Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
When you are in school, your talents are without number, and your promise is boundless. . . But at a certain point, you begin to feel your talents dropping away, like feathers from a molting bird.
I prefer empty cages, Sabina, until I find a unique bird I once saw in my dreams.
Birds and beasts have in fact our own nature, flattened a semi-tone.
But, as old Swedish legends say, Of all the birds upon that day, The swallow felt the deepest grief, And longed to give her Lord relief, And chirped when any near would come. Hugswala swala swal honom! Meaning, as they who tell it deem, Oh, cool, oh, cool and comfort Him!
Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.
But tomorrow, dawn will come the way I picture her, barefoot and disheveled, standing outside my window in one of the fragile cotton dresses of the poor. She will look in at me with her thin arms extended, offering a handful of birdsong and a small cup of light.
A forest bird never wants a cage.
The thousands small birds of January in their smooth soaring cloud finding the trees.
Thinking is to man what flying is to birds. Don’t follow the example of a chicken when you could be a lark.
She told them simply and directly that the meadow was a place of peace and beauty, where indeed if one came to it in a quiet manner, the animals would not be disturbed; for there are lovely birds, and squirrels and field mice, and sometimes deer.
Birds are the most popular group in the animal kingdom. We feed them and tame them and think we know them. And yet they inhabit a world which is really rather mysterious.
A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.
I hide my grief, just like the blessed birds hide themselves when they are preparing to die, my love.
These false answers such as, I am stone, I am bird, I am animal, I am man, I am woman, I am great, I am small are, in turn, received, tested and discarded until the Question arrives at the right and Final Answer, I AM GOD.
When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.
I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high.
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
Being a bird ain't all about flying and shitting from high places.
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.