Phoenix
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The phoenix (Ancient Greek: Φοῖνιξ, phoínix) is a mythical sacred firebird which dies in flames and is reborn from the ashes. These quotes refer to the mythical phoenix.
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The Phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies. ~ Thomas Carew
- Change is the constant, the signal for rebirth, the egg of the phoenix.
- Christina Baldwin, in One to One (1977)
- First in the ranks see Joan of Arc advance,
The scourge of England and the boast of France!
Though burnt by wicked Bedford for a witch,
Behold her statue plac'd in glory's niche;
Her fetters burst, and just releas'd from prison,
A virgin phoenix from her ashes risen.- Lord Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
- When fame's loud trump hath blown its noblest blast,
Though long the sound, the echo sleeps at last;
And glory, like the phoenix midst her fires,
Exhales her odours, blazes, and expires.- Lord Byron, in English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809)
- Ask me no more if east or west
The Phoenix builds her spicy nest;
For unto you at last she flies,
And in your fragrant bosom dies.- Thomas Carew, in "A Song"
- The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise.
- Miguel de Cervantes, as quoted in The Book of the Bizarre: Freaky Facts & Strange Stories (2008) by Varla Ventura, p. 46
- There is another holy bird, called the Phoenix, which I have never seen but in pictures. He rarely appears in Egypt — only once in every 500 years, so they say, in Heliopolis — and he is supposed to come when his father dies. If the painter describes him truly, his plumage is part golden and part red, and he is very like an eagle in shape and size. They say that this bird comes from Arabia, bringing the body of his father embalmed in myrrh to the temple of the sun, and there he buries him. First he molds an egg of myrrh; then he puts his father in the middle of it. Lastly, he covers up the body with myrrh. This is what they say this bird does. But I do not believe them.
- Herodotus in Histories Vol. 2
- A chattering crow lives out nine generations of aged men,
but a stag's life is four time a crow's,
and a raven's life makes three stags old,
while the phoenix outlives nine ravens,
but we, the rich-haired Nymphs
daughters of Zeus the aegis-holder,
outlive ten phoenixes.- Hesiod, in The Precepts of Chiron
- Do not expect again a phoenix hour,
The triple-towered sky, the dove complaining,
Sudden the rain of gold and heart's first ease
Traced under trees by the eldritch light of sundown.- Cecil Day-Lewis, in "From Feathers to Iron"(1931)
- Hurry! We burn
For Rome’s so near us, for the phoenix moment
When we have thrown off this traveller’s trance
And mother-naked and ageless-ancient
Wake in her warm nest of renaissance.- Cecil Day-Lewis in "Flight to Italy" in An Italian Visit (1953)
- My mom was a phoenix who always expected to rise again from the ashes of her latest disaster. And in spite of her self-doubts, she had a very strong sense of who she was. She had a sense of self-worth. She loved being Judy Garland. Did she secretly long to be Frances Gumm Somebody, Minnesota housewife? Are you kidding? She'd have run off with a vaudeville troupe just the way my grandfather did.
- Lorna Luft, in Me and My Shadows : A Family Memoir (1999), p. 222
- Also paraphrased as: "My mother was a phoenix who always expected to rise from the ashes of her latest disaster. She loved being Judy Garland."
- Most beings spring from other individuals; but there is a certain kind which reproduces itself. The Assyrians call it the Phoenix. It does not live on fruit or flowers, but on frankincense and odoriferous gums. When it has lived five hundred years, it builds itself a nest in the branches of an oak, or on the top of a palm tree. In this it collects cinnamon, and spikenard, and myrrh, and of these materials builds a pile on which it deposits itself, and dying, breathes out its last breath amidst odors. From the body of the parent bird a young Phoenix issues forth, destined to live a life as long as its predecessor. When this has grown up and gathered sufficient strength, it lifts its nest from the tree (its own cradle and its parent’s sepulcher), and carries it to the city of Heliopolis in Egypt, and deposits it in the temple of the Sun.
- Ovid, as quoted in Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch
- There'll be that crowd, that barbarous crowd, through all the centuries,
And who can say but some young belle may walk and talk men wild
Who is my beauty's equal, though that my heart denies,
But not the exact likeness, the simplicity of a child,
And that proud look as though she had gazed into the burning sun,
And all the shapely body no tittle gone astray.
I mourn for that most lonely thing; and yet God's will be done:
I knew a phoenix in my youth, so let them have their day.- William Butler Yeats, in "His Phoenix" in The Wild Swans at Coole (1917)
