Quotes & Sayings About Lights And Stars

Clouds there are none, and clear stars beam mild, God, in His mercy, protection is showing, Comfort and hope to the poor orphan child. Ev'n should I fall o'er the broken bridge passing, Or stray in the marshes, by false lights beguiled, Still will my Father, with promise and blessing, Take to His bosom the poor orphan child. There is a thought that for strength should avail me, Though both of shelter and kindred despoiled; Heaven is a home, and a rest will not fail me; — Charlotte Bronte

I saw your name in lights last night. It's the middle of the night, and I can't sleep, thinking all my trumpeting thoughts, and I get out of bed, open the curtains, and look into the night full of stars, and you know what I saw? Your name. Like the stars joined up and spelled the word for me. Like a sign. — Jaclyn Moriarty

With the heat billowing out around us and inside us, the lights of the dash our only stars, Finn let his hands slide over me, breathing life into me, letting his colors flow through me, his mouth call out to me. And I met him at the door. — Amy Harmon

Ah, love is a voyage with water and a star, in drowning air and squalls of precipitate bran; love is a war of lights in the lightning flashes, two bodies blasted in a single burst of honey. — Pablo Neruda

You didn't think I really liked you? Do you think I really like you now?"
He turned toward her, uncertainty in his face."You did go quite a lot of effort to be having this conversation, but ... I don't want to read too much of what I hope into that."
Val stretched out beside him, resting her head in the crook of his arm. "What do you hope?"
He pulled her close, hands careful not to touch her wounds as they wrapped around her. "I hope that you feel for me as I do for you," he said, his voice like a sigh against her throat.
And how is that?" she asked, her lips so close to his jaw that she could taste the salt of his skin when she moved them.
You carried my heart in your hands tonight," he said. "But I have felt as if you carried it long before that."
She smiled and let her eyes drift closed. They lay there together, under the bridge, city lights burning outside the windows like a sky full of falling stars, as they slid off into sleep — Holly Black

It was safe, with all the lights off and no one around to point and stare. In the night it's easy to indulge. It was just the two of us - we didn't have to think about who we were or what this meant or where it was going. It was like an escape. It's easy to forget at this moment billions of people exist and far-off galaxies are being born and stars collide. Kissing is its own kind of collision, it produces its own planetarium of lights inside your head. For me, it was like seeing colors for the first time after living in a black-and-white world. A single person can be just as wide and vast and spellbinding as any sky full of stars. They can make you think the world stops and night can last forever., — Katie Kacvinsky

The ground went out from under her. She sucked in a breath, flailing for balance. Arms came around her waist from behind, jerking her back, keeping her feet in the air.
She fought, feeling his chest at her back, but he was too strong.
"Damn it," he said, his voice strained. "Do you want to go in the water?"
That forced her still. Red and white lights still hung in the distance, warring with the stars. Now that she wasn't running the sound of waves hitting the rocks was unmistakable.
And right in front of her.
"The water?" she said numbly.
He put her feet on the ground, but he didn't let her go. "Yeah. Water. Did you miss the part where I said we're parked on a peninsula? — Brigid Kemmerer

When she tipped her head and looked upward at the glowing dark blue dome pricked with its millions of lights, bigger and brighter than stars had ever been, she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold. — Wallace Stegner

It looked like someone had been planting stars. The castle was in shreds, flagstone floors tiny islands in a sea of stones and wild grass, but clusters of lights were nestled on the castle floor and the earth of the cliffs alike, lanterns strung from the crumbling battlements.
There were so many lights they cast a shimmering haze over everything, bathing the ruins in a pale glow. Mae walked, hardly aware that she was walking, through Tintagel Castle over stones washed in brightness — Sarah Rees Brennan

