“A bird is safe in its nest - but that is not what its wings are made for.”
― Amit Ray, World Peace: The Voice of a Mountain Bird

“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man. But every time he burnt himself up he sprang out of the ashes, he got himself born all over again. And it looks like we're doing the same thing, over and over, but we're got on damn thing the phoenix never had. We know the damn silly thing we just did. We know all the damn silly things we've done for a thousand years and as long as we know that and always have it around where we can see it, someday we'll stop making the goddamn funeral pyres and jumping in the middle of them. We pick up a few more people that remember every generation.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”
― Claude Monet

“I heard a bird sing in the dark of December. A magical thing. And sweet to remember. We are nearer to Spring than we were in September. I heard a bird sing in the dark of December.”
― Oliver Herford

“A bird who hurt her wing,
now forgotten how to fly.

A song she used to sing,
but can't remember why.

A breath she caught and kept -
that left her in a sigh.

It hurts her so to love you,
but she won't say goodbye.”
― Lang Leav

“When the Sun of compassion arises darkness evaporates and the singing birds come from nowhere.”
― Amit Ray, Nonviolence: The Transforming Power

“For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.”
― Kahlil Gibran

“I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander

“The robin flew from his swinging spray of ivy on to the top of the wall and he opened his beak and sang a loud, lovely trill, merely to show off. Nothing in the world is quite as adorably lovely as a robin when he shows off - and they are nearly always doing it.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...”
― Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street

“I ain't never seen a creature like that before, she says. He's so smart, he's-
More, like a person than a bird? I says.
Yeah, she says. That's it.
Whatever you do, I says, don't tell him that. I'll never hear the end of it.”
― Moira Young, Blood Red Road

“Featherweight by Suzy Kassem


One evening,
I sat by the ocean and questioned the moon about my destiny.
I revealed to it that I was beginning to feel smaller compared to others,
Because the more secrets of the universe I would unlock,
The smaller in size I became.

I didn't understand why I wasn't feeling larger instead of smaller.
I thought that seeking Truth was what was required of us all –
To show us the way, not to make us feel lost,
Up against the odds,
In a devilish game partitioned by
An invisible wall.

Then the next morning,
A bird appeared at my window, just as the sun began
Spreading its yolk over the horizon.
It remained perched for a long time,
Gazing at me intently, to make sure I knew I wasn’t dreaming.
Then its words gently echoed throughout my mind,
Telling me:

'The world you are in –
Is the true hell.
The journey to Truth itself
Is what quickens the heart to become lighter.
The lighter the heart, the purer it is.
The purer the heart, the closer to light it becomes.
And the heavier the heart,
The more chained to this hell
It will remain.'

And just like that, it flew off towards the sun,
Leaving behind a tiny feather.
So I picked it up,
And fastened it to a toothpick,
To dip into ink
And write my name.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Birds were created to record everything. They were not designed just to be beautiful jewels in the sky, but to serve as the eyes of heaven.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“I am Cinna's bird, ignited, flying frantically to escape something inescapable. The feathers of flame that grow from my body. Beating my wings only fans the blaze. I consume myself, but to no end.
Finally, my wings begin to falter, I lose height, and gravity pulls me into a foamy sea the color of Finnick's eyes. I float on my back, which continues to burn beneath the water, but the agony quiets to pain. When I am adrift and unable to navigate, that's when they come. The dead.
The ones I loved fly as birds in the open sky above me. Soaring, weaving, calling to me to join them. I want so badly to follow them, but the seawater saturates my wings, making it impossible to lift them. The ones I hated have taken to the water, horrible scaled things that tear my salty flesh with needle teeth. Biting again and again. Dragging me beneath the surface.
The small white bird tinged in pink dives down, buries her claws in my chest, and tries to keep me afloat.
"No, Katniss! No! You can't go!"
But the ones I hated are winning, and if she clings to me, she'll be lost as well. "Prim, let go!" And finally she does.”
― Suzanne Collins

“I think we consider too much the luck of the early bird and not enough the bad luck of the early worm.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Soft feathers cannot make a cruel bird kind”
― Munia Khan

“The Mercy of Allah is an Ocean, Our sins are a lump of clay clenched between the beak of a pigeon. The pigeon is perched on the branch of a tree at the edge of that ocean.It only has to open it's beak”
― Leila Aboulela, Minaret

“A Rule: Life without Islam is a naked tree,
Birds without trees can never feel free.”
― Leena Ahmad Almashat, Harmony Letters

“There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's building its own nest. Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged? But alas! we do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveller with their chattering and unmusical notes. Shall we forever resign the pleasure of construction to the carpenter?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“I knew I was a grain of sand in the vast desert that never ended and he was a sparkling star in the sky. I was a fish who couldn’t breathe in air and had to stay in dark waters forever while he was a majestic bird who soared so high that he barely touched the ground. I did not deserve him. I could only watch him from down here and wish, wish that he could come here someday. That he could know that I existed. But for that, he had to fall. He had to drop to the ground but I could not let that happen. And then I thought, birds are meant to fly and stars are meant to shine and if someone takes it away from them, they can't be the same anymore. So, I just prayed that his wings never fail him, that the star never explodes. And I was at peace.”
― Aleena Yasin

“Owls hoot in B flat, cuckoos in D, but the water ousel sings in the voice of the stream. She builds her nest back of the waterfalls so the water is a lullaby to the little ones. Must be where they learn it.”
― Karen Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary

“Quartering the topmost branches of one of the tall trees, an invisible bird was striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.”
― Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way

“Amanda took the torn page from Maniac. To her, it was the broken wing of a bird, a pet out in the rain.”
― Jerry Spinelli, Maniac Magee

“O Heavenly Children, do not forget that God is here, there and everywhere. The birds are his eyes and the air is his ears. And as you sleep, your heart and soul rest naked before him. He can drink from the rivers of your thoughts, and even feel the wetness of your tears.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“You jumped like a frog.
You touched like a dog.
You kissed like a bird.”
― Santosh Kalwar, An Aphrodisiac

“Eagle's flight of loneliness soars so high
Around its sigh, no more alone the sky
Other birds remain away, clouds pass by
Between shrouds of life and haze sun rays die”
― Munia Khan

“Birds are the eyes of Heaven.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“I am a waning bird
encased in a glass sphere;
I cannot see my prison,
and my cries no one can hear.”
― Craig Froman, An Owl on the Moon: A Journal From the Edge of Darkness

“Two birds went for dating. The male bird was killed and the female bird is being murdered.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“Who were these people? Where was all this joy, and where does joy go when it leaves your family? Does it go into someone else's family, soak into the earth, or does it dissolve away like your breath in the winter? And if it doesn't leave like this, then why isn't there any left for me?”
― Crystal Chan, Bird