Bird Wing Quotes & Sayings

Perfect as the wing of a bird may be, it will never enable the bird to fly if unsupported by the air. Facts are the air of science. Without them a man of science can never rise. — Ivan Pavlov

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

Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring wing, the soul that seems to thirst for sovereignty only, and know not that the flight of this ambitious bird has been from a bosom or home that is filled with ashes. — William Gilmore Simms

Come, fill the Cup, in the fire of Spring
Your Winter-garment of Repentance fling:
The Bird of Time has but a little way
To flutter--and the Bird is on the Wing — Omar Khayyam

He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air's buoyancy even for an hour: the trad was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird. — Jonathan Franzen

My life is a tree, yoke fellow of the earth, pledged by roots too deep for remembrance. To stand hard against the storm. To fill my place. (But high in the branches of my green tree there is a wild bird singing. Wing-free are the wings of my bird; she hath built no mortal nest) — Karle Wilson Baker

Last night I heard a robin singing in the rain,
And the raindrop's patter made a sweet refrain,
Making all the sweeter the music of the strain.
So, I thought, when trouble comes, as trouble will,
Why should I stop singing? Just beyond the hill
It may be that sunshine floods the green world still.
He who faces the trouble with a heart of cheer
Makes the burden lighter. If there falls a tear,
Sweeter is the cadence in the song we hear.
I have learned your lesson, bird with dappled wing,
Listening to your music with its lilt of spring
When the storm-cloud darkens, then's the TIME to sing. — Eben E. Rexford

Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known. Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy, that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists of three elongated fingers with membranes between? — Arthur Conan Doyle

The bird that flutters least is longest on the wing. — William Cowper

It's as if someone fashioned a small golden bird and then attached a ring around it. The bird is connected to the ring only by its wing tips. — Suzanne Collins

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.

I seemed like a baby bird keeping its truly innocent animal lusts hidden under its wing. I was being tempted, not by the desire of possession, but simply by unadorned temptation itself. — Yukio Mishima

You're chasing the dragon, you're chasing the high. A bird with one wing, who's still trying to fly. — Ozzy Osbourne

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

And when she's fragile like this, she's a little lost bird looking for ts nest. So i give her my wing to hide under. — Maggie Stiefvater

A believer is a bird in a cage, a freethinker is an eagle parting the clouds with tireless wing. — Robert Green Ingersoll

God continually turns you from one state of feeling to another, revealing truth by means of opposites.... So that you may have the two wings of fear and hope; for the bird with one wing is unable to fly.... — Jalaluddin Rumi

To a Young Poet Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird. Bird and wing together Go down, one feather. No thing that ever flew, Not the lark, not you, Can die as others do. — Edna St. Vincent Millay

See the wild birds on the wing,
Hear the bells that sweetly ring,
When you feel like singin', sing
Keep a-goin'! — Frank Lebby Stanton

Everywhere on the Continent, the tourist is looked upon as a bird to be plucked, and presently the bird himself feebly comes to regard plucking as his proper destiny and abjectly holds out his wing so long as there is a feather left on it. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The old stories must be learned anew, studied again within the context of a world at odds with itself and only able to be redeemed by the brush of the wing of the great bird of spirit. — Michael Meade

Like a bird with broken wing
that has traveled through wind for years ...
I sleep and my heart stays awake ... — Giorgos Seferis

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,- When he beats his bars and would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings- I know why the caged bird sings! — Paul Laurence Dunbar

Skin. Blue sparks writhed across his hands like tiny snakes. Rain washed his face. "This is the best," he shouted, over the roar of the storm. As if it understood him, the bird began to rise higher, every wing-beat a clap of thunder, and it swooped and dove and tumbled through the dark clouds. "In my dream, I was hunting you," said Shadow, his words ripped away by the wind. "In my dream. I had to bring back a feather." Yes. The word was a static crackle in the radio of his mind. They — Neil Gaiman

Don't let someone keep putting out the flame God keeps re-lighting, we all have a purpose. As a wing to a bird. As wind that goes the destiny over the sea. — Anthony Liccione

Broken wings don't mend that way; the way you think broken wings do. Once that wing has taken time to mend; that bird has forgotten how to fly — S.L. Northey

I am strong and on the road to recovery away from the place that caused so much pain. I am free. I am a bird whose broken wing is now mended and I am able to escape the steel cage I was once trapped in. — Mary E. Palmerin

