Geese Quotes

“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.”
― Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings

“I look up at the sky, wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don't. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn't be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative often self-centered nature that still doubts itself--that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I'm not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I've carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I love these geese. They make my chest tight and full and help me believe that things will be all right again, that I will pass through this time as I have passed through other times, that the vast and threatening blank ahead of me is a mere specter, that life is lighter and more playful than I’m giving it credit for. But right on the heels of that feeling, that suspicion that all is not yet lost, comes the urge to tell my mother, tell her that I am okay today, that I have felt something close to happiness, that I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can't tell her. That's the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can't tell her that I'm okay.

The geese don't care that I'm crying again. They're used to it.”
― Lily King, Writers & Lovers

“They would set their course toward it, seeing it grow bigger silently and imperceptibly, a motionless growth--and then, when they were at it, when they were about to bang their noses with a shock against its seeming solid mass, the sun would dim. Wraiths of mist suddenly moving like serpents of the air would coil about them for a second. Grey damp would be around them, and the sun, a copper penny, would fade away. The wings next to their own wings would shade into vacancy, until each bird was a lonely sound in cold annihilation, a presence after uncreation. And there they would hang in chartless nothing, seemingly without speed or left or right or top or bottom, until as suddenly as ever the copper penny glowed and the serpents writhed.”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“I'm scared of the geese. When I was five, my mom took me down there to feed those horrible beasts and one of them nearly took my hand off.”
― Leah Rae Miller, The Summer I Became a Nerd

“Geese are terrorists. But ducks, ducks are the heroes of the bird world.”
― Jarod Kintz, Music is fluid, and my saxophone overflows when my ducks slosh in the sounds I make in elevators.

“This morning I stopped to watch the geese fly, even though I didn��t have the time to do so. And I realized that not having the time to do something might be the very reason why I need to do it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Each time you see that indelible V-formation, be grateful for the perfect moment to be alive. And should you hear the geese calling, drink it in, knowing you have been touched with the indescribable magnificence of the Canada Geese.”
― Barbara Klide, Along Came Ryan, the Little (Gosling) King, Volume I,

“One brisk morning I stood in a field chilled frosty by autumn’s touch. Suddenly, the hordes of geese that surrounded me lifted off into the sky in a thunderous roar of nature on a grand mission. Standing stunned and awed in a field now fallen silent, it dawned on me that something is most powerful when it believes in its mission and rises without hesitation to achieve it.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“One time I tried to join a gang. Turns out it was just a bunch of ducks standing around smoking, and not the dangerous geese I was seeking.”
― Jarod Kintz, Ducks are the stars of the karaoke bird world

“Wild geese pair off for life. I never knew them to even make an application for divorce. The male guards his mate on the nest. As soon as the young hatch, he protects them from the side opposite the mother, keeping the babies between the parents. He will leave his family for her and for her only, but he will die in the front ranks for any of them....I have placed their bushels of corn around one of my mating pairs, and of the thousands of hungry geese that come here, none will interfere with these little plots to take even one kernel...When traveling in the air, the male Canada Goose leads the way, breaking the air for his sweetheart, who is quartering behind him, and his family travels next to her. In brief, he is one of the most self-sacrificing, godly-principled leaders the human eye ever beheld, and to know him is to love and admire him.”
― Jack Miner, Jack Miner and the Birds: And Some Things I Know About Nature

“Clouds of geese floated out of autumn’s sky and settled onto morning’s pond. Engulfed in this winged majesty, an aged man hobbled to the lake’s edge, reached into a bag, and threw handfuls of corn to the hungry masses. Watching for a moment, he paused and then hobbled away. And I thought, “Never think that you are too old to feed a hungry world, and never think that it’s not hungry.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“One time seven geese were walking towards me in a V, with the biggest Killer Duck marching point. They saw me as weak and moved to attack formation. But my Karate Hands were too knife-like to be an easy TV dinner.”
― Jarod Kintz, BearPaw Duck And Meme Farm presents: Two Ducks Brawling Is A Pre-Pillow Fight

“As they walked along the tide line in late afternoon, he took her hand and looked at her. "Will you marry me, Kya?"
"We are married. Like the geese," She said.
"Okay. I can live with that.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“Geese are the terrorists of the bird world. They look similar to ducks, which is natural, because the bad guys always try to look like the heroes.”
― Jarod Kintz, I design saxophone music in blocks, like Stonehenge

“I hate the phrase “Silly Goose.” Geese aren’t silly. They are bullies.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“Maya lifted a bony shoulder. “Besides, even if he had messed with the babies, you kind of overshadowed it by killing a pelican.”

