“Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.”

“If you take as your pattern the wings of feathered birds, these are more powerful in structure of bone and sinew because they are penetrable, that is to say the feathers are separated from one another and the air passes through them. But the bat is aided by its membrane, which binds the whole together and is not penetrated by the air.”

“Anne Lamott’s priest friend Tom, how to get through:
"Left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe," he said. "Right foot, left foot, right foot, breathe."
Salon April 25, 2003”

“Maggie threw her head back and laughed. 'So you're going to try… what? Birds of a Feather?' she quested.

'Of course not,' Kat said. 'Everyone knows the French government banned the importation of peacocks in 1987.”

“People with yuan fen are destined to like one another;
Friendship develops even if a thousand miles apart.
But should yuan fen be absent between two individuals,
They will remain strangers despite sitting face-to-face”

“the power of philosophy floats through my head.. light like a feather, heavy as lead.”

“It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot.
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.”

“Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters.”

“We do not pass through the same door twice
Or return to the door through which we did not pass”

“Above them,
parades mark the passing of days
through parks where pale colonnades arch
in marble and steel,
where all of the Twenty Thousand attending your foot fall
(and the Cause that they died for)
are lost in the idling birdcalls,
and the records they left are cryptic at best,
lost in obsolescence”