Quotes about feather

A collection of quotes on the topic of feather, likeness, bird, doing.

Quotes about feather

“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering its a feather bed. ”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Love, World, Dreams, Courage

“The rationale for springing out our bed each morning is a sense of purpose. Purpose is the compass that guides us through the decision-making process and aids in the development of our behavior and actions. Lacking a sense of purpose is the equivalent of a feather thrown into a gusty wind.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1988

Making love, Behavior, Spring, Decision

“Feathers shall raise men towards the heaven even as they do the birds. That is by the letters written by their quills.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XLV Prophecies

Men, Bird

“Democracy! Bah! When I hear that I reach for my feather boa!”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

Democracy

“Just erotic. Nothing kinky. It's the difference between using a feather and using a chicken.”

Terry Pratchett book Eric

Source: Eric

“Second hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Books

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they moved finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.”

Henry Beston book The Outermost House

Source: The Outermost House, 1928, p. 25: Ch 2

Life, Fate, World, Nature

“Remain grounded and entrenched for your end will be the feather that gets tossed and turned at the mercy of the wind.”

Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola)

1992

“Verona is full of pictures which have never been painted. Every step excites emotion and gives rise to unaffected reflection. In the course of a short stroll, you may pass by a Roman amphitheatre, still used, then the castle of some petty prince of the Middle Ages, and while you are contrasting the sublime elevation of antiquity with the heterogeneous palace of a Scaliger your eyes light on a gate of Oriental appearance and fantastic ornament... The illusion is perfect, the eye rests with pain on the passing citizens in their modern costumes; you look for black velvets and gold chains, white feathers and red stockings.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Letter to Isaac Disraeli (September 1826), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume I. 1804–1859 (1929), p. 107

Pain, Age, Light, Appearance

“Feathers filled the small room. Our laughter kept the feathers in the air. I thought about birds. Could they fly if there wasn't someone, somewhere, laughing?”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Bird, Laughter, Flying

“He would have shaved the centaurs, dipped them in honey, covered them with feathers, and hung them up like a bunch of pinatas. I'm just saying." - Warren”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

“On the moon we wore feathers in our hair, and rubies on our hands. On the moon we had gold spoons.”

Shirley Jackson book We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Source: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“Eyes watching always
Shadows in shadows they wait
A black feather falls

First accepted, loved
Then betrayed-spit in the face
Vengeance sweet like dots.”

Kristin Cast book Hunted

Source: Hunted

Love, Waiting

“Birds of a feather flock together”

Lewis Carroll book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Source: Alice in Wonderland

Bird

“One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Bird, Light

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

Bob Marley (1945–1981) Jamaican singer, songwriter, musician

Light

“Death is lighter than a feather, duty heavier than a mountain.”

Robert Jordan (1948–2007) American writer

Misattributed

Death, Mountain

“Do not conceive that fine Clothes make fine Men, any more than fine feathers make fine Birds—A plain genteel dress is more admired and obtains more credit than lace & embroidery in the Eyes of the judicious and sensible.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to Bushrod Washington http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/default.xqy?keys=FOEA-chron-1780-1783-01-15-12 (15 January 1783) <br class="br">1780s

Men, Bird, Clothes

“The feather, whence the pen
Was shaped that traced the lives of these good men,
Dropped from an Angel's wing.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Part III, No. 5 - Walton's Book of Lives. Compare: "The pen wherewith thou dost so heavenly sing / Made of a quill from an angel's wing", Henry Constable, Sonnet; "Whose noble praise / Deserves a quill pluckt from an angel's wing", Dorothy Berry, Sonnet.
Ecclesiastical Sonnets (1821)

Men, Angels

“But Florentine was still riding the crest of her great wave…When it lifted her high she had to hold her breath. How could she ever again be bothered by these petty everyday cares? Would she ever again feel the old anxiety on hearing these dreadful midnight confidences, in the silence heavy with breathing? The wave that bore her was like a long, slow swell. There were hollows into which she sank with all her thoughts, all her willpower, where she was no more than a wing, a feather, a fringe, borne off ever faster, ever faster…He kissed me on the cheeks. On the eyes! "What's going to happen to us, Florentine? If your father's gone and lost his job again, we'll have to live on what you can give us, poor Florentine. We can always go back on relief…”

Gabrielle Roy book The Tin Flute

Source: The Tin Flute (1945), P. 85

Feeling, Confidence, Kiss, Silence

“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.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XVII Flight

Bird

“Valmiki went alone to the clear Ganga waterside and bathed. He washed away the anthill dust and peeled grey bark from a tree and made new fresh clothes. Then he sat back resting against a stone. He watched two small water birds in a tree nearby. The male bird was singing to his mate when before Valmiki’s eyes an arrow hit him, and the little bird fell from the limb. He thrashed on the ground an instant and then lay dead and blood drops strained his feathers.”

