{"quotes":[{"text":"You think that upon the score of fore-knowledge and divining I am infinitely inferior to the swans. When they perceive approaching death they sing more merrily than before  because of the joy they have in going to the God they serve.","author":"Socrates","tags":["swans"],"id":38853,"author_id":"Socrates"},{"text":"Every morningbefore the birds starttrilling me their stories,I give birth to a new lovethrough my same old heartwhen a lake’s placidityfinds life in the swans breathOnly for you...From the poem 'Only For You.","author":"Munia Khan","tags":["birds","breath","heart","lake","love","love","love","lover","lovers","morning","poem","poetry","poetry","swan","swans","verse"],"id":48907,"author_id":"Munia+Khan"},{"text":"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.","author":"E.B. White","tags":["music","sleep","swans","trumpets","twilight"],"id":70528,"author_id":"E.B.+White"},{"text":"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.","author":"C. JoyBell C.","tags":["advice","believe-in-yourself","ducks","envy","evil-envy","human-nature","self-worth","self-worthiness","stealing-your-thunder","swans","warnings","wisdom"],"id":150056,"author_id":"C.+JoyBell+C."},{"text":"Every sweet hath its sour  every evil its good.","author":"Ralph Waldo Emerson","tags":["swans"],"id":201121,"author_id":"Ralph+Waldo+Emerson"},{"text":"Sweet meat must have sour sauce.","author":"Ben Jonson","tags":["swans"],"id":234663,"author_id":"Ben+Jonson"},{"text":"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.","author":"Srinidhi.R","tags":["dream","hut","life","mountains","pond","swans","swim","writer"],"id":284885,"author_id":"Srinidhi.R"},{"text":"It doesn't matter if you're born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan's egg!","author":"Hans Christian Andersen","tags":["aspirations","beauty","dreams","ducks","empowerment","fairy-tales","outcasts","potential","swans","ugliness","underdogs"],"id":337811,"author_id":"Hans+Christian+Andersen"},{"text":"Wings are of many kinds. Butterfly's wings, vulture's wings, eagle-wings, spread wings of white swans, dragonfly's serene wings, wings of albatross, lovely wings of humming birds, tiny wings of a fly or a bumble-bee-wings; and when they fly, they fly their best according to their ability of flying. We should not underestimate the size of those heavenly wings.","author":"Munia Khan","tags":["ability","according","albatross","bee","birds","butterfly","dragonfly","eagle","flying","flying","heavenly","hummingbird","hummingbirds","powerful","size","swans","tiny","underestimate","vulture","wing","wings","wings-and-flying","wings-to-fly","wisdom","wise-words"],"id":355836,"author_id":"Munia+Khan"},{"text":"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.","author":"Rebecca Solnit","tags":["fairy-tales","folk-tales","hans-christian-andersen","stories","swans","the-wild-swans","transformation"],"id":357977,"author_id":"Rebecca+Solnit"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":18,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}