Perching Quotes & Sayings

Beautiful day out there," I said, perching on the stool and crossing my legs. "It's autumn, Sunday, great weather, and crowded everywhere you go. Relaxing indoors like this is the best thing you can do on such a nice day. It's exhausting to get into those crowds. And the air is bad. I mostly do laundry on Sundays - wash the stuff in the morning, hang it out on the roof of my dorm, take it in before the sun goes down, do a good job of ironing it. I don't mind ironing at all. There's a special satisfaction in making wrinkled things smooth. And I'm pretty good at it, too. Of course, I was lousy at it at first. I put creases in everything. After a month of practice, though, I knew what I was doing. So Sunday is my day for laundry and ironing. I couldn't do it today, of course. Too bad: wasted a perfect laundry day. — Haruki Murakami

Stardom is just an uneasy seat on top of a tricky toboggan. Being a star is merely perching at the head of the downgrade. A competent featured player can last a lifetime. A star, a year or two. There's all that agony of finding suitable stories, keeping in character, maintaining illusion. — Fredric March

Lila backed away toward the curtain. "Do you just... stand here until I need you?"
The woman smiled and dug a volume from a pocket. "I have a book."
"Let me guess, a religious text?"
"Actually," said Ister, perching on the low couch, "it's about pirates."
Lila smiled. — V.E Schwab

Turtles hate heights. They don't even like being a few feet off the ground. It's the main reason they have resisted evolution for so long-fear of heights. Turtle thinking goes thus: Sure, first our scales turn into feathers and the next thing you know we're flying and chirping and perching on trees. We've seen it happen. Thanks, but we're staying right here in the mud where we belong. You're not going to see us flying full-tilt boogie into a sliding glass door. — Christopher Moore

Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound, feathered dinosaur. But it's not. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of 'paleobabble' is going to change that. — Alan Feduccia

Above us, outlined against the brilliant sky, dragons crowded every available perching space on the Rim. And the sun made a gold of every one of them. — Anne McCaffrey

Have you noticed how often it happens that a really good idea
the kind of idea that looks, as it approaches, like the explanation for everything about everything
tends to hover near at hand when you are thinking hard about something quite different? There you are, halfway into a taxi, thinking about the condition of the cartilage in the right knee joint, and suddenly, with a whirring sound, in flies a new notion looking for a place to light. You'd better be sure you have a few bare spots, denuded of anything like thought, ready for its perching, or it will fly away into the dark. — Lewis Thomas

Perching on a corner of the couch between the boxes, I tore out a small piece of my heart and buried it there between them to await its own restoration of all things, in the end of every good-bye ever spoken. — Preston Yancey

Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig. — Chinua Achebe

She remembered perching on the sill of her bedroom window with the pane opened a crack so she could let the winter in, and she remembered letting it sting her nose and wash over her until she was shivering and blue. — Meagan Spooner

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. These memories, which are my life - for we possess nothing certainly except the past - were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning. — Evelyn Waugh

Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching. — Chinua Achebe

We are a breed of spoilers!' thought Jolyon, 'close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never-never her cage! — John Galsworthy

At 1.30 she left the hospital to do some shopping. Both men were sound asleep. Gentle afternoon sunlight flooded the room, and I felt as though I might drift off at any moment perching on my stool. Yellow and white chrysanthemums in a vase on the table by the window reminded people it was autumn. In the air floated the sweet smell of boiled fish left over from lunch. The nurses continued to clip-clop up and down the hall, talking to each other in clear, penetrating voices. They would peep into the room now and then and flash me a smile when they saw that both patients were sleeping. I wished I had something to read, but there were no books or magazines or newspapers in the room, just a calendar on the wall. — Haruki Murakami

Do you blame a vulture for perching over a carcass? — Chinua Achebe

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

Notice the convulsed orange inch of moon
perching on this silver minute of evening — E. E. Cummings

Surely ruminating and lolling, squandering slivers of time as you ponder on this or that plant; perching about the place on seats chosen for their essential and individual quality, are other whole aspects of being a gardener. Why shouldn't we? We sit in other people's gardens, why not in our own. — Mirabel Osler

Finches are seed eaters, but Dr. Daruwalla didn't know this, nor did the doctor know that the green parrot perching on the vine had feet with two toes pointing forward and two backward. These were the details he missed, and they contributed to the growing list of things he didn't know. This was the kind of Everyman he was - a little lost, a little misinformed (or uninformed), almost everywhere he ever was. — John Irving

We did it," he muttered to Ekaterin, now perching on the chair arm. "Why didn't anybody stop us? Why aren't there more regulations about this sort of thing? What fool in their right mind would put me in charge of a baby? Two babies? — Lois McMaster Bujold