Gull Quotes & Sayings

He usually gets what he wants. And what he wants is to keep you safe. He really cares about you, you know."

Her chest constricted with a strange combination of pleasure and pain. She tried to cover her emotions with a playful shrug. "Well, of course he does - I mean, what's not to like? I make incredibly bad, impulsive decisions. Plus, I'm lame, scarred, and crazy - the whole package. — Kathryn Knight

The road to a clinic goes through the pathologic museum and not through the apothecary's shop. — Sir William Gull, 1st Baronet

Acts have consequences, Dixon, they must. These Louts believe all's right now,
that they are free to get on with Lives that to them are no doubt important,
with no Glimmer at all of the Debt they have taken on. That is what I smell'd,
Lethe-Water. One of the things the newly-born forget, is how terrible its Taste, and Smell. In Time, these People are able to forget ev'rything. Be willing but to wait a little, and ye may gull them again and again, however ye wish,
even unto their own Dissolution. In America, as I apprehend, Time is the true River that runs 'round Hell. — Thomas Pynchon

Or you can turn your figures into, for instance, a flock of seagulls, and the formation they fly in and the way in which the wings of each gull beat will be determined by the performance of each division of your company. — Douglas Adams

By fools, knaves fatten; by bigots, priests are well clothed; every knave finds a gull. — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted. — John Le Carre

The Vega Gull is peacock blue with silver wings, more splendid than any bird I've known, and somehow mine to fly. She's called The Messenger, and has been designed and built with great care and skill to do what should be impossible - cross an ocean in one brave launch, thirty-six hundred miles of black chop and nothingness - and to take me with her. It — Paula McLain

A gull planed steeply over their heads, a precarious flash of white against the windy blue sky. The short, hacking cry of a baby seemed to merge seamlessly for a moment with the gull's repetitive wail, as if they were one species. One species, Falkender thought, raucous and scavenging; one species calling out in pain. To be human is to be mixed and miscegenated like this. To be lost. — M. John Harrison

Lord, thy children are jaded, and their ears go flat with sound. Marveling in the thunder rumbling of thy voice no longer - they hear not, and the omens of the white gull and the flayed oak are as naught to their purblind sight. The prophecy in the thunder, the foreshadowings of the leaves quivering white, the dismay of the grass bent in the merciless wind are naught, lord. — Sylvia Plath

A new day was starting, the things of the garden were not concerned with our troubles. A blackbird ran across the rose-garden to the lawns in swift, short rushes, stopping now and again to stab at the earth with his yellow beak. A thrush, too, went about his business, and two stout, little wagtails, following one another, and a little cluster of twittering sparrows. A gull poised himself high in the air, silent and alone, and then spread his wings wide and swooped beyond the lawns to the woods and the Happy Valley. These things continued, our worries and anxieties had no power to alter them. — Daphne Du Maurier

Seeing is such a privilege. Who notices the way the screech of a gull looks, the look of a gale, the sight of some fragrance? — Keith Crown

One of the things that made me want to be an actor more than ever was seeing a Chekhov play, "The Sea Gull," when was 14 in the Bronx. — Al Pacino

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep
The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.
The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.
They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep? — Robert Frost

I'd be interested to read Gull's paper on it, and I wish Alan would put it in somewhere. It gives him a relevance to our times, which he doesn't otherwise have. Gull, I mean, not Alan. — Eddie Campbell

I am a sea-gull - no - no, I am an actress. — Anton Chekhov

I should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it; knavery cannot, sure, hide himself in such reverence. — William Shakespeare

A gull on an invisible wire attached through space dragged. You carry the symbol of your frustration into eternity. Then the wings are bigger Father said only who can play a harp. — William Faulkner

When expression returned, it was outrage. "Oh, that - " Wells couldn't think of anything bad enough to call
Law.
"Rat bastard is the word you're looking for," Tom filled in for him.
Wells turned and stalked back up the dock.
A gull alighted on the boards at Tom's feet. It cocked a beady eye up at him. Tom gestured with his beer
bottle as he commented to the bird, "You're right. Rat bastard is two words, isn't it. — Jez Morrow