In days of yore, the poet's pen From wing of bird was plunder'd, Perhaps of goose, but now and then, From Jove's own eagle sunder'd. But now, metallic pens disclose Alone the poet's numbers; In iron inspiration glows, Or with the poet slumbers. — John Adams

Let your love fly like a bird on a wing
And let your love bind you to all livin' things
And let your love shine and you'll know what I mean
That's the reason. — Lawrence Eugene Williams

A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from his new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man's hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence - the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird's wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they are little. His comrades look at him with large eyes thoughtfully. Moreover, they fear vaguely that the weight of a finger upon him might send him headlong, precipitate the tragedy, hurl him at once into the dim, gray unknown.
("An Episode Of War") — Stephen Crane

She loved your mother', Taliesin said gently. 'This is her farewell.'
As he spoke, a chanted melody began inside the chamber, a song without words. Yet it spoke of the beauty in the heart of the flame, of the passing glory of the white bird on the wing, and the blossom of the sea spray under the shining prow. It sang of a mother with her baby, of the hard love between men and women, and the gentle rest that comes at last to all. — Rosalind Miles

When the whistling-thrush released
A deep sweet secret on the trembling air;
Blackbird on the wing, bird of the forest shadows,
Black rose in the long ago summer,
This was your song:
It isn't time that's passing by,
It is you and I. — Ruskin Bond

So I care for this restless fluttering in my heart as if it were a bird with a broken wing, in the hope that it will one day heal and fly. — Hazel Gaynor

The immense desert, empty as a bird's wing, inspired him with promise. — Mike Bond

If the wind had taken me to you,
I would have held tight to the skirts of the wind.
I miss you so much that I would fly to you faster than a bird;
But how can a bird with a clipped wing fly — Rumi

I've always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it's no longer an eagle and it's going to crash. — Bill Moyers

A small child has no ambitions, he has no desires. He is so absorbed in the moment - a bird on the wing catches his eye so totally; just a butterfly, its beautiful colors, and he is enchanted; the rainbow in the sky ... and he cannot conceive that there can be anything more significant, richer than this rainbow. And the night full of stars, stars beyond stars ... Innocence is rich, it is full, it is pure. — Rajneesh

You ... 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 wing and removing its ability to fly ... A bird is not defined by being grounded but by his ability to fly. Remember this, humans are defined not by their limitations, but by the intentions I have for them; not by what they seem to be, but by everything it means to be created in my image. Love is NOT the limitation; love is the flying. I AM love. — Wm. Paul Young

Aaron's therapist calls him a wounded bird, but, I ask you, who wouldn't care for a wounded bird? What kind of person sees a bird with a broken wing, cat on the horizon, and walks on by? — David James Poissant

You've got to believe in yourself, or no one will believe in you. Imagination is like a bird on the wing, flying free for you to use. — Ozzy Osbourne

Suddenly a dog bayed in the wood, and the dancers stopped, and going up two by two, knelt down, and kissed the man's hands. As they did so, a little smile touched his proud lips, as a bird's wing touches the water and makes it laugh. But there was disdain in it. — Oscar Wilde

Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring The Winter Garment of Repentance fling: The Bird of Time has but a little way To fly-and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing. — Omar Khayyam

He had his eyes closed and
rocked himself so much that everyone thought he would
soon crash to the ground. And then it happened. He
crashed to the ground. Surprised, he lay on the ground
on his side, not sure what had happened, looking around.
Next he jumped up and listened to Matica's singing again,
starting to rock himself once more. His eyes closed slowly,
his beak opened. And then he crashed to the ground a second
time. This time he kept lying down, spreading his free
wing up into the air and waving it to the tune of the melody.
Strange sounds came out of his beak. It was a grunt
but more than a grunt, as if he was really enjoying himself,
as if he would follow Matica's words and would sing
or hum as well. — Gigi Sedlmayer

A bird cannot fly with one wing only. Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women. — Valentina Tereshkova

Who has the right to decide that the supreme value is a world without insects even though it would be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight. The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power. — Rachel Carson

Buddha also said that the Dharma, like a bird, needs two wings to fly, and that the wing that balances Wisdom is compassion. — Sylvia Boorstein

High in the sky is a bird on a wing Please carry me with you Far far away from the mad rushing crowd Please carry me with you — Tom Springfield

