Best 71 quotes in «swans quotes» category

In the story of Ugly Duckling, when did the Ugly Duckling stop feeling Ugly? When he realized that he was a Swan. Each of us has something Special, a swan of some sort, hidden inside somewhere. But until we recognize that it's there, what can we do but splash around, treading water? The Wise are Who They Are. They work with what they've got and do what they can do.

No amount of observations of white swans can allow the inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.

Last year when "Black Swan," "True Grit" and "King's Speech" all grossed over $100 million, it gave studios and independent financiers the confidence to make daring movies. You know, and not do the same old you-know-what.

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.

My mother is part albino." Bella Swan

Shiva... is the only hunter that will ever catch the wild swan; The prey she will take last is the wild white swan of the beauty of things. Then she will be alone, pure destruction, achieved and supreme, Empty darkness under the death-tent wings. She will build a nest of the swan's bones and hatch a new brood, Hang new heavens with new birds, all be renewed.

Millions of years ago, in my previous incarnations, I must have been related to swans... because I can still feel that affinity.

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.

no matter how many instances of white swans we may have observed, this does not justify the conclusion that all swans are white.

No number of sightings of white swans can prove the theory that all swans are white. The sighting of just one black one may disprove it.

Notes for a ballet, The Spell: ... Suddenly Sigmund hears the flutter of wings, and a group of wild swans flies across the moon ... Sigmund is astounded to see that their leader is part swan and part woman - unfortunately, divided lengthwise. She enchants Sigmund, who is careful not to make any poultry jokes.

Swan flocks of lilies shoreward lying, In sweetness, not in music, dying.

Swans live wherever there is water, and leave the place where water dries up; let not a man act so - and comes and goes as he pleases.

Swans are majestic, beautiful looking creatures. With really ugly temperaments.

The evening advanced. The shadows lengthened. The waters of the lake grew pitchy black. The gliding of the ghostly swans became rare and more rare.

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.

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.

The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.

Such as ne'er saw swans May think crows beautiful.

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.

There's a double beauty whenever a swan Swims on a lake with her double thereon.

There was no reason for Bella Swan to cross paths with me. She would be avoided like the plague she was.

The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.

The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast upon the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more: 'Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise.'

The swan in the pool is singing, And up and down doth he steer, And, singing gently ever, Dips under the water clear.

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.

The Singing of Swans is a remarkable narrative calling--even compelling--us to connect with our own ancestral roots, to seek our own inner wisdom, and to reclaim our own inner voices!

The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks And far beyond the discords of the wind.

This ugly duckling investment will likely need time - quarters, or even years - to blossom into a beautiful swan.

Ugly ducklings don't turn into swans and glide off down the lake. Whether your sunglasses are on or off, you only see the world you make.

Typhoid and swans - it all comes from the same place.

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.

To be born in a duck's nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan's egg.

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.

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.

As he made his way back to his home on the Dijver, along the canals, beside the calm waters, Borluut felt his regret, his remorse at having divulged his worries grow at the sight of the noble swans, sealed-in snow, which, prisoners of the canals, prey to the rain, the sadness of the bells, the shadow of the gables, have the modesty to remain silent and only complain, with a voice that is almost human, when they are about to die...

Women who start out as ugly ducklings don't become beautiful swans. What they mainly become is confident ducks. They take charge of their lives.

Why get married? For human beings, marriage is such an unnatural state. If you want monogamy, it has been said, you should marry a swan.

Yeah, it's an off day when I don't get somebody telling me how edible I smell." - Bella Swan.

Dream of the Tundra Swan Dusk fell and the cold came creeping, cam prickling into our hearts. As we tucked beaks into feathers and settled for sleep, our wings knew. That night, we dreamed the journey: ice-blue sky and the yodel of flight, the sun's pale wafer, the crisp drink of clouds. We dreamed ourselves so far aloft that the earth curved beneath us and nothing sang but a whistling vee of light. When we woke, we were covered with snow. We rose in a billow of white.

Every lake belongs to the quietness desired by the swans.

I dream that one day I would be a published writer and people would read my books - if not, I would be living in the mountains in a small hut, near a pond where swans swim, writing a diary for myself.

Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one. In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis... In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch. Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story.

I am as restless a traveller in my own land as a wintering whooper swan.

If you are stealing people's thunder just by being around and standing there; you really can't expect people to like you. People want their own thunder to be heard loud and wide, not yours! Swans should never despair over ducks not liking them.

It's a wonder they can sit down at all, and when they walk, nothing touches their legs under the billowing skirts, except their shifts and stockings. They are like swans, drifting along on unseen feet; or else like the jellyfish in the waters of the rocky harbour near our house, when I was little, before I ever made the long sad journey across the ocean. They were bell-shaped and ruffled, gracefully waving and lovely under the sea; but if they washed up on the beach and dried out in the sun there was nothing left of them. And that is what the ladies are like: mostly water.

The fresco on one large wall was indeed the marvel Julian had promised. It was a Pre-Raphaelite portrayal of the Children of Lir, those four siblings cursed to remain swans for nine hundred years. Despite a ragged crack that was making its way down the plaster, the fresco was as pulsing with life as though one was actually looking out on a placid freshwater lake. When Marjan turned away from the painted wall, she saw its real-life inspiration outside the window. There, through floor-length panes, stood a pond complete with a flock of those gracious birds, the white-necked swans.

There is nothing in nature which approximates to the idea of a hospice.

There, tonight. The eternity of that. Swan logic. Swan history.

Your heart plays a song like a broken music box, but nothing ever sounded quite so beautiful to me. Together, in the dance of wounded-wing swans we’ll rise above the ruins, melting into the golden light.