If I was a nightingale I would sing like a nightingale; if a swan, like a swan. But since I am a rational creature my role is to praise God.
The women of the French Resistance astounded me. Isabelle and Vianne [from The Nightingale] are my homage to those brave and forgotten women.
The love-lorn nightingale nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well.
America is the noisiest country that ever existed. One is waked up in the morning, not by the singing of the nightingale, but by the steam whistle.
Who but knows How it goes! Life's a last year's Nightingale, Love's a last year's rose.
I envy no man's nightingale or spring; Nor let them punish me with loss of rhyme, Who plainly say, My God, My King.
Many books belong to sunshine, and should be read out of doors. Clover, violets, and hedge roses breathe from their leaves; they are most lovable in cool lanes, along field paths, or upon stiles overhung by hawthorn, while the blackbird pipes, and the nightingale bathes its brown feathers in the twilight copse.
Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures. . . who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.
I simply couldn't walk away from [ The Nightingale].
The wren and the nightingale sound nothing alike, but think how dull the world would be without the songs of both birds. -Miss Kanagawa
Fare thee well my nightingale, I lived but to be near you. Thow you are singing somewhere still I can no longer hear you.
There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin.
Even a man's exact imitation of the song of the nightingale displeases us when we discover that it is a mimicry, and not the nightingale.
Music lives within thy lips Like a nightingale in roses.
In each human heart are a tiger, a pig, an ass and a nightingale. Diversity of character is due to their unequal activity.
To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all.
The nightingale is sovereign of song.
Where the nightingale doth sing Not a senseless, tranced thing, But divine melodious truth.
Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy. And before Buddha or Jesus spoke the nightingale sang, and long after the words of Jesus and Buddha are gone into oblivion the nightingale still will sing. Because it is neither preaching nor commanding nor urging. It is just singing. And in the beginning it was not a Word, but a chirrup.
Go, little book, and wish to all Flowers in the garden, meat in the hall, A bin of wine, a spice of wit, A house with lawns enclosing it, A living river by the door, A nightingale in the sycamore!
