Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Tarjei Vesaas has written the best Norwegian novel ever, 'The Birds' - it is absolutely wonderful: the prose is so simple and so subtle, and the story is so moving that it would have been counted amongst the great classics from the last century if it had been written in one of the major languages.
One of the bibles of my youth was 'Birds of the West Indies,' by James Bond, a well-known ornithologist, and when I was casting about for a name for my protagonist I thought, 'My God, that's the dullest name I've ever heard,' so I appropriated it. Now the dullest name in the world has become an exciting one.
Everything, however complicated - breaking waves, migrating birds, and tropical forests - is made of atoms and obeys the equations of quantum physics. But even if those equations could be solved, they wouldn't offer the enlightenment that scientists seek. Each science has its own autonomous concepts and laws.
Well, I think one of the problems with 'Birds of Prey' was there were too many cooks in that kitchen. The studio, the producers, the network, all had very different visions of what that should be. They should have just let Laeta Kalogridis control that. Instead they decided to try to get their hands in the mix.
The more often we see the things around us - even the beautiful and wonderful things - the more they become invisible to us. That is why we often take for granted the beauty of this world: the flowers, the trees, the birds, the clouds - even those we love. Because we see things so often, we see them less and less.
Indians walk softly and hurt the landscape hardly more than the birds and squirrels, and their brush and bark huts last hardly longer than those of wood rats, while their more enduring monuments, excepting those wrought on the forests by the fires they made to improve their hunting grounds, vanish in a few centuries.
Birds and animals in the wild migrate every year to safer and nurturing pastures, leaving behind the old environment. After nurturing their young ones, they return to thrive in the old environs. I use that analogy to meditate. You migrate to your inner soul, nurture the strength, light and creativity there, and return.
If a natural disaster like a flock of birds or a bolt of lightning causes a plane's engines to fail, you know what should be expected? That the pilot will keep his or her wits about them and do their best to save each and every soul on board. That's precisely what Captain 'Sully' Sullenberger and the rest of his crew did.
Sense the blessings of the earth in the perfect arc of a ripe tangerine, the taste of warm, fresh bread, the circling flight of birds, the lavender color of the sky shining in a late afternoon rain puddle, the million times we pass other beings in our cars and shops and out among the trees without crashing, conflict, or harm.
The Antichrist will be the infernal prince again for the third and last time... so many evils shall be committed by the means of Satan, the infernal Prince, that almost the entire world shall be found undone and desolate. Before these events happen, many rare birds will cry in the air, 'Now! Now!' and sometime later will vanish.
I do have a treadmill desk in my office, and for a while, I would walk on it while checking email and going through jokes. I haven't walked on it in probably four months. Now it's more of an upright dining table for me. At some point, moss will grow over it, birds will build nests, and nature will reclaim the treadmill as its own.
We have chosen to bring future generations into this world of rising seas and warming temperatures, droughts and floods, heat waves and wildfires, a world in which one in four mammals and one in eight birds are at risk of disappearing forever. While the damage we've done is irreversible, that doesn't give us the right to do nothing.
Certainly a sort of industrial use of creatures, so that geese are fed in such a way as to produce as large a liver as possible, or hens live so packed together that they become just caricatures of birds, this degrading of living creatures to a commodity seems to me in fact to contradict the relationship of mutuality that comes across in the Bible.
