Luminous Quotes (page 3)
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When I should have been producing obscure volumes of verse entitled the Triumph of Humpty Dumpty or the Nose with the Luminous Dong! Or at best, like Clare, "weaving fearful vision" ... A frustrated poet in every man. Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains the deficiency.
Malcolm Lowry
Now there you have a sample of man’s “reasoning powers,” as he calls them. He observes certain facts. For instance, that in all his life he never sees the day that he can satisfy one woman; also, that no woman ever sees the day that she can’t overwork, and defeat, and put out of commission any ten masculine plants that can be put to bed to her. He puts those strikingly suggestive and luminous facts together, and from them draws this astonishing conclusion: The Creator intended the woman to be...
Mark Twain
…it charms
mere eyesight to believe
The nearest thing not trees
Is the sky, into which
The trees reach, opening
their luminous new leaves…
and thought finds rest
beneath a brightened tree
In which, unseen, a warbler
feeds and sings. His song’s
Small shapely melody
Comes down irregularly,
as all light’s givings come.”
Sabbaths 1999 III
Wendell Berry
He recognized her despite the uproar, through his tears of unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her, and he looked at her for the last and final time with eyes more luminous, more grief-stricken, more grateful than she had ever seen them in half a century of a shared life, and he managed to say to her with his last breath: “Only God knows how much I loved you
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Whatever the reason we first mustered the _Apollo_ program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of _Apollo_. What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.
Carl Sagan
The ocean rose up around me, hiding that low, dark patch from my eyes. The daylight, the trailing glory of the sun, went streaming out of the sky, was drawn aside like some luminous curtain, and at last I looked into the blue gulf of immensity which the sunshine hides, and saw the floating hosts of stars. The sea was silent, the sky was silent. I was alone with the night and silence.
H. G. Wells
From mirror to mirror? this is what I happen to dream of? the totality of things, the whole, the entire universe, divine wisdom could concentrate their luminous rays into a single mirror. Or perhaps the knowledge of everything is buried in the soul, and a system of mirrors that would multiply my image would then reveal to me the soul of the universe, which is hidden in mine.
Italo Calvino
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pocketsfull of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the starsbut my thoughts, and they floated light as mothsamong the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdomsbreathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with...
Mary Oliver