As The Crow Flies Quotes & Sayings

I went from an unemployed actor's life to doing stand-up comedy, and that was fortuitous. It's not the usual way the crow flies, going from being in a TV sketch show to playing one of Shakespeare's finest characters, but, hey, that's the way it has happened. — Catherine Tate

You know the expression 'As a crow flies,' don't you? People use it to mean a straight line. And that's very important. Because the way a capital-c Crow flies is a straight line. It may appear jagged to some, but the Crow flies in a straight line to its goal. — Barry Lyga

Soon he was toiling up a steep slope, the first of three long, sweeping switchbacks that in three miles as the crow flies, and six to follow the road, would finally flatten out onto the top of Eastham Rise, where a hundred and fifty years ago Abraham Vanderzee had donated the land that would one day house the most prestigious research institution in the area. But — Gordon Bonnet

The seasons and the years came and went ... and always ... one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract. — W.G. Sebald

It is not enough to say the crow flies purposefully, or heavily, or rowingly, or whatever. There are no words to capture the infinite depth of crowiness in the crow's flight. All we can do is use a word as an indicator, or a whole bunch of words as a general directive. But the ominous thing in the crow's flight, the bare-faced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke, as if the wings were both too heavy and too powerful, and the headlong sort of merriment, the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness - you could go on for a very long time with phrases of that sort and still have completely missed your instant, glimpse knowledge of the world of the crow's wingbeat. And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying. — Ted Hughes

That thou art blamed shall not be thy defect,
For slander's mark was ever yet the fair;
The ornament of beauty is suspect,
A crow that flies in heaven's sweetest air. — William Shakespeare

From The Self-Mover's Bible; The Longest Distance between Two Points is a Shortcut

Most of us look at a map and instinctively plot a trip based on the shortest distance or as the crow flies. The difference here is that you aren't flying a crow you're driving a truck. Unless you are personally familiar with the alternative route your quickest and safest route is the Interstate. 500 miles of smooth sailing on a six-lane highway takes less time to drive than 400 miles on winding two-lane country roads. The Interstate was made for trucks. — Jerry G. West

As the crow flies-a popular and picturesque expression to denote a straight line. — William Henry Maule

As the crow flies. That's how she liked to walk. So what if she had nowhere to go? So what if no one on earth knew or probably cared where she was or when she'd get home? That wasn't the point. It didn't mean she had to take the long way. She was starting a new school in the morning, and she meant to put as much distance between herself and tomorrow as she could. Walking fast didn't stop the earth's slow roll, but sometimes it felt like it could. — Francine Pascal