Bird In Hand Quotes & Sayings

I HAD a dove and the sweet dove died;
And I have thought it died of grieving:
O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving;
Sweet little red feet! why should you die -
Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?
You liv'd alone in the forest-tree,
Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me?
I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas;
Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees? — John Keats

Under no circumstances are you to butter your entire roll and, my God!" she cried suddenly, switching Lan's hand three times in rapid succession. "Never lick your knife!" "Ouch! Fine! Buggering fuck! Leave off with that beshitted thing!" The dead woman let out a sound like the chirping of a bird, staring at her with an indignation that was nearly horror. "Ladies," she sputtered at last. "Ladies do not say bugger or fuck!" "But beshitted's all right?" Lan asked cautiously. "No, it is not!" "You know, I may not be as mannered-up as you are, but in Norwood, it's rude to yell at the table. — R. Lee Smith

This strange thing must have crept
Right out of hell.
It resembles a bird's foot
Worn around the cannibal's neck.
As you hold it in your hand,
As you stab with it into a piece of meat,
It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:
Its head which like your fist
Is large, bald, beakless, and blind. — Charles Simic

Twenty-seven bones make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid, and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though different in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird's wing, a whale's dorsal fine, a gecko's pad, your own hand. Bust an arm or leg and the knitting bone's sealed in a wrap of calcium so it's stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right. — Craig Davidson

You're like some wild bird, aren't you? Batting its wings and flying against the cage door. Even if it hurts you. Even if it kills you. You won't stop. Even if on one is out to hurt you, you wont stop." He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear, and I flinch at the brush of his fingers on my skin.
I shrug, slap at his hand "So what? You just described everyone in here. All of us."
"No, the rest of us will keep to this cage. It's protection from the dangers outside. In here, we have shelter. Freedom. Each other. We wait for the door to open, and when its safe, only then do we go out. You? You don't care as long as you're gone. Away from the rest of us. — Sophie Jordan

And there, row upon row, with the soft gleam of flowers opened at morning, with the light of this June sun glowing through a faint skin of dust, would stand the dandelion wine. Peer through it at the wintry day - the snow melted to grass, the trees were reinhabitated with bird, leaf, and blossoms like a continent of butterflies breathing on the wind. And peering through, color sky from iron to blue.
Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in — Ray Bradbury

A bird in the hand is worth plucking, frying, and sticking between two bits of bread. — Edward Burns

He pulls down one of my straps, slides his other hand in among the feathers, but it's no good, I lie there like a dead bird. He is not a monster, I think. I can't afford pride or aversion, there are all kinds of things that have to be discarded, under the circumstances. "Maybe I should turn the lights out," says the Commander, dismayed and no doubt disappointed. I see him for a moment before he does this. Without his uniform he looks smaller, older, like something being dried. The trouble is that I can't be, with him, any different from the way I usually am with him. Usually I'm inert. Surely there must be something here for us, other than this futility and bathos. — Margaret Atwood

It's relatively easy to create an ambiguous character. Any conglomeration of likable and unlikeable traits, chosen at random, will result in an ambiguous character. Getting an audience to deeply identify with a character, on the other hand, is one of the hardest things in the world to do. — Matt Bird

A bird named Vlad the Impaler, who spent the bulk of his life hissing and looking at himself in a little mirror hanging[ ... ] in the iron cage, a mirror so dull and cloudy with Vlad the Impaler's bird-spit that Vlad the Impaler could not possibly have seen anything more than a vague yellowish blob behind a pane of mist[ ... ] A bird that not infrequently literally bit the hand that fed it, before returning to dance in front of its own shapeless reflection, straining and contorting always for a better view of itself. — David Foster Wallace

You can lead a horse to water but a bird in hand can't fool me twice. — Robert Leland Taylor

Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation, of silence. Waiting for our Lord to be born. A pregnant woman is so happy, so content. She lives in such a garment of silence, and it is as though she were listening to hear the stir of life within her. One always hears that stirring compared to the rustling of a bird in the hand. But the intentness which which one awaits such stirring is like nothing so much as a blanket of silence. — Dorothy Day