Vālmīki Ramayana

Source: Ramayana, p. 7.

Bird, Tree, Water, Singing

“It is a great deal easier to set a story afloat than to stop it. If you want truth to go round the world you must hire an express train to pull it; but if you want a lie to go round the world, it will fly: it is as light as a feather, and a breath will carry it. It is well said in the old proverb, "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on." Nevertheless, it does not injure us; for if light as feather it travels as fast, its effect is just about as tremendous as the effect of down, when it is blown against the walls of a castle; it produces no damage whatever, on account of its lightness and littleness. Fear not, Christian. Let slander fly, let envy send forth its forked tongue, let it hiss at you, your bow shall abide in strength. Oh! shielded warrior, remain quiet, fear no ill; but, like the eagle in its lofty eyrie, look thou down upon the fowlers in the plain, turn thy bold eye upon them and say, "Shoot ye may, but your shots will not reach half-way to the pinnacle where I stand. Waste your powder upon me if ye will; I am beyond your reach."”

Charles Spurgeon (1834–1892) British preacher, author, pastor and evangelist

Then clap your wings, mount to heaven, and there laugh them to scorn, for ye have made your refuge God, and shall find a most secure abode.
"No. 17: Joseph Attacked by the Archers (Genesis 49:23–24, delivered on Sunday 1855-04-01)" pp.130
Sermons delivered in Exeter Hall, Strand, during the enlargement of New Park Street Chapel, Southmark (1855)

God, Truth, Lie, World

“That Descartes' Cartesian way of looking at animals, like they're machines… It is outdated, and quite frankly, 100% insane. Because, if we all understand that animals use their eyes to see, ears to hear, noses to smell, mouths to eat, legs to walk, feathers to fly, fins to swim, genitalia to procreate, bowels to defecate.. I'm always perplexed that most people don't believe that they can also use their brains to think, feel, be rational, be aware and be self-aware! Am I supposed to believe, that every body part of an animal functions just like it's supposed to, except the brain?”

Gary Yourofsky (1970) animal rights activist

Part of the speech to the students of the Georgia Institute of Technology, On animal intelligence (Summer 2010)

People, Way, Feeling, Understanding

“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.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Bird

“A FEATHER.

A feather is trimmed, it is trimmed by the light and the bug and the post, it is trimmed by little leaning and by all sorts of mounted reserves and loud volumes. It is surely cohesive.”

Gertrude Stein book Tender buttons: objects, food, rooms

Source: Tender Buttons

Light

“Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken!”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

“There's in my mind a…
turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs

but she is not kind.”

Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet

Source: Poems, 1972-1982

Girl

“Self-pity in its early stages is as snug as a feather mattress. Only when it hardens does it become uncomfortable.”

Maya Angelou book Gather Together in My Name

Gather Together in My Name (1974), p. 17.

“How wrong Emily Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich.”

Woody Allen Without Feathers

Source: Without Feathers

Hope

“Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.”

Margaret Atwood book Cat's Eye

Source: Cat's Eye

Way, Home

“Hal: "… Then we'll leave in a huff, taking you with us."
"I've always wanted to travel in a huff," Ingvar mused. "It sounds very comfortable. I imagine they're well padded."
"Lined with feathers, in fact," Gilan put in.”

John Flanagan (1873–1938) Irish-American hammer thrower

Source: Slaves of Socorro

Travel, Imagination

“A weapon, I told Horus. I need a weapon.
I reached into the Duat and pulled out an ostrich feather.
“Really?” I yelled.
Horus didn’t answer”

Rick Riordan book The Serpent's Shadow

Source: The Serpent's Shadow

“One should be light like a bird and not like a feather.”

