Starred Quotes (page 86)
There are landscapes in which we feel above us not sky but space. Something larger, deeper than sky is sensed, is seen, although in such settings the sky itself is invariably immense. There is a place between the cerebrum and the stars where sky stops and space commences, and should we find ourselves on a particular prairie or mountaintop at a particular hour, our relationship with sky thins and loosens while our connection to space becomes solid as bone.
Tom Robbins
[T]he truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
Gustave Flaubert
Go and catch a falling star, Get with child a mandrake root, Tell me where all past years are, Or who cleft the devil's foot, Teach me to hear mermaids singing, Or to keep off envy's stinging, And find. What wind. Serves to advance an honest mind. If thou be'st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see, Ride ten thousand days and nights, Till age snow white hairs on thee, Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me, All strange wonders that befell thee, And swear, No where. Lives a woman...
John Donne
The brain, which operates on electromagnetic impulses, is as much an activity of the universe as are the electromagnetic storms in the atmosphere or on a distant star. Therefore science is one form of electromagnetism that spends it time studying another form…science is god explaining god through a human nervous system…isn’t spirituality the same thing?
Deepak Chopra
How they are all about, these gentlemen. In chamberlains' apparel, stocked and laced, Like night around their order's star and gem. And growing ever darker, stony-faced, And these, their ladies, fragile, wan, but propped. High by their bodice, one hand loosely dropped, Small like its collar, on the toy King-Charles: How they surround each one of these who stopped. To read and contemplate the objects d'art, Of which some pieces still are theirs, not ours. Whit exquisite decorum they allow us....
Rainer Maria Rilke