The psalmist saith more to the point about true happiness in this short Psalm than any one of the philosophers, or all of them put together; they did but beat the bush, God hath here put the bird into our hand. John Trapp, 1660 — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

I confess that altruistic and cynically selfish talk seem to me about equally unreal. With all humility, I think whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, infinitely more important than the vain attempt to love one's neighbor as one's self. If you want to hit a bird on the wing you must have all your will in focus, you must not be thinking about yourself, and equally, you must not be thinking about your neighbor; you must be living with your eye on that bird. Every achievement is a bird on the wing. — Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

A bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, he told her, to which she retorted that a proverb was the last refuge of the mentally destitute. — W. Somerset Maugham

Every sky with its varied tints and every feather of each bird were coloured by hand; and when it is considered that nearly two hundred and eighty thousand illustrations in the present work have been so treated, it will most likely cause some astonishment to those who give the subject a thought. — John Gould

A bird in hand is a certainty. But a bird in the bush may sing. — Bret Harte

For all his learning or sophistication, man still instinctively reaches towards that force beyond. Only arrogance can deny its existence, and the denial falters in the face of evidence on every hand. In every tuft of grass, in every bird, in every opening bud, there it is. — Hal Borland

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant.
Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by ... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony. — Mary Karr

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, unless it is the burning bush, in that case the value of your bird just went up!! — Neil Leckman

A bird in the hand may be worth two in the bush, but remember also that a bird in the hand is a positive embarrassment to one not in the poultry business. — George Ade

I caught this insight on the way and quickly seized the rather poor words that were closest to hand to pin it down lest it fly away again. And now it has died of these arid words and shakes and flaps in them
and I hardly know anymore when I look at it how I could ever have felt so happy when I caught this bird. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I like B. Wooster the way he is. Lay off him, I say. Don't try to change him, or you may lose the flavour. Even when we were merely affianced, I recalled, this woman had dashed the mystery thriller from my hand, instructing me to read instead a perfectly frightful thing by a bird called Tolstoy. At the thought of what horrors might ensue after the clergyman had done his stuff and she had a legal right to bring my grey hairs in sorrow to the grave, the imagination boggled. It was a subdued and apprehensive Bertram Wooster who some moments later reached for the hat and light overcoat and went off to the Savoy to shove food into the Trotters. The — P.G. Wodehouse

After nine nights must come ten and every desperate meeting only leaves you desperate for another. There is never enough to eat, never enough garden for your love.
So you refuse and then you discover that your house is haunted by the ghost of a leopard.
When passion comes late in life it is hard to bear.
One more night. How tempting. How innocent. I could stay tonight surely? What difference could it make, one more night? No. If I smell her skin, find the mute curves of her nakedness, she will reach in her hand and withdraw my heart like a bird's egg. I have not had time to cover my heart in barnacles to elude her. If I give in to this passion, my real life, the most solid, the best known, will disappear and I will feed on shadows again like those sad spirits whom Orpheus fled.
I wished her goodnight, touching her hand only and thankful for the dark that hid her eyes. — Jeanette Winterson

Now that I know that each star has its path, each bird is finally feathered and grown in the unbroken shell, each tree in the seed, each song in the life laid down - is the night sky any less strange; should my glance less follow the flight; should the pen shake less in my hand. — Judith Wright

We all leave something behind us. A bird in flight will lose a snow-white feather, and flowers in the hedgerows will drop their petals. And people? We leave memories. Footprints in the dust and fingerprints on everything we've touched, warmth in every hand we've held. We become stories that are spoken of, for always. And in this way, we carry on. — Susan E. Fletcher

This beach I voyage on leads me through the earth's immortal consistencies. Each form I encounter obeys the principles of perfection and trial, a timelessness in the making. The proportions of truth are at hand. Existence is celebrated in a splinter of driftwood, worn by wind-driven sand into the shape of an arrow. The onshore waves jostle each other, busy with their eternal changing, mixing crab shells, sand grains, and fish bones together. The trim little shorebirds feeding at the water's edge are acutely aware of one another, under the light and shadow leaning and drifting over all awareness. Wither own mysteries behind their beady eyes, their quick, advantageous movements, they follow the great, unifying sea." ~ John Hay. Bird of Light. — John Hay

