Quotes About Water Birds

“I liked the solitude and the silence of the woods and the hills. I felt there the sense of a presence, something undefined and mysterious, which was reflected in the faces of the flowers and the movements of birds and animals, in the sunlight falling through the leaves and in the sound of running water, in the wind blowing on the hills and the wide expanse of earth and sky.”

— Bede Griffiths

“When they started to drain a swamp where birds and fish had lived, for a new housing development down the road from his apartment, Steven watched the protests and the preparations with interest. The bird people were furious, the developers unmovable, and Steven was filled with relief that the fight wasn't his. Nothing here was his ... He thought there should have been something sad about how little he was tied up with the place, but instead it felt like freedom. He was free because it wasn't his water here, and they weren't his fish.”

— Maile Meloy

“Girl from the fifth floor, who feeds the birds every day, climbs up to the water tank and jumps off.
I see her body on the road below, and feel absolutely nothing. Maybe because I expect her to get up and walk off. In a story, the birds would have joined forces in a show of gratitude and broken her fall, carried her to a faraway land of safety. As it is, they just gurgle foolishly and confer about the no-show of breakfast.
I imagine myself in Pigeon girl's place - a split open bag of skin on tar.”

— Amruta Patil

“As they drifted down the Apple River, Virgil felt as though a medicine was moving through him, flushing his cells with a natural liquid peace. The quiet shrilly of katydids and the soft song of moving water permeated the air. He watched Chantel slowly spinning in the currents, her eyelids fluttering in a way he'd never seen before, her ebony face drenched in sunshine, feet kicking lazily in the water. He wanted to think only of her, in this calm river vision, releasing all other thoughts from his head like flocks and flocks of birds, every species known to man, shooting out of a cavern and filling the sky.”

— Ron Parsons

“Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.”

— Loren Eiseley

“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

“And if there is water there let it be from a river. And if there is peace let it be from silence and forgetting. From the slow settle of dust on a house worn down, on a history lost, on a woman buried quietly into geography. And if there is memory let it be disjointed and nonsensical, let it disturb understanding and logic, let it rise like birds or hands into the blood blue bone of the sky, whispering its nothing beyond telling. ( ... ) Let someone lose the captions to all of the photographs; let them pile into new logics and forms that outlive us.
- "Siberia: Still Life of a Moving Image" (6. Representation)”

— Lidia Yuknavitch

“One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, "We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life."
The Fog Horn blew.”

— Ray Bradbury

“The sun rose yellow as a lemon.
The sky was round and blue.
The birds looped clear water songs in the air.
Will and Jim leaned from their windows.
Nothing had changed.
Except the look in Jim's eyes.
"Last night ... " said Will. "Did or didn't it happen?”

— Ray Bradbury

“As he rose to his feet he noticed that he was neither dripping nor panting for breath as anyone would expect after being under water. His clothes were perfectly dry. He was standing by the edge of a small pool-not more than ten feet from side to side in a wood. The trees grew close together and were so leafy that he could get no glimpse of the sky. All the light was green light that came through the leaves: but there must have been a very strong sun overhead, for this green daylight was bright and warm. It was the quietest wood you could possibly imagine. There were no birds, no insects, no animals, and no wind. You could almost feel the trees growing. The pool he had just got out of was not the only pool. There were dozens of others-a pool every few yards as far as his eyes could reach. You could almost feel the trees drinking the water up with their roots. This wood was very much alive.”

— C.S. Lewis

“I got up to get us a drink of water and as I stood in the kitchen in the early morning light, running the water out of the tap, I looked out at the hills at the back of the town, at the trees on the hills, at the bushes in the garden, at the birds, at the brand new leaves on a branch, at a cat on a fence, at the bits of wood that made the fence, and I wondered if everything I saw, if maybe every landscape we casually glanced at, was the outcome of an ecstasy we didn't even know was happening, a love-act moving at a speed slow and steady enough for us to be deceived into thinking it was just everyday reality.”

— Ali Smith

“There are those who cannot imagine a world without birds;
there are those who cannot imagine a world without water;
but in my case I am unable to imagine a world without books.”

— Jorge Luis Borges

“Once upon a time, [ ... ]. There was a world that was perfectly made and full of birds and striped creatures and lovely things like honey lilies and star tenzing and weasels
[ ... ] And this world already had light and shadow, so it didn't need any rouge stars to come and save it, and it had no use for bleeding suns or weeping moons, either, and most important, it had never known war, which is a terrible and wasteful thing that no world needs. It had earth and water, air and fire, all four elements, but it was missing the last element. Love.
[ ... ]
And so this paradise was like a jewel box without a jewel. There it lay, day after day of rose-colored dawns and creature sounds and strange perfumes, and waited for lovers to find it and fill it with their happiness. The end.
[ ... ]
The story is unfinished. The world is still waiting.”

