“I dream of flight, not to be as the angels are, but to rise above the smallness of it all. The smallnesss that I am. Against the daily death the iconography of wings.”
Source: Art and Lies
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Jeanette Winterson 187
English writer 1959Related quotes

“So rapid is the flight of dreams upon the wings of imagination.”

“Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?”
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942), It Must Give Pleasure
Context: What am I to believe? If the angel in his cloud,
Serenely gazing at the violent abyss,
Plucks on his strings to pluck abysmal glory, Leaps downward through evening’s revelations, and
On his spredden wings, needs nothing but deep space,
Forgets the gold centre, the golden destiny,Grows warm in the motionless motion of his flight,
Am I that imagine this angel less-satisfied?
Are the wings his, the lapis-haunted air?

“For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast.”
The Destruction of Sennacherib, st. 3.
Hebrew Melodies (1815)
Source: Selected Poems
"The Chantry Of The Cherubim" in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse (1917) by D. H. S. Nicholson.
Context: p>I buoyed me on the wings of dream,
Above the world of sense;
I set my thought to sound the scheme,
And fathom the Immense;
I tuned my spirit as a lute
To catch wind-music wandering mute.Yet came there never voice nor sign;
But through my being stole
Sense of a Universe divine,
And knowledge of a soul
Perfected in the joy of things,
The star, the flower, the bird that sings.Nor I am more, nor less, than these;
All are one brotherhood;
I and all creatures, plants, and trees,
The living limbs of God;
And in an hour, as this, divine,
I feel the vast pulse throb in mine.</p

“O dream on your black wings
you come when I am sleeping.”
The Willis Barnstone translations, Dream

“Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth as raven's
claws”
An American Prayer (1978)
Variant: Death makes angels of us all
and gives us wings
where we had shoulders
smooth a raven´s claws…