The flake of snow grew larger and larger; and at last it was like a young lady, dressed in the finest white gauze, made of a million little flakes like stars. She was so beautiful and delicate, but she was of ice, of dazzling, sparkling ice; yet she lived; her eyes gazed fixedly, like two stars; but there was neither quiet nor repose in them. She nodded towards the window, and beckoned with her hand. The little boy was frightened, and jumped down from the chair; it seemed to him as if, at the same moment, a large bird flew past the window. — Hans Christian Andersen

On 'State of Affairs,' we're going after some names that you wouldn't think would traditionally do TV. A show that shoots in Los Angeles is such a rare bird in hand that I think we're gonna have the pick of the litter. — Joe Carnahan

Your name is a -- bird in my hand
a piece of -- ice on the tongue
one single movement of the lips.
Your name is: five signs,
a ball caught in flight, a
silver bell in the mouth

a stone, cast in a quiet pool
makes the splash of your name, and
the sound is in the clatter of
night hooves, loud as a thunderclap
or it speaks straight into my forehead,
shrill as the click of a cocked gun.

Your name -- how impossible, it
is a kiss in the eyes on
motionless eyelashes, chill and sweet.
Your name is a kiss of snow
a gulp of icy spring water, blue
as a dove. About your name is: sleep. — Marina Tsvetaeva

If the Bennu bird could be viewed in relation with the Ibis, it would explain why Thoth has it on his head. The symbolism has nothing to do with the Sun or any divine role it has, but on the contrary, the Sun is being subjugated by Thoth in one hand and a scepter on the other. The proof that this emblem means that the Sun had been conquered therein, is that Akhenaten's depictions show the fork end of the scepter handing over the Ankh directly from the Sun in total contrast to the stance of Thoth who possesses the Authority of 'was' which literally means 'overpower' to extract the Ankh from the Sun as he wishes. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

You love my art?"
Adam laughed. "Jesus, I tell you I love you and you're more interested with the fact that I love your fucking art? Yeah, Miles, I love your art. I love your smelly paints and weird concoctions and the way you run your hands throught your hair so it stands on end. I love your crazy-ass bird. I love the way you completely lose yourself so deeply in what you're doing that an atom bomb could go off next door and you wouldn't even notice. I love how you look when we've just made love, and I love when you're all pissy and cranky and yelling. I love this cottage and this resort and I love this room and I love your room. I love you." He took a deep breath and forced himself to meet Mile's eyes. "I love you. Do you ... can you ... "
"Moron," Miles said with a grin. He took Adam's hand and dragged him to Miles' own room.
There had to be six-no-eight-no, eleven portraits of Adam hanging on the walls of Miles' bedroom. — Rowan Speedwell

Moss; A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush; A cripple in the right way, will beat a racer in the wrong; Make hay while the sun shines; 'T is hard to carry — Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the bottom of every dilemma, he says, is fear, and the brain always prefers the bird in the hand to venturing into the bush, even if you are clutching a scrawny black crow. — Barbara Bradley Hagerty

What a joy it is to look at loved ones, flowers, trees, the sky, bird, mountains, babies, and sunsets, to mention a very few things, and know how special they really are. What a joy it is to see the hand of God around you constantly, even in a troubled world. — Van Harden

A bird in the hand is worth more than a Bush. — Ice Cube

Man is insatiable for power; he is infantile in his desires and, always discontented with what he has, loves only what he has not. People complain of the despotism of princes; they ought to complain of the despotism of man. We are all born despots, from the most absolute monarch in Asia to the infant who smothers a bird with its hand for the pleasure of seeing that there exists in the world a being weaker than itself. — Joseph De Maistre