“Goose. And I didn’t kill it.”
― Deidre Huesmann, Burning Britely

“It’s not that geese can fly. It’s that they choose to.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, LPC

“It is the geese plying the graying skies of autumn in floating V-formations on a rendezvous with southern horizons that gives me the greatest pause. For my life is rarely raised to the calls of life on the wing that beg me to rise up and lay hold of distant horizons in search of a season being birthed out of the one now dying. For to stay here in a season now expired is to die along with it, and despite the fact that I had died many times, I must never forget that I can still fly.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In late summer, when sprays of purple loosestrife, goldenrod, and ripening cranberries burst into color along the old road cutting through the Great Marsh of West Barnstable on Cape Cod, the air vibrated with the drumbeat of cicadas, the caws of seagulls and geese.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

“He rows her out into this goose-infested swamp (the part this movie leaves out is that geese are rank, shit-covered, hissing demons, but I guess it’s okay because they are his kin), even though he knows it’s about to start pouring down rain and says so before they get in the boat.”
― Lindy West, Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema

“Endless flocks of honking geese surged across cool September skies announcing to all below that Lanark County's warmest briefest season was coming to an end.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Comfort

“When the Canada geese fly north in spring, there is a leader who points the way, a leader at the apex of the V as the formation moves across the land. Those who follow must believe that the leader is doing the best he can but there is no guarantee that all journeys will end in salvation for everyone involved.”
― Alistair MacLeod, No Great Mischief: Adapted from the Novel by Alistair MacLeod

“A formation of geese majestically swept over my office as they flew out to feed in the local fields. And as they coursed their way into the promise of morning’s horizon, I was immediately reminded of how many things vie for my attention and consume my time that possess nothing of majesty and have no ability to fly.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The majesty of geese lifting themselves over the road and surging into the morning sky laid bare the meaningless rush of cars speeding off to places that seemed much less important than those for which the host of magnificent geese were destined. And I thought that there is more meaning in a handful of geese aloft than a million men on a thousand roads.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The geese were quick to enjoy themselves, once the sense of alarm had subsided and the spirit of fun took hold. Geese, Marika learned, are typically a serious lot; but after being brought into the game, they become quite committed and surprisingly sportsman-like.”
― Marti Healy, The Secret Child

“Drifting out of the black sky, it was a far-carrying and haunting cry. The first hairy man who heard that sound had tilted his head to search out its source, and it has touched a sensitive chord in human beings ever since. It was the voice of freedom unlimited, the incarnation of nature itself, the sound and song of fond dreams: the cry of the northbound wild geese.”
― Jim Kjelgaard, Stormy

“So I have learned to love and venerate the honker Wild Goose whom Mother Nature dowered with love unquenchable, constructed for her own good ends a monument of faithfulness unchanging, a creature heir of all the promises, so master of the hostile world around that he lives and spreads, defying plagues and beasts, and I wonder if this secret is not partly that the wise and patient mother leads.”
― Ernest Thompson Seton, Billy and other stories from Wild Animals Ways being personal histories of Billy Atalapha, the Wild Geese of Wyndygoul Jinny

“At that precise moment, a large flock of geese flying south over the lake caught her eye. How she admired their brilliant instincts. Such a freeing thing it must be, not having to wonder and think and plan when to fly south for winter, but to simply know when the time was right.”
― Talya Tate Boerner, Bernice Runs Away

“I'm not great at solving puzzles or riddles. Especially those riddles where you have to ride boats back and forth with foxes, geese, and sacks of grain. The fox would eat everything and I would starve.”
― Glen Nesbitt, BREAK OUT OF HEAVEN