Quotes & Sayings About Nesting

Life is complex and prone to being pedantic
Always little things crawl, flutter
and creep in.
Nesting in cracks in our psyches
Gibbering, whispering and scratching
on sanity's walls.
Messages without form or reason
Teasing us to come out
And blend in. — Neil Leckman

In two of your poems you called that central
Passage of womanhood a wound,
Instead of a curtain guarding a silken
Trail of sighs. How many men,
Upon regarding such beauty, helplessly
Touching it, recklessly needing
To enter its warmth again and again,
Have assumed it embodies their own ache
Of absence, the personal
Gash that has punished their lives.
So endowed of anatomy, any woman
Who has been loved
Knows that her tenderest blush
Of tissue is a luxe burden of have.
Although it bleeds, this is only to cleanse,
To prepare yet another nesting for love.
It is not a wound, friend.
It is a home for you.
It is a way into the world. — Michele Wolf

Twisting through the thorn-thick underbrush, scratched and exhausted, one turns suddenly to find an unexpected waterfall, not half a mile from the nearest road, a spot so hard to reach that no one comes a hiding place, a shrine for dragonflies and nesting jays, a sign that there is still one piece of property that won't be owned. — Dana Gioia

We're every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls. My mother is an 8 year old girl. My grandson is a 74 year old retiree whose kidneys just failed. And that's the glue between me and you. That's the screws and nails. We live in a house made of each other and if that sounds strange that's because it is. — George Watsky

Seasonally ploughing and harvesting crops will mash up a few moles, slice through a burrow of field mice and crush any ground-nesting bird chicks. Far more significant, however, is the creation of the field in the first place: an act that replaces entire ecosystems, along with all their animal inhabitants. — Tristram Stuart

Grief, I believe, is cumulative-each experience of loss shaping the size and scope of the next, each loss holding reverberations of the losses a person has experienced over a lifetime. The pain of grief is real, but it's also an echo and an aftershock, the spirits of past emotions rising up to grip your hand again. Examine one loss and you're likely to find another inside of it, and then another inside of that one, all that grief repeating like a set of Russian nesting dolls. — Meg Donohue

It was magic to be above [the clouds], to see their uppermost contours, the way they caught the light and held it, their vast shadows moving upon the face of the earth. I wished I could open the window and know what the world sounded like at that altitude. I thought about the solitude of that world, how it must be inhabited by the voice of the wind, only. ... I thought about what my crows saw as they flew above canyons and treetops, the birds-eye view of life. They would recognize specific trees, perches, and nesting sites from a completely different perspective than I could. Their maps differed from mine; they knew the topography, the contours of the landscape, on a much grander scale. — Elizabeth J. Church

You can't keep the birds of sadness from flying over your head, but you can keep them from nesting in your hair. — Sharon Creech

Kilgore Trout, incidentally, could never be President of the United States without a Constitutional amendment. He hadn't been born inside the country. His birthplace was Bermuda. His father, Leo Trout, while remaining an American citizen, worked there for many years for the Royal Ornithological Society - guarding the only nesting place in the world for Bermuda Erns. — Kurt Vonnegut

Pretty much the day I stopped being laureate, the poems that had been few and far between came back to me, like birds in the evening nesting in a tree. — Andrew Motion

People were like Russian nesting dolls - versions stacked inside the latest edition. But they all still lived inside, unchanged, just out of sight. — Megan Miranda

Besides, this was the gentle-going hour in which he hated Annawadi least. The pale sun lent the sewage lake a sparkling silver cast, and the parrots nesting at the far side of the lake could still be heard over the jets. — Katherine Boo