We all stared at the scoreboard in stunned silence. Only Carter was able to get anything out.
"That," he told Robert exuberantly, "is how a bird in the hand gets up before the early worm."
"That doesn't make any sense," said Roger.
Carter pointed at the scoreboard. "Neither does that, but there you have it. — Richelle Mead

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

He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance. He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it. — Cormac McCarthy

I return to the sprinklers and sit down. George plunks down next to me. "Did you know that a bird-eating tarantula is as big as your hand?"
"Jase doesn't have one of those, does he?"
George gives me his sunniest smile. "No. He useta have a reg'lar tarantula named Agnes, but she" - his voice drops mournfully - "died."
"I'm sure she's in tarantula heaven now," I assure him hastily, shuddering to think what that might look like.
Mrs. Garret's van pulls in behind the motorcycle, disgorging what I assume are Duff and Andy, both red-faced and windblown. Judging by their life jackets, they've been at sailing camp.
George and Harry, my loyal fans, rave to their mother about my accomplishments, while Patsy immediately bursts into tears, points an accusing finger at her mother, and wails, "Boob."
"It was her first word." Mrs. Garret takes her from me, heedless of Patsy's damp swimsuit. "There's one for the baby book. — Huntley Fitzpatrick

The slate black sky. The middle step
of the back porch. And long ago

my mother's necklace, the beads
rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass
knob on the bedroom door. Last summer's

pot of parsley and mint, white roots
shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Years ago the cat's tail, the bird bath,
the car hood's rusted latch. Broken

little finger on my right hand at birth--
I was pulled out too fast. What hasn't

been rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars into patterns
I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade
of grass. Possible, unthinkable,

the cricket's tiny back as I lie
on the lawn in the dark, my hart

a blue cup fallen from someone's hands. — Dorianne Laux

The most splendid thing about the Amish is the names they give their towns. Everywhere else in America towns are named either after the first white person to get there or the last Indian to leave. But the Amish obviously gave the matter of town names some thought and graced their communities with intriguing, not to say provocative, appellations: Blue Ball, Bird in Hand, and Intercourse, to name but three. Intercourse makes a good living by attracting passers-by such as me who think it the height of hilarity to send their friends and colleagues postcards with an Intercourse postal mark and some droll sentiment scribbled on the back. — Bill Bryson

A black raven flew past me and landed on the back of the couch.
Roman slapped his hand over his face.
"There you are," the raven said in Evdokia's voice. "Ungrateful son."
"Here we go ... " Roman muttered.
"Eighteen hours in labor and that's what I get. He can't even pick up the phone to talk to his own mother."
"Mother, can't you see I have people here?"
"I bet if their mothers called them, they would pick up."
That would be a neat trick for both of us. Sadly, dead mothers didn't come back to life, even in post-Shift Atlanta.
"Nice to see you, Roman." I grabbed Curran by the hand.
The bird swiveled toward me. "Katya!"
Oh no.
"Don't you leave. I need to talk to you."
"Got to go, bye! — Ilona Andrews

Hegel understood the Heisenbergian reality of knowing: yes, it would be nice if we could somehow delicately capture the truth and bring it closer to ourselves without altering it, "like a bird caught with a limestick." But the reality is, every truth we manage to know is altered, deformed by our very "encheiresis naturae," by the act of our taking-in-hand of nature (to borrow the alchemists' phrase from Goethe's Faust). — Kenny Smith

Vik?"
The little metallic bird postured on the windowsill, eyeing him coldly. Vik's paint was iridescent and glossed-something the mecha had never liked, since he said it made him look like a girlie bird. "I'm surprised you remember my name." Vik paused before he added an acerbic, "Asshole."
Syn laughed as he rolled away from Shahara. "You prickly little shit, get over here."
Vik swooped in to land between the two of them on the bed. He burst apart, shifting from bird form to that of a more traditional mechbot. With his hand, he smacked Syn in the arm. "I thought you were coming back for me."
"I tried. I really did, but by the time I could, I figured you'd be gone."
Vik hissed then looked at Shahara. "He lie to you like that?"
-Syn & Vik — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Be calm," she said soothingly, and I realized she was not talking to the bird.
"How am I supposed to be calm? I worry," I retorted.
She gave a snort. "Then you are more stupid than I supposed. Worry, what is that? A pointless thing is Mr. Worry-an intruder. He steals into your house and creeps into your bed and what do you do child? Do you push him away and tell him to be gone and bolt the door fast against him? No, you move over and let him have the good pillow and the best quilt to warm himself." She flapped a hand in disgust. "Worry never did a man a bit of good. All he does is robs one's peace and make lines on the face. — Deanna Raybourn

