We are saddened by a bird's cry, but not a fish's blood; Blessed are those with voices. If those dolls had voices, I bet each and everyone would scream "I don't want to be a human." (Alternate translation from one of the dubbed versions)

The fact that Saigyō composed the poem that begins, "I shall be unhappy without loneliness," shows that he made loneliness his master. He also wrote:
In the mountain village
who are you calling, yobuko-bird?
I thought you lived alone.

Bomanz could not get away from the bird, who, if he had been human, would have hung out in taverns masquerading as the world’s foremost authority, armed with an uninformed and ready opinion on every conceivable subject. His cheerful bigotry and who-cares ignorance drove the old man’s temper to its limit.

With the troubled eyes of a youth
I envied
Birds flying—
Flying they sang.

The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The God's name is Abraxas.

It's just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.

Does it not move you strangely, the love-bird's cry, tonight when, like the drifting snow, memory piles up on memory?

A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song