“And so their spirits soaredas they took positions own the passageways of battleall night long, and the watchfires blazed among them.Hundreds strong, as stars in the night sky glitteringround the moon's brilliance blaze in all their glorywhen the air falls to a sudden, windless calm...all the lookout peaks stand out and the jutting cliffsand the steep ravines and down from the high heavens burststhe boundless bright air and all the stars shine clearand the shepherd's heart exults - so many fires burnedbetween the ships and the Xanthus' whirling rapidsset by the men of Troy, bright against their walls.A thousand fires were burning there on the plainand beside each fire sat fifty fighting menpoised in the leaping blaze, and champing oatsand glistening barley, stationed by their chariots,stallions waited for Dawn to mount her glowing throne.”

“Come, weave us a scheme so I can pay them back!Stand beside me, Athena, fire me with daring, fierceas the day we ripped Troy's glittering crown of towers down.Stand by me - furious now as then, my bright-eyed one -and I would fight three hundred men, great goddess,with you to brace me, comrade-in-arms in battle!”

“The blazing fire makes flames and brightness out of everything thrown into it.”

“..because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling.”

“In my mind's eye I can still see the first night flight I made in Argentina. It was pitch-dark. Yet in the black void, I could see the lights of man shining down below on the plains, like faintly luminous earthbound stars. Each star was a beacon signaling the presence of a human mind. Here a man was meditating on human happiness, perhaps, or on justice or peace. Lost among this flock of stars was the star of some solitary shepherd. There, perhaps, a man was in communication with the heavens, as he labored over his calculations of the nebula of Andromeda. And there, a pair of lovers. These fires were burning all over the countryside, and each of them, aven the most humble, had to be fed. The fire of the poet, of the teacher, of the carpenter. But among all these living fires, how many closed windows there were, how many dead stars, fires that gave off no light for lack of nourishment.”

“...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance.”

“[B]ut it is only what happens, when they die, to all mortals.The sinews no longer hold the flesh and the bones together,and once the spirit has let the white bones, all the restof the body is made subject to the fire's strong fury,but the soul flitters out like a dream and flies away.”