Rita Vargas caught her breath - the dark was spilling out of the mountains as the sun vanished in the west. The deep purple/blue shadows spread out on the water of the Caribe. The ocean was shadowy, yet at the same time, glowing. The massif green on one side, and velvety black on the other. And below, the lights of the cities scattered and burned, white, yellow, white, looking like gems. Stars.
She still recalls it as one of the most beautiful sights she'd ever witnessed, as if the coast of Veracruz were somehow welcoming its sons home. It would have astounded the dead if the could have looked out the windows. Why would they ever have left such a beautiful home for the dry bones and spikes of the desert? If they could have seen what she saw, they might have stayed home. — Luis Alberto Urrea

It is the eye that discovers the mystery of light, not only the moon and the stars and the vast splendours of the Aurora, but the endless changes the earth undergoes under changing lights. — Nan Shepherd

The lights shifted into and out of his field of view. He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He'd never looked up at a sky. The thought inspired a certain vertigo. A sense of terror of the infinite that was almost pleasant. There — James S.A. Corey

It was too late to tell Dally. Would he have listened? I doubted it. Suddenly it wasn't only a personal thing to me. I could picture hundreds and hundreds of boys living on the wrong sides of cities, boys with black eyes who jumped at their own shadows. Hundreds of boys who maybe watched sunsets and looked at stars and ached for something better. I could see boys going under street lights because they were mean and tough and hated the world, and it was too late to tell them that there was still good in it, and they wouldn't believe you if you did. It was too much of a problem to be just a personal thing. — S.E. Hinton

The sky above them was an intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon, where the great stars burned like street-lamps. From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag, and disappear; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness, trailing a shower of sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours - red, copper, and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten gray. — Rudyard Kipling

Sitting at the old patio table she'd cleared of leaves, she smiled and leaned back. The stars looked twisted in the limbs of the trees, like Christmas lights. She felt like part of the hollow around her was filling. She'd come here with too many expectations. — Sarah Addison Allen

So when their campfire was nothing but embers and the horses were dozing behind them, Ansel and Celaena lay on their backs on the side of a dune and stared up at the stars.
Her hands tucked behind her head, Celaena took a long, deep breath, savoring the balmy night breeze, the exhaustion ebbing from her limbs. She rarely got to see stars so bright - not with the lights of Rifthold. The wind moved across the dunes, and the sand sighed. "That's the stag," Celaena breathed. "The Lord of the North." ... the smile faded when she stared at the familiar constellation. "Because the stag remains constant - no matter the season, he's always there. — Sarah J. Maas

I couldn't tear my eyes from the window, wanting to drink in as much of St. Louis as I could, knowing somewhere out there, one of those infinitesimally small lights was him. I wondered if he'd look up and see the planes crossing the sky like shooting stars, knowing one of those lights was me. — Leah Raeder

Our civilization has fallen out of touch with night. With lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads even, will have none of it. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? — Henry Beston

No wonder the sky had to be blotted out by advertisements. The stars drowned with lights. If everyone could see beyond Coalition horizons, perhaps they'd see the titans of humanity for what they were: tiny creatures, smaller than insects, and in the scale of things, every bit as insignificant. — S.J. Kincaid

Maybe this time Quinn could bare his heart and soul to Mhisery, let her see all of him, and maybe, just maybe, if he were lucky enough, she would find the bright lights of New York would never match the stars of Georgia. — Shyloh Morgan

I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. When the first galaxies fell into luminous clumps, already matter was struggling toward consciousness. The star clouds of Sagittarius are a burning bush. If there is a voice in Sagittarius, I'd be a fool not to listen. If God's voice in the night is a scrawny cry, then I'll prick up my ears. If night's faint lights fail to knock me off my feet, then I'll sit back on a dark hillside and wait and watch. A hint here and a trait there. Listening and watching. Waiting, always waiting, for the tingle in the spine. — Chet Raymo

I want to drive to the coast, away from city lights,
and breathe in stars ... — Jeffrey A. White

He lived with his mother, father and sister; had a room of his own, with the fourth-floor windows staring on seas of rooftops and the glitter of winter nights when home lights brownly wave beneath the heater whiter blaze of stars
those stars that in the North, in the clear nights, all hang frozen tears by the billions, with January Milky Ways like silver taffy, veils of frost in the stillness, huge blinked, throbbing to the slow beat of time and universal blood. — Jack Kerouac