— Laini Taylor

“Wherever snow falls, or water flows, or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds, or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial space, wherever is danger, and awe, and love, there is Beauty, plenteous as rain, shed for thee, and though thou shouldest walk the world over, thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“All around him, for as far as he could see, lay a rough land strewn with rocks, with not a drop of water, nor a blade of grass. Colorless, with no light to speak of. No sun, no moon or stars. No sense of direction, either. At a set time, a mysterious twilight and a bottomless darkness merely exchanged places. A remote border on the edges of consciousness. At the same time, it was a place of strange abundance. At twilight birds with razor-sharp beaks came to relentlessly scoop out his flesh. But as darkness covered the land, the birds would fly off somewhere, and that land would silently fill in the gaps in his flesh with something else, some other indeterminate material.”

— Haruki Murakami

“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

“First, the avid student must be aware that when the world was young it knew only seven things: water, life and death, salt, night, birds and the length of an hour.”

— Catherynne M. Valente

“Over the plains of Ethiopia the sun rose as I had not seen it in seven years. A big, cool, empty sky flushed a little above a rim of dark mountains. The landscape 20,000 feet below gathered itself from the dark and showed a pale gleam of grass, a sheen of water. The red deepened and pulsed, radiating streaks of fire. There hung the sun, like a luminous spider's egg, or a white pearl, just below the rim of the mountains. Suddenly it swelled, turned red, roared over the horizon and drove up the sky like a train engine. I knew how far below in the swelling heat the birds were an orchestra in the trees about the villages of mud huts; how the long grass was straightening while dangling locks of dewdrops dwindled and dried; how the people were moving out into the fields about the business of herding and hoeing.”

— Doris Lessing

“About the Maker you know?" I nodded and said that we called him the Outsider. "A good name for him that is. Outside him we keep, into our hearts we don't let him come. "When everything he's got made, he got to paint. First the water. Easy it is. Then the ground, all the rocks. A little harder it gets. Then sky and trees. Grass harder than you think it is, the little brush he had got to use, and paint so when the wind blows the color changes, and different colors for different kinds. Then dogs and greenbucks, all the different animals. Birds and flowers going to be tough they are. This he knows. So for the last them he leaves." I”

— Gene Wolfe

“As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there's something below it, I won't know it. But that's part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn't the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I'm perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me.”

— Maggie Stiefvater

“It is just dawn, daylight: that gray and lonely suspension filled with the peaceful and tentative waking of birds. The air, inbreathed, is like spring water. He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the natural grayness, becoming one with loneliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years.”

— William Faulkner

“I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.”

— Mary Oliver

“The salamanders,
like tiny birds, locked into formation,
fly down into the endless mysteries
of the transforming water,
and how could anyone believe
that anything in this world
is only what it appears to be
that anything is ever final
that anything, in spite of its absence,
ever dies
a perfect death?
(from the poem 'What Is It?')”

— Mary Oliver

“A forest is a living thing like a human body ... each part dependent on all the other parts. A forest needs its birds, its beaver ... all its animals and plants. The forest gives shelter to the birds, but they repay the debt with the insects they eat, the droppings they leave, the seeds they carry off to plant elsewhere. The beaver builds dams for himself, but the dams keep water on the land, and although the beaver cut trees to use and to eat, their ponds provide water for the trees during the hot, dry months ... Listen, and you can hear the forest breath.”

— Louis L’Amour

“From here she could see miles of dark emerald forest with just a few birds erupting from its depths like flying fish skimming an ocean ...
'Annabel!' Ewan called.
She looked down. He was standing in water, after all. So without a moment's trepidation, she launched herself from the downed carriage, coming home to his arms with all the security and the pleasure of child leaping from the second stair.”

— Eloisa James

“Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them.”

— Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

“WHEN I GO ALONE AT NIGHT
WHEN I go alone at night to my love-tryst, birds do not sing, the wind does not stir, the houses on both sides of the street stand silent.
It is my own anklets that grow loud at every step and I am ashamed.
When I sit on my balcony and listen for his footsteps, leaves do not rustle on the trees, and the water is still in the river like the sword on the knees of a sentry fallen asleep.
It is my own heart that beats wildly
I do not know how to quiet it.
When my love comes and sits by my side, when my body trembles and my eyelids droop, the night darkens, the wind blows out the lamp, and the clouds draw veils over the stars.
It is the jewel at my own breast that shines and gives light. I do not know how to hide it.”