When a court officer suggested quarantine for Nerissa, she grabbed the man's pen and jammed it into the back of his hand, screaming that he was a Crimson Guard witch come to remove her memories and replace them with bird-song.
They decided to skip quarantine after that. — Caitlin Kittredge

A bird in the hand is worth what it will bring. — Ambrose Bierce

Bird in hand makes it harder to blow nose. — Confucius

Out of the dark we came, into the dark we go. Like a storm-driven bird at night we fly out of the Nowhere; for a moment our wings are seen in the light of the fire, and, lo! we are gone again into the Nowhere. Life is nothing. Life is all. It is the Hand with which we hold off Death. It is the glow-worm that shines in the night-time and is black in the morning; it is the white breath of the oxen in winter; it is the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself at sunset. — H. Rider Haggard

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they're born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of all ornithological expressions, mocking birds aren't content to merely play the hand that is dealt them. Like all artists, they are out to rearrange reality. Innovative, willful, daring, not bound by the rules to which others may blindly adhere, the mockingbird collects snatches of birdsong from this tree and that field, appropriates them, places them in new and unexpected contexts, recreates the world from the world. For example, a mockingbird in South Carolina was heard to blend the songs of thirty-two different kinds of birds into a ten-minute performance, a virtuoso display that serve no practical purpose, falling, therefore, into the realm of pure art. — Tom Robbins

The feel of her hand has never left me. It was different from any other hand I'd ever held, different from any touch I've ever known. It was merely the small, warm hand of a twelve-year-old girl, yet those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know
and everything I had to know. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were. That within the real world, a place like this existed. In the space of those ten seconds I became a tiny bird, fluttering into the air, the wind rushing by. From high in the sky I could see a scene far away. It was so far off I couldn't make it out clearly, yet something was there, and I knew that someday I would travel to that place. — Haruki Murakami

Women can go mad with insomnia.
The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird
a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home.
Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one. — Cathy Ostlere

Remembering a dream is almost as hard as catching a bird in your hand, but sometimes it's as if the bird comes and sits on your shoulder of its own free will. — Jostein Gaarder

The Ripe Fig
Now that You live here in my chest,
anywhere we sit is a mountaintop.
And those other images,
which have enchanted people
like porcelain dolls from China,
which have made men and women weep
for centuries, even those have changed now.
What used to be pain is a lovely bench
where we can rest under the roses.
A left hand has become a right.
A dark wall, a window.
A cushion in a shoe heel,
the leader of the community!
Now silence. What we say
is poison to some
and nourishing to others.
What we say is a ripe fig,
but not every bird that flies
eats figs. — Rumi

Most birds were created to fly. Being grounded for them is a limitation within their ability to fly, not the other way around. You, on the other hand, were created to be loved. So for you to live as if you were unloved is a limitation, not the other way around. Living unloved is like clipping a bird's wings and removing its ability to fly. Not something I want for you. Pain has a way of clipping our wings and keeping us from being able to fly. And if left unresolved for very long, you can almost forget that you were ever created to fly in the first place. — William P. Young

A man can refrain from wanting what he has not and cheerfully make the best of a bird in the hand. — Seneca The Younger

Was awakened abruptly just after dawn by a tiny stinging sensation on top of my head. I blinked and put up a hand to investigate. The movement startled a large gray jay who had been pulling hairs out of my head, and he shot up into a nearby pine tree, screeching hysterically. "Serve you right, mate," I muttered, rubbing the top of my head, but couldn't help smiling. I had been told often enough that my hair looked like a bird's nest first thing in the morning; perhaps there was something to it, after all. — Diana Gabaldon

