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1 " That’s the bittersweet joy of ministry. We see people healed, and then we watch them move on in victory. Sometimes, it means saying goodbye. We must learn to celebrate as our fledgling birds spread their wings and fly into freedom, even if that flight pattern takes them far away from us. "
― Katherine J. Walden , Seasons: Reflections on Changes Throughout Life
2 " I was always fishing for something on the radio. Just like trains and bells, it was part of the soundtrack of my life. I moved the dial up and down and Roy Orbison's voice came blasting out of the small speakers. His new song, " Running Scared," exploded into the room.Orbison, though, transcended all the genres - folk, country, rock and roll or just about anything. His stuff mixed all the styles and some that hadn't even been invented yet. He could sound mean and nasty on one line and then sing in a falsetto voice like Frankie Valli in the next. With Roy, you didn't know if you were listening to mariachi or opera. He kept you on your toes. With him, it was all about fat and blood. He sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop and he meant business. One of his previous songs, " Ooby Dooby" was deceptively simple, but Roy had progressed. He was now singing his compositions in three or four octaves that made you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal. Typically, he'd start out in some low, barely audible range, stay there a while and then astonishingly slip into histrionics. His voice could jar a corpse, always leave you muttring to yourself something like, " Man, I don't believe it." His songs had songs within songs. They shifted from major to minor key without any logic. Orbison was deadly serious - no pollywog and no fledgling juvenile. There wasn't anything else on the radio like him. "
3 " In after-years he would tell of an incident that took place at one of their encampments: " We were with the Prophet when a Companion brought in a fledgling that he had caught, and one of the parent birds came and threw itself into the hands of him who had taken its young. I saw men's faces full of wonderment, and the Prophet said: 'Do ye wonder at this bird? Ye have taken its young, and it hath thrown itself down in merciful tenderness unto its young. Yet I swear by God, Your Lord is more merciful unto you than is this bird unto its fledgling. And he told the man to put back the young bird where he had found it. He also said: " God hath a hundred mercies,and one of them hath He sent down amongst jinn and men and cattle and beasts of prey. Thereby they are kind and merciful unto one another, and thereby the wild creature inclineth in tenderness unto her offspring. And ninety-nine mercies hath God reserved unto Himself, that therewith He may show mercy unto His slaves on the day of the Resurrection. "
4 " The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear their own " hunting shirts" to build on the reputation of frontier marksmen. "
5 " Too many film schools, as well as any number of screenwriting gurus and an obscene number of how-to-write tomes, have made a business of catering to fledgling screenwriters and filmmakers by exploiting their belief that the only thing standing between them and an Oscar is the right kind of knowledge. If only one knew enough, one could easily become rich and famous. Unfortunately, almost all are susceptible to that eternal malady – “that last great infirmity of the soul” – which is FAME. And whilst I don’t deny the value of technical knowledge, such knowledge matters very little if the story one is trying to tell doesn’t matter, either because it’s incoherent or simply because it fails to make us care. "
6 " The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses. "
― Barbara Ehrenreich , Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything
7 " It was strange: When you reduced even a fledgling love affair to its essentials - I loved her, she maybe loved me, I was foolish, I suffered - it became vacuous and trite, meaningless to anyone else. In the end, it's only the moments that we have, the kiss on the palm, the joint wonder at the furrowed texture of a fir trunk or at the infinitude of grains of sand in a dune. Only the moments. "
― Susan Vreeland , Girl in Hyacinth Blue
8 " I was still too much of a fledgling with people to understand that, in the long run, nobody is a picnic and that I was no picnic myself. "
― Philip Roth , The Plot Against America