Italo Calvino (1923–1985) Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels

Source: Six Memos For The Next Millennium

Bird, Light

“I am troubled, immeasurably
by your eyes.
I am struck by the feather
of your soft reply.
The sound of glass
speaks quick, disdain
and conceals
what your eyes fight
to explain.”

Jim Morrison (1943–1971) lead singer of The Doors

Source: Wilderness: The Lost Writings, Vol. 1

Fight

“She weighed no more than a feather as he lifted her, but he teased her, saying, "You weigh more than you look."
"You are weaker than you look," she immediately whispered.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: If You Dare

“He had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O'Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother's velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.”

Margaret Mitchell book Vom Winde verweht (1937 German edition)

Source: Gone with the Wind

World

“To a Young Poet

Time cannot break the bird's wing from the bird.
Bird and wing together
Go down, one feather.

No thing that ever flew,
Not the lark, not you,
Can die as others do.”

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) American poet

Source: Collected Poems

Bird, Time

“Just remember that Dumbo didn't need the feather; the magic was in him.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Source: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“If love wants you; if you've been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.”

Anne Michaels (1958) Poet and novelist

Love, Star

“Erotica is using a feather; pornograpy is using the whole chicken.”

Isabel Allende (1942) Chilean writer

“No matter that we could be beheaded for this,” said Esa. “Heads are overrated.”
“Yes, they are so unfashionable,” said Miri, imitating an Aslandian accent. “This spring, ladies of style are wearing their feathers in their necks.”

Shannon Hale (1974) American fantasy novelist

Source: Palace of Stone

Spring

“Life is always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope.”

Edith Wharton (1862–1937) American novelist, short story writer, designer

Journal entry (March 1926)

Life

“Peacocks have the bright feathers. Fish have the long tails. Women have the mall.”

Janette Rallison (1966) American writer

Source: My Double Life

Women, Fish

“As the eagle was killed by the arrow winged with his own feather, so the hand of the world is wounded by its own skill.”

Helen Keller (1880–1968) American author and political activist

World

“If you were Queen of pleasure
And I were King of pain
We'd hunt down Love together,
Pluck out his flying-feather,
And teach his feet a measure,
And find his mouth a rein;
If you were Queen of pleasure
And I were King of pain.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Love, Pain, Pleasure, Flying

“I have to remind myself that some birds aren’t meant to be caged. Their feathers are just too bright.”

Stephen King book Different Seasons

Source: Different Seasons

Bird

“What shall I say? I must tread a fine line between glaciosity and friendlinosity. With just a hint of 'you don't know what you are missing, my fine-feathered friend.”

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) British writer

Source: Startled by His Furry Shorts

“Sara: "You are so brave," I tell her, and then I smile. "When I grow up, I want to be just like you."
To my surprise, Kate shakes her head hard. Her voice is a feather, a thread. "No Mommy," she says. "You'd be sick.”

Jodi Picoult My Sister's Keeper

Source: My Sister's Keeper

Smile

“It was a meditation on life, love, old age, death: ideas that had often fluttered around her head like nocturnal birds but dissolved into a trickle of feathers when she tried to catch hold of them.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

Love, Life, Death, Age

“Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth? The goose who trades his is soon a pile of feathers.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“March: The Geese Return”, p. 18.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "January Thaw", "February: Good Oak" & "March: The Geese Return"
Source: A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

Education

“Beautiful women rarely possess sufficient depth of character to survive without their pretty feathers.”

Karen Marie Moning book Darkfever

Source: Darkfever

Women, Beauty

“I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.”

Lawrence Durrell book Justine

Source: Justine

Happiness, Lie, Memory

“The wolf howled under the leaves
And spit out the prettiest feathers
Of his meal of fowl:
Like him I consume myself.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Wolf

“I look hot and, most of all, skinny. I love the day after throwing up. I felt like a feather.”

Chelsea Handler (1975) American comedian, actress, author and talk show host

Source: My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands

Love

“Schuyler put a gentle hand on Abbadon's feathered extensions, feeling the majestic power underneath their silky weight. She had been frightened once, to see him in this light, but now that she saw his terrifying face, she found it beautiful.”

