret.”

— David Nicholls

“There was a time in Africa the people could fly. Mauma told me this one night when I was ten years old. She said, Handful, your granny-mauma saw it for herself. She say they flew over trees and clouds. She say they flew like blackbirds. When we came here, we left that magic behind.”

— Sue Monk Kidd

“And you know that anyone who at least once in his life has caught a perch or seen blackbirds migrating in the fall, when they rush in flocks over the village on clear, cool days, is no longer a townsman, and will be drawn towards freedom till his dying day.”

— Anton Chekhov

“And the redwinged blackbirds sing in the budding greengage plumtree.”

— Ken Kesey

“Doubt is the act of challenging our beliefs ... This is an active, investigative doubt: the kind that inspires us to wander onto shaky limbs or out into left field; the kind that doesn't divide the mind so much as multiply it, like a tree in which there are three blackbirds and the entire Bronx Zoo. This is the doubt we stand to sacrifice if we can't embrace error-the doubt of curiosity, possibility, and wonder.”

— Kathryn Schulz

“February
Boris Pasternak
It's February. Get ink. Weep.
Write the heart out about it, sing
Another song of February
While raucous slush burns black with spring.
Six grivnas* for a buggy ride
Past booming bells, on screaming gears,
Out to a place where drizzles fall
Louder than any ink or tears
Where like a flock of charcoal pears,
A thousand blackbirds, ripped awry
From trees to puddles, knock dry grief
Into the deep end of the eye.
A thaw patch blackens underfoot.
The wind is gutted with a scream.
True verses are the most haphazard,
Rhyming the heart out on a theme.
*Grivna: a unit of currency.”

— Boris Pasternak

“We waste days like mad blackbirds and pray for alcoholic nights
our silk-sick human smiles wrap around us like somebody else's confetti”

— Charles Bukowski

“And when you write a poem within the accepted poem-form, making it sound like a poem because a poem is a poem is a poem, you are saying "good morning" in that poem, and well, your morals are straight and you have not said SHIT, but wouldn't it be wonderful if you could ... instead of sweating out the correct image, the precise phrase, the turn of a thought ... simply sit down and write the god damned thing, throwing on the color and sound, shaking us alive with the force, the blackbirds, the wheat fields, the ear in the hand of the whore, sun, sun, sun, SUN!; let's make poetry the way we make love; let's make poetry and leave the laws and the rules and the morals to the churches and the politicians; let's make poetry the way we tilt the head back for the good liquor; let a drunken bum make his flame, and some day, Robert, I'll think of you, pretty and difficult, measuring vowels and adverbs, making rules instead of poetry.”

— Charles Bukowski

“The eldest who had the misfortune of being too beautiful and had a far off look in her eyes. Madame Cohen had seen what could happen to girls like that, they were picked off like fruit on a tree, devoured by blackbirds.”

— Alice Hoffman

“I value my garden more for being full of blackbirds than of cherries, and very frankly give them fruit for their songs.”

— Joseph Addison

“We have to suffer mosquitoes the size of blackbirds.”

— Rebecca Wells

“For as I sit there, in pain, I suddenly notice I have changed. I am not self-loathing anymore. These billion cheap blackbirds inside me - beaking the wires of the cage, frantic - are now on the ground, sleeping. This billion eyed mess, which I cannot comprehend, contain or name, has now disappeared - replaced by these hot, red lines on my leg and arm.”

— Caitlin Moran

“In the spring I'd shit with the door open, watching the blackbirds”

— William H. Gass

“I am a flawed person. A brook with many stones, a clear blue sky with many blackbirds. I have many shortcomings. A rainbow that's not long enough, a starry night with clouds. But I can only be thankful to the God who loves me just this way, and I can only be grateful to the people in my life who accept the clear blue sky with many blackbirds and who are patient with the rainbow that isn't long enough. And because of this, I am taught love, because of this I love my God, and I love these people.”

— C. JoyBell C.

“And then a strong gust blew against her, and her feet slipped just slightly. She jerked forward against the railing, ever so softly. But, rotten, it crumbled like paper, and May and Kitty went sliding forward, right through it. May scrambled to stop herself, but it was too late.
They slid a few more feet, then fell off the edge of the roof.
They looked like blackbirds faliing out through the sky.”

— Jodi Lynn Anderson

“O'er hill and field October's glories fade;
O'er hill and field the blackbirds southward fly;
The brown leaves rustle down the forest glade,
Where naked branches make a fitful shade,
And the lost blooms of Autumn withered lie.”

— George Arnold

“I've always found it difficult to start with a definite idea, but if I start with a pond that's being drained because of a diesel fuel leak and a cow named Hortense and some blackbirds flying over and a woman in the distance waving, then I might get somewhere.”

— Bobbie Ann Mason

“Again the blackbirds sings; the streams Wake, laughing, from their winter dreams, And tremble in the April showers The tassels of the maple flowers.”

— John Greenleaf Whittier

“Words like 'unputdownable' and 'irresistible' are simply not enough for Cat Winters's In the Shadow of Blackbirds. Days after finishing this story, it remains the first thought I have in the morning, and the thing that haunts me until I sleep.”

— Lauren DeStefano

“The breed is more than the pasture. As you know, the cuckoo lays her eggs in any bird's nest; it may be hatched among blackbirds or robins or thrushes, but it is always a cuckoo ... a man cannot deliver himself from his ancestors.”

— Amelia Barr

“A springful of larks in a rolling Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling Blackbirds and the sun of October Summery On the hill's shoulder.”

— Dylan Thomas

“The world has different owners at sunrise ... Even your own garden does not belong to you. Rabbits and blackbirds have the lawns; a tortoise-shell cat who never appears in daytime patrols the brick walls, and a golden-tailed pheasant glints his way through the iris spears.”

— Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Blackbirds are the cellos of the deep farms.”

— Anne Stevenson

“In New England they once thought blackbirds useless, and mischievous to the corn. They made efforts to destroy them. The consequence was, the blackbirds were diminished; but a kind of worm, which devoured their grass, and which the blackbirds used to feed on, increased prodigiously; then, finding their loss in grass much greater than their saving in corn, they wished again for their blackbirds.”

— Benjamin Franklin

“At the sight of blackbirds Flying in a green light, Even the bawds of euphony Would cry out sharply.”

— Wallace Stevens

“As to the garden, it seems to me its chief fruit is-blackbirds.”

— William Morris