I am a cautious pilgrim of the night, a tentative wanderer among the stars. My awareness of my home in the universe is fleeting and incomplete. Into the homeless home of the sun-faced buddha I have stepped but briefly. My quest, such as it is, is rewarded with faint lights and scrawny cries, a trait here and trait there, a hint of the infinite and a tingle in the spine. Of "minute particulars" I will make my way. — Chet Raymo

Having grown up here, I always wonder what it would be like to see this city as a tourist. Is it ever a disappointment? I have to believe that New York always lives up to its reputation. The buildings really are that tall. The lights really are that bright. There's truly a story on every corner. But it still might be a shock. To realize you are just one story walking among millions. To not feel the bright lights even as they fill the air. To see the tall buildings and only feel a deep longing for the stars. — David Levithan

Then he stared down at the twinkling lights and sobbed, "All my stars fell out of the sky. — Belinda Bauer

All over the city lights were coming on in the purple-blue dusk. The street lights looked delicate and frail, as though they might suddenly float away from their lampposts like balloons. Long twirling ribbons of light, red, green, violet, were festooned about the doorways of drugstores and restaurants
and the famous electric signs of Broadway had come to life with glittering fish, dancing figures, and leaping fountains, all flashing like fire. Everything was beautiful. Up in the deepening sky above the city the first stars appeared white and rare as diamonds. — Elizabeth Enright

These earthly godfathers of Heaven's lights, that give a name to every fixed star, have no more profit of their shining nights than those that walk and know not what they are. — William Shakespeare

Some journalists have described the South Pole as 'hell on earth.' Others refer to my time here as 'an ordeal.' They would be surprised to know how beautiful Antarctica has seemed to me, with its waves of ice in a hundred shades of blue and white, its black winter sky, its ecstatic wheel of stars. They would never understand how the lights of the Dome welcomed me from a distance, or how often I danced and sang and laughed here with my friends. And how I was not afraid. — Jerri Nielsen

Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away. — Carl Sagan

, And you, ye stars,
Who slowly begin to marshal,
As of old, the fields of heaven,
Your distant, melancholy lines!
Have you, too, survived yourselves?
Are you, too, what I fear to become?
You, too, once lived;
You, too, moved joyfully
Among august companions,
In an older world, peopled by Gods,
In a mightier order,
The radiant, rejoicing, intelligent Sons of Heaven.
But now, ye kindle
Your lonely, cold-shining lights,
Unwilling lingerers
In the heavenly wilderness,
For a younger, ignoble world;
And renew, by necessity,
Night after night your courses,
In echoing, unneared silence,
Above a race you know not -
Uncaring and undelighted,
Without friend and without home;
Weary like us, though not
Weary with our weariness. — Matthew Arnold

Down to the river itself, the water so smooth that the stars and lights blended on its dark surface like a living ribbon of eternity. The — Sarah J. Maas

And give me some coffee. Black as midnight on a moonless night."
Harga looked surprised. That wasn't like Vimes.
"How black's that, then?" he said.
"Oh, pretty damn black, I should think."
"Not necessarily."
"What?"
"You get more stars on a moonless night. Stands to reason. They show up more. It can be quite bright on a moonless night."
Vimes sighed.
"An overcast moonless night?" he said.
Harga looked carefully at his coffee pot.
"Cumulus or cirro-nimbus?"
"I'm sorry? What did you say?"
"You get city lights reflected off cumulus, because it's low lying, see. Mind you, you can get high-altitude scatter off the ice crystals in
"
"A moonless night," said Vimes, in a hollow voice, "that is as black as coffee. — Terry Pratchett

Each of us is born to follow a star, be it bright and shining or dark and fated. Sometimes the path of these stars will cross, bringing love or hatred. However, if you look up at the skies on a clear night, out of all the countless lights that twinkle and shine, there will come one. That star will be seen in a blaze, burning a path of light across the roof of the earth, a great comet. — Brian Jacques