The raven settled back. "Dog is Cordi."
"Said that." Percy took flight from Kate's shoulder and landed next to the raven. "First."
Copernicus swatted the parrot with a wing.
Percy ducked his head, feathers fluffing, and twisted, bumping the other bird with his rear. David intervened before a bird brawl broke out in earnest. "Enough, you two. — Gayla Drummond

(First lines) Now a traveler must make his way to Noon City by the best means he can, for there are no trains or buses headed in that direction, though six days a week a truck from the Chuberry Turpentine Company collects mail and supplies at the nextdoor town of Paradise Chapel; occasionally a person bound for Noon City can catch a ride with the driver of the truck, Sam Ratcliffe. It's a rough trip no matter how you come, for these washboard roads will loosen up even brandnew cars pretty fast, and hitchhikers always find the going bad. Also, this is lonesome country, and here in the sunken marshes where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark water like drowned corpses. Often the only movement on the landscape is a broken spiral of smoke from a sorry-looking farmhouse on the horizon, or a wing-stiffened bird, silent and arrow-eyed, circling endlessly over the bleak deserted pinewoods. — Truman Capote

Like bones to the human body, the axle to the wheel, the wing to the bird, and the air to the wing, so is liberty the essence of life. Whatever is done without it is imperfect. — Jose Marti

To fall asleep like a bird. To have a wing you could stick your head under, a
world of branches suspended above the earthly world, barely glimpsed down
below, muffled and remote. Once you begin rejection your present state, there is no knowing where you can arrive. — Italo Calvino

Muhammad Ali has a lot to answer for. When he lit the flame at the Atlanta Olympics there wasn't a dry eye on the planet. Why were we crying? Because a great sportsman had been reduced to this-a shuffling, mumbling, twitching cripple. A man who once danced like a butterfly now shook like blancmange.
We always remember sportsmen. When the body deserts a scientist like Stephan Hawking we figure that he'll be able to live in his mind, but a crippled athlete is like a bird with a broken wing. When you soar the heights the landing is harder. — Michael Robotham

A Girl is gone! A Girl is lost! A simple Rustic Maiden but Yesterday swung upon the Pasture Gate, with Knowledge nowhere, yet is now, to-day, no better than her Mother, and her Mother's Mother before her! Soiled! Despoiled! Handled! Mauled! Rumpled! Rummaged! Ransacked! No purer than Fish in Sea, no sweater than Bird on Wing, no better than Beasts of Earth! — Djuna Barnes

Here you play in the street, little chicken. Some day an automobile will run over you; and if it kills you, that will be the best thing that can happen. It may only break your leg or your wing. Then all of your life you will drag along in misery. Life is too hard for you, little bird. — John Steinbeck

It is impossible to think about the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved. It is impossible for a bird to fly on only one wing. — Swami Vivekananda

Then Ged pitied her. She was like a white deer caged, like a white bird wing-clipped, like a silver ring in an old man's finger. — Ursula K. Le Guin

The closer the bird is to the surface of the water, the firmer and more inelastic is the uplift of the rising air. The bird appears to almost feel the surface with the tip of its weather wing. — Lawrence Hargrave

There is a beautiful spirit breathing now Its mellowed richness on the clustered trees, And, from a beaker full of richest dyes, Pouring new glory on the autumn woods, And dipping in warm light the pillared clouds. Morn on the mountain, like a summer bird, Lifts up her purple wing, and in the vales The gentle wind, a sweet and passionate wooer, Kisses the blushing leaf, and stirs up life Within the solemn woods of ash deep-crimsoned, And silver beech, and maple yellow-leaved, Where Autumn, like a faint old man, sits down By the wayside a-weary. — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He walked outside onto the terrace and sat. Obviously settled and comfortable, he poured coffee. There were ways and ways to gain trust, he thought. With
a bird with a broken wing, it took patience, care, and a gentle touch. With a high-strung horse that had been whipped, it took diligence and the risk of being kicked. With a woman, it took a certain amount of charm. He was willing to combine all three. — Nora Roberts

She limped, unaided around the house, like a bird with its wing broken. Tame, because it couldn't fly away. All her time was taken up with managing herself, working out new ways to do things. Being a different person in the world. — Joan London

Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: 'Men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching on a twig.' — Chinua Achebe

He spent a lot of time flying.
He learnt to communicate with birds and discovered that their conversation was fantastically boring. It was all to do with wind speed, wing spans, power-to-weight ratios and a fair bit about berries. Unfortunately, he discovered, once you have learnt birdspeak you quickly come to realize that the air is full of it the whole time, just inane bird chatter. There is no getting away from it. — Douglas Adams

