“Sing a song of sixpence.”
Act V, scene 2.
The Tragedy of Bonduca (1611–14; published 1647)
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John Fletcher 52
English Jacobean playwright 1579–1625Related quotes
“The Siren waits thee, singing song for song.”
To Robert Browning (1846).
“The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
Source: Tropic of Cancer
Love's Voice (c.1935–1939)
Context: Such fable ours! However sweet,
That earlier hope had, if fulfilled,
Been but child's pap and toothless meat
— And meaning blunt and deed unwilled,
And we but motes that dance in light
And in such light gleam like the core
Of light, but lightless, are in right
Blind dust that fouls the unswept floor
For, no: not faith by fable lives,
But from the faith the fable springs
— It never is the song that gives
Tongue life, it is the tongue that sings;
And sings the song. Then, let the act
Speak, it is the unbetrayable
Command, if music, let the fact
Make music's motion; us, the fable.
“A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”
Although it appears on U.S. postage featuring Angelou, this is actually a variant quote from the work of poet Joan Walsh Anglund.
Misattributed
Source: Postal Service releases Maya Angelou stamp with quote from another author, Josh Hicks, 7 April 2015, Washington Post, 9 April 2015 http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2015/04/07/postal-serves-releases-maya-angelou-stamp-with-quote-from-another-author/,
“The whales do not sing because they have an answer. They sing because they have a song.”
Ashes and Snow : A Novel in Letters (2005) Flying Elephants Press
“And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.”
Lucy Gray, or Solitude, st. 16 (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)