I still search
for you in crowds,
in empty fields
and soaring clouds.
In city lights
and passing cars,
on winding roads
and wishing stars.
I wonder where
you could be now,
for years I've not said
your name out loud.
And longer since
I called you mine
time has passed
for you and I.
But I have learnt
to live without,
I do not mind
I still love you anyhow. — Lang Leav

When you think of the former high school football star, you think 6-foot-2, white, meathead as the model for that kind of character. Since I'm not 6-foot-2 or white, I just thought about what I could bring to it. I thought about Smash Williams from 'Friday Night Lights,' like the cocky quarterback, and played around with that. — Donald Glover

Until now, I've never been able to see while I fly, and I feel a dizzying lightness as I look out at the land below us.
Is this what I've missed?
The stars have come to the earth, and the ocean has turned over the ground; dark waves meet the sky. They are unmoving, barely visible but for the light of the sun rising behind them.
Mountains, I realize. That's what the ocean is. Those waves are peaks. The stars are lights in houses and on streets. The earth reflects the sky and the sky meets the earth and, every now and then, if we're lucky, we have a moment to see how small we are. — Ally Condie

There was no moon but the night sky was a riot of crisp and glittering autumn stars. There were streetlights too and lights on buildings and on bridges which looked like earthbound stars and they glimmered repeated as they were reflected with the city in the night water of the Thames. It's fairyland thought Richard. — Neil Gaiman

Powerful winds that crack the boughs of November! - and the bright calm sun, untouched by the furies of the earth, abandoning the earth to darkness, and wild forlornness, and night, as men shiver in their coats and hurry home. And then the lights of home glowing in those desolate deeps. There are the stars, though! - high and sparkling in a spiritual firmament. We will walk in the windsweeps, gloating in the envelopment of ourselves, seeking the sudden grinning intelligence of humanity below these abysmal beauties. Now the roaring midnight fury and the creaking of our hinges and windows, now the winder, now the understanding of the earth and our being on it: this drama of enigmas and double-depths and sorrows and grave joys, these human things in the elemental vastness of the windblown world. — Jack Kerouac

The body of the Earth, large, sluggish and inapt for motion, is not to be disturbed by movement (especially three movements), any more than the Aetherial Lights [stars] are to be shifted, so that such ideas are opposed both to physical principles and to the authority of the Holy Writ which many time: confirms the stability of the Earth (as we shall discuss more fully elsewhere). — Tycho Brahe

Sofi could see the lights in the distance, like the stars hanging above and the planet perched in the sky. Waiting breathless by the moon for them to visit in their rocket ship. — Mary Weber

Then God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser one to rule the night. He made stars also.
Genesis 1:16 — Anonymous

All the way back she talked haltingly about herself, and Amory's love waned slowly with the moon. At her door they started from habit to kiss good night, but she could not run into his arms, nor were they stretched to meet her as in the week before. For a minute they stood there, hating each other with a bitter sadness. But as Amory had loved himself in Eleanor, so now what he hated was only a mirror. Their poses were strewn about the pale dawn like broken glass. The stars were long gone and there were left only the little sighing gusts of wind and the silences between ... but naked souls are poor things ever, and soon he turned homewards and let new lights come in with the sun. — F Scott Fitzgerald

And unless we look and listen closely, we risk making the same mistake. God's lights in our dark nights are as numerous as the stars, if only we'll look for them. from In the Eye of the Storm — Max Lucado

Lights of ships moved in the fairway-a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. — Joseph Conrad

SUN, MOON, AND STARRY SKY
Early summer evenings, when the first stars come out, the warm glow of sunset still stains the rim of the western sky.
Sometimes, the moon is also visible, a pale white slice, while the sun tarries.
Just think
all the celestial lights are present at the same time!
These are moments of wonder
see them and remember. — Vera Nazarian

The hot humid day had followed the sun westward, leaving a cool midnight breeze. The sky, God's special gift to the sailor, was free of city lights and urban pollution. Placed on display, all of creation was set on the night's canopy of blue-black velvet adorned with the glistening diamond dust of billions of lesser stars and the sparkling one-point diamonds of the major stars.