There is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of woman is improved. It is not possible for a bird to fly on only one wing.
There is no hope for that family or country where there is no estimation of women, where they live in sadness. For this reason, they have to be raised first. — Swami Vivekananda

the evolutions of the bird on the wing are quite as safe and infinitely more rapid and beautiful than the movements of either the quadruped on the land or the fish in the water. — David McCullough

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

They cripple the bird's wing, and then condemn it for not flying as fast as they. — Malcolm X

Mozart's mental grip never loosens; he never abandons himself to any one sense; even at his most ecstatic moments his mind is vigorous, alert, and on the wing. He dives unerringly on to his finest ideas like a bird of prey, and once an idea is seized he soars off again with an undiminished power. — Walter J. Turner

Everything, even herself, was now unbearable to her. She wished that, taking wing like a bird, she could fly somewhere, far away to regions of purity, and there grow young again. — Gustave Flaubert

The shield wall reeks of shit, and all a man wants is to be home, to be anywhere but on this field that prepares for battle, but none of us will turn and run or else we will be despised for ever. We pretend we want to be there, and when the wall at last advances, step by step, and the heart is thumping fast as a bird's wing beating, the world seems unreal. — Bernard Cornwell

I averted my eyes, looked around, and stumbled through all the faces in the room till they finally rested on his. He was standing like a scared bird, waving one wing and using the other to hide his scar. Aya Rabah- Scars — Refaat Alareer

Classical virtuosity is more than technique, line, proportion, and balance. It is as if the performer and spectator come together to hold in their hands a bird with a broken wing. The creature can be felt to stir, to struggle for freedom. Its life responds to human warmth; its wing might brush your check as it flies away. — Gelsey Kirkland

A Leprecaun without a pot of gold is like a rose without perfume, a bird without a wing, or an inside without an outside. — James Stephens

It has thrown off its disguise as a meal and has revealed itself to me for what it is, a large dead bird. I'm eating a wing. It's the wing of a tame turkey, the stupidest bird in the world, so stupid it can't even fly any more. I am eating lost flight. — Margaret Atwood

Once a bird had lost his ability to fly, not much else could be done in the way of mending him. Losing a wing was a little like losing a leg and the freedom of movement, of spirit, it granted you; most people could live without the former but not the latter. — Rebecca Rasmussen

The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in the blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. — E.B. White

I am neither left wing nor right wing. I am middle-of-the-bird. — Pat Paulsen

I guess everyone has a bird urge when they look down heights, a desire to jump, without wing or buoyant sail. Fear of heights is fear of a desire to jump. — Amruta Patil

A bird with a broken wing cannot survive nor will a man with a broken spirit endure. — Kilroy J. Oldster

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone. — Oscar Wilde

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

I caught a glimpse of happiness, and saw it was a bird on a branch, fixing to take wing. — Richard Peck

But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena's owl of wisdom and Merlin's companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind. — Mary Oliver

Who told you I was called Carl David?" "A little bird, Monsieur." "Does it fly from me to you? Then one can tie a message under its wing when needful. — Charlotte Bronte

A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled, down, down to the water — Kate Chopin

Even towards yourself you have to be tremendously loving, because you too are god's form. One has to love oneself, one has to love all. Love is prayer. And the more you love, the more you will feel your consciousness expanding, becoming bigger - because whomsoever we love becomes part of our being, we include him. Mm? A bird on the wing, and we look at the bird with great love - suddenly we are not two: the bird is inside us and we are inside the bird. — Rajneesh

How can I be kind? How can I find bird-relief in the nest-building of day-to-day? Necessity supplies no velvet wing with which to escape. I am indeed and mortally pierced with the seeds of love. — Elizabeth Smart

People ask me, "Are you right wing or are you left wing?" and I always say, "I'm for the whole bird." A one-winged bird didn't ever get off the ground. — Rick Warren

How can the bird that is born for joy Sit in a cage and sing? How can a child, when fears annoy, But droop his tender wing, And forget his youthful spring? — William Blake

Against the wounded sky, a lone angel circles above us. No, not an angel. Light glints off curved metal on one of the edges of his wings. They are not shaped like a bird's wings. It's a giant bat-wing shape. My heart speeds up with my need to shout out to him. Could — Susan Ee

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

A bird's wing, comrades," he said, "is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg. — George Orwell