O Jays Quotes & Sayings

ENTER THIS DESERTED HOUSE
But please walk softly as you do.
Frogs dwell here and crickets too.
Ain't no ceiling, only blue
Jays dwell here and sunbeams too.
Floors are flowers - take a few.
Ferns grow here and daisies too.
Whoosh, swoosh - too-whit, too-woo,
Bats dwell here and hoot owls too.
Ha-ha-ha,hee-hee,hoo-hoooo,
Gnomes dwell here and goblins too.
And my child, I thought you knew
I dwell here ... and so do you. — Shel Silverstein

I thought of many an autumn I had known: Seemly autumns approaching deliberately, with amplitude. I thought of wild asters, Michaelmas daisies, mushrooms, leaves idling down the air, two or three at a time, warblers twittering and glittering in every bush ('Confusing fall warblers,' Peterson calls them, and how right he is): the lingering yellow jackets feeding on broken apples; crickets; amber-dappled light; great geese barking down from the north; the seesaw noise that blue jays seem to make more often in the fall. Hoarfrost in the morning, cold stars at night. But slow; the whole thing coming slowly. The way it should be. — Elizabeth Enright

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

On the appearance of Clayton Moore at a Blue Jays home game - It's not very often you get to see the Lone Ranger and Toronto in the same night. — Bobby Bragan

Perishable, It Said
Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
And below, in different ink,
The date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.
I found myself looking;
Now at the back of each hand,
Now inside the knees,
Now turning over each foot to look at the sole.
Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
Then at the arguing jays.
Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
Hunger, sorrow, fears-
These too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.
How suddenly then
The strange happiness took me,
Like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
Inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings. — Jane Hirshfield

If there ever was an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptown-on-the-Hudson, call New York. Cosmopolitan they call it, you bet. So's a piece of fly-paper. You listen close when they're buzzing and trying to pull their feet out of the sticky stuff. "Little old New York's good enough for us"
that's what they sing. — O. Henry

Blue pointed to a chair beneath the fake Tiffany lamp. "Sit."
"I'd rather stand."
She made a neat rack of teeth at the Gray Man. "Sit."
The Gray Man sat. He glanced over his shoulder, back down the hall, then back to her. He had those bright, active eyes that Dobermans and blue jays had.
"No one's going to murder you here." She handed him a glass of water. "That's not poisoned."
"Thanks." He set it doen but didn't drink it. "My only intentions right now are to ask her to dinner. — Maggie Stiefvater

Also, he detested people who bought fast horses that they were unskilled to ride. Furthermore, he detested: recreational sailing vessels; surveyors; cheaply made shoes; French (the language, the food, the populace); nervous clerks; tiny porcelain plates which broke in a man's damned hand; poetry (but not songs!); the stooped backs of cowards; thieving sons of whores; a lying tongue; the sound of a violin; the army (any army); tulips ("onions with airs!"); blue jays; the drinking of coffee ("a damned, dirty Dutch habit!"); — Elizabeth Gilbert

It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh ...
Even the streams were now lifeless ... No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world.
The people had done it themselves ... — Rachel Carson

I threw the opening pitch at a Blue Jays game, and after the pitch, the mascot asked me if I wanted him to sign the game ball, which I thought was funny. What would he write? "Best Wishes, Some Guy in a Bird Suit"?" — Ken Jennings

There are folks who can't abide camp-robber jays, but I take to them. Often enough they've been my only company for days at a time, and they surely do get friendly. They'll steal your grub right from under your nose, but who I am to criticize the lifestyle of a bird? He has his ways, I have mine. Like I say, I take to them. — Louis L'Amour

Colonial American and Australian schoolchildren once memorized poems about British skylarks while the blue jays or cockatoos (according to continent) squawked outside, utterly ignored. The dominant culture has a way of becoming more real than the stuff at hand. — Barbara Kingsolver