Sat in the Jacuzzi last night looking at the dark recesses of the nozzles. Remembering the story I wrote about spiders nesting there. Multifaceted eyes watching me watching them, almost like when you set two mirrors parallel to each other, accept this infinity ends up in some fuzzy creature's belly. I have a nice picture of a Hobo spider in my backyard, venom dripping off one of those nasty fangs of theirs. Son of a bitch is looking at me and his mouth is watering waiting for me to stick my hand under the rock he's nested in. I hate it when you spray a spider with insecticide and it curls up for a few minutes, then uncurls and staggers home. I'm like an arachnid cheap date that sucks!!
I just picture the spider staggering into the nest and the female spider asking, "Is that Raid I smell on you?"
The spider just smiles (interesting thing to picture) and passes out. — Neil Leckman

She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame. — Louise Erdrich

An acre of poppies and a forest of spruce boggle no one's mind. Even ten square miles of wheat gladdens the hearts of most ... No, in the plant world, and especially among the flowering plants, fecundity is not an assault on human values. Plants are not our competitors; they are our prey and our nesting materials. We are no more distressed at their proliferation than an owl is at a population explosion among field mice ... but in the animal world things are different, and human feelings are different ... Fecundity is anathema only in the animal. "Acres and acres of rats" has a suitably chilling ring to it that is decidedly lacking if I say, instead, "acres and acres of tulips". — Annie Dillard

Re. the Caribbean Conservation Corporation
Everybody in the organization has subscribed to the original concept that its most important attributes are a single-minded resistance to any distraction from the central aim of keeping watch over the Tortuguero nesting colony and a determination to make it the most thoroughly studied sea turtle population in the world. — Archie Carr

I was impressed, and also unnerved. Being around Nikolai was always like this, watching him shift and change, revealing secrets as he went. He reminded me of the wooden nesting dolls I'd played with as a child. Except instead of getting smaller, he just kept getting grander and more mysterious. Tomorrow, he'd probably tell me he'd built a pleasure palace on the moon. Tough to get to, but quite a view. — Leigh Bardugo

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight. — Gloria Steinem

I learned vulnerability is a bit like those Russian nesting dolls, the ones that get smaller and smaller in size when you twist the top off and pull another one out. In the end, you're left with the tiniest doll, that one nugget. No more layers to take off. Nothing left but a surprise, the surprise of finding out the littlest doll is the most solid of them all. It doesn't hide inside of itself. — Hannah Brencher

The unusual thing about quiet is that when you seek it, it is almost impossible to achieve. When you strive for quiet, you become impatient, and impatience is itself a noiseless noise. You can block every superficial sound, but, with each new layer extinguished, a next rises up, finer and more entrapping, until you arrive at last in the infinite attitude of your own riotous mind. Inside is where all the memories last like wells, and the unspoken wishes like golden buds, and the pain that you keep, lingering and implicit, staying inside, nesting inside, articulating, articulating, through to the day you die. (p. 240) — Hilary Thayer Hamann

I've never been a hoarder but I love nesting. — Tsh Oxenreider

The butcher bird makes its noise
And asks you to agree
With its brutal nesting habits
And its pointless savagery
Now, the nightingale sings to you
And raises up the ante
I put one hand on your round ripe heart
And the other down your panties — Nick Cave

Let me say right here, if I haven't made it clear, that I have seen as many pale, naked old-man parts in the last twenty-four hours to bruise my delicate psyche for a lifetime, so don't be surprised if you someday find me wandering the moors at midnight, a crazed look in my eye, babbling about albino Tater Tots nesting in Brillo pads and being pursued by sagging man ass, because that shit can happen when you've been traumatized. — Christopher Moore

Throughout the living world, we find living systems nesting within other living systems. — Fritjof Capra

He took a hairpin out of my untidy hair (by now my complicated arrangement of ringlets must have looked as if a couple of birds had been nesting there); he took a strand of it and wound it around his finger. With his other hand he began stroking my face, and then he bent down and kissed me again, this time very cautiously. I closed my eyes - and the same thing happened as before: my brain suffered that delicious break in transmission. — Kerstin Gier

