Top 100 The Swan Quotes
#1. I love the idea of species fluidity, I guess, the sense of the maiden inherent in the swan or seal, the youth inherent in the bear or deer. After all, human beings are animals.
Delia Sherman
#2. Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs
drive the sap
downward and up again: and almost without awakening
it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement.
Like the god stepping into the swan.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#3. Let beeves and home-bred kine partake The sweets of Burn-mill meadow; The swan on still St. Mary's Lake Float double, swan and shadow!
William Wordsworth
#4. A rational human being of the civilized world would be like the swan that can draw the milk from a mixture of milk and water, leaving aside the water.
Abhijit Naskar
#5. I think I'll call you Cygnus," Chelsea said.
"The swan?" I said. A bit precious, but it could have been worse.
She shook her head. "Black hole. Cygnus X-1.
Peter Watts
#6. Coal-black is better than another hue,
In that it scorns to bear another hue;
For all the water in the ocean
Can never turn the swan's black legs to white,
Although she lave them hourly in the flood.
William Shakespeare
#7. Pooley hunched closer to his pint. 'A pox on it all,' said he. 'The Swan packed full of these idiots, old Soap flushed away round the proverbial S-bend and Cowboy Night looming up before us with about as much promise as the coming of Ragnorok!
Robert Rankin
#8. Tonight I heard Louis's horn. My father heard it, too. The wind was right, and I could hear the notes of taps, just as darkness fell. There is nothing in all the world I like better than the trumpet of the swan.
E.B. White
#9. He worked night and day. He made a coat that would transform him; he would be more than a man; a winged creature, beautiful as light. All the birds brought him feathers. Even the eagle. Even the swan.
Catherine Fisher
#11. In America, there's a programme called 'The Swan.' They take 12 ugly people and call them 'ugly ducklings.' They spend six months and have everything done - plastic surgery, teeth, everything. And then they have this moment where their family is brought in, and they are revealed. It's scary.
Trinny Woodall
#12. The swan murmurs sweet strains with a flattering tongue, itself the singer of its own dirge.
Martial
#13. Merrily, merrily goes the bark On a breeze from the northward free, So shoots through the morning sky the lark, Or the swan through the summer sea.
Walter Scott
#14. The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, The vapours weep their burthen to the ground, Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, And after many summer dies the swan. Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#15. The Teutons have been singing the swan song ever since they entered the ranks of history. They have always confounded truth with death.
Henry Miller
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. 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
#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. The swan is not without cause dedicated to Apollo, because foreseeing his happiness in death, he dies with singing and pleasure.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#24. in 1596 a man called William Wayte claimed to have been set upon by four assailants outside the Swan Theatre
Neil MacGregor
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. When an eagle spreads its wings to fly, even the swan is envious.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#29. Yeah," I said. "What is that? A bird? "It's the swan," he said. "Wow. A school with a swan. Wow."
"That swan is the spawn of Satan. Never get closer to it than we are now.
John Green
#30. 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
#32. 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
#33. When we accept bad art because it's good politics, we're killing the swan to feed the chickens.
Tom Robbins
#34. The swan, like the soul of the poet, By the dull world is ill understood.
Heinrich Heine
#35. Perthites were like the Swan River's jellyfish - small pink blobs adrift in a warm environment.
Dave Franklin
#36. Nobody really metamorphoses. Cinderella is always Cinderella, just in a nicer dress. The Ugly Duckling was always a swan, just a smaller version. And I bet the tadpole and the caterpillar still feel the same, even when they're jumping and flying, swimming and floating.
Just like I am now.
Holly Smale
#37. Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan.
Epictetus
#38. In traditional 'Swan Lakes,' it's Prince Siegfried's 21st-birthday celebration, his coming-of-age. The entire court, from his mother the Queen on down, is on hand.
Robert Gottlieb
#39. Contact lenses are for vain, weak-willed piglets who swan around showing off: 'Look everybody, I can see without spectacles. No one at first glance will ever assume I know how to surf the net.'