If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it's different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they're very cocky. — Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Never forget that it is not a pneumonia, but pneumonic man who is your patient — William Withey Gull

They drove together under the stars to the lake, where they sat with fishing poles in a metal rowboat and waited for something to bite. Zack ate the toast, Uncle Orson gave some pointers, and then they cast their lines, again and again, into the pale fog. Dawn broke. The sunrise cracked. Clouds settled across the sky. The fog scattered as the air heated. And they still weren't catching anything. And that whole time, the exact same gull was circling overhead. "Nothing's happening," Zack complained. But Uncle Orson smiled at the clouds and smiled at the rowboat and smiled at the gull and smiled at the poles. "Nothing has to happen," Uncle Orson had said. — Matthew Baker

Take no revenge that you have not pondered beneath a starry sky, or on a canyon overlook, or to the lapping of waves and the mewing of a distant gull. — Robert Breault

I never see a ship sailing out of the channel, or a gull soaring over the sand-bar, without wishing I were on board the ship or had wings, not like a dove 'to fly away and be at rest,' but like a gull, to sweep out into the very heart of the storm. — L.M. Montgomery

First, a poem must be magical, then musical as a sea-gull and it must hold fire as well. — Jose Garcia Villa

Hark to the sky of a seagull!
He cries because he's not an eagle.
Oh, what if you were you silly he-gull?
What would you say to your she-gull? — Ogden Nash

You are the gull, Jo, strong and wild, fond of the storm and the wind, flying far out to sea, and happy all alone. — Louisa May Alcott

For most gulls it was not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. — Richard Bach

Survivors look back and see omens, messages they missed.
They remember the tree that died, the gull that splattered onto the hood of the car.
They live by symbols. They read meaning into the barrage of spam on the unused computer, the delete key that stops working, the imagined abandonment in the decision to replace it. — Joan Didion

Happy? Most of the time? Happiness is always a fleeting thing," he said, "It never rests upon anyone as a permanent state, though many of us persist in believing in the foolish idea that if this would just happen or that we would be happy for the rest of our lives. I know moments of happiness just as most other people do. Perhaps I have learned to find it in ways that would pass some people by. I feel the summer heat here at this moment and see the trees and the water and hear that invisible gull overhead. I feel the novelty of having company when I usually come here alone. And this moment brings me happiness. — Mary Balogh

This couldn't be just a lake. No real water was ever blue like that. A light breeze stirred the pin-cherry tree beside the window, ruffled the feathers of a fat sea gull promenading on the pink rocks below. The breeze was full of evergreen spice. — Dorothy Maywood Bird

Who is more responsible than a gull who finds and
follows a meaning, a higher purpose for life? For a thousand
years we have scrabbled after fish heads, but now we have a
reason to live - to learn, to discover, to be free! — Richard Bach

Gull Fletcher," they asked, "did the Magnificent Jonathan say, 'We are in truth the ideas of the Great Gull . . .' or was it, 'We are in fact the ideas of the Great Gull . . .'?" "Please. Call me Fletcher. Just Fletcher Seagull," he would reply, appalled that they would use a term of reverence upon him. "And what difference does it make, which word he used? Both are correct, we are ideas of the Great Gull . . ." But — Richard Bach

Mr. Ferris didn't say anything the whole time. He sat next to me and listened. And when I finished, I looked at him.
He was crying. I'm not lying. He was crying.
I don't think it was because how hard I hit him.
I know how the Black-Backed Gull feels when he looks up into the sky.
Maybe, somehow, Mr. Ferris does too. — Gary D. Schmidt

