Jonathan Quotes

“Don’t believe what your eyes are telling you. All they show is limitation.”

“By morning the Flock had forgotten its insanity, but Fletcher had not. ‘Jonathan, remember what you said a long time ago, about loving the Flock enough to return to it and help it learn?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘I don’t understand how you manage to love a mob of birds that has just tried to kill you.’ ‘Oh, Fletch, you don’t love that! You don’t love hatred and evil, of course. You have to practice and see the real gull, the good in every one of them, and to help them see it in themselves. That’s what I mean by love. It’s fun, when you get the knack of it.’”

“Look with your understanding, find out what you already know, and you’ll see the way to fly.”

“Look at Fletcher! Lowell! Charles-Roland! Judy Lee! Are they also special and gifted and divine? No more than you are, no more than I am. The only difference, the very only one, is that they have begun to understand what they really are and have begun to practice it.”

“‘The only true law is that which leads to freedom,’ Jonathan said. ‘There is no other.’”

“’Why is it,’ Jonathan puzzled, ‘that the hardest thing in the world is to convince a bird that he is free, and that he can prove it for himself if he’d just spend a little time practicing? Why should that be so hard?’”

“He spoke of very simple things–It is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition out limitation in any form.”

“A mile from shore a fishing boat chummed the water, and the word for Breakfast Flock flashed through the air, till a crowd of a thousand seagulls came to dodge and fight for bits of food. It was another busy day beginning. But way off alone, out by himself beyond boat and shore, Jonathan Livingston Seagull was practicing.”

“Most gulls don’t bother to learn more than the simplest facts of flights–how to get from shore to food and back again. For most gulls, it is not flying that matters, but eating. For this gull, though, it was not eating that mattered, but flight. More than anything else, Jonathan Livingston Seagull loved to fly.”

″ ‘Lawks!’ Jemmy thought. Hadn’t the prince run away in royal style! He had even brought a china plate, a silver spoon and a silver knife for himself.”

“Marissa tried to close the door. Eva tried and tried some more. And Jonathan didn’t try at all, he just cried and cried and cried...”

Then the unthinkable happens . . . Jonathan is killed in an accident. Heartbroken, Karl longs for the day he’ll be reunited with his brother.

“Neither of the girls had ever heard of a poor working boy with three names. ‘You’re not making it up?’ Cilla asked, almost respectfully. ‘I’ve heard tell of folk with three names, but I never saw one before.’ ”

There’s no one Karl Lion loves more than his older brother, Jonathan, who is brave, strong, and handsome - everything Karl believes he is not.