Top 100 Swan Quotes
#1. If Edward Cullen had of been ugly I'm sure Bella Swan wouldn't have been quite so smitten with him coming into her bedroom to watch her sleep at night. We females can be strange, shallow creatures when the mood takes us.
L. H. Cosway
#2. I don't want the guy who wanted the swan. I want the guy who wanted the duckling."
A long moment of silence passes.
Then: "Chloe, I don't know what that means."
She stomps her foot. "Seriously? Do mothers not read nursery rhymes to their sons?
Lauren Layne
#4. Dream young. Don't settle for old - for to be old is to be superstitious and without curiosity and always questioning your faith. And be ferocious in your dreaming - run like a sun's explosion, and skip across bluing waves, and dance upon tips of swan feathers.
Carew Papritz
#5. The swan who goes on living in its parents' tree will die; this is why those who are beautiful and talented bear the burden of finding their own way in the world.
Arthur Golden
#7. There was a sorry judge who lived at the Swan by himself. He got but little honor, and he got but little pelf [i.e. wealth], He drudged and judged from morn to night, no ass drudged more than he, And the more he drudged, and the more he judged, the sorrier judge was he.
St. George Tucker
#8. I'm going to do 'The Social Network Two: The Electric Boogaloo.' And I have a part in 'Beige Swan.' I'm going to be the lead, but I don't dance. I just do a lot of sitting down. It's too tiring to get up and dance around. That should be coming out in 20-never.
Amy Poehler
#9. My duchess," James stated, his eyes sweeping the crowd with the air of a man who has ruled the waves. "She is not a swan, because that would imply she had once been an ugly duckling.
Eloisa James
#10. Well what would you have us do, Jason? Swan into a hardware store without any cash and say "give us your best rack or we'll set the adorable button-nosed robots on you for bunny-boiler death by cuddling?" Jared Thomas in Red Gods Sing
Trevor Barton
#11. I felt a surge of pity, and relief. Pity because, as beautiful as they were, they were outsiders, clearly not accepted. Relief that I wasn't the only newcomer here, and certainly not the most interesting by any standard.
Bella Swan
Stephenie Meyer
#12. To love love and not its meaning, hardens the heart in monstrous ways ... (The Rape Of The Swan)
Footnote : A form of self-edification, infatuation, lust and the epitome of hedonism.
Archibald MacLeish
#13. It is best to live with honor for just a day than with dishonor for many decades; better a short lived celestial swan than a century-lived crow.
Sathya Sai Baba
#14. The world may see you as an ugly duckling, but God sees you as a magnificent swan.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#15. This ugly duckling investment will likely need time - quarters, or even years - to blossom into a beautiful swan.
Barry Ritholtz
#16. I once wrote a song so beautiful that I myself couldn't sing it. It's called Plastic Government Cheese Swan, and it's about how the world is plastic and full of government cheese swans.
Thom Yorke
#17. I cry. Evil dissolves, and love, like foam;
that love. Prattle of children powers me home,
my heart claps like the swan's
under a frenzy of who love me and who shine.
John Berryman
#18. The dying swan, when years her temples pierce, In music-strains breathes out her life and verse, And, chanting her own dirge, tides on her wat'ry hearse.
Phineas Fletcher
#19. God is the reason why even in pain, I smile. In confusion, I understand. In betrayal, I trust. And in fear, I continue to fight. -Bella Swan
Stephenie Meyer
#20. I like relativity and quantum theories because I don't understand them and they make me feel as if space shifted about like a swan that can't settle, refusing to sit still and be measured; and as if the atom were an impulsive thing always changing its mind.
D.H. Lawrence
#21. I have no idea! I have been writing for 35 years and from the beginning up to now the situation's almost the same. I'm kind of an ugly duckling. Always the duckling, never the swan.
Haruki Murakami
#22. They were doing the Dying Swan at the ballet. And there was a rumor that some bookmarkers had drifted into town from upstate New York and that they had fixed the bullet. There was a lot of money bet on the swan to live.
Woody Allen
#23. You just didn't bring a pitchfork to a swan fight.
T. Kingfisher
#24. Wearing a corset, a ball gown, heels and a swan hat with wings to fight in the forest gave me a whole new appreciation for everyday clothes, because you really become that alter ego while wearing those costumes in those environments on the set. They just influenced everything you tried to do.
Lily Collins
#25. Even the ugliest swan is still more beautiful than the loveliest crown on the fence, Anna thought
Jill Alexander Essbaum
#26. I've developed into quite a swan. I'm one of those people that will probably look better and better as I get older - until I drop dead of beauty.
Rufus Wainwright
#27. You could look at birds all your life without ever knowing what was a sparrow and what was a blackbird, but we all know a swan when we see it.
Joe Hill
#28. Tony Swan, Jorge Sanchez, Calvin Franz, Frances Neagley, Stanley Lowrey, Manuel Orozco, David O'Donnell, and Karla Dixon.
Lee Child
#29. I was in two episodes playing Christopher Reeve's character's emissary. They wanted to have my character announce Dr Swan's death, which I thought was exploitative.
