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# Weekend Words: Stardust
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-stardust/
- Published: 2013-02-24T14:45:35.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:35:39.000Z
- Description: With a meteor streaking across the Siberian sky and the Oscars ceremony tonight, Weekend Words fixes its eye on the stars — shooting, falling or going nowhere in particular.
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 06:51 (2012, 2013, part 1)

![Giovanni da Modena. "The Appearance of the Star" (c. 1412). Fresco. Basilica di San Petronio, Bologna.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2013/02/22213.jpg)

Giovanni da Modena. “The Appearance of the Star” (c. 1412). Fresco. Basilica di San Petronio, Bologna.

With a meteor streaking across the Siberian sky and the Oscars ceremony tonight, Weekend Words fixes its eye on the stars — shooting, falling or going nowhere in particular.

> “I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”  
>  
> **—Jack London**

> “You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure  
> In the exceeding lustre, and the pure  
> Intense irradiation of a mind,  
> Which, with its own internal lightning blind,  
> Flags wearily through darkness and despair—  
> A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,  
> A hooded eagle among blinking owls.—”  
>  
> **—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Letter to Maria Gisborne”**

> “When I have a terrible need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.”  
>  
> **—Vincent van Gogh**

> “Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.”  
>  
> **—Elisabeth Kubler-Ross**

> Thunder rolled by the rolling stars  
> Simulates triumphal cars  
> Deployed in constellated wars  
> Scorpion fights against the Sun  
> Until the Sun and Moon go down  
> Comets weep and Leonids fly  
> Hunt the heavens and the plains  
> Whirled in a vortex that shall bring  
> The world to that destructive fire  
> Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.  
>  
> **—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”**