Despite popular belief to the contrary, there is absolutely no power in intention. The seagull may intend to fly away, may decide to do so, may talk with the other seagulls about how wonderful it is to fly, but until the seagull flaps his wings and takes to the air, he is still on the dock. There's no difference between that gull and all the others. Likewise, there is no difference in the person who intends to do things differently and the one who never thinks about it in the first place. Have you ever considered how often we judge ourselves by our intentions while we judge others by their actions? Yet intention without action is an insult to those who expect the best from you. — Andy Andrews

Jonathan Livingston Seagull ... was no ordinary bird. Most gulls don't bother
to learn more than the simplest facts of flight how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this
gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else,
Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly. — Richard Bach

You can't go about smelling of April and May, the pair of you, and then expect to gull people into thinking you don't mean to get riveted! — Georgette Heyer

Ethology developed its own specialized language about instincts, fixed action patterns (a species' stereotypical behavior, such as the dog's tail wagging), innate releasers (stimuli that elicit specific behavior, such as the red dot on a gull's bill that triggers pecking by hungry chicks), displacement activities (seemingly irrelevant actions resulting from conflicting tendencies, such as scratching oneself before a decision), and so on. Without going into the details of its classical framework, — Frans De Waal

Last-Minute Message For a Time Capsule


I have to tell you this, whoever you are:
that on one summer morning here, the ocean
pounded in on tumbledown breakers,
a south wind, bustling along the shore,
whipped the froth into little rainbows,
and a reckless gull swept down the beach
as if to fly were everything it needed.
I thought of your hovering saucers,
looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,
so it wouldn't be lost forever - -
that once upon a time we had
meadows here, and astonishing things,
swans and frogs and luna moths
and blue skies that could stagger your heart.
We could have had them still,
and welcomed you to earth, but
we also had the righteous ones
who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.
When you go home to your shining galaxy,
say that what you learned
from this dead and barren place is
to beware the righteous ones. — Philip Appleman

Hide me, I cry,
protect me, for I am the youngest, the most naked of you all.
Jinny rides like a gull on the wave ... but I ... am broken into
separate pieces; I am no longer one. — Virginia Woolf

(on grief) And you do come out of it, that's true. After a year, after five. But you don't come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life. — Julian Barnes

The gull sees farthest who flies highest — Richard Bach

In fact, to gull a fool seems to me an exploit worthy of a witty man. — Giacomo Casanova

What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him. — Karen Russell

As she'd hoped, the two of them were the sole occupants of this stretch of windswept beach. Sipping the steaming liquid, she let the familiar peace seep into her soul. The cerulean water sparkled in the morning sun, as if sprinkled with diamonds, and she drew in a cleansing breath of the tangy salt air. She watched a sandpiper play tag with the surf. Listed to the caw of a gull high overhead and the muted thunder of the breaking waves. Felt the breeze caress her cheek. — Irene Hannon

The Nantucketer, he alone resides and riots on the sea; he alone, in Bible language, goes down to it in ships; to and fro ploughing it as his own special plantation. There is his home; there lies his business, which a Noah's flood would not interrupt, though it overwhelmed all the millions in China. He lives on the sea, as prairie cocks in the prairie; he hides among the waves, he climbs them as chamois hunters climb the Alps. For years he knows not the land; so that when he comes to it at last, it smells like another world, more strangely than the moon would to an Earthman. With the landless gull, that at sunset folds her wings and is rocked to sleep between billows; so at nightfall the Nantucketer, out of sight of land, furls his sails, and lays him to his rest, while under his very pillow rush herds of walruses and whales. — Herman Melville

Every community is a gull gliding over a sea of spite, eager for carrion, all too ready to steal, and all too quick to squawk when stolen from. — Brent Weeks

One sparrow is worth a thousand gulls,
When it sings. The gull sits on chimney-tops.
He mocks the guinea, challenges
The crow, inciting various modes.
The sparrow requites one, without intent. — Wallace Stevens

Oh, Fletch, you don't love that! You don't love hatred and evil,of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and help them to see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love. It's fun, when you get the knack of it. — Richard Bach

