Star Quotes (page 34)
Nothing could be taken for granted. Women who loved you tried to cut your throat, while women who didn't even know your name scrubbed your back. Witches could sound like Katharine Hepburn and your best friend could try to strangle you. Smack in the middle of an orchid there might be a blob of jello and inside a Mickey Mouse doll, a fixed and radiant star.
Toni Morrison
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum. Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead. Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crpe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now: put out...
W. H. Auden
You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them
Gene Wolfe
We cannot know his legendary headwith eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torsois still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwisethe curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor coulda smile run through the placid hips and thighsto that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defacedbeneath the translucent cascade of the shouldersand would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would...
Rainer Maria Rilke
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews. Not to be born is the best for man. The second best is a formal order. The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy. The tune is catching and will not stop. Dance till the stars come down from the rafters. Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
W. H. Auden
Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful. This is the reason why beauty is still escaping out of all analysis. It is not yet possessed, it cannot be handled. …It instantly deserts possession, and flies to an object in the horizon. If I could put my hand on the north star, would it be as beautiful? The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in it, the beauty forsakes all the near water. For the imagination and senses cannot be...
Ralph Waldo Emerson