Greg Proops
#40. The music, and the banquet, and the wine
The garlands, the rose odors, and the flowers, The sparkling eyes, and flashing ornaments
The white arms and the raven hair
the braids, And bracelets; swan-like bosoms, and the necklace, An India in itself, yet dazzling not.
Lord Byron
#41. "When you left
he left
you took everything with you. But the absence of him is everywhere I look." - Bella Swan, New Moon
Stephenie Meyer
#42. I didn't realize I was crying until it was time to say the blinding words. 'I do,' I managed to choke out in a nearly unintelligible whisper... When it was his turn to speak, the words rang clear and victorious. 'I do,' he vowed.
Stephenie Meyer
#43. Do you really believe that in the late 1800s Paddy Hannan would have walked 600 miles in the hot sun from Perth to Kalgoorlie to discover gold if he had to pay the Wayne Swan resource super tax?
Clive Palmer
#44. The river is such a tranquil place, a place to sit and think of romance and the beauty of nature, to enjoy the elegance of swans and the chance of a glimpse of a kingfisher.
Jane Wilson-Howarth
#45. She could never understand why creatures of darkness had the slightest interest in spineless human girls.
Thomm Quackenbush
#46. strangers? Millie's swan song on the stage, the last
Kate Atkinson
#47. And said with the softness of repressed violence, 'I am not one to stick his neck out; it is a bit of a reach. I was waiting for the smallest sign that you could love me ... I never got it.'
Laertes, Count of Samothrace
Rebecca Ashe
#48. Swan renders the gathering amusingly, depicting the vile android Brainiac, scourge of the galaxy, sitting on Clark's ottoman and chatting away with Luthor as if he's at some kind of Stitch-n-Bitch-of-Doom.
Glen Weldon
#49. The savior of a living thing owns the living thing. The destroyer of a living thing slays and wastes life, so he does not own a living thing. The living swan belongs to the savior, not the slayer.
Ama H. Vanniarachchy
#50. Don't worry about the bloodsucker,' Jacob suggested, and his tone was smug. 'He's just jealous.'
'Of course I am.' Edward's voice was velvet again, under control, a musical murmur in the darkness.
Stephenie Meyer
#51. In the heyday of the Oscars, there were electric sparks flying. When Cher went in her fabulous Bob Mackie dress and her Mohawk, and Bjoerk with her swan dress. Then we thought it was bad taste; now I think it should have been the best dress because she stood out.
Andre Leon Talley
#52. What the hell is in swan saliva that burns so badly?
John Green
#53. For Swan's birthday, Calla made pineapple upside-down cake, which is not the kind of cad you put candles on. So there was nothing to blow and make wishes on. Nobody missed the candles, because when you're eating pineapple upside-down cake, there is nothing much left to wish for
Jenny Wingfield
#54. The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening clowd.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on
To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow
While small birds nestle in the edge below.
John Clare
#55. Every morning
before the birds start
trilling me their stories,
I give birth to a new love
through my same old heart
when a lake's placidity
finds life in the swans breath
Only for you...
From the poem 'Only For You
Munia Khan
#56. As Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, writes, "Big data may mean more information, but it also means more false information." And even when the information is not false, the problem is "that the needle comes in an increasingly larger haystack.
Arianna Huffington
#57. There's no need to curse God if you're an ugly duckling. He chooses those strong enough to endure it so that they can guide others who've felt the same.
Criss Jami
#59. If troubled companies want to explain away 2008 as a 'black swan,' then someone should take responsibility for creating the oil slick that seems to have tarred the entire flock!
Andrew Lo
#60. Once you become a professional, to get through a ballet like 'Swan Lake' - four acts as the lead, changing character - the perseverance is incredible. It takes a lot to make it through and keep the same energy throughout the entire performance.
Misty Copeland
#61. Now that that's settled, you're coming with me."
"Never in a billion suns. Not even if Zeus showed up as a swan and tried to peck me in your direction. I wouldn't go with you even if my other option was Hades dragging me to the Underworld for an eternal threesome with Persephone.
Amanda Bouchet
#63. Put one foot forward and the other will get you to where you are going~!" Bag Lady, Swan Song
Robert McCammon
#64. Isn't it supposed to be like this?" He smiled. "The glory of first love, and all that. It's incredible, isn't it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?"