Jess pushed herself up to sit next to him. "In case you didn't get the memo, it' s my turn to take care of you right now." Ike dropped his face into his hands on a groan, and Jess's cool hand massages his neck. "Oh, my God. You're so hot."
He chuffed out a small laugh. "Why, thank you."
Jess Chuckled. "You realize you don't have to fish for compliments, right? Not from me. Because I will straight-up tell you that the sight of your Ravens tat stretched over all these muscles gives me a lady boner." Her fingers traced the design across his shoulder blades - a spread-winged raven perches on the hilt of a dagger sunk into the eye socket of a skull. The block letters of the club's name arched over the menacing black bird.
He threw her some major side-eye. "I know I'm sick because the perverted part of my brain just heard you say my ink gives you a lady boner. — Laura Kaye

I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm. — Lauren Oliver

We had our arms round each other. It was like holding in my hand some rare, exhausted, nearly doomed bird which I had miraculously happened to find. — James Baldwin

As they say - a bird in the hand is worth one in the bush. — Micky Quinn

o each his Dulcinea, that he alone can name...to each a secret hiding place where he can find the haunting face to light his secret flame. For with his Dulcinea beside him, so to stand, a man can do quite anything, outfly the bird upon the wing, hold moonlight in his hand. Yet if you build your life on dreams, it's prudent to recall--a man with moonlight in his hand has nothing there at all. There is no Dulcinea, she's made of flame and air, and yet how lovely life would seem if ev'ry man could weave a dream to keep him from despair. To each his Dulcinea...though she's naught but flame and air! — Mitch Leigh

Then she took my hand and touched it to the wound beside her eye. I caressed the half-inch scar. As I did so, the waves of her consciousness pulsed through my fingertips and into me - a delicate resonance of longing. Probably someone should take this girl in his arms and hold her tight, I thought. Probably someone other than me. Someone qualified to give her something. Goodbye, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. See you again sometime. — Haruki Murakami

One day a hummingbird flew in
It fluttered against the window til I got it down where I could reach it with an open umbrella
When I had it in my hand it was so small I couldn't believe I had it
but I could feel the intense life
so intense and so tiny
... You were like the humming bird to me ...
And I am rather inclined to feel that you and I know the best part of one another without spending much time together
It is not that I fear the knowing
It is that I am at this moment willing to let you be what you are to me
it is beautiful and pure and very intensely alive. — Georgia O'Keeffe

Hild fetched a lump of grey salt for Mildburh and mortar and pestle to crush it in. She loved the gritty crunch and thump under her hand. It sounded like a cat eating a bird. — Nicola Griffith

On summer evenings, when every flower, and tree, and bird, might have better addressed my soft young heart, I have in my day been caught in the palm of a female hand by the crown, have been violently scrubbed from the neck to the roots of the hair as a purification for the Temple, and have then been carried off highly charged with saponaceous electricity, to be steamed like a potato in the unventilated breath of the powerful Boanerges Boiler and his congregation, until what small mind I had, was quite steamed out of me — Charles Dickens

Golosh Street is an interesting locality. All the oddities of trade seemed to have found their way thither and made an eccentric mercantile settlement. There is a bird-shop at one corner. Immediately opposite is an establishment where they sell nothing but ornaments made out of the tinted leaves of autumn, varnished and gummed into various forms. Further down is a second-hand book-stall. There is a small chink between two ordinary-sized houses, in which a little Frenchman makes and sells artificial eyes, specimens of which, ranged on a black velvet cushion, stare at you unwinkingly through the window as you pass, until you shudder and hurry on, thinking how awful the world would be if everyone went about without eyelids. Madame Filomel, the fortune-teller, lives at No. 12 Golosh Street, second storey front, pull the bell on the left-hand side. Next door to Madame is the shop of Herr Hippe, commonly called the Wondersmith.
("The Wondersmith") — Fitz-James O'Brien