— Rabindranath Tagore

“I went to the springs while the sun was still up, and sitting on a rocky outcrop above the cave mouth I watched the light grow reddish across the misty pools, and listened to the troubled voice of the water. After a while I moved farther up the hill, where I could hear birds singing near and far in the silence of the trees. The presence of the trees was very strong ... The big oaks stood so many, so massive in their other life, in their deep, rooted silence: the awe of them came on me, the religion.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

“His touch both consoles and devastates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the roaring mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this innocent who makes cages to keep the sweet birds in. Eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, I go back and back to him to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.”

— Angela Carter

“You never count your chickens before they hatch. I used to keep parakeets and I never counted every egg thinking I would get all eight birds. You just hoped they came out of the nest box looking all right. I'm like a swan at the moment. I look fine on top of the water but under the water my little legs are going mad.”

— Ian Holloway

“Give a drink of water as alms to the birds which go forth at morning, and deem that they have a better right than men [to thy charity]. For their race brings not harm upon thee in any wise, when thou fearest it from thine own race.”

— Al-MaÊ¿arri

“O God, when I listen to the voices of animals, the sounds of trees, the murmurings of water, the singing of birds, the whistling of the wind, or the boom of thunder, I see in them evidence of Your unity; I feel that You are supreme power, omniscience, supreme knowledge, and supreme justice.
I recognize You, O God, in the trials I am going through. May Your pleasure be my pleasure, too. May I be Your joy, the joy that a Father feels for a son. And may I think of You calmly and with determination, even when I find it hard to say I love You.”

— Paulo Coelho

“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

“It is estimated that one-third of all reef-building corals, a third of all fresh-water mollusks, a third of sharks and rays, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles, and a sixth of all birds are headed toward oblivion. The losses are occurring all over: in the South Pacific and in the North Atlantic, in the Arctic and the Sahel, in lakes and on islands, on mountaintops and in valleys,”

— Elizabeth Kolbert

“All living beings, things that move, are equally important, whether they are human beings, dogs, birds, fish, trees, ants, weeds, rivers, wind or rain. To stay healthy and strong, life must have clean air, clear water and pure food. If deprived of these things, life will cycle to the next level, or as the system says, 'die'.”

— John Africa

“Our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience, it slips through our fingers, we can't hold on to it, and the more time passes, the harder it gets ... My father said that the natural world gave us explanations to compensate for the meanings we could not grasp. The slant of the cold sunlight on a winter pine, the music of water, an oar cutting the lake and the flight of birds, the mountains' nobility , the silence of the silence. We are given life but must accept that it is unattainable and rejoice in what can be held in the eye, the memory, the mind.”

— Salman Rushdie

“Seek wisdom in books, rare manuscripts, and cryptic poems if you will, but seek it out also in simple stones, and fragile herbs, and in the cries of wild birds. Listen to the whisperings of the wind and the roar of water if you would discover magic, for it is here that the old secrets are preserved.”

— Scott Cunningham

“A tree is a thought, an obstruction stopping the flow of wind and light, trapping water, housing insects, birds, and animals, and breathing in and out. How treelike the human, how human the tree.”

— Gretel Ehrlich

“Blessed be the Lord for the beauty of summer and spring, for the air, the water, the verdure, and the song of birds.”

— Carl Linnaeus

“Fish play in the water
birds play in the sky
ordinary beings play on the earth
sublime beings play in display.”

— Thinley Norbu

“Don't bring the ocean if I feel thirsty, nor heaven if I ask for a light; but bring a hint, some dew, a particle, as birds carry only drops away from water, and the wind a grain of salt.”

— Olav H. Hauge

“It occurs to me one evening as I'm feeding the birds that all I did was put two birds in the aviary, some food and water and nothing else and now there are six of them. I know this is perfectly natural, it's one of the things life is all about, but to have it happen in my bedroom, under my own eyes, is magic.”

— William Wharton

“The beauty of the landscape - where sand, water, reeds, birds, buildings, and people all somehow flowed together - has never left me.”

— Zaha Hadid

“But human borders mean nothing to air, water, windblown soil or seeds or migrating fish, birds or mammals.”

— David Suzuki

“The miraculous is not extraordinary but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances will hardly balk at the turning of water into wine which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is turned into grapes.”

— Wendell Berry

“[Man's] life consists in a relation with all things: stone, earth, trees, flowers, water, insects, fishes, birds, creatures, sun,rainbow, children, women, other men. But his greatest and final relation is with the sun.”

— D.H. Lawrence