“A bird doesn't sing because he has an answer, he sings because he has a song”

Ashes and Snow : A Novel in Letters (2005) Flying Elephants Press

Source: The Hunger Games

Source: The Oven Bird (1916)
Context: There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

As quoted in Woody Guthrie: A Life (1981) by Joe Klein, p. 160
Context: Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of the people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.

[Post Staff, http://www.phnompenhpost.com/national/recollections-king-father, Recollections of the King Father, 3 February 2013, 29 June 2015, Phnom Penh Post]

The Dutch Picture, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

A Prayer For Old Age http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1423/, st. 1.
A Full Moon in March (1935)
Context: God guard me from those thoughts men think
In the mind alone;
He that sings a lasting song
Thinks in a marrow-bone.

Brekkukotsannáll (The Fish Can Sing) (1957)

Adnan Solaković http://www.bhdani.com/arhiva/260/t26008.shtml