"Very different," I agreed. "More forceful than I'd imagined.
Stephenie Meyer
#65. A rare bird upon the earth and very much like a black swan.
Juvenal
#66. He framed my face now, and I met his stare in the dark of the car. "I think you're beautiful." My heart folded like an origami swan.
Jenny B. Jones
#67. The first time the Kirov ballet was seen in America was on Sept. 11, 1961. The ballet was 'Swan Lake.' The ballerina was Inna Zubkovskaya. The place was the old Met, on what must have been one of the hottest nights of the year, and there was no air-conditioning.
Robert Gottlieb
#68. It was dusk and the light had an ultra-violet quality to it, a final burst of pigmentation as night and day rushed at each other in a clash of colour prisms before darkness finnaly, inevitably won out.
Karen Swan
#69. My heart is not brave or big. It is not cruel either. It is not strong at all. I keep it within this iron cage for a reason. Breathe on it wrong and I will die ... Just go now. I would rather let you see my face, than my heart.'
Laertes, Count of Samothrace
Rebecca Ashe
#70. You cannot dance an arabesque in 'Swan Lake' and 'Nutcracker' the same way.
Natalia Makarova
#71. The demons almost got me! But glory be to Jesus, and when he arrives on his flying saucer from the planet Jupiter I'll be there on the golden shore to kiss his hand!
Robert McCammon
#72. What 'War and Peace' is to the novel and 'Hamlet' is to the theater, Swan Lake' is to ballet - that is, the name which to many people stands for and sums up an art form.
Robert Gottlieb
#73. Elaine slowly transformed from the proverbial ugly duckling into a swan.
Mike Wells
#74. that the Black Swan has three attributes: unpredictability, consequences, and retrospective explainability. Let
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#75. You don't get 'The Unfinished Swan' or 'Shadow of the Colossus' or even Telltale's 'Walking Dead' until you've sat through the long, linear infodumps of something like 'Metal Gear Solid'.
Dave Morris
#76. Death darkens his eyes, and unplumes his wings, Yet the sweetest song is the last he sings: Live so, my Love, that when death shall come, Swan-like and sweet it may waft thee home.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#77. There was no reason for Bella Swan to cross paths with me. She would be avoided like the plague she was.
Stephenie Meyer
#78. Then came night
that was like falling water.
At times, for hours,
a bird spirit,
half buzzard, half swan,
just above the rushes
from which a snow-storm howls.
Peter Huchel
#79. FRANK: Do you know Yeats?
RITA: The wine lodge?
FRANK: No, WB Yeats, the poet.
RITA: No.
FRANK: Well, in his poem 'The Wild Swans At Coole',Yeats rhymes the word "swan" with the word "stone". You see? That's an example of assonance.
RITA: Yeah, means getting the rhyme wrong.
Willy Russell
#80. There are no makeovers in my books. The ugly duckling does not become a beautiful swan. She becomes a confident duck able to take charge of her own life and problems.
Maeve Binchy
#81. Every man experiences what you call love for every pretty woman and least of all for his wife. That is what the proverb says, and it is a true one. Another's wife is a swan, but one's own is bitter wormwood.
Leo Tolstoy
#82. But swan, float lightly because you are a swan, because by the exquisite curve of your neck the gods gave you some special favor, and even though you fracture it running against some man-made bridge, it healed and you sailed onward.
F. Scott Fitzgerald to his wife Zelda.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#83. 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
#84. Every lake belongs to the quietness desired by the swans.
Munia Khan
#85. 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
#86. He had danced with fair maidens before, but Odette was different. She was graceful and beautiful, but there was something in her eyes and in the things she said, an intelligence and a boldness that belied her quiet demeanor.
Melanie Dickerson
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. The world may see you as an ugly duckling, but God sees you as a magnificent swan.
Matshona Dhliwayo
#90. 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
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.
James Russell Lowell
#97. The mosaicist was making the fine hairs on the nape of Mona's swan neck out of chips of gold
Kurt Vonnegut
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.
E.B. White
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