A deep golden harvest moon hung low on the eastern horizon. Its glow cut a pewter path from moon to ship across shifting liquid swells rolling forward to meet the Farnley's bow. The bow, rocking gently, rose, then floated gently down to embrace the next swell. — Larry Laswell

Space is so dark that looking out at it confounds the brain. The more you stare at the vastness of it, at the hanging stars and the swirling galaxies, the more you start to notice how imprecise words like 'dark' and 'black' and 'endless' are. There are so many gradients of shadow, all of them terrifying to me. That's why I keep the lights on. — Holly Black

The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places; and one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip passing over. — Ryan Bingham

Light takes darkness vanish and worlds reappear. Light opens each day with a blaring overture, then throws its wands to earth and casts diamonds on lakes and oceans. Each night, lights tricks make the stars seem alive. — Bruce Watson

The dull light fell more faintly upon the page whereon another equation began to unfold itself slowly and to spread abroad its widening tail. It was his own soul going forth to experience, unfolding itself sin by sin, spreading abroad the balefire o fits burning stars and folding back upon itself, fading slowly, quenching its own lights and fires. they were quenched; and the cold darkness filled chaos. — James Joyce

The whole of Paris was lit up. The tiny dancing flames had bespangled the sea of darkness from end to end of the horizon, and now, like millions of stars, they burned with a steady light in the serene summer night. There was no breath of wind to make them flicker as they hung there in space. They made the unseen city seem as vast as a firmament, reaching out into infinity. — Emile Zola

I'm half of my father. Half of my hero. And I am half of my mother. Half soft sighs and half sharp edges. And if they can be Carmindor and Amara--then somewhere in my blood and bones I can be too. I'm the lost princess. I'm the villain of my story, and the hero. Part of my mom and part of my dad. I am a fact of the universe. The Possible and the Impossible. I am not no one. I am my parents' daughter, and then I realize--I realize that in this universe they're alive too. They're alive through me. Fashioning my hands into a pistol, I point it at the ceiling, lifting my chin, raising my eyes against the blinding stage lights, and I ignite the stars. — Ashley Poston

William looked up ... through his tears ... past the catwalk and lights ... past the sky ... through the dark and clouds and stars and into the void where he once knew God existed, then turned himself outside-in, alone, and asked, 'Why? — Jake Vander Ark

What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem something very erratic, very undependable-now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech-and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Picadilly. — Virginia Woolf

Nothing happened for a whole day. Then, in a little hollow on the edge of the brooding hill, a few grains of sand shifted and left a tiny hole.

Something emerged. Something invisible. Something joyful and selfish and marvellous. Something as intangible as an idea, which is exactly what it was. A wild idea.

It was old in a way not measurable by any calendar known to Man and what it had, right now, was memories and needs. It remembered life, in other times and other universes. It needed people.

It rose against the stars, changing shape, coiling like smoke.

There were lights on the horizon.

It liked lights.

It regarded them for a few seconds and then, like an invisible arrow, extended itself towards the city and sped away.

It liked action, too . . . — Terry Pratchett

But when she turned her back to the lights, she saw that the night was so dark ... She could not see the stars. The world felt as high as the depthless night sky and deeper than she could know. She understood, suddenly and keenly, that she was too small to run away, and she sat on the damp ground and cried. — Shannon Hale

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. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by. — Dorianne Laux

I trembled to think of a world without stars. No guide for the sailor to trust at see, no jewels to dazzle our sense of beauty [ ... ] But all around the globe, the air is so dirty and the lights from the cities are so bright that for some people few stars can be seen anymore. A generation of children may grow up seeing a blank sky and asking, Did there used to be stars there? — Michael Jackson

