Common Cuckoo Eggs

Famous quotes containing the words common, cuckoo and/or eggs:

    The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgement, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational—an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable.
    Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)

    The cuckoo is a lazy bird,
    She never builds a nest,
    She makes herself busy
    By singing to the rest.
    —Unknown. The Cuckoo (l. 9–12)

    One of our defects as a nation is a tendency to use what have been called “weasel words.” When a weasel sucks eggs the meat is sucked out of the egg. If you use a “weasel word” after another there is nothing left of the other.
    Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919)