Melissa de la Cruz book Misguided Angel

Source: Misguided Angel

Beauty, Feeling, Light

“Before Peter Pan belonged to Wendy he belonged to the girl with the crow feather in her hair”

Jodi Lynn Anderson American children's writer

Source: Tiger Lily

Girl

“Do you know what most people have from their grandmother? A tea set. Or a quilt.” Curran smiled. “If your family had a quilt, it would be made out of chimera skin and stuffed with feathers from dead angels.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Breaks

People, Family, Smile, Angels

“He was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all”

Richard Bach book Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Source: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

Idea, Freedom, Perfection

“I believe you, Sadie."
"Oh really. I'm holding the bloody feather of truth, and you believe me. Well, thanks.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

Truth

“Ani felt a stirring, a hope, a winged thing waking up in her chest and brushing her heart with it's feathers.”

Shannon Hale The Goose Girl

Source: The Goose Girl

Hope, Heart

“I think the canary left some feathers in there after you ate it.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Uncommon Criminals

Thinking

“No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it - no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”

George MacDonald (1824–1905) Scottish journalist, novelist

Hell, Heart

“Some say that we shall never know, and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer's day, and some say, to the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”

Thornton Wilder book The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Source: The Bridge of San Luis Rey

God, Boy, Summer

“Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

Books, Hope, Soul, Sense

“And the Bastard grant us... in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word. In darkness, understanding.”

Lois McMaster Bujold book Paladin of Souls

Source: Paladin of Souls (2003), p. 44

Mountain, Understanding, Kiss, Despair

“It was the kind of sword that would make a lifelong pacifist look for tall boots and a hat with feathers.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bleeds

“I don't know what this feather means, the story of it, but I know it means he was thinking of me. For all these years. He remembered me.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Thinking

“Stefan: "Indian with a dot, not a feather.”

Patricia Briggs book Bone Crossed

Source: Bone Crossed

“Of three things be wary-
of a feather on a cat,
The shepherd eating mutton,
And a guardsman that is fat.”

Mercedes Lackey book By the Sword

Source: By the Sword

Cats

“It's so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in his cap.”

Agatha Christie Murder at the Vicarage

Source: Murder at the Vicarage

Secret

“The broom wasn't as comforting as a flamethrower would have been, but it was better than a mop and certainly more threatening than a feather duster.”

Dean Koontz book Forever Odd

Source: Forever Odd

“Kinky sex involves the use of duck feathers. Perverted sex involves the whole duck.”

Lewis Grizzard (1946–1994) American journalist

Sex

“They could see she was a real Princess and no question about it, now that she had felt one pea all the way through twenty mattresses and twenty more feather beds. Nobody but a Princess could be so delicate.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Princess and the Pea

The Princess and the Pea
Fairy Tales (1835)
Source: The Princess and the Pea: The Graphic Novel

Way, Question, Princess

“I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as ‘forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.”

Stanley Kubrick (1928–1999) American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer and editor

Flying, Forgetting

“ There is […] no necessary connection between the symbol and that which is symbolized. Just as men can wear yachting costumes without ever having been near a yacht, so they can make the noise "I'm hungry" without being hungry. Furthermore, just as social rank can be symbolized by feathers in the hair, by tattooing on the breast, by gold ornaments on the watch chain, or by a thousand different devices according to the culture we live in, so the fact of being hungry can be symbolized by a thousand different noises according to the culture we live in: "J'ai faim," or "Es hungert mich," or "Ho appetito," or "Hara ga hetta," and so on.”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, p. 27

Men, Tattoo

“To die for the racists is lighter than a feather, but to die for the people is heavier than any mountain and deeper than any sea.”

Huey P. Newton (1942–1989) Co-founder of the Black Panther Party

To Die for the People (1972), paraphrasing Mao Zedong's "Serve the People"

People, Mountain, Sea

“When you can see the colors of the feathers, you'll also understand how you can expand your borders to infinity.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, Borders of Infinity (1989)

Color, Understanding

“Do all you can to become a bird of the Way to God;
Do all you can to develop your wings and your feathers.”