In fact, I've essentially given up on the idea of flight altogether and accepted that I'm going to be an angel-blood who stays earthbound, a flightless bird, like an ostrich. Maybe, or in this weather, a penguin. — Cynthia Hand

Come, evening, once again, season of peace;
Return, sweet evening, and continue long!
Methinks I see thee in the streaky west,
With matron step, slow moving, while the night
Treads on thy sweeping train; one hand employ'd
In letting fall the curtain of repose
On bird and beast, the other charged for man
With sweet oblivion of the cares of day. — William Cowper

I absolutely think that hand-drawn animation is valid and I actually hope to do one in the future with a large budget. — Brad Bird

Remember that I'm old enough to give advice, and the advice I'm giving you now is exactly right, and a bird in the hand is better than a vulture in the air, ... — Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

He is a fool who lets slip a bird in the hand for a bird in the bush. — Plutarch

The problem is that every time people have deviated from the Disney playbook in hand-drawn animation, they've done so with staff that are nowhere near Disney-level talent or Disney-level budgets. — Brad Bird

Weetzie could not even cry and make Kleenex roses. She remembered the day her father, Charlie, had driven away in the smashed yellow T-bird, leaving her mother Brandy-Lynn clutching her flowered robe with one hand and an empty glass in the other, and leaving Weetzie holding her arms crossed over her chest that was taking its time to develope into anything — Francesca Lia Block

Even in hand drawn animation, humans are widely considered to be the most difficult to execute, because everybody has a feeling for how they move. — Brad Bird

So that day, in music assembly, the teacher asked who knew the valley song. Your hand shot right up in the air. She stood you up on a stool and had you sing it for us. And I swear, every bird outside the windows fell silent ... and right when your song ended, I knew - just like your mother - I was a goner. — Suzanne Collins

She lifted her hand, slowly folded down her index, ring, and little fingers, then cheerfully flipped him the bird. Someone behind him laughed and he whirled around and bellowed out a curse. Maybe it had meant the same general thing in the Middle Ages. Or maybe it had been the look on her face. Whatever the case, she felt rather vindicated. She lowered her hand and smiled up at Richard, whose expression had darkened even more. His eyebrows had become a single, dark slash across his forehead. His scar was white. Even if she hadn't seen the blazing fury in his eyes, she would have known by his scar that he was livid. — Lynn Kurland

I hope she can't tell that I'm appraising her and that I'm completely worried by what I see. She's excitable and strange. She's ten. What do people do during the day when they're ten? She runs her fingers along the window and mumbles, "This could give me bird flu," and then she forms a circle around her mouth with her hand and makes trumpet noises. She's nuts. Who knows what's going on in that head of hers, and speaking of her head, she most definitely could use a haircut or a brushing. There are small tumbleweeds of hair resting on the top of her head. Where does she get haircuts? I wonder. Has she ever had one before? She scratches her scalp, then looks at her nails. She wears a shirt that says I'M NOT THAT KIND OF GIRL. BUT I CAN BE! I'm grateful that she isn't too pretty, but I realize this could change. — Kaui Hart Hemmings

Gormenghast.
Withdrawn and ruinous it broods in umbra: the immemorial masonry: the towers, the tracts. Is all corroding? No. Through an avenue of spires a zephyr floats; a bird whistles; a freshet beats away from a choked river. Deep in a fist of stone a doll's hand wriggles, warm rebellious on the frozen palm. A shadow shifts its length. A spider stirs ...
And darkness winds between the characters.
- Gormenghast — Mervyn Peake

On the other hand the machine does not bleed, ache, hang for hours in the empty sky in a torment of hope to learn the fate of another machine, nor does it cry out with joy nor dance in the air with the fierce passion of a bird. — Loren Eiseley

