Take the birds which you'll have noticed in so many of my recent paintings. I never thought them up, they just materialized of their own accord; they were born on the canvas... it is absurd to read any sort of symbolic significance into them.
I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.
When you have clay in your hands, it's hard to avoid making birds.
The jackdaw, stript of her stolen colours, provokes our laughter.
My father always said, 'Malala will be free as a bird.'
Ethereal minstrel! pilgrim of the sky! Dost thou despise the earth where cares abound? Or, while the wings aspire, are heart and eye Both with thy nest upon the dewy ground?
The stork is voiceless because there is really nothing to say.
When I rise up, let me rise up joyful like a bird. When I fall, let me fall without regret like a leaf.
Sharp is the kiss of the falcon's beak.
I think people who don't believe in God are crazy. How can you say there is no God when you hear the birds singing these beautiful songs you didn't make?
It takes a lot to be considered a Raven.
Birds are, perhaps, the most eloquent expression of reality.
Not half so swift the trembling doves can fly, When the fierce eagle cleaves the liquid sky; Not half so swiftly the fierce eagle moves, When thro' the clouds he drives the trembling doves.
Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Robin is one of the most native and democratic of our birds; he is one of the family, and seems much nearer to us than those rare, exotic visitants, as the orchard starling or rose-breasted grossbeak, with their distant, high-bred ways.
But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird . . . but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you. If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.
Love without hope, as when the young bird-catcher Swept off his tall hat to the Squire's own daughter, So let the imprisoned larks escape and fly Singing about her head, as she rode by.
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting...
I'm youth, I'm joy, I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.
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.
Clouds of black birds rose up wailing and screaming, like the thoughts of my heart.
The dove is my emblem.
Man is a bird without wings and a bird is a man without sorrow.
You're just an empty cage girl, if you kill the bird.
I wake up every morning new, free as a bird.