As we looked up in silence to those distant lights, we were reminded that it was a rare imagination which first taught that the stars are worlds, and had conferred a great benefit on mankind. — Henry David Thoreau

The street lamps and illuminated signs were all extinguished, and on impulse everybody looked into the sky. The frogs and crickets fell quiet to the count of five before they began to sing again. The smaller stars were spread across the darkness in a fine white powder, and the brighter ones pierced the air like nail points. In Andrew Brady's yearbook she wrote: The thing I will always remember about you is the time we were watching the film strip in Miss Applebome's class, and the lights were out, and you sat behind me scratching my back with your fingers. — Kevin Brockmeier

People have stars, but they aren't the same. For travelers, the stars are guides. For other people, they're nothing but tiny lights. And for still others, for scholars, they're problems ... But all those stars are silent stars. You, though, you'll have stars like nobody else ... since I'll be laughing on one of them, for you it'll be as if all the stars are laughing. You'll have stars that can laugh! ... and it'll be as if I had given you, instead of stars, a lot of tiny bells that know how to laugh ... — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Apprehensions"

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself-
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A grey wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.

This red wall winces continually:
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two grey, papery bags-
This is what i am made of, this, and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and rain of pietas.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel their heads and cry.
There is no talk of immorality among these!
Cold blanks approach us:
They move in a hurry. — Sylvia Plath

On westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century. — Graham Moore

Slowly, his eyes came up and he looked through the kitchen window and out through the Cahuenga Pass. The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance.
Bosch nodded and bent down. He closed his eyes, put his hands under the water and brought them up to his face. The water was cold and bracing, as he thought any baptism, the start of any second chance, should be. — Michael Connelly

The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel. — Yoon Ha Lee

Meanwhile the Hemulen was arranging firework set pieces in suitable places. They had Bengal Lights, Blue-Star Rain, Silver Fountains, and Rockets that exploded with stars. — Tove Jansson

A new moon lay on its back, and stars were out. Here, away from lights and sounds of town or village, the night was deep, the black sky stretching, fathomless, away among the spheres to some unimaginable world where gods walked, and suns and moons showered down like petals falling. Some power there is that draws men's eyes and hearts up and outward, beyond the heavy clay that fastens them to earth. Music can take them, and the moon's light, and, I suppose, love, though I had not known it then, except in worship. — Mary Stewart

Once, I asked my mom why stars shine. She said they were
night-lights, so the angels could find their way around in Heaven.
But when I asked my dad, he started talking about gas, and somehow
I put it all together and figured that the food God served caused
multiple trips to the bathroom in the middle of the night. — Jodi Picoult

Now she realized that she was not peering at a so-dark-blue-it-looked-black ocean, but rather she was looking straight through miles of incredibly clear water at something enormous and black in its nethermost depths. Maybe it was the bottom
so deep that not even light could touch it.
And yet, down in those impossible depths, she thought she could see tiny lights sparkling. She stared uncertainly at the tiny glimmerings. They seemed almost like scattered grains of sand lit from within; in some places they clustered like colonies, faint and twinkling.
Like stars ... — Fuyumi Ono

After your visits, I twisted my blinds shut every night. I locked out the stars and I never saw lightning again. Each night, I simply turned out the lights and went to bed. — Jay Asher

O thou beautiful And unimaginable ether! and Ye multiplying masses of increased And still increasing lights! what are ye? what Is this blue wilderness of interminable Air, where ye roll along, as I have seen The leaves along the limpid streams of Eden? Is your course measur'd for ye? Or do ye Sweep on in your unbounded revelry Through an aerial universe of endless Expansion,
at which my soul aches to think,
Intoxicated with eternity. — Lord Byron

A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold;
While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars?-
Then you've a hunch was the music meant ... hunger and night and the stars. — Robert W. Service

Street lights kill the essence of the night sky. Stars and meteors fade away. No songs or whispers from my blackberry. I drift away to my special place. — Fidelis O. Mkparu