The Vicar stood aghast, with his smoking gun in his hand. It was no bird at all, but a youth with an extremely beautiful face, clad in a robe of saffron and with iridescent wings, across whose pinions great waves of colour, flushes of purple and crimson, golden green and intense blue, pursued one another as he writhed in his agony. Never had the Vicar seen such gorgeous floods of colour, not stained glass windows, not the wings of butterflies, not even the glories of crystals seen between prisms, no colours on earth could compare with them. Twice the Angel raised himself, only to fall over sideways again. Then the beating of the wings diminished, the terrified face grew pale, the floods of colour abated, and suddenly with a sob he lay prone, and the changing hues of the broken wings faded swiftly into one uniform dull grey hue. Oh! — H.G.Wells

Three or four days later he was still thinking about seal flipper pie. Remembered the two raw eggs Petal gave him. That he invested with pathetic meaning.
'Petal,' said Quoyle to Wavey, 'hated to cook. Hardly ever did.' Thought of the times he had fixed dinner for her, set put his stupid candles, folded the napkins as though they were important, waited and finally ate alone, the radio on for company. And later dined with the children, shoveling in canned spaghetti, scraping baby food off small chins.
'Once she gave me two eggs. Raw eggs for a present.' He had made an omelet of them, hand-fed her as thought she were a nestling bird. And saved the shells in a paper cup on top of the kitchen cabinet. Where they still must be. — Annie Proulx

A bird in the hand loses its mystery in no time flat. — Barbara Kingsolver

Sudenly Garge spring up and walk to the wall to admire some modarn art hanging on Frank and Estele Catandas wall. Hes impressed. Frank and Estele have always had a traditienel sensibility when it come to aesthetic matter's. For as long as he knew it, this space on the wall was ocupied by a Normen Rockwell print of a smileing child with a cast on his arm eating a handful of bird seed out of the hand of the postman. But now its replace with this minimelist art work, a large black rectangle. He make out hes bald reflectien in the imposibly smooth black surfece. It look like something that should be hang in the Moma (Museum Of Modarn Art).
"This is beauteful," Garge remark. "It seem like a stark comentary on the end of art. Who designe this?"
"Not art," Frank go. "Thats a televisien. — Seinfeld 2000

A feather in hand is better then a bird in the ayre. — George Herbert

Tattoo Man in his fishtop cap and dark glasses and sandy blond goatee. You could see the bird tattoo on his hand because the rawhide gloves had stayed in his back pocket until he and Linda Gray were in — Stephen King

The Happy Trinity is her home: nothing can trouble her joy.
She is the bird that evades every net: the wild deer that leaps every pitfall.
Like the mother bird to its chickens or a shield to the armed knight: so is the Lord to her mind, in His unchanging lucidity.
Bogies will not scare her in the dark: bullets will not frighten her in the day.
Falsehoods tricked out as truths assail her in vain: she sees through the lie as if it were glass.
The invisible germ will not harm her: nor yet the glittering sunstroke.
A thousand fail to solve the problem, ten thousand choose the wrong turning: but she passes safely through.
He details immortal gods to attend her: upon every road where she must travel.
They take her hand at hard places: she will not stub her toes in the dark.
She may walk among lions and rattlesnakes: among dinosaurs and nurseries of lionettes.
He fills her brim full with immensity of life: he leads her to see the world's desire. — C.S. Lewis

What are you? Who are you? I have never met a Chosen like you in my entire existence. You are everything that is free. You are freedom. And I... I'm the bird trapped in the cage, watching you fly away. But then, you look back at me, you always look back, and you reach through the bars and offer your hand to me. Though I am nothing, though I am just a heartless creature, you still offer me your hand. But I won't take it. I won't because... what will happen to us if I do?

It doesn't matter. None of it matters. Because you were kind to me, you made me laugh - that isn't something I will forget easily, and I will repay you. — Giselle Simlett

Cinderella frowned as she wrestled thin willow branches into place, trying her hand at making a wicker basket. One of the maids had left her with a sample basket and pattern, as well as several started bases, but Cinderella's basket was lopsided, and the branch ends poked out like twigs in a bird's nest. "Are you trying to make it look like that, or is it supposed to resemble this one?" Colonel Friedrich asked, holding up the sample basket. Cinderella glared at him. "Don't you have work to do?" She savagely stabbed the willow in the weaving pattern. "I've — K.M. Shea