Quotes about kite

A collection of quotes on the topic of kite, flying, fly, likeness.

Quotes about kite

“This writing distinctly about the kite seems to be my destiny, because among the first recollections of my infancy, it seemed to me that, as I was in my cradle, a kite came to me and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me several times with its tail inside my lips.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XXI Letters. Personal Records. Dated Notes.

Time

“The celebrated Mr. K.
Performs his feat on Saturday at Bishops Gate
The Hendersons will dance and sing
As Mr. Kite flies through the ring don't be late
Messrs. K and H. assure the public
Their production will be second to none
And of course Henry the Horse dances the waltz!”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (1967)
Lyrics

Singing, Horse, Dance

“For the benefit of Mr. Kite
there will be a show tonight on trampoline.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

"Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!" (1967)
Lyrics

“And victory the beautiful woman (shahid) whose world-adornment of waving tresses was embellished by Allah will aid you with a mighty aid, bestowed on us the good fortune that had been hidden behind a veil, and made it a reality. The absurd (batil) Hindus, knowing their position perilous, dispersed like carded wool before the wind, and like moths scattered abroad. Many fell dead on the field of battle; others, desisting from fighting, fled to the desert exile and became the food of crows and kites. Mounds were made of the bodies of the slain, pillars of their heads.”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

Babur-Nama, translated into English by A.S. Beveridge, New Delhi reprint, 1979, pp. 572-73

World, Food, Beauty, Reality

“I am a kite in a tornado, but I have a long string.”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: Dreamfever

“a kite is a victim you are sure of.
you love it because it pulls.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Love

“Did you ever fly a kite in bed?
Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head?
Did you ever milk this kind of cow?
Well, we can do it. We know how.
If you never did, you should.
These things are fun and fun is good.”

Dr. Seuss book One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish

Source: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish

Cats, Flying

“Kites rise highest against the wind, not with it.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Variant: A kite flies against the wind, not with it.

“Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Love, Life, Dreams, Country

“Imagination is the highest kite that can fly.”

Lauren Bacall (1924–2014) American actress, model

Source: Lauren Bacall By Myself and Then Some (2005)

Imagination, Flying

“These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began-
Jacala's mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.”

Rudyard Kipling book The Jungle Book

Source: The Jungle Books

“After my bad experience as a kite, I simply refused to go about as a glowing Sadie-headed chicken. That’s fine for Carter, but I have standards.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“And I began to let him go. Hour by hour. Days into months. It was a physical sensation, like letting out the string of a kite. Except that the string was coming from my center.”

Augusten Burroughs book You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

Source: You Better Not Cry: Stories for Christmas

“Honestly, I thought I was going to be a kite forever, suffocating inside a little feathery prison. And he had the nerve to make fun!”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

“For me, I have seen worlds and people begin and end, actually and metaphorically, and it will always be the same. It’s always fire and water.
No matter what your scientific background, emotionally you’re an alchemist. You live in a world of liquids, solids, gases and heat-transfer effects that accompany their changes of state. These are the things you perceive, the things you feel. Whatever you know about their true natures is rafted on top of that. So, when it comes to the day-to-day sensations of living, from mixing a cup of coffee to flying a kite, you treat with the four ideal elements of the old philosophers: earth, air, fire, water.
Let’s face it, air isn’t very glamorous, no matter how you look at it. I mean, I’d hate to be without it, but it’s invisible and so long as it behaves itself it can be taken for granted and pretty much ignored. Earth? The trouble with earth is that it endures. Solid objects tend to persist with a monotonous regularity.
Not so fire and water, however. They’re formless, colorful, and they’re always doing something. While suggesting you repent, prophets very seldom predict the wrath of the gods in terms of landslides and hurricanes. No. Floods and fires are what you get for the rottenness of your ways. Primitive man was really on his way when he learned to kindle the one and had enough of the other nearby to put it out. It is coincidence that we’ve filled hells with fires and oceans with monsters? I don’t think so. Both principles are mobile, which is generally a sign of life. Both are mysterious and possess the power to hurt or kill. It is no wonder that intelligent creatures the universe over have reacted to them in a similar fashion. It is the alchemical response.”

Roger Zelazny Isle of the Dead

Source: Isle of the Dead (1969), Chapter 6 (pp. 137-138)

Life, God, Hate, People

“Can imagination act
Perpendicular to fact?
Can it be a kite that flies
Till the Earth, umbrella-wise,
Folds and drops away from sight?”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

"Imagination" in America Sings (1949); re-published in Pearls From Peoria (2006)

Imagination

“A certain amount of opposition is a great help to a man. Kites rise against, not with, the wind. Even a head wind is better than none. No man ever worked his passage anywhere in a dead calm.”

