Jonathan Livingston Seagull
by Richard Bach
(New York: Scribner, 1970)
Jonathan Livingston Seagull … was no ordinary bird.
Page 3.
For most gulls, it is not flying that mattes, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.
Page 4.
There’s a reason to life! We can lift ourselves out of ignorance, we can find ourselves as creatures of excellence and intelligence and skill. We can be free!
Page 17.
His one sorrow was not solitude, it was that other gulls refused to believe the glory of flight that awaited them; they refused to open their eyes and see.
Page 25.
What he had once hoped for the Flock, he now gained for himself alone he learned to fly, and was not sorry for the price that he had paid. Jonathan Seagull discovered that boredom and fear and anger are the reasons that a gull’s life is so shot, and with these gone from his thought, he lived a long fine life indeed.
Page 26.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull rose with the two starbright gulls to disappear into a perfect dark sky.
Page 37.
In heaven, he thought, there should be no limits.
Page 41.
The memory of his life on Earth was falling away. Earth had been a place where he had learned much, of course, but the details were blurred - something about fighting for food, and being Outcast.
Page 42.
“We choose our next world through what we learn in this one. Learn nothing, and the next world is the same as this one, all the same limitations and lead weights to overcome.”
Page 44.
“You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.”
Page 45.
“The gulls who s corn perfection for the sake of travel go nowhere, slowly. Those who put aside travel for the sake of perfection go anywhere, instantly. Remember, Jonathan, heaven isn’t a place or a time, because place and time are so very meaningless. Heaven is …”
Page 56.
“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,” he said, “you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.”
Page 56.
The more Jonathan practiced his kindness lessons, and the more he worked to know the nature of love the more he wanted to go back to Earth. For in spite of his lonely past, Jonathan Seagull was born to be an instructor, and his own way of demonstrating love was to give something of the truth that he had seen to a gull who asked only a chance to see truth for himself.
Page 59.
The gull sees farthest who flies highest.
Page 60.
“If our friendship depends on things like space and time, then when we finally overcome space and time, we’ve destroyed our own brotherhood!”
Page 61.
By the end of three months Jonathan had six other students Outcasts all, yet curious about this strange new idea of flight for the joy of flying.
Page 74.
“Precision flying is a step toward expressing our real nature. Everything that limits us we have to put aside.”
Page 74.
It is the Law of the Flock that an Outcast never returns, and the Law had not been broken once in ten thousand years.
Page 75.
It took almost an hour for the Word of the Elder to pass through the Flock: ignore them. The gull who speaks to an Outcast is himself Outcast. The gull who looks upon an Outcast breaks the Law of the Flock.
Page 76.
He spoke of very simple things - that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.
Page 81.
“The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.”
Page 81.
Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.
Page 82.
“Oh, Fletch, come on. Think. If you are talking to me now, then obviously you didn’t die, did you? What you did manage to do was to change your level of consciousness rather abruptly.”
Page 84.
“You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.”
Page 89.
“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation. Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.”
The shimmering stopped. Jonathan Seagull had vanished into empty air.
Page 90.
“To begin with,” he said heavily, “you’ve got to understand that a seagull is an unlimited idea of freedom, an image of the Great Gul, and your whole body, from wingtip to wingtip, is nothing ore than your thought itself.”
Page 91.
Fletcher Lynd Seagull and the other students of Jonathan spread their instructor’s teaching of freedom and flight in long missionary journeys to every flock on the Coastline.
Page 97.
The learning curve of a highly motivated seagull goes on steeply off the top of any graph, and now and then there were students who overcame limits so perfectly that they disappeared, as Jonathan had, from the face of an earth too limited to contain them.
Page 97.
The classes changed, with years, from wide soaring poems in flight to hushed talk about Jonathan before and after practice; to long involved recitations on the sand about the Divine One, with no flying ever done by anybody.
Page 100.
Each Tuesday afternoon the Flock walked over to stand around the pebbles and hear the miracles of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and his Gifted Divine Students.
Page 104.
The symbol for Jonathan’s teaching became a smooth pebble. Then later, any old rock would do. It was the worst possible symbol for a bird who had come to teach the joy of flight, but nobody seemed to notice.
Page 106.