Starred Quotes (page 82)
Dawn's faint breath
breathes with your mouth
at the ends of empty streets.
Gray light your eyes,
sweet drops of dawn
on dark hills.
Your steps and breath
like the wind of dawn
smother houses.
The city shudders,
Stones exhale—
you are life, an awakening.
Star lost
in the light of dawn,
trill of the breeze,
warmth, breath—
the night is done.
You are light and morning.
Cesare Pavese
THE ROSE OF THE WORLD
WHO dreamed that beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna’s children died.
We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men’s souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any...
William Butler Yeats
You see spirits who talk to you in broad daylight, at night you see perfectly shaped, perfectly distinct phantoms, you think you remember having lived in other forms, you imagine you are growing very tall and that your head is touching the stars, the horizon of Saturn and Jupiter spreads before your eyes, bizarre creatures appear before you with all the characteristics of real beings . . . If the mind has to become completely unhinged in order to place us in communication with another world,...
Gerard De Nerval
Looking upwards, she speculates still more ambitiously upon the nature of the moon, and if the stars are blazing jellies; looking downwards she wonders if the fishes know that the sea is salt; opines that our heads are full of fairies, 'dear to God as we are'; muses whether there are not other worlds than ours, and reflects that the next ship may bring us word of a new one. In short, 'we are in utter darkness'. Meanwhile, what a rapture is thought!
Virginia Woolf
Sorry about Bender," Lula said, letting the Trans Am idle at the curb. "Maybe we could tell Vinnie he died. We could say we were all set to bring Bender in, and he died. Bang. Dead as a doorknob."Better yet, why don't we just go back and kill him," I said. I opened the door to leave, caught my toe in the floor mat, and fell out of the car, face first. I rolled onto my back and stared up at the stars. "I'm fine," I said to Lula. "Maybe I'll sleep here tonight.
Janet Evanovich
I consider books to be good for our health, and also our spirits, and they help us to become poets or scientists, to understand the stars or else to discover them deep within the aspirations of certain characters, those who sometimes, on certain evenings, escape from the pages and walk among us humans, perhaps the most human of us all.
Jose Saramago
Looking at the sky last night and the moon in the first fresh dark, just a few stars, bright with their cold flares, I had a little crumpled thought, 'Oh well, the moon. It's just another place like California.' One's imagination drags its feet as we are inexorably hauled into the future.
James Schuyler