The Forbidden Room and Seances are related. Both of them are made up of lost film matter adapted through the medium of me and Evan, but the way they present themselves is totally different. One of them is this big Russian nesting doll of movie narratives and the other is much shorter experience on the internet. — Guy Maddin

How readily the bluebirds become our friends and neighbors when we offer them suitable nesting retreats! — John Burroughs

lithographic
landscape beyond the forgotten

ocean of the innermost ear

where one boy, with a wolf for a heart, wants
to eat the songbird nesting inside the other — John D. Fry

The American punctuation rule sticks in the craw of every computer scientist, logician, and linguist, because any ordering of typographical delimiters that fails to reflect the logical nesting of the content makes a shambles of their work. — Steven Pinker

That night I kept thinking about Pandora's box. I wondered why someone would put a good thing as Hope in a box with sickness and kidnapping and murder. It was fortunate that it was there, though. If not, people would have the birds of sadness nesting in their hair all the time, because of nuclear war and the greenhouse effect and bombs and stabbings and lunatics.
There must have been another box with all the good things in it, like sunshine and love and trees and all that. Who had the good fortune to open that one, and was there one bad thing down there in the bottom of the good box? Maybe it was Worry. Even when everything seems fine and good, I worry that something will go wrong and change everything. — Sharon Creech

For many years now, my source for salvific chicken soup has been the Sanamluang Cafe on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Kingsley Drive: crystalline broth, flecks of fried garlic, and a moist, steamed bird nesting on thick rice noodles and bean sprouts has stanched many a misery. — Michelle Huneven

As the sun shines low and red across the water, I wade into the ocean. The water is still high and brown and murky with the memory of the storm, so if there's something below it, I won't know it. But that's part of this, the not knowing. The surrender to the possibilities beneath the surface. It wasn't the ocean that killed my father, in the end. The water is so cold that my feet go numb almost at once. I stretch my arms out to either side of me and close my eyes. I listen to the sound of water hitting water. The raucous cries of the terns and the guillemots in the rocks of the shore, the piercing, hoarse questions of the gulls above me. I smell seaweed and fish and the dusky scent of the nesting birds onshore. Salt coats my lips, crusts my eyelashes. I feel the cold press against my body. The sand shifts and sucks out from under my feet in the tide. I'm perfectly still. The sun is red behind my eyelids. The ocean will not shift me and the cold will not take me. — Maggie Stiefvater

We'll help," said one boy, his finger far enough up his nose to tickle a memory nesting in his frontal lobe. — Christopher Moore

Cocooning is about insulation and avoidance, peace and protection, coziness and control - a sort of hyper-nesting. — Faith Popcorn

Sure, he was attracted to her, but women always had to go beyond that.
Women [had] nesting fantasies. It wasn't long before they were
redecorating your apartment and criticizing your choice of mustard. — Janet Evanovich

You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,You are soft as the nesting dove.Come to my heart and bring it restAs the bird flies home to its welcome nest. — Paul Laurence Dunbar

One naughty little woodpecker
Another day pecking your holes
Ruining the the forest, tree wrecker
The angry wood god turned your little beak into a poison knife
Poor little wood pecker, your nesting holes are all tainted
Your foods with toxins rife
Touch your friends, and they all will die falling to your feet
Oh, sad little woodpecker
Poisonous tears, shining brightly as they stream down your cheeks — Shiro

It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it's all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It's our choice. — Andre Agassi

I was thinking. What if the world was like one of those Russian nesting dolls? What if we only saw one surface of it, the outside, but there was all kinds of other stuff going on, too? All the time. Underneath. But we just don't see it, even if we're part of it? Even if we're in it? And what if you had a chance to see a different layer, like flipping a channel or something? Would you want to look? Even if what you saw looked like hell? Or worse? — Andrew Smith

