Trumpet Of The Swan Quotes

Safety is all well and good: I prefer freedom.

The world is full of talkers, but it is rare to find anyone who listens. And I assure you that you can pick up more information when you are listening than when you are talking.

Besides, my life is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe to be without a voice.

Every night, before he turned in, he would write in the book. He wrote about things he had done, things he had seen, and thoughts he had had. Sometimes he drew a picture. He always ended by asking himself a question so he would have something to think about while falling asleep.

The sky," he wrote on his slate, "is my living room. The woods are my parlor. The lonely lake is my bath. I can't remain behind a fence all my life.

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.

People're always buried facing west, so at the end of time when the Last Trumpet blows, all the dead people'll claw their way up and walk due west to the throne of Jesus to be judged. . . . Suicides, mind, get buried facing north. They won't be able to find Jesus 'cause dead people only walk in straight lines. . . . Isn't no god better than one who does that to people?

They just keep trotting back and forth across the bridge thinking there is something better on the other side. If they'd hang head-down at the top of the thing and wait quietly, maybe something good would come along.

His face looked shrewd and wise, as if he knew many things, many of them not worth knowing.

In almost everyone's life there is one event that changes the whole course of his existence.

Louis is a musician. Like most musicians, he is in need of money.

When in love, one must take risks.

Most peasants did not miss the school. "What's the point?" they would say. "You pay fees and read for years, and in the end you are still a peasant, earning your food with your sweat. You don't get a grain of rice more for being able to read books. Why waste time and money? Might as well start earning your work points right away." The virtual absence of any chance of a better future and the near total immobility for anyone born a peasant took the incentive out of the pursuit of knowledge. Children of school age would stay at home to help their families with their work or look after younger brothers and sisters. They would be out in the fields when they were barely in their teens. As for girls, the peasants considered it a complete waste of time for them to go to school. "They get married and belong to other people. It's like pouring water on the ground." The Cultural Revolution was trumpeted as having brought education to the peasants through 'evening classes." One day my production team announced it was starting evening classes and asked Nana and me to be the teachers. I was delighted. However, as soon as the first 'class' began, I realized that this was no education. The classes invariably started with Nana and me being asked by the production team leader to read out articles by Mao or other items from the People's Daily. Then he would make an hour-long speech consisting of all the latest political jargon strung together in undigested and largely unintelligible hunks. Now and then he would give special orders, all solemnly delivered in the name of Mao.

There were snow geese there—hundreds of them, white and crisp against the dark and shining water, and more coming in, sounding like trumpets as the sky drew downward. The season was turning.

Now is my time to act!" he said to himself. "Now is my moment for risking everything on one bold move, however shocking it may be to my sensibilities, however offensive it may be to the laws that govern the lives of men. Here I go! May good luck go with me!

The trumpeter is beautiful to behold, graceful and elegant, just like our Ms. Swan. But if you disturb a trumpeter, trespass through its territory, or threaten its nest, it will hiss like a cobra and attack with the viciousness of a wolf. That is the black swan side.

In the darkness I thought of Fyodorovich, deep in the Kolyma taiga. It was the eleventh of October, and already, I imagined, the first light snows had dusted the area around Sunny Lake. I pictured the old man sitting alone in the sun by the lakeshore, smoking a Prima and gazing skyward as the last of the whooper swans flew south, squawking and trumpeting as they went.

The Phoenix and the Turtle Let the bird of loudest lay On the sole Arabian tree Herald sad and trumpet be, To whose sound chaste wings obey. But thou shrieking harbinger, Foul precurrer of the fiend, Augur of the fever's end, To this troop come thou not near. From this session interdict Every fowl of tyrant wing, Save the eagle, feather'd king; Keep the obsequy so strict. Let the priest in surplice white, That defunctive music can, Be the death-divining swan, Lest the requiem lack his right. And thou treble-dated crow, That thy sable gender mak'st With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st, 'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go. Here the anthem doth commence: Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the Turtle fled In a mutual flame from hence. So they lov'd, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain. Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance and no space was seen 'Twixt this Turtle and his queen: But in them it were a wonder. So between them love did shine That the Turtle saw his right Flaming in the Phoenix' sight: Either was the other's mine. Property was thus appalled That the self was not the same; Single nature's double name Neither two nor one was called. Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together, To themselves yet either neither, Simple were so well compounded; That it cried, "How true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love has reason, reason none, If what parts can so remain." Whereupon it made this threne To the Phoenix and the Dove, Co-supremes and stars of love, As chorus to their tragic scene: Beauty, truth, and rarity, Grace in all simplicity, Here enclos'd, in cinders lie. Death is now the Phoenix' nest, And the Turtle's loyal breast To eternity doth rest, Leaving no posterity: 'Twas not their infirmity, It was married chastity. Truth may seem but cannot be; Beauty brag but 'tis not she; Truth and beauty buried be. To this urn let those repair That are either true or fair; For these dead birds sigh a prayer

The sound of the trumpeter swans on the lake." I turned my head toward him. "Did you know they mate for life?" Charlie’s eyes softened before his lips briefly met mine. "Then I guess we’re just a couple of swans looking for a safer pond to wade in.

Dilemmas of the Angels: Flight" Before the angel there was something else— not this coffee shop next to a drug rehabilitation center filled with war veterans of the past, men and women strapped to their chairs, birds straining to rise from piles of feathers, bones, and blood. Drenched in sweat and a little shaky from too much caffeine, she takes flight, a shining white-winged trumpeter swan crossing open water, steam rising from the feathers' barbs. Below her, a cormorant, unfolding its black wings, explodes from the surface, and even fish, leaping from the oily sheen, glide for a moment, gills pumping in the poisonous atmosphere. Such longing. How large the muscles in our shoulders must be to lift our wings even a single time.

Louis knew right away what they were up to. He grew hot with rage. If those men succeeded in catching Serena and cutting a wing tip, all his plans would go wrong—she could never fly away to a lonely lake with him; she would have to remain in Philadelphia the rest of her life, a horrible fate.

For a time the bay at the river mouth was full of long-tailed ducks, that for a whistle, almost came to your hand, and there too came flocks of wild-swan, flying in wedges, trumpeting as they flew. Fierce otters quarrelled over eels at the mouth of the Black Burn that flows underneath the town and out below the Tolbooth to the shore, or made the gloaming melancholy with their doleful whistle.

TROUBLE

Wolves howl in the bright light of the moon. Bison remain wild, not tamed. And on dark days, when everywhere we turn war is raging and violence around the world seems to be rising, a dozen trumpeter swans fly in formation over snow-covered peaks.