Pigeons Quotes

“But if you tell folks you're a college student, folks are so impressed. You can be a student in anything and not have to know anything. Just say toxicology or marine biokinesis, and the person you're talking to will change the subject to himself. If this doesn't work, mention the neural synapses of embryonic pigeons.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Invisible Monsters

“While many find the new clothes of the emperor magnificent, some dare to say out loud, he is simply naked. If the clear sighted are constrained by the credulous and when the “followers” are browbeating the "knowers", the cat is among the pigeons and the age of obscuration is under way. Obviously "something wicked this way comes…" ("His master's voice" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“I pressed PLAY and started up Chiron's favorite--the All-Time Greatest Hits of Dean Martin. Suddenly the air was filled with violins and a bunch of guys moaning in Italian.

The demon pigeons went nuts. They started flying in circles, running into each other like they wanted to bash their own brains out.”
― Rick Riordan, The Sea of Monsters

“Blasted spam pigeons!”
― Kate Beaton, Hark! A Vagrant

“There," Zoë suggested."By the Embarcadero Building."
"Good thinking," Chuck said. "Me and Hank can blend in with the pigeons."
We all looked at him.
"Kidding," he said. "Sheesh, can't a statues have a sense of humor?”
― Rick Riordan, The Titan’s Curse

“Me? I was lost for long time. I didn’t make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school […]. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. […]. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.”
― Rabih Alameddine, The Hakawati

“Arguing with idiots is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how good you are, the bird is going to shit on the board and strut around like it won anyway.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“I spent the day with the pigeons, on a bench in Trafalgar Square, my bag of belongings huddled to my chest in case someone thought of taking them, and a pile of breadcrumbs at my feet. I let the pigeons congregate around me ... Eventually a local warden came up to me and said , "Sir, we ask people not to feed the pigeons," with such an expression of civic determination that I pretense not to understand English. Instead, I listed my way through various "eh?" sounds until, having exhausted his two words of French and three of Spanish, he concluded that since I was neither nationality, I wasn't worth the bother.”
― Kate Griffin, A Madness of Angels

“Manfred used to be a flock of pigeons -- literally, his exocortex dispersed among a passel of bird brains, pecking at brightly colored facts, shitting semidigested conclusions. Being human again feels inexplicably odd. (331)”
― Charles Stross, Accelerando

“No matter what you do if it isn't genuine it's not worth doing, if it isn't meant with good heart it's not worth saying, and if it's a darkness around you perhaps it's not worth remembering.”
― Conversations With A Pigeon, Conversations With A Pigeon

“When I ache to live, my mind loves to stay with the peaceful whiteness of a pigeon’s care...in boundless amity..”
― Munia Khan

“They've moved me to a new office and I don't like it at all. Different pigeons come to the window.”
― Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

“JASON: 'Intended wings.' How depressing.
MICHAEL: Yes. Makes them into suicides, really, the pigeons.
JASON: No - no, it doesn't. It could mean the wings were 'intended' to carry them upwards, out of the darkness, but they were defective in some way, these wings, so the pigeons aren't suicidal, not at all, just badly equipped for flying. Like the rest of us.”
― Simon Gray

“You wouldn't walk with your underpants stuck in your bottom, you'd adjust them. So don't treat life like ill-fitting wondering underpants, adjust it to be comfortable again”
― Conversations With A Pigeon, Conversations With A Pigeon

“Pigeons act like customers during sales.”
― Alain Bremond-Torrent, running is flying intermittently

“Too bad the Nazis aren't vampires, Ollie thought. At least with vampires, they could be deterred with holy water, crosses, and cloves of garlic. But with Nazis, we need antiaircraft guns, Hurricanes, and Spitfires. Ollie glanced back at the lofts. And maybe pigeons.”
― Alan Hlad, The Long Flight Home

“Those who live on crumbs are pigeons and mice.
I want all the love!”
― Augusto Branco

“Keith was no Franciscan, and it seemed to him an act of narcissism to feed pigeons, who would if anything outlast us.”
― Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire

“Delaurier makes an intrigued noise and picks up the finished drawings Renoir has sitting under a rock, just in case the wind picks up.
"I like them."
"Of course you do. They're the cruelly oppressed creatures of society," Renaire says. "Look at how the bourgeois humans have hurt them, how they're forced to huddle near sewer vents for warmth in this brutal freezing world. These poor souls need your help, Emile. Look at their plight, their misery. Save the pigeons.”
― Luchia Dertien, Gnomon

“People didn't always hate pigeons in the city—in fact, one could look up and catch glimpses of homing-pigeon lofts atop a lot of the lower buildings, owners doting on the dear little things, circling on their wings high above the rooftops. But people have come to make a hobby of detesting the birds, I think, because they've come to see that pigeons are much like people: dirty and murmuring, greedy and abundant, flocking in a corpus of such shit and weight that one fears they may permanently deface or crush whatever they congregate on.”
― Kathleen Rooney, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

“The hour was not so very early, it being only a little before eight o'clock, but even the most frequented streets of Greyness were so deserted that the desultory tread of some heavy-footed police constable, as he daun'ert along the pavement, was sufficiently notable to arouse the attention of wakeful people who occupied front rooms toward the street, as well as of the few who from various causes had been prompted to peep out of doors; and the thoroughfares of the place were still practically in possession of incidental groups of pigeons, which flitted hither and thither, lighting in twos and threes on the causeway to pick up what they could find, and croodle threateningly at each other as they tramped round tail-ward in the vicinity of edible treasures, the ownership of which was undetermined.”
― William Alexander, My Uncle the Baillie

“Imagine being blindfolded and then taken hundreds of miles from home -- perhaps even to another country across the sea. And then suddenly having the blindfold removed and, despite not having the slightest idea where you are, racing home at top speed. Even if home is six hundred miles away. That is not normal. Just like the superpowers of comicbook heroes, the homing instinct of pigeons is something that scientists cannot explain. They have tried over the years, with theories about magnetic fields and the sun, but no one has satisfactorily managed it.

It is a strangely comfy superpower though. The pigeon is not on a mission to save the world. It just wants to go home. From the age of six weeks, pigeons can be taught to "home" to the loft from which they make their first flight because they understand that is where they will find food, water and company. Pigeons can be picky in their journey -- they do not like to fly at night or to cross water, often flying along the coast to find the shortest point at which to cross a body like the English Channel. but they are ultimately single-minded in simply wanting to get back to where they belong. Amid the horrors of wartime, this longing has a particular resonance.”
― Gordon Corera, Secret Pigeon Service: Operation Columba, Resistance and the Struggle to Liberate Europe

“Fat pigeons show the wealth of a nation. Fat cats, the ignorance of one.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“The way upstream may not be easy,
for we have strayed far.

But one is never too lost
to rediscover the Path.

Like pigeons, we can always find
our way back home.”
― Felisa Tan, In Search for Meaning

“It came to me on the wing."

"As would a hawk ripping a pigeon.”
― Justin Scott, The Sister Queens