A garland of quotations CVII
Culled from the finest stargazers in literary history, and re-woven every Wednesday
Man suffers, it is possible; but just look at Aldebaran rising!
•Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862).
I have never seen the evening Star set behind the mountains but it was as if I had lost a Hope our of my Soul—as if Love were gone, & a sad Memory only remained— / O it was my earliest Affection, the Evening Star / —One of my first utterances in verse was an address to it, as I was returning from the New River, and it looked newly bathed as well as I—I could remember that the substance of the Sonnet was that the woman whom I could ever love, would surely have been emblemed in the pensive serene brightness of that Planet—that we were both constellated to it, & would after death return thither / — —
•S.T. Coleridge, notebook (1811).
Look, Elizabeth Barret, look at the infinitude of the night! Oh, cosmos! Oh, endless cosmos, endlessly creating, endlessly devouring!
•Max Shulman, I Was a Teen-Age Dwarf (1959).
The infinitely small size of the planet Earth when compared with that of the star Betelgueux (which holds a million suns) should not make you shudder. Size is noting without accessibility: Betelgueux is a mere spark in the night.
•Robert Graves, “Alpha and Omega of the Autobiography of Baal” (1930).
There are those to whom it is impossible to tell news. They knew it all the time. And there are those who always have the Inside Stuff. In the second class is a wearisome acquaintance, who, on being told that Betelguese was 27,000,000 times as large as the sun, said, “I heard different.”
•Franklin P. Adams, Overset (1922).
The stars are so big,
The earth so small,
Stay as you are.
•some second grader, quoted in McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964).
The moon departs the sky,
the Pleiads pass from sight,
midnight’s hour slips by,
and I lie alone tonight.
•Sappho.
Touch my lips with your lips as those people on Earth did.
•Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924).
Pah! this rotten old breeding-patch circling the sun!
•Benjamin De Casseres “My Divine Hate” (1915).
In fine, it must be admitted that Tor-tu is a much more beautiful world than ours. I saw colors there that we could not produce because we have not the proper elements.
•W.S. Harris, Life in a Thousand Worlds (1905).
Sources: Graves: But It Still Goes On (Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, 1931); Sappho: in Jeffrey M. Duban, Ancient and Modern Images of Sappho (University Press of America, 1983); Aelita: screenplay by Aleksei Fajko and Fyodor Otsep; De Casseres: The Shadow Eater (American Library Service, 1923); some of this material is copyrighted, and I plead only fair use.