Lewis Mumford (1895–1990) American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology, and literary critic

John Neal, as quoted in The Journal of Education for Upper Canada Vol. III (1850)
Misattributed

Help, Dead

“Engvall is in the park flying a kite with his son.
Passerby: Y'all flyin' a kite?
Engvall: Nope, fishin' for birds! Here's your sign.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Here's Your Sign Reloaded (2003)
Here's Your Sign

Bird, Flying

“He should have remembered, there was [an Islamist] attack on Akshardham temple in September 2002, so many people were killed inside the temple, yet Gujarat maintained peace. Gujarat maintained peace even after serial blasts. There was a time when Gujarat used to have riots over kite flying and cricket matches. Gujarat has not witnessed riots for last 12 years. The children of Gujarat don’t know what is curfew all about? Gujarat has progressed because of peace and harmony. And this is what the nation needs for growth as these things will have catalytic effect in achieving that.”

Narendra Modi (1950) Prime Minister of India

2014, "Read full interview of Narendra Modi to Rajat Sharma", 2014

Children, People, Peace, Time

“Hassan slumps to the asphalt, his life of unrequited loyalty drifting from him like the windblown kites he used to chase.”

Khaled Hosseini book The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner (2003)

Life, Loyalty

“Cos. Pray now, what may be that same bed of honour?
Kite. Oh, a mighty large bed! bigger by half than the great bed at Ware: ten thousand people may lie in it together, and never feel one another.”

George Farquhar The Recruiting Officer

The Recruiting Officer (1706), Act i. Sc. 1.

People, Lie, Feeling

“Such bickerings to recount, met often in these our writers, what more worth is it than to chronicle the wars of kites or crows flocking and fighting in the air?”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

The History of England (1670), Book IV

War, Fight

“We shall all live. We pray for life, children, a good harvest and happiness. You will have what is good for you and I will have what is good for me. Let the kite perch and let the egret perch too. If one says no to the other, let his wing break.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 3 (p. 22)

Life, Children, Happiness

“Orioles fly over tall grasses in second-month weather;
Willows sweep the riverbank, intoxicated with mist.
Children return home in haste after school,
Eager to fly kites when there is yet wind.”

Gao Ding

"Living in a Village" (《村居》), in Four-line poems of the Jin, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties (Translated in English), p. 311 (ISBN 978-7560025827)
Variant translation:
Grass is stretching, birds are dancing in the spring days.
The willow trees wholeheartedly absorb the sun's rays.
My after-school schedule today is unusually tight.
The first business is, of course, in east wind to kite.
"Country Life", as translated by Xian Mao in Children's Version of 60 Classical Chinese Poems, p. 60 (ISBN 978-1468559040)

Children, School, Home, Grass

“A golden shower and Kite Runner reference in the same joke? Almost impossible! Almost impossible! I pull it off, because I care.”

Daniel Tosh (1975) American stand-up comedian

Happy Thoughts (2011)

“A diamond kite
On a diamond flight.
Over the lights, under the moon.
Over the lights, under the moon.
Over the moon, over the moon!”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Light

“Five kinds of animals are mischief-doers and can be killed even in the Sanctuary: They are the rat, the scorpion, the kite, the crow and the rabid dog.”

Muhammad (570–632) Arabian religious leader and the founder of Islam

Hadith - Bukhari 4:531, Narrated by 'Aisha
Sunni Hadith

Dogs, Animals

“We can say that the United States runs the world like the Taliban ran Afghanistan. Cuba is dealt with like a woman caught outside not wearing her burkha. Horrific sanctions are imposed on Iraq in the manner of banning music, dancing, and kite-flying in Kabul. Jean-Bertrand Aristide is banished from Haiti like the religious police whipping a man whose beard is not the right length.”

