Weekend Words: Star
The greatly anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh installment in the series, opened this weekend.
The greatly anticipated Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the seventh installment in the series, opened this weekend.
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
—Carl Sagan, Cosmos
But I am as constant as the northern star,
Of whose true-fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.
—William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar in Julius Caesar)
I am the darkly shaded, the bereaved, the inconsolate, the prince of Aquitane, with the blasted tower. My only star is dead, and my star-strewn lute carries on it the black sun of melancholy.
—Gerard de Nerval, “El Desidchado”
Stella, oh, Stella, Stella! Stella for Star!
—Tennessee Williams (Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire)
There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, “Consume me.”
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue.
—James Joyce, Ulysses
In his blue gardens, men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
—Walt Whitman
There is no easy way from the earth to the stars.
—Seneca
For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
—Vincent Van Gogh
The stars are scattered all over the sky like shimmering tears, there must be great pain in the eye from which they trickled.
—Georg Buchner
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space.
—George Gordon Lord Byron, “Darkness”
Often on fine nights when the park of this establishment is vacant, I amuse myself with this marvelous instrument (telescope). I go upstairs, walk across the grass, sit on a bench in the Avenue of Oaks – and there, in my solitude, I enjoy the pleasure of weighing the rays of dead stars.
—Villiers De Lisle Adam, “Tomorrow’s Eve”
The way a team plays as a whole determines its success. You may have the greatest bunch of individual stars in the world, but if they don’t play together, the club won’t be worth a dime.
—Babe Ruth
A confused labyrinth
of smoky stars
entangles my hopes,
which are nearly faded.
—Federico Garcia Lorca, “The Shadow of My Soul”
I’m a star, I’m a star, I’m a star. I’m a star. I’m a star, I’m a big bright shining star.
—Paul Thomas Anderson (spoken by Mark Wahlberg as Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights)
