“A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.”
“I wanted to feel the blood running back into my veins, even at the cost of annihilation. I wanted to shake the stone and light out of my system. I wanted the dark fecundity of nature, the deep well of the womb, silence, or else the lapping of the black waters of death. I wanted to be that night which the remorseless eye illuminated, a night diapered with stars and trailing comets. To be of night so frighteningly silent, so utterly incomprehensible and eloquent at the same time. Never more to speak or to listen or to think.”
“Were she better, or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves.”
“There is no way in which a man can earn a star or deserve a sunset.”
“To explain all nature is too difficult a task for any one man or even for any one age”
“All through the night, men looked at the sky and were saddened by the stars.”
“Small said, But what about when we are dead and gone, will you love me then, does love go on? …Large (replied) Look at the stars, how they shine and glow, some of the stars died a long time ago. Still they shine in the evening skies, for you see…love like starlight never dies…”
“She murmured, We could always blame the stars. I beg your pardon, Doctor? That s what influenza means, she said. Influenza delle stelle—the influence of the stars. Medieval Italians thought the illness proved that the heavens were governing their fates, that people were quite literally star-crossed. I pictured that, the celestial bodies trying to fly us like upsidedown kites. Or perhaps just yanking on us for their obscure amusement.”
“When I opened my eyes I saw nothing but the pool of nocturnal sky, for I was lying on my back with out-stretched arms, face to face with that hatchery of stars. Only half awake, still unaware that those depths were sky, having no roof between those depths and me, no branches to screen them, no root to cling to, I was seized with vertigo and felt myself as if flung forth and plunging downward like a diver.”
“He lay on his back in his blankets and looked our where the quartermoon lay cocked over the heel of the mountains. In the false blue dawn the Pleiades seemed to be rising up into the darkness above the world and dragging all the stars away, the great diamond of Orion and Cepella and the signature of Cassiopeia all rising up through the phosphorous dark like a sea-net. He lay a long time listening to the others breathing in their sleep while he contemplated the wildness about him, the wildness within.”
“Let me peer out at the world through your lens. (Maybe I ll shudder, or gasp, or tilt my head in a question.) Let me see how your blue is my turquoise and my orange is your gold. Suddenly binary stars, we have startling gravity. Let s compare scintillation - let s share starlight.”
“The spaces between stars are where the work of the universe is done.”
“If the scars of our daily reality overwhelm the beat of our life, we can at all times decide to start from square one, look up at the sky, being conscious of our pettiness, and enjoy the sparks of the stars to find the missing links. ( Man without Qualities )”
“Isn t it strange that all life can pretty much end, but the universe goes on as it is? No one else exists, but the moon keeps shining and the stars keep falling.”
“Life is so complete that even when we are knocked on our backs, we have the best view of the stars.”
“Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the young but never the actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event.”
“In our village, folks say God crumbles up the old moon into stars.”