Music criticism should be to musicians what ornithology is to the birds.
Dead voices, lost sounds, forgotten noises, vibrations lockstepping into the abyss and now too distant ever to be recaptured!. . . What sort of arrows would be able to transfix such birds?
The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country.
No empty handed man can lure a bird
Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?" - from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird
A gun will give you the body, not the bird
Why do birds sing in the morning? It's the triumphant shout: 'We got through another night!'
People don't use their eyes. They never see a bird, they see a sparrow. They never see a tree, they see a birch. They see concepts.
Birds born in a cage think flying is an illness.
What is a fish without a river? What is a bird without a tree to nest in? What is an Endangered Species Act without any enforcement mechanism to ensure their habitat is protected? It is nothing.
When you have birds you stare at them a lot and their eyes are recessed on their head. When they look at something they tilt their head in a quizzical expression.
I am like a tree in a forest. Birds come to the tree, they sit on its branches and eat its fruits. To the birds, the fruit may be sweet or sour or whatever. The birds say sweet or they say sour, but from the tree's point of view, this is just the chattering of birds.
Music is a bird's answer to the noise and heaviness of words. It puts the mind in a state of exhilarated speechlessness.
Foppery, being the chronic condition of women, is not so much noticed as it is when it breaks out on the person of the male bird.
Nature, or at least birds and women, abhorred the invisible man.
To be worth making at all a journey has to be made in the mind as much as in the world of objects and dimensions. What value can there be in seeing or experiencing anything for the first time unless it comes as a revelation? And for that to happen, some previously held thought or belief must be confounded, or enhanced, or even transcended. What difference can it make otherwise to see a redwood tree, a tiger, or a humming bird?
A bird in the hand is worth more than a Bush.
When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.
Just at the turn of the tide, nature held its breath - no bird sang, everything seemed to be waiting and waiting. And then, sure enough, as if someone had flicked a switch, everything started in motion again.
I'll wire the International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers and give them the number stamped on the bird's leg ring.