“How the moon triumphs through the endless nights!How the stars throb and glitter as they wheelTheir thick processions of supernal lightsAround the blue vault obdurate as steel!And men regard with passionate awe and yearningThe mighty marching and the golden burning,And think the heavens respond to what they feel.Boats gliding like dark shadows of a dreamAre glorified from vision as they passThe quivering moonbridge on the deep black stream;Cold windows kindle their dead glooms of glassTo restless crystals; cornice dome and columnEmerge from chaos in the splendour solemn;Like faery lakes gleam lawns of dewy grass.With such a living light these dead eyes shine,These eyes of sightless heaven, that as we gazeWe read a pity, tremulous, divine,Or cold majestic scorn in their pure rays:Fond man! they are not haughty, are not tender;There is no heart or mind in all their splendour,They thread mere puppets all their marvellous maze.”

“Look at the sky. It’s not dark and black and without character. The black is, in fact deep blue. And over there: lighter blue and blowing through the blues and blackness the winds swirling through the air and then shining, burning, bursting through: the stars! And you see how they roar their light. Everywhere we look, the complex magic of nature blazes before our eyes.”

“In winter darkness, the Baghdad Arabian keen blue deepness of the piercing lovely January winter's dusk--it used to tear my heart out, one stabbing soft star was in the middle of the magicalest blue, throbbing like love--I saw Maggie's black hair in this night-- In the shelves of Orion her eye shades, borrowed, gleamed a dark and proud vellum somber power brooding rich bracelets of the moon rose from our snow, and surrounded the mystery.”

“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.”

“So the days slipped away, as each morning dawned bright and fair, and each evening followed cool and clear. But autumn was waning fast; slowly the golden light faded to pale silver, and the lingering leaves fell from the naked trees. A wind began to blow chill from the Misty Mountains to the east. The Hunter's Moon waxed round in the night sky, and put to flight all the lesser stars. But low in the South one star shone red. Every night, as the Moon waned again, it shone brighter and brighter. Frodo could see it from his window, deep in the heavens, burning like a watchful eye that glared above the trees on the brink of the valley.”

“the dewy night unrolls a heaven thickly jewelled with sparkling stars”