Alone in her shelter, she allowed herself tears. When her shelter cooled to the touch she called to Gull, "Coming out!" She eased her head out into the smoky air, looked over at Gull. She imaged they both looked like a couple of sweaty, parboiled turtles climbing out of their shells.
"Hello, gorgeous."
She laughed. It hurt her throat, but she laughed. "Hey, handsome. — Nora Roberts

To begin with, you've got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gull, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing more than your thought itself. — Richard Bach

There is darkness on your lantern
and pumpkins in your wind.
and Oh, they clutter up your mind
with their senseless bumping
while your heart is like a sea gull
frozen into a long distance telephone
call.
I'd like to take the darkness
off your lantern and change the pumpkins
into sky fields of ordered comets
and disconnect the refrigerator telephone
that frightens your heart into standing
still. — Richard Brautigan

Through atoms of grey-blue air the sun struck at English fields and lit up marshes and pools, a white gull on a stake, the slow sail of shadows over blunt-headed woods and young corn and flowing hayfields. It beat on the orchard wall, and every pit and grain of the brick was silver pointed, purple, fiery as if soft to touch, as if touched it must melt into hot-baked grains of dust. — Virginia Woolf

I'm not lying, I was a killer Helen Burns. I stepped out on to that stage like I was the Great Esquimaux Curlew. When Jane Eyre came to look at my book
which happened to be Our Town
I handed it to her just right. When Miss Scatchard told me I never cleaned my nails, I was about as quiet and innocent as a Large-Billed Puffin. When she hit me a dozen times with a bunch of twigs, I was the Brown Pelican: I didn't bat an eye
and you try getting hit a dozen times with a bunch of twigs. And when I had to die, people were crying. Really. And you know why? Because I was the Black-Backed Gull, and so people cried like Helen Burns was their best friend. — Gary D. Schmidt

Sea-fever
I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over. — John Masefield

But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight.
The gull inquired into his dream,
which was, I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all. — Elizabeth Bishop

It rose slowly like a gull sensing a reckless blue fish to close to the surface, and then it dived relentlessly for the green, kicked and stopped three feet short of the flag. — Alistair Cooke

And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind. — William Faulkner

Where are you? Have you arrived yet?" she asked eagerly.
"I have. I'm here and it's great. I love it."
"I knew you would!" cried Hannah. "So are you coming down? Help me pull a pint or two?"
"Yeah, sure. Give me half an hour or so, and I'll be there."
"Brilliant. See you soon."
"Bye," replied Layla, hanging up.
No time for eating then, she'd better unpack the car, sort out the bedraggled mess that she was, and get down to the pub. Start learning the ropes.
Hauling one of the bags upstairs, she went into her bedroom and plonked it on the bed. Before doing anything else, however, she couldn't resist peering out of the window again, having to imagine Gull Rock this time as the deepening night had hidden it completely. A year, she thought. That's all I've got, a year. Enough time to get over anyone, surely?
Taking in a deep breath then letting it slowly out, she bloody hoped so. — Shani Struthers

Her eyes drank in the colors of home - the soft gray of an arctic gull's wing. The clear blue heart of an ice floe. — Jennifer Donnelly

This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you. — Mary Oliver

Jonahtan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short,and with these gone from his thought,he lived a long life indeed. — Richard Bach

You don't love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That's what I mean by love. — Richard Bach

He spoke of very simple things- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.
"Set aside," came a voice from the multitude, "even if it be the Law of the Flock?"
"The only true law is that which leads to freedom," Jonathan said. "There is no other. — Richard Bach

Yet, sluggard, wake, and gull thy soul no more With earth's false pleasures, and the world's delight, Whose fruit is fair and pleasing to the sight, But sour in taste, false as the putrid core: Thy flaring glass is gems at her half light; She makes thee seeming rich, but truly poor: She boasts a kernel, and bestows a shell; Performs an inch of her fair-promis'd ell: Her words protest a heav'n; her works produce a hell. — Francis Quarles

Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull's life is so short, and with those gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed. — Richard Bach