Attar of Nishapur (1145–1230) Persian Sufi poet

"In the Dead of Night" as translated by Andrew Harvey and Eryk Hanut in Perfume of the Desert

God, Way, Bird

“The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them — like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

Love, Life, Hate, World

“The Mockery Bird regarded him with a roguish eye, head on one side, and took a few slow steps into the clearing. With its head on one side and its foot tentatively raised, it seemed like some sort of lanky, avian dancing master. It stepped forward among the guava stems with a mincing delicacy and then shuffled its wings like someone shuffling a pack of cards. He noticed that it had very long eyelashes which it raised and lowered over its large gaily-sparkling eyes. … There was another complicated rustle and flurry in the undergrowth and then, projected into the clearing by its own nervous eagerness, came a female Mockery Bird making strange, peeting noises, which became a soothing babble when she caught sight of the male. She went up to her mate and briefly preened his throat feathers as an over-zealous wife will straighten the tie of her consort. … Here in front of him, cossetting each other, were two birds which were thought to be extinct.”

Gerald Durrell book The Mockery Bird

The Mockery Bird (1981)

Bird, Dance

“p>GUIN
GUINN
GUINNESS IS
white bird lying unnoticed in a corner
splattered feathers
blood running merged with the neonsigns
in a puddle
GUINNESS IS GOOD
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR
Masks Masks Masks Masks Masks
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU

Adrian Henri (1932–2000) British poet

"The Entry of Christ into Liverpool", from British Poetry since 1945 (1970), Ed. Edward Lucie-Smith.<p>

Lying, Bird

“Your father bears an iron reed
Filled with a flame that makes us bleed;
Your kindly mother loves to tear
Feathers and skin to deck her hair.”

Edward Andrade (1887–1971) English physicist

Poem A song for Edmund Blunden

Love, Tear

“In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.”

Margaret Atwood book Morning in the Burned House

Morning in the Burned House (1995), The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Women, War, Children, Peace

“There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.”

Robert Greene (dramatist) (1558–1592) English author

Groatsworth of Wit; cited from William Shakespeare (ed. Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller) The Complete Works (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002) p. xlvii.
Probably the earliest reference to Shakespeare as a figure in the theatrical world.

Heart, Country

“There you stood on the edge of your feather
Expecting to fly.
While I laughed, I wondered whether
I could wave goodbye
Knowin' that you'd gone.”

Neil Young (1945) Canadian singer-songwriter

Expecting to Fly, from Buffalo Springfield Again
Song lyrics, With Buffalo Springfield

Flying

“Yankee Doodle came to town
Riding on a pony;
Stuck a feather in his cap
And called it macaroni.”

Edward Bangs (1756–1818)

“The sun was gone now; the curl'd moon
Was like a little feather
Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
She spoke through the still weather.
Her voice was like the voice the stars
Had when they sang together.”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

The Blessed Damozel http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/715.html (1850)

Star, Sun, Weather

“Some birds are not meant to be caged, that's all. Their feathers are too bright, their songs too sweet and wild. So you let them go, or when you open the cage to feed them they somehow fly out past you. And the part of you that knows it was wrong to imprison them in the first place rejoices, but still, the place where you live is that much more drab and empty for their departure.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Different Seasons (1982), Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

Departure, Bird, Past, Parting

“[Unitarianism is] a feather-bed to catch a falling Christian.”

Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) English physician, botanist; member of the Lunar Society

Quoted by Charles Darwin in a letter http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-DAR-00115-00015/5 to Joseph Dalton Hooker, 11 May 1859 http://books.google.com/books?id=YMERco2uLdcC&q=%22a+feather+bed+to+catch+a+falling+Christian%22&pg=PA158#v=onepage

“I hold peace and war in my toga but I'l take a cherry flip
Today nobody knows whether he was tomorrow
They beat time with a coffin lid
If somebody had the nerve to rip the tail feathers
out of the trolley car it's a great age…”

Richard Huelsenbeck (1892–1974) German poet

End of the World, Ende der Welt', 1919

War, Age, Peace, Cars

“Fine feathers, they say, make fine birds.”

Isaac Bickerstaffe (1733–1812) Irish playwright and librettist

The Padlock (1768).

Bird

“When you see a tomcat with his whiskers full of feathers, do not say "Canary!" — he'll take offense.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 159.

“Twas thine own genius gave the final blow,
And help'd to plant the wound that laid thee low:
So the struck eagle, stretch'd upon the plain,
No more through rolling clouds to soar again,
View'd his own feather on the fatal dart,
And wing'd the shaft that quiver'd in his heart.”

George Gordon Byron English Bards and Scotch Reviewers

Source: English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), Line 826. A number of authors have addressed this common motif of an eagle shot with an eagle-feather arrow

Heart