Quotes About Magpies

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

I live in the English countryside, so I'm surrounded by magpies.

I want limits, damn it. I'll accept omens and portents and second sight. I'll accept giant black hounds and creepy ravens and magpies. I'm still working out the fae and Wild Hunt thing. But I draw the line at people disappearing into thin air.

and magpies coming straight from a meeting with misfortune

We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny.

There's nothing like the very early morning. It's the sweetness of the air, the sweet coolness; it's the bubbling of the creek which, for some strange reaction, always sounds more energetic than it does later on; it's the gargling of the magpies.

It bothered Veblen's mother that most people were lazy and had given up original thought a long time ago, stealing stale phrases from the media like magpies.

Waking in a strange bed, I'd forgotten magpies until this morning. Beyond the window, one flies over the weathered picket fence, black-white staccato wing beat: moonlit cloud against night sky, snow-streaked shadowed mountain, manic-depressive, winged declaration of disunion.

Woods are grim places. Farmers shoot squirrels, crows, magpies, and hang them up on trees to warn Mother Nature to get it together or else. Much notice she takes, being in league with God. They're a right pair, more carnage than the rest of us put together.

There are many rhymes about magpies, but none of them is very reliable because they are not the ones that the magpies know themselves.

Dry snow coming down in the hills. Magpies hair-triggered and thuggish in worn trees. A wall has started to fall in you, it will take years to land.

MIDSUMMER: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.

Once I came back to the leaves just as they were falling into the rattling of magpies and the waving flights through treetops beyond the long field tawny with stubble a scatter of sheep wandered there circling slowly as a galaxy ferrying the gray lights that were theirs wading into their shadows with the stalks whispering under them and the day shining out of the straw

One for sorrow, two for joy. So they said when I was a child, but there were fewer Magpies then.