Alan Lightman Quotes

I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could.

The varying modes of flight exhibited by our diurnal birds of prey have always been to me a subject of great interest, especially as by means of them I have found myself enabled to distinguish one species from another, to the farthest extent of my power of vision.

Birds, except when broiled and in the society of a cold bottle, bored him stiff.

In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.

My father said you can't make a living in birds, my relatives all went into business: bankers, stockbrokers. However, they eventually lost it all and died in wheelchairs. Sometimes you have to be a little aberrant.

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?

Few forms of life are so engaging as birds.

Memphis—it’s just a bird. Birds fly around, brother. It’s what they do. It’s not following you, and it’s not a sign. Unless you really did give it candy and flowers, in which case you are one strange brother.

I'm not really a bird person or an Audubon guy who studies them, but as I was around them, they interested me.

I have trained my eye over and over ever since I was a kid. I was a bird watcher when I was a little boy. My grandmother gave me a bird book, and I got to like their colors.

I consider myself to have been the bridge between the shotgun and the binoculars in bird watching. Before I came along, the primary way to observe birds was to shoot them and stuff them.

I spend a lot of time learning about bird watching.

The moment a little boy is concerned with which is a jay and which is a sparrow, he can no longer see the birds or hear them sing.

To a man, ornithologists are tall, slender, and bearded so that they can stand motionless for hours, imitating kindly trees, as they watch for birds.

You may depend on it that the bunting, emberiza miliaria, does not leave this country in the winter.

There is not a bird that flies by without our knowledge.

For most of my life, I didn't pay attention to birds.

I think everybody's book is about somebody's daughter, in a lot of ways. I dig that.

A bird in the open never looks Like its picture in the birdie books - Or if it once did, it has changed its plumage, And plunges you back into ignorant gloomage.

No man had ever heard a nightingale, When once a keen-eyed naturalist was stirred To study and define -- what is a bird.

We [me and Alison McGhee] probably wouldn't have said that when we were writing the stories, but it is so apparent to me in the finished product. For me, looking at Bink, it's like looking at myself on the page in a way that I've never experienced with any other book that I've written.

Grandmother walked up over the bare granite and thought about birds in general. It seemed to her no other creature had the same dramatic capacity to underline and perfect events - the shifts in the seasons and the weather, the changes that run through people themselves.

Aesthetics is to artists as ornithology is to birds.

I'm not very interesting. Birds are interesting. I could stand there lip-synching all day long, but it would feel funny, and people would be able to tell. I'm not a good actress.

Only my books anoint me, and a few friends, those who reach into my veins.