Most of us are like those Russian nesting dolls, presenting a slightly different visage to the world depending on which world we're dealing with at the time. The outermost doll isn't a lie; mine still offers part of who I am, but it's not all of who I am. As I get closer to people, the nesting dolls open and the masks change. But it's a rare person whom I allow to see what's at my core: my innermost thoughts and fears, my dreams and desires, my pettiness and peevishness. — Paul Asay

Pines and spruces can't be sheared like yew or hemlock, but they are stately in large landscapes, where their eventual size is a plus. (But they are a nightmare in small yards, where their eventual size is like having a brontosaurus nesting in the front yard.) — Cassandra Danz

I love you, Levi."
"Thank God for it because I love you too."
Her laugh was back in his house again. Her scent on his sheets.
Her crap on his bathroom counter and her stuff in the drawers in his armoire.
She lived in him and he had no plans to ever let that change.
It didn't matter that she was younger than he was. All that mattered was that she loved him and he loved her. The rest they could work out as time passed. She'd keep him in line. Decorate their house and fill it with music and love. And one day with children.
They had time, he realized. Time to be in love and be engaged. Time for her art and his job, time for weddings and honeymoons and nesting. She was his, forever. As deeply as he was hers.
Made the groveling worth it.

~~Sway — Lauren Dane

Um, I guess you're still mad about that whole harpy fiasco. I swear, I thought those caves were empty." "How did you overlook a hundred harpies nesting in that cave? Did the giant carpet of bones not tip you off?" "Oh, sure, complain now. But we found the trod to Athens, didn't we? — Julie Kagawa

His circuitry is all different, she told her twin sister. His ambition differed in essence as well as degree. Whereas with others she could tell the point at which she might assert certain proprietary rights (the very first hints of nesting behavior), with this runner there was never any question about her rearranging his priorities. This rankled her from the start. She might have the ability to make him miserable, perhaps, but she swayed him not an inch from his path. He told her as much, and she found out quickly he meant it. There was something in the ferocity of his dedication that challenged the formula of her femininity. She responded to the challenge without even realizing she was doing so. — John L. Parker Jr.

There's a mathematics to nesting, I'm sure, that explains how length of stay + space available = accumulating way too much stuff. — Amy Smith

Watch now," Handful told her. "This rabbit goes under the log, and this rabbit goes over the log. You make them hop like that all the way down. See, that's how you make a plait - hop over, hop under." Nina took possession of the rabbits and the log and created a remarkably passable braid. Handful and I oohed and ahhed as if she'd carved a Florentine statue. It was a winter evening like so many others that passed in quiet predictability: the room flushed with lamplight, a fire nesting on the grate, an early dark flattening against the windows, while my two companions fussed over me at the dresser. — Sue Monk Kidd

This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation that is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeated stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. — Walter Benjamin

She was familiar with this immaterial hunger. There had been times when her entire life had seemed characterized by this craving. By this compelling, incessant desire for something. Maybe it was like that for everyone. Surely it was for some people. It was the reason they ate too much, drank too much, and became deliberately self-destructive. But what was it they wanted? Was it different for everyone? And what was she really craving? — Cynthia Rogers Parks

Under the Walnut Tree

When I face what has left my life,
I bow. I walk outside into the cold,
rain nesting in my hair.
All the houses near me
have their lights on. Somewhere,
there is a deep listening.
I stand in the dark for a long time
under the walnut tree, unable
to tell anyone, not even the night,
what I know. I feel the darkness
rush towards me, and I open my arms. — Lynn Martin

By providing safe nesting sites, woodpeckers are thus keystone organisms for a vast assemblage of birds the world over, including many owls, parrots, parids, flycatchers. — Bernd Heinrich

In every creepy movie ever made, the barn is the prime nesting ground for the things you don't know you're looking for and always regret finding. — Rick Yancey

The cooing of pigeons, nesting in the wall outside; shimmering and unexpected like a first hyacinth gently tearing open its nutritious heart to release its flower of sound, mauve and satin-soft, letting into my still dark and shuttered bedroom as through an opened window the warmth, the brightness, the fatigue of a first fine day. — Marcel Proust

