Crows Quotes

“[M]en, though they know full well how much women are worth and how great the benefits we bring them, nonetheless seek to destroy us out of envy for our merits. It's just like the crow, when it produces white nestlings: it is so stricken by envy, knowing how black it is itself, that it kills its own offspring out of pique.”
― Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women: Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men

“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white.”
― William James

“Bright flashes of memory sparked through Kaz’s mind. A cup of hot chocolate in his mittened hands, Jordie warning him to let it cool before he took a sip. Ink drying on the page as he’d signed the deed to the Crow Club. The first time he’d seen Inej at the Menagerie, in purple silk, her eyes lined with kohl. The bone-handled knife he’d given her. The sobs that had come from behind the door of her room at the Slat the night she’d made her first kill. The sobs he’d ignored. Kaz remembered her perched on the sill of his attic window, sometime during that first year after he’d brought her into the Dregs. She’d been feeding the crows that congregated on the roof.

“You shouldn’t make friends with crows,” he’d told her.

“Why not?” she asked.

He’d looked up from his desk to answer, but whatever he’d been about to say had vanished on his tongue.

The sun was out for once, and Inej had turned her face to it. Her eyes were shut, her oil-black lashes fanned over her cheeks. The harbor wind had lifted her dark hair, and for a moment Kaz was a boy again, sure that there was magic in this world.

“Why not?” she’d repeated, eyes still closed.

He said the first thing that popped into his head. “They don’t have any manners.”

“Neither do you, Kaz.” She’d laughed, and if he could have bottled the sound and gotten drunk on it every night, he would have. It terrified him.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“THOREAU KNOWS
(The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.)


Making sense of things,
Trying to track

Nine pebbles of sadness
To their source.

Sly crows
Stole them a mile back,

But Thoreau knows
I should walk anyway

Under sun-coined trees
Thick with wood-thrush song

Till I reach undergrowth
Dense and itchy with the past

Till the air cools and I am near
Enough to con crow talk

Mouth fulls, stories dark.”
― Ken Craft, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants: Life, Death, & In-Between Poems

“I don't want your prayers', he said.
'What do you want then?'
The old answers came easily to mind. Money. Vengeance. Jordie's voice in my head silenced forever. But a different reply roared to life inside him, loud, insistent, and unwelcome. You, Inej. You.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“A familiar is such a creature, an animal or bird that sees inside to the very soul of its human companion, and knows what others might not.
What fears there might be, and what joys, for it shares the emotions of its human partner.”
― Alice Hoffman, Magic Lessons

“A crow can recall every route it has ever taken, and Cadin had been this way before. Crows are messengers, spies, guides, companions, harbingers of luck, deliverers of trinkets and treasures, tireless in all ways, more loyal than any other man or beast.”
― Alice Hoffman, Magic Lessons

“Crows are ferociously intelligent birds. I used to watch them gather as the men set off for another day of war. Drums, pipes, trumpets, the rhythmical pounding of swords on shields—to the fighters, this music meant honour, glory, courage, comradeship…To the crows, it only ever meant food.”
― Pat Barker, The Women of Troy

“I wish you could see what I do. I can hear every body on this ship, the blood rushing through their veins. I can here the change in Kaz's breathing when he looks at you... It catches every time, like he's never seen you before.”
― Leigh Bardugo, Six of Crows

“We don't need the victim's entrails for their own sake, only for the sake of the signs they convey. And we don't worship the crow or the raven -- we worship God who communicates by means of them.”
― Epictetus

“Outside the window the thin moon stood upright in a deep sky, like the paring of a finger-nail for magic, and against the sky the weather vane of the carrion crow with arrow in mouth pointed it's arrow to the south”
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

“The manor ravens were on the move. One by one, they glided across the lawn and took up posts in the trees that fringed the property. It was rare to see so many at once. And what was that called?
“Unkindness,” I said. “An unkindness of ravens.”
Rubbing my chilled arms, I rose from the bench and took a last look at the scene below.
“Unkindness and murder,” I whispered.”
― M.E. Hilliard, The Unkindness of Ravens

“Wouldn't the crow, that ubiquitous trickster, make a more compelling and accurate national symbol for the United States than the bald eagle?”
― Sherman Alexie, War Dances

“She wondered if the outside crows hated the crows of the blistered land the way that the villagers outside hated the people inside.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“I am a ghost town, my body still exists among the remnants and relics, but no one lives here anymore. The locals moved out with the post office. The shelves at the corner store stand as tombstones marking the prices of items
that once waited for hands to toss them in their basket. Spiders and the remains of their kills fill the fluorescent lights. The crows don’t even stop on the wires when they fly over.”
― Anne Marie Wells, Survived By: A Memoir in Verse + Other Poems

“The island and its women loom large in the dreams of local folks, who sometimes wake up sweating from visions of witches in black (though the island women never wore black) or of crows watchful in treetops, or of swamp streams bubbling up through the floorboards of their houses. It is said the island, where healing waters percolate to the surface, was a place where women shared one another's dreams, a place where women did what they wanted.”
― Bonnie Jo Campbell, The Waters

“The crows squawked and scattered from their perch on wooden rail fence, as the rhythmic clip-clop of the horse's hooves grew louder.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Collection: Winding Our Way Down Memory Lane

“We dig up dinosaurs to try and figure out what happened to them. Perhaps someday dinosaurs, in the form of corvids, will dig us up to figure out what happened to us.”
― Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think

“Our folly was that we listened to the crows when we should have listened to the doves.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Slay not the crow for all that he does is feed on man's woes.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“I could sit here for the rest of my life, with my hands full of wire, building dogs out of bone. And then the crows will eat me and I will fall in to the pit and we shall all be bones together.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“Fog lined the edges of the wood, hanging in low swirls over the meadow. The crows cawed together like a disjointed heartbeat. Nothing else moved.”
― T. Kingfisher, Nettle & Bone

“Their laughter floods the hallway, sounding like the cawing of crows.”
― Holly Black, The Wicked King

“Crows can't keep secrets any better than mud; once they see something curious in the forest they have to tell everybody. Those who listen are rewarded: either warned of predators or alerted to food. Kya knew something was up.”
― Delia Owens, Where the Crawdads Sing

“One at a time, each of the crow left the circle and hopped into the surrounding thicket, emerging with a small twig or a piece of dried grass. One by one, they placed their offering on top of the body, hiding the twisted wings and the open beak that lay glinting like an obsidian shard in the low sun. More and more crows began to arrive, each bringing, something to lay on the corpse, until the clearing was a sea of glossy backs.
You'd told me once that crows mourn their dead. You'd never told me how.
Each bird laid their gift atop the dead crow and flew off. I did not yet know that, sometimes, it is impossible to mourn in the presence of others. When all the crows had left their offerings, the crowd dissolved into the twilight.”
― Zeyn Joukhadar, The Thirty Names of Night

“The baby is our baby, but as soon as we saw all the things that it can do, the dull solemness of its very gaze, we wished to put it back; we wished that a muster of crows might come and take it away.”
― Alice Ash, Paradise Block

“Crows love shiny things and they steal them and take them to their nests, the politician is also a crow, shameless like a crow, so he steals gold, silver, money, anything that shines and takes it to the place he trusts!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“I have a deep fascination with crows. They are such intelligent birds.”
― Robin S. Baker

“The crow was an oracular bird, supposed to house the soul of a sacred king, after the sacrifice.”
― Robert Graves, The Greek Myths 1

“Vanity, thy name is crow. Which is funny because c-r-o-w is also how you spell kleptomaniac.”
― Hailey Edwards, Amber Gambler