As far as our noblest hardwood forests are concerned, the animals, especially squirrels and jays, are our greatest and almost only benefactors. It is to them that we owe this gift. It is not in vain that the squirrels live in or about every forest tree, or hollow log, and every wall and heap of stones. — Henry David Thoreau

Because Tavis had been the one to take the lion's share of the heat when it turned out that Blue Jays' spectators in the stands, — David Foster Wallace

It's a cliche, but true, that writing is intensely solitary and at times really lonely. I sit in one room and talk to squirrels and blue jays all day. — Douglas Coupland

Orioles fought with tigers, blue jays battled against angels, bear cubs warred with giants, and none of it made any sense. A baseball player was a man, and yet once he joined a team he was turned into an animal, a mutant being, or a spirit who lived in heaven next to God. According — Paul Auster

If there was ever an aviary overstocked with jays it is that Yaptouwn on the Hudson called New York — O. Henry

Atticus said to Jem one day, "I'd rather you shot at tin cans in the backyard, but I know you'll go after birds. Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird." That was the only time I ever heard Atticus say it was a sin to do something, and I asked Miss Maudie about it. "Your father's right," she said. "Mockingbirds don't do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corn cribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. — Harper Lee

In the woods, if you stopped, if you grew still, you'd hear a whole new set of sounds, wind rasping through silhouetted leaves and the cries and chatter of blue jays and brown thrashers and redbirds and sparrows, the calling of crows and hawks, squirrels barking, frogs burping, the far braying of dogs, armadillos snorkeling through dead leaves ... — Tom Franklin

Carol's liveliest interest was in her walks with the baby. Hugh wanted to know what the box-elder tree said, and what the Ford garage said, and what the big cloud said, and she told him, with a feeling that she was not in the least making up stories, but discovering the souls of things. They had an especial fondness for the hitching-post in front of the mill. It was a brown post, stout and agreeable; the smooth leg of it held the sunlight, while its neck, grooved by hitching-straps, tickled one's fingers. Carol had never been awake to the earth except as a show of changing color and great satisfying masses; she had lived in people and in ideas about having ideas; but Hugh's questions made her attentive to the comedies of sparrows, robins, blue jays, yellowhammers; she regained her pleasure in the arching flight of swallows, and added to it a solicitude about their nests and family squabbles. — Sinclair Lewis

The sharp scents made my throat ache. I had been up such hillsides before, and smelled these same spring scents. But then the pine and grass scent had been diluted with the smell of petrol fumes from the road below and the voices of day trippers replaced those of the jays. Last time I walked such a path, the ground was littered with sandwich wrappers and cigarette butts instead of mallow blossoms and violets. Sandwich wrappers seemed a reasonable enough price to pay, I supposed, for such blessings of civilization as antibiotics and telephones, but just for the moment, I was willing to settle for the violets. I badly needed a little peace, and I felt it here. — Diana Gabaldon

Later than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dreams these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in the wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed. Somewhere down the hill hammers and saws were busy and country music was playing out of somebody's truck radio. Zoyd was out of smokes. — Thomas Pynchon

When you go hard your nays become yays. Yankee stadium with Jays and Kanyes. — Nicki Minaj

As we still ascend from shelf to shelf, we find the tenants of the tower serially disposed in order of their magnitude: gannets, black and speckled haglets, jays, sea hens, sperm-whale birds, gulls of all varieties -- thrones, princedoms, powers, dominating one above another in senatorial array; while, sprinkled over all, like an ever-repeated fly in a great piece of broidery, the stormy petrel or Mother Cary's chicken sounds his continual challenge and alarm. — Herman Melville

Johanna, could you really hear him screaming?" "That was part of it," she says. "Like the jabber jays in the arena. Only it was real. And it didn't stop after an hour. Tick tock. — Suzanne Collins

Shoot all the blue jays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird. — Harper Lee

I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house; and that he'd rather I'd shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted - if I could hit 'em; but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. — Harper Lee