Birds nested among the gutters and eaves of Unseen University, although it was noticeable that however great the pressure on the nesting sites they never, ever, made nests in the invitingly open mouths of the gargoyles that lined the rooftops, much to the gargoyles' disappointment. — Terry Pratchett

What is a turducken? An exclusive culinary creation available by special order from some little Cajun town down south. Entirely deboned, a turducken consists of a turkey, stuffed with duck, stuffed with a chicken, like an edible Russian nesting doll. Some were stuffed with alligator, crap, shrimp; my favorite was the traditional cornbread variety. — S.A. Bodeen

Domesticity has to mean nesting. Otherwise, six months go by, and you don't know where your underwear is. — Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio

They stood among their horses in the squalid little alameda while the wind ransacked the trees and the birds nesting in the gray twilight cried out and clutched the limbs and the snow swirled and blew across the little square and shrouded the shapes of the mud buildings beyond and made mute the cries of the vendors who'd followed them. — Cormac McCarthy

Do you think yourself a string too short to save? Do you think that you are lank and straight, a linear bit with no connection fore or aft? Fear not your insignificance. Nature has a drawer for you. Yes, nature garners all the string too short to save, and mice visit that drawer. Here's nesting material! Yes, you will be interwoven, be it now or later. — Sena Jeter Naslund

Once she was standing by her locker and her puka shells broke and scattered and she made a joke about it but he could tell she was upset. He wanted to buy her some more. He wanted to give her a million strands of little nesting polished shells, and tropical flowers and ice creams and lemonades and a pale blue surfboard to teach her to surf on and anything else she wanted. Instead he let his checkered Vans step on one of the rolling shells and crush it. — Francesca Lia Block

In the autumn, the entire backyard became a mass of lollipop-yellow leaves, so bright they lit up the night like daylight. Birds nesting in the trees would get confused because they couldn't tell what time of day it was, and they would stay awake for days until they dropped out of the branches with exhaustion. — Sarah Addison Allen

worked in New York my whole life - actually lived only about twenty blocks away - and had never even heard of this place, or the Freedom Tunnel, for that matter. This city never failed to surprise. Hamster got out of the car, his big eyes blinking through the tangled gray mop of his hair as he looked around. We listened to the cooing of pigeons nesting in the crevices of the raised roadbed above as we waited. — James Patterson

After twenty-two years of marriage, we had outgrown the challenge of making something out of nothing. The nesting instincts just weren't there anymore. I no longer hyperventilated over a melon keeper that I bought at a Tupperware party. I now worshipped at the shrine of convenience and Sara Lee. Bill no longer rushed home to make bird houses in the basement. He wanted to sleep in his BarcaLounger so he wouldn't be so tired when he went to bed.
It was as if we were closing the door on the years of struggle. It wasn't fun anymore. — Erma Bombeck

the happiness of every artist fits into my palm" says the homeless with no arms "when i had my hands i wrote beautiful pieces of poetry the poems were nesting under my nails i just had to snap with my fingers and rhymes were born" there — Zoltan Komor

I have so much joy in my life. I love my husband and kids so much. So much love. I'm also more focused now on spending more time at home and in town instead of going on tour. Because of that nesting, I find that I'm even more into writing and creating. — Lisa Loeb

I hate the thought that I'm just some kind of Russian nesting doll with the big outside and inevitably, rattling around under all the layers, a crude little peg with a face is the truth of me. — Wendy McClure

The structure of the human brain is enormously complex. It contains about 10 billion nerve cells (neurons), which are interlinked in a vast network through 1,000 billion junctions (synapses). The whole brain can be divided into subsections, or sub-networks, which communicate with each other in a network fashion. All this results in intricate patterns of intertwined webs, networks of nesting within larger networks. — Fritjof Capra

