Quotes & Sayings About Bird Dogs

Chickens are cheerless birds, I advise you to keep geese which can be taught to follow like dogs, one needs all the companionship one can get in these days. — Nancy Mitford

The sound of the universe is also spectacular around here. In the evenings there is a cricket orchestra with frogs providing the bass line. In the dead of the night dogs howl about how misunderstood they are. Before dawn the roosters for miles around announce how freaking cool it is to be roosters. Every morning around sunrise there is a tropical bird song competition, and it is always a ten way tie for the championship. When the sun comes out the butterflies get to work. The whole house is covered with vines; I feel like any day it will disappear into the foliage complete and I will disappear with it and become a jungle flower myself. The rent is less than what I use to pay in New York City for taxi fare every month. The word paradise, by the way, which comes to us from the Persian, means literally a walled garden. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Lucky ain't a puppy no more and he don't bark for just any old reason. It takes a mailman, a squirrel, a car, a bird, a blowing leaf, or a tumbling scrap of paper to get him stirred up now. — Sandra Kring

I think we are drawn to dogs because they are the uninhibited creatures we might be if we weren't certain we knew better. — George Bird Evans

It couldn't be an all-bad world, could it, not with birds who warble and call? Maybe that was the secret - to find the few things that made life just a fraction better, and to focus on those. Bird warbles. Peach fuzz. Puppies barking as if they're full grown dogs. Nothing great, certainly nothing to justify the rest of it, but enough to keep you going. — Shalom Auslander

Angell and Marzluff once spotted an airborne group of crows playing with a ball of paper above a University of Washington football game. One crow would carry the ball a few wing lengths and then drop it, at which point the others would dive in, the fastest one snatching it from the air. They repeated rounds of this corvid quidditch over and over again, causing attention in the stands to stray from the earthbound athletes. And at the University of Montana, a crow learned to gather up small packs of dogs by whistling and calling what for all the world sounded like "Here, boy!" The bird would lead the dogs on frenzied chases across campus for no apparent reason. To — Nathanael Johnson

You know what kind of a man Lonny Tooker is? The kind of a man that sets broken bird's wings."
"Hitler loved dogs and babies," Dave said. — Joseph Hansen

I live in the country. I'm a bird-watcher, an oyster-raiser. You know, I'll do anything that - raise dogs for the blind as a volunteer. — Isabella Rossellini

The bird rocked free from its blocks and carried them down the tarmac, away from their homes and families and dogs and cats and to a land that didn't want them. — Ross Ritchell

Loss invites reflection and reformulating and a change of strategies. Loss hurts and bleeds and aches. Loss is always ready to call out your name in the night. Loss follows you home and taunts you at the breakfast table, follows you to work in the morning. You have to make accommodations and broker deals to soften the rabbit punches that loss brings to your daily life. You have to take the word "loser" and add it to your resume and walk around with it on your name tag as it hand-feeds you your own shit in dosages too large for even great beasts to swallow. The word "loser" follows you, bird-dogs you, sniffs you out of whatever fields you hide in because you have to face things clearly and you cannot turn away from what is true. — Pat Conroy

Until you have bred dogs and have drawn and painted them, it is difficult to realize that no two are identical in conformation. You need do no more than gun for a day over two of them to recognize that each is an individual. It requires the intimacy of daily living with a dog to know the subtle quality of his mind, the ham-smell of his ears, and that his wet nose in your mouth tastes salty. — George Bird Evans

Only the long melancholy call to prayer, or the wail of women over the dead, or the barking of dogs, breaks the silence which at sunset falls as a pall over Baghdad. — Isabella Bird

He lay with a pack of panting dogs on a hill overlooking plains where antelope grazed. He marched with ants, and labored in the rigors of the nest, filing eggs. He danced the mating dance of the bower bird, and slept on a warm rock with his lizard kin. He was a cloud. He was the shadow of a cloud. He was the moon that cast the shadow of a cloud. He was a blind fish; he was a shoal; he was a whale; he was the sea. He was the lord of all he surveyed. He was a worm in the dung of a kite. He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it. — Clive Barker

Dogs have a sense of smell much greater than ours and they're much faster than we are. We have fairly dull senses, fairly slow locomotion. In our Olympic trials, we celebrate speeds that would be an embarrassment to a bird or a dog or another animal. — Neal Barnard

I walked into a bakery seven years later and there he was. He had dogs at his feet and a bird in a cage beside him. The seven years were not seven years. They were not seven hundred years. Their length could not be measured in years, just as an ocean could not explain the distance we had traveled, just as the dead can never be counted. I wanted to run away from him, and I wanted to go right up to him. — Jonathan Safran Foer

What's better? Dogs or broomsticks? I mean will the world really ever know? — Larry Bird