“Hope is the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all”
– Emily Dickinson
“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown …”
– John Keats, Ode To A Nightingale
“No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings”
– William Blake
“Just by the wooden brig a bird flew up,
Frit by the cowboy as he scrambled down
To reach the misty dewberry”
– John Clare, The Yellowhammer’s Nest
“If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands”
– Douglas Adams
“Be like the bird who, pausing in her flight awhile on boughs too slight, feels them give way beneath her, and yet sings, knowing she has wings”
– Victor Hugo
“God gives every bird his worm, but He does not throw it into the nest”
– PD James
“Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers”
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
“Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert”
– Percy Bysse Shelley, To a Skylark
“I caught this morning morning’s minion, kingdom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn falcon”
– Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Windhover
“A bird does not sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”
— Maya Angelou
THE Verwood-based Fireside Theatre has chosen Robert Thomas’s thriller Trap for a Lonely Man for its next reading, on at the home of Margaret and Tony Wilson on Wednesday 19th March.