It's like a nesting doll of imagination! It's like a painting of a painting! It's like the wind catching a chill from the wind, or a wave taking a dip in the ocean. It's like reading a novel that merely describes another novel. It's like music tapping its foot to a tune and saying 'Oh! I love this song! — Michelle Cuevas

Have you ever seen Russian nesting dolls?"
Thrown by the questions, she opened her eyes. Why would he suddenly speak about a child's toy? "I own a few of them."
"Then you must understand that undressing you is like playing with one of those dolls. I open one to find another beneath it. I took away your gown to find you are still as clothed as you were a moment ago and I wonder how many more layers I will have to work through to get down to you - the doll I'm searching for. — Dominique Eastwick

We lay on our sides, like spoons nesting in a drawer. My arm ended up under her head, like a pillow. She curled snugly along the inside of my body, so easy and natural, as if she had been designed to fit there. - Kvothe - The Name Of The Wind - pg 629 — Patrick Rothfuss

You cannot stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them nesting in your hair. — Eva Ibbotson

Another persistent problem is that the Gothic ornament can become a maintenance nightmare. The cracks, joints, and attachments are a magnet for ivy, nesting animals, and moisture. It is rare indeed to see a Gothic structure more than a few decades old that doesn't have some sort of ongoing structural maintenance problems. — Douglas Keister

The deeper I went into the valley, the greater the rewards. First, it was a clump of birches, the bottoms wrapped in thick fog, the uppermost branches clear now, nesting birds waking with bright-eyed songs. Next, I passed under the pines, browned needles underfoot, and was transported to the quiet moments of rapture under such branches throughout my life. The last, and worth all other gifts combined, was that moment when the valley inhaled, taking with it the fog. In its place, so close to where I was standing, there they were, the year's first flowers, the pure white snowdrops springing from the dark-green foliage under the elms. It was as if the clouds were swept in an instant from the sky leaving only the quiet delicacy of the stars. — Megan Rich

Once or twice I saw evidence that rats had been nesting among the books, rearranging them to make snug two and three-level homes for themselves and smearing dung on the covers to form the rude characters of their speech. — Gene Wolfe

Being around Nikolai was always like this, watching him shift and change, revealing secrets as he went. He reminded me of the wooden nesting dolls I'd played with as a child. Except instead of getting smaller, he just kept getting grander and more mysterious. — Leigh Bardugo

Thyroid secretions in adequate amounts appear to be essential for development of the egg and for proper ovarian secretions. If thyroid function is low, an egg may be discharged from an ovary but it may not be fertilizable or, if fertilized, may not be capable of nesting so that pregnancy is quickly aborted. — Broda Otto Barnes

Concepts in the brains of humans acquired the property that they could get rolled together with other concepts into larger packets, and any such larger packet could then become a new concept in its own right. In other words, concepts could nest inside each other hierarchically, and such nesting could go on to arbitrary degrees. — Douglas R. Hofstadter

Invitation to Love
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or come when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
Come in the night or come in the day,
Come, O love, whene'er you may,
And you are welcome, welcome.
You are sweet, O Love, dear Love,
You are soft as the nesting dove.
Come to my heart and bring it to rest
As the bird flies home to its welcome nest.
Come when my heart is full of grief
Or when my heart is merry;
Come with the falling of the leaf
Or with the redd'ning cherry.
Come when the year's first blossom blows,
Come when the summer gleams and glows,
Come with the winter's drifting snows,
And you are welcome, welcome — Paul Laurence Dunbar

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing. — Jacob M. Appel

Arya was a trial, it must be said. Half a boy and half a wolf pup. Forbid her anything and it became her heart's desire. She had Ned's long face, and brown hair that always looked as though a bird had been nesting in it. I despaired of ever making a lady of her. She collected scabs as other girls collected dolls, and would say anything that came into her head. I think that she must be dead too. — George R R Martin

Welcome to the world of the nesting instinct, where Mother Nature turns pregnant women into frenzied cleaning machines ahead of the new arrival. — Mark Woods