Pygmy Kingfisher

Famous quotes containing the words pygmy and/or kingfisher:

“Some are dinning in our ears that we Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men. But what is that to the purpose? A living dog is better than a dead lion. Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can? Let every one mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

“the mud
Flies from his hunching wings and beak—my heart,
The blue kingfisher dives on you in fire.”
—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)