William Blum (1933–2018) American author and historian

Introduction to Freeing the World to Death

World, Music, Dance, Flying

“We are introduced to Iraq, "a sovereign nation"…In this peaceable kingdom, according to Moore's flabbergasting choice of film shots, children are flying little kites, shoppers are smiling in the sunshine, and the gentle rhythms of life are undisturbed. Then—wham! From the night sky come the terror weapons of American imperialism. Watching the clips Moore uses, and recalling them well, I can recognize various Saddam palaces and military and police centers getting the treatment. But these sites are not identified as such. In fact, I don't think Al Jazeera would, on a bad day, have transmitted anything so utterly propagandistic. You would also be led to think that the term "civilian casualty" had not even been in the Iraqi vocabulary until March 2003…the "insurgent" side is presented in this film as justifiably outraged, whereas the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once.That this—his pro-American moment—was the worst Moore could possibly say of Saddam's depravity is further suggested by some astonishing falsifications. Moore asserts that Iraq under Saddam had never attacked or killed or even threatened (his words) any American. I never quite know whether Moore is as ignorant as he looks, or even if that would be humanly possible…Baghdad was the safe house for the man whose "operation" murdered Leon Klinghoffer…In 1991, a large number of Western hostages were taken by the hideous Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and held in terrible conditions for a long time. After that same invasion was repelled—Saddam having killed quite a few Americans and Egyptians and Syrians and Brits in the meantime and having threatened to kill many more—the Iraqi secret police were caught trying to murder former President Bush during his visit to Kuwait. Never mind whether his son should take that personally…Iraqi forces fired, every day, for 10 years, on the aircraft that patrolled the no-fly zones and staved off further genocide in the north and south of the country…And it was after, and not before, the 9/11 attacks that Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi moved from Afghanistan to Baghdad and began to plan his now very open and lethal design for a holy and ethnic civil war.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2004-06-21
Unfairenheit 9/11
Slate
1091-2339
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2004/06/unfairenheit_911.html: On Michael Moore
2000s, 2004

Life, War, Children, Secret

“Strong men are made by opposition; like kites they go up against the wind.”

Frank Harris (1856–1931) Irish journalist and rogue

Oscar Wilde ([1916] 1997) ch. 6, p. 59.

Men, Strong

“There's a hole in the sky with a big eyeball
Calling me: "Come up and be a kite,
On a diamond flight!"”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

“Some people I know were telling me of a curious experience which they had recently; they put a collection of old and rejected household articles in their car and drove to a dump to dispose of them. While busy at the dump, they were accosted by a strange figure, a woman of tall and stately presence, wearing a paper crown and carrying a staff in her hand, who strode majestically through the avenues of ashes, tin cans, dishonoured wash-boilers and superannuated bathtubs, attended by a rabble of admiring children. This apparition hailed my friends in a strange, incoherent, but musical language, and her breath was richly perfumed with bay-rum, or it may have been lilac lotion; she was in fact as high as a kite and as mimsy as a borogrove. Having said her say, she strode off in queenly style, and she and her raffish crew were soon lost in the mazes of the dump… My theory is that this was Titania, the fairy queen, fallen upon evil days, but magnificent in ruin; or it may simply have been some rumdumb old bag with a sense of humour. In either case the matter is worth investigating.”

Robertson Davies book The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks

The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks (1947)

Children, People, Music, Cars

“There is, as it were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own individuality. Without grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.”

Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) Swiss philosopher and poet

8 November 1852
Journal Intime (1882), Journal entries
Context: My privilege is to be spectator of my life drama, to be fully conscious of the tragi-comedy of my own destiny, and, more than that, to be in the secret of the tragi-comic itself, that is to say, to be unable to take my illusions seriously, to see myself, so to speak, from the theater on the stage, or to be like a man looking from beyond the tomb into existence. I feel myself forced to feign a particular interest in my individual part, while all the time I am living in the confidence of the poet who is playing with all these agents which seem so important, and knows all that they are ignorant of. It is a strange position, and one which becomes painful as soon as grief obliges me to betake myself once more to my own little rôle, binding me closely to it, and warning me that I am going too far in imagining myself, because of my conversations with the poet, dispensed from taking up again my modest part of valet in the piece. Shakespeare must have experienced this feeling often, and Hamlet, I think, must express it somewhere. It is a Doppelgängerei, quite German in character, and which explains the disgust with reality and the repugnance to public life, so common among the thinkers of Germany. There is, as it were, a degradation a gnostic fall, in thus folding one's wings and going back again into the vulgar shell of one's own individuality. Without grief, which is the string of this venturesome kite, man would soar too quickly and too high, and the chosen souls would be lost for the race, like balloons which, save for gravitation, would never return from the empyrean.

Soul

“Ramakrishna possessed a deep aversion to formal learning and education. Learned persons were likened by him to kites and vultures, which soar to great heights in the sky but whose eyes are forever focused on the decaying carcasses below.”

Anantanand Rambachan (1951) Hindu studies scholar

Source: The Nature and Authority of Scripture (1995), p. 22
Context: Ramakrishna possessed a deep aversion to formal learning and education. Learned persons were likened by him to kites and vultures, which soar to great heights in the sky but whose eyes are forever focused on the decaying carcasses below. They were also described as similar to foolish people in an orchard who count the leaves and fruit and argue to estimate their value instead of plucking and relishing the juicy fruit. Reason and the intellectual life received little attention or recognition in his teachings.

Education, Learning, Personality

“History is bunk. What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites?”

Henry Ford (1863–1947) American industrialist

History is Bunk, Says Henry Ford, Special to The New York Times, New York Times, October October 29, 1921. p. 1

Time, History, Making love