Margot Kidder
#30. The very first film I ever saw was a pirate movie called 'The Black Swan' with Tyrone Power. And I thought that was great stuff. Of course, in those days, Technicolor was really Technicolor; there was no such thing as desaturation. Everybody looked super suntanned.
Ridley Scott
#31. How d'you want me to put it? You waltzed off on a whim and left us to pick up the pieces. Now you suddenly swan back and expect us to carry on where we left off! You can't have it both ways--either we were affected by your departure or we weren't. Which do you prefer?
Jonathan Stroud
#32. The swan is not without cause dedicated to Apollo, because foreseeing his happiness in death, he dies with singing and pleasure.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#33. in 1596 a man called William Wayte claimed to have been set upon by four assailants outside the Swan Theatre
Neil MacGregor
#34. The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.
James Russell Lowell
#35. I'm telling you, the gorgeous of the world can actually look pretty intimidating when they scowl. Imagine a snow-white swan with a scary tattoo holding a chain saw. There's just no way to really prepare for that.
Jim Benton
#36. I have had so many great moments, but I would have to say that dancing the Swan in 'Swan Lake' was such a unique and passionate experience for me. It was such bloody hard work, even at that very early age, that I would not want to try to replicate it again now.
William Kempe
#37. Of course! the path to heaven
doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
-from The Swan
Mary Oliver
#39. The mosaicist was making the fine hairs on the nape of Mona's swan neck out of chips of gold
Kurt Vonnegut
#40. The Black Swan asymmetry allows you to be confident about what is wrong, not about what you believe is right.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#41. Holden was imagining what several hundred rounds of Teflon-coated tungsten steel going five thousand meters per second would do to human bodies when Alex threw down the throttle and a roomful of elephants swan dived onto his chest.
James S.A. Corey
#42. So the world is much more correlated than we give credit to. And so we see more of what Nassim Taleb calls "black swan events" - rare events happen more often than they should because the world is more correlated.
Richard Thaler
#44. Ages elapsed ere Homer's lamp appear'd, And ages ere the Mantuan swan was heard: To carry nature lengths unknown before, To give a Milton birth, ask'd ages more.
William Cowper
#45. I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned.
Robert Gottlieb
#46. With 'Black Swan,' the ballerina saga flips its tiara and goes on a hallucinatory bender, a scary acid trip where transfiguration and disfiguration meet.
James Wolcott
#47. I have this really morbid, awesome love for the movie 'Black Swan.'
Sherri Saum
#48. The central idea in The Black Swan is that: rare events cannot be estimated from empirical observation since they are rare.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#49. From a public perspective, the Grand National is the biggest race of all, and not to have won it yet is definitely a failure. But there's been a lot of jockeys every bit as good and better than me that haven't won it - John Francome, Peter Scudamore, Jonjo O'Neill, Charlie Swan, to name a few.
Tony McCoy
#50. Now, as Rilke would say, let's eat us
some effing panther and swan, shall we?
Jason Bredle
#51. And while we're on the subject of ducks, which we plainly are, the story, 'The Ugly Duckling' ought be banned as the central character wasn't a duckling or he wouldn't have grown up into a swan. He was a cygnet.
Russell Brand
#52. Jorgen!" Mathis strode up to Jorgen's side. "I hope you are not going to dance with this lovely swan all night." "I had hoped I would." Jorgen winked at her. Odette smiled at him.
Melanie Dickerson
#53. I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.
Paolo Bacigalupi
#54. One Mother's Day, he gave Mom a music box that played the theme from Swan Lake. She cried for days over it.
Karen Joy Fowler
#55. My last night in my room. My last night as Isabella Swan. Tomorrow night, I would be Bella Cullen.
Stephenie Meyer
#56. The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.
Gary Shteyngart
#57. There's a double beauty whenever a swan
Swims on a lake with her double thereon.
Thomas Hood
#58. She tastes like nectar and salt. Nectar and salt and apples. Pollen and stars and hinges. She tastes like fairy tales. Swan maiden at midnight. Cream on the tip of a fox's tongue. She tastes like hope.
Laini Taylor
#60. Sing swan, Spring swan then lets fly.
Follow the pretty bird across the sky.
Call swan, Fall swan, then lets rest.
Tucked in the branches of your quiet nest.
Shannon Messenger
#61. 'Don't Look Back' is my first YA contemporary mystery/thriller. It's been described as 'Black Swan' meets 'Pretty Little Liars'.
Jennifer Armentrout
#62. What kind of bird do you think these feathers come from?' she asked.
'I don't know. A swan?'
'You had better stop wearing those wings, then.
A swan might fall in love with you. And as you
probably know, swans mate for life.'
'You are a funny one, Rose.
Heather O'Neill
#63. The old woman remembered a swan she had bought many years ago in Shanghai for a foolish sum. This bird, boasted the market vendor, was once a duck that stretched its neck in hopes of becoming a goose, and now look!
it is too beautiful to eat.
Amy Tan
#64. Hell, he thought maybe they were hippos in tutus doing Swan Lake, the way everything flipped and bounced.
