The Painted Bird Quotes

#1. Can the imagination, any more than the boy, be held prisoner ?"
- from the foreword to the 1976 edition of "The Painted Bird

Jerzy Kosinski

#2. A bird painted not with beauty but with all the dirt and wounds collected in a long hard life, in battle, in love, with torn feathers and a busted leg and a chipped beak and one of its eyes half closed; and yet a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that.

Jeff Noon

#3. We existed moment to moment, never knowing who would be the next to leave this world.

Anonymous

#4. MY GAZELLES ARE ALL IN ROW, (But they run off a lot)
Kego O'Grady

Steve Merrick

#5. If you behave like a doormat, expect to be stepped on and don't complain about it.

Suzette Haden Elgin

#6. FEAR only one person that is GOD. LISTEN to only one voice that is your CONSCIENCE

Amit Abraham

#7. I woke up one morning and realized that what I wanted to say to everyone - children, young people, adults - was: Read for your life.

Katherine Paterson

#8. Open skies painted above painted doorways and painted birds skimming across bricks trying to fly away. Little bird, what are you thinking? You come from a can.

Cath Crowley

#9. Soul smiles through the lips of a happy face

Munia Khan

#10. Everything was curved to fit the walls: the stove, the sink and the cupboards, and all of it had been painted with flowers, insects and birds in bright primary colours.

J.K. Rowling

#11. Sometimes they rose up inside her, these moments of fierce happiness, kindling out of their own substance like a spark igniting a mound of grass. It was a joy to be alive, a strange and savage joy, and she stood there in the warmth and destruction of it knowing it could not last.

Kevin Brockmeier

#12. If you cannot live with hope and create with intention or be kind to a stranger, bury your head. You are not living at all.

Dawn Garcia

#13. Move quickly. Sound, calm mind. Be light in body. Have a clever mind. Master the basics.

Gogen Yamaguchi

#14. A king-size bed sat catty-corner opposite me. The bedroom was painted white, but the comforter was crimson. Small black velvet bird appliques swarmed in the center. I'm not much for art. I'll confess the deeper meaning of the twisted comforter was lost on me. Maybe death to all swallows?

Hailey Edwards