I know what the caged bird feels, alas! When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; When the wind blows soft through the springing grass, And the river floats like a stream of glass; When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, And the faint perfume from its chalice steals- I know what the caged bird feels! I know why the caged bird beats his wing Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; For he must fly back to his perch and cling When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars And they pulse again with a keener sting- I know why he beats his wing! I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,- When he beats his bars and he would be free; It is not a carol of joy or glee, But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, But a plea that upward to Heaven he flings- I know why the caged bird sings!
Paul Laurence DunbarRelated topics
bird blood bright carol chalice deep fly free glass glee grass heaven joy keener pain prayer red river soft sore sting stream sun till wind wing beats feels stealsRelated quotes
One day I saw the combative Giants shortstop Billy Jurges confront umpire George Magerkurth, on a call Jurges violently objected to, the two men standing jaw to jaw, raging invective at each other. A faint spray of saliva emitted from Magerkurth's mouth; Jurges stepped back and uncorked his own oyster of spittle, right in the umpire's face. Magerkurth slugged Jurges, who slugged him back, and the two men rolled on the infield grass, clawing at each other until they were pried apart. Jurges, of course, was tossed out of the game and suspended for a spell, his place at shortstop taken over by the mild-mannered prematurely gray utility infielder, Lou Chiozza. The very next day, Chiozza ran out to short left field, chasing a pop fly, while in rushed Joe Moore, from his left field post. The result was a noisy collision, which sent Chiozza to the hospital, marking the first and only time one player's spittle had broken another player's leg.
Arnold Hano
Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on forever risked ending up in some as-yet-unglimpsed horror future. What if you lived forever and all that had gone before, however terrible things had sometimes appeared to be in the past, however badly people had behaved to each other throughout history, was nothing compared to what was yet to come? Suppose in the great book of days that told the story of everything, all the gone, done past was merely a bright, happy introduction compared to the main body of the work, an unending tale of unbearable pain scraped in blood on a parchment of living skin?
Better to die than risk that.
Live well and then die, so that the you that is you now can never be again, and only tricks can re-create something that might think it is you, but is not.
Iain Banks
The Age that admires talk so much can have little discernment for inarticulate work, or for anything that is deep and genuine. Nobody, or hardly anybody, having in himself an earnest sense for truth, how can anybody recognize an inarticulate Veracity, or Nature-fact of any kind; a Human Doer especially, who is the most complex, profound, and inarticulate of all Nature's Facts? Nobody can recognize him: till once he is patented, get some public stamp of authenticity, and has been articulately proclaimed, and asserted to be a Doer. To the worshipper of talk, such a one is a sealed book. An excellent human soul, direct from Heaven,-how shall any excellence of man become recognizable to this unfortunate? Not except by announcing and placarding itself as excellent,-which, I reckon, it above other things will probably be in no great haste to do.
Thomas Carlyle
I stand at the seashore, alone, and start to think.
There are the rushing waves
mountains of molecules
each stupidly minding its own business
trillions apart
yet forming white surf in unison.Ages on ages
before any eyes could see
year after year
thunderously pounding the shore as now.
For whom, for what?
On a dead planet
with no life to entertain.Never at rest
tortured by energy
wasted prodigiously by the sun
poured into space.
A mite makes the sea roar. Deep in the sea
all molecules repeat
the patterns of one another
till complex new ones are formed.
They make others like themselves
and a new dance starts.Growing in size and complexity
living things
masses of atoms
DNA, protein
dancing a pattern ever more intricate.Out of the cradle
onto dry land
here it is
standing:
atoms with consciousness;
matter with curiosity.Stands at the sea,
wonders at wondering: I
a universe of atoms
an atom in the universe.
Richard Feynman
The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turn. The lunatic's visions of horror are all drawn from the material of daily fact. Our civilization is founded on the shambles, and every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. If you protest, my friend, wait till you arrive there yourself! ... Here on our very hearths and in our gardens the infernal cat plays with the panting mouse, or holds the hot bird fluttering in her jaws. Crocodiles and rattlesnakes and pythons are at this moment vessels of life as real as we are; their loathsome existence fills every minute of every day that drags its length along; and whenever they or other wild beasts clutch their living prey, the deadly horror which an agitated melancholiac feels is the literally right reaction on the situation.
William James