K.C. Wells
#65. Would you just strap some toe shoes on and dance 'Swan Lake?' No. Would you just put a violin in your hand and - ? No. I felt that way about acting, and I was taught to feel that way. I didn't come to it on my own.
Ellen Barkin
#66. I already know how strong you are. You didn't have to break the furniture. - Bella Swan
Stephenie Meyer
#67. Sometimes I feel my arm is like a swan's neck - so weak.
Maria Sharapova
#68. Slashing its way to the finish line, 'Black Swan' is the first ballet movie for highbrow horror fans for whom ballet itself signifies little to nothing. Those of us who know and love ballet can only look on it with a different kind of horror.
James Wolcott
#69. Who may be called a paramahamsa? He who, like a swan, can take the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water. He who, like an ant, can take the sugar from a mixture of sugar and sand, leaving aside the sand.
Ramakrishna
#70. Adjustment, that synonym for conformity that comes more easily to the modern tongue, is the theme of our swan song, the piper's tune to which we dance on the brink of the abyss, the siren's melody that destroys our senses and paralyzes our wills.
Robert M. Lindner
#71. Perthites were like the Swan River's jellyfish - small pink blobs adrift in a warm environment.
Dave Franklin
#72. The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.
Heinrich Heine
#73. You think of yourself
light, fast, free
free of earth, free of bondage to your body. In your 'perfect' body, you are in control, addicted to the light that keeps you out of body. You're a swan maiden, addicted to wings, addicted to spirit. You refused to eat in order to fly.
Marion Woodman
#74. Strut' said Ursula. 'One wants to strut, to be a swan among geese
D.H. Lawrence
#75. 'Swan,' by Mary Oliver. Poems and prose. Reading from this book is as if visiting a very wise friend. There is wisdom and welcoming kindness on every page.
Jessye Norman
#76. Some moralist or mythological poet
Compares the solitary soul to a swan;
I am satisfied with that,
Satisfied if a troubled mirror show it,
Before that brief gleam of its life be gone ...
William Butler Yeats
#77. When we accept bad art because it's good politics, we're killing the swan to feed the chickens.
Tom Robbins
#78. The swan in the pool is singing, And up and down doth he steer, And, singing gently ever, Dips under the water clear.
Heinrich Heine
#80. If I had the wings of a swan, over these stony hills I would fly. I would fly to the arms of my true love, and there I'd be happy to die.
Susan Price
#81. My last night as Isabella Swan. Tomorrow night, I would be Bella Cullen. Though the whole marriage ordeal was a thorn in my side, I had to admit that I liked the sound of that.
- bella swan
Stephenie Meyer
#83. There's no law that says I can't cook in my own house.
- Charlie Swan
Stephenie Meyer
#84. A rare bird on this earth, like nothing so much as a black swan.
Juvenal
#85. Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, retrospective explainability.
Nicholas Nassim Taleb
#86. His leap was exact, mathematical. The initial arc - head tucked between taut arms that spread out gradually like wings - was as graceful as a swan dive.
Juan Filloy
#87. I eased back into the throne. Damn comfortable: swan-down and silk. Kinging it is pain in the arse enough without one of those gothic chairs.
Mark Lawrence
#88. Technical things are getting more mechanical. Take 'Swan Lake,' the Black Swan pas de deux. Now, my goodness, they're turning not just 32 fouettes - but double or triple pirouettes.
Natalia Makarova
#89. Evolution writ large is the belief that a cloud of hydrogen will spontaneously invent extreme-ultraviolet lithography, perform Swan Lake, and write all the books in the British Museum.
Fred Reed
#90. The raven once in snowy plumes was drest,
White as the whitest dove's unsullied breast,
Fair as the guardian of the Capitol,
Soft as the swan; a large and lovely fowl
His tongue, his prating tongue had changed him quite
To sooty blackness from the purest white.
Ovid
#91. I was in disbelief that I'd just explained my dreary life to this bizarre, beautiful boy who may or may not despise me.
Bella Swan
Stephenie Meyer
#92. Some full-breasted swan That, fluting a wild carol ere her death, Ruffles her pure cold plume, and takes the flood With swarthy webs.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#93. You can't just kill a swan and wrap yourself in its skin, you know. It takes something from you. In her case it took the thing that she wanted most.
Anne Ursu
#94. The Water Babies "Young and Old" When all the world is young, lad, And all the trees are green; And every goose a swan, lad, And every lass a queen; Then hey for boot and horse, lad, And round the world away: Young blood must have its course, lad, And every dog his day.
Charles Kingsley
#95. Every whore needs a man that could turn her into a beautiful swan ...
Cleopatramoneysex
#96. Having done so many versions, I never felt like an artist in 'Swan Lake.'
David Hallberg
#97. He said it was as if she punctured his skin and entered his veins and swan directly to his heart.
Sarah Winman
#99. And as she'd watched him stagger away Swan had realized that forgiveness crippled evil, drew the poison from it like lancing a boil.
Robert McCammon
#100. We were the best team in the world: European champions in 1984, we qualified without a hitch and 86 was to be the swan song for a very experienced side.
Michel Patini
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