We lay side by side on the extension roof, hands behind our heads, elbows just touching. My head was still spinning a little, not unpleasantly, from the dancing and the wine. The breeze was warm across my face, and even through the city lights I could see constellations: the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt. The pine tree at the bottom of the garden rustled like the sea, ceaselessly. For a moment I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be all right. — Tana French

The light blazed out across the patch of grass; fell on the child's green bucket with the gold line round it, and upon the aster which trembled violently beside it. For the wind was tearing across the coast, hurling itself at the hills, and leaping, in sudden gusts, on top of its own back. How it spread over the town in the hollow! How the lights seemed to wink and quiver in its fury, lights in the harbour, lights in bedroom windows high up! And rolling dark waves before it, it raced over the Atlantic, jerking the stars above the ships this way and that. — Virginia Woolf

I find that with fantasy, you lose yourself in it a lot. It's great to be able to go into a dark theater or turn off the lights in your house and just get sucked into this world. I remember watching Star Wars when I was a little kid when they did the re-release of all the originals. I couldn't even read yet but my uncle took me and he would read me the opening as the words were coming up on the screen. I just remember being so sucked into that and thinking, "I want to be Luke Skywalker." — Austin Butler

Lying flat on my back, with my toes dipped into the lake, I stared at the stars for a second. I guess I should have pondered their beauty and realized the rarity of a sky unsaturated by city lights, or something. But it occurred to me that you could probably see stars from the vast majority of the earth. It was city lights that were actually rare. — Emily Adrian

But for now there was this, and it was enough, it was more than they could have hoped for: the two of them in their stone corner, their dark clothes bleeding into the dusk, lights being kindled across the city, and a few pale stars in the sky. — Sarah Waters

Democracy is the eagle on the back of a dollar bill, with 13 arrows in one claw, 13 leaves on a branch, 13 tail feathers, and 13 stars over its head - this signifies that when the white man came to this country, it was bad luck for the Indians, bad luck for the trees, bad luck for the wildlife, and lights out for the American eagle. — Johnny Carson

Two things hold promise of improving those lights. One is to apply science to land-use. The other is to cultivate a love of country a little less spangled with stars, and a little more imbued with that respect for mother-earth - the lack of which is, to me, the outstanding attribute of the machine-age. — Aldo Leopold

We went up and up into the heavens until people were just dots below us. As we hung right at the top
the twinkling electric lights below mingling with the stars
Father said something I will never forget. He said, 'See here, Queenie. Look around. You've got the whole world at your feet, lass. — Andrea Levy

There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you're miles away from the neon lights of the city, bars after 2am, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you. — Beau Taplin

It is amazing just how much light reaches the earth and lights it up from stars millions of light years away. Many of them probably no longer in existence but their light still comes to rest on us. It's mind boggling sometimes. — John O'Brien

In regard to waiting for the right time to do something: "The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. — Blake Mycoskie

When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly. — Ross Macdonald

The stars are out,' Zoe said.
She was right. There were millions of them, with no city lights to ruin turn the sky orange.
'Amazing,' Bianca said. 'I've never actually seen the Milky Way.'
'This is nothing,' Zoe said. 'In the old days, there were more. Whole constellations have disappeared because of human light pollution.'
'You talk like you're not human,' I said.
Zoe raised an eyebrow. I am a Hunter. I care what happens to the wild places of the world. Can the same be said for thee?'
'For you,' Thalia corrected. 'Not thee.'
'But you use you for the beginning of a sentence.'
'And for the end,' Thalia said. 'No thou. No thee. Just you.'
Zoe threw up her hands in exasperation. 'I hate this language. It changes too often! — Rick Riordan

My heart goes out to the playing and singing folk, the folk who are forever on the roads. Life is change; and to be seeing new wonders every day - the thrown sea, the silver rush of the meadow, the lights in distant towns - is to be living, and not merely existing. I pity the man who is content to stay always in the place where his mother dropped him; that is, unless his thoughts wander. For one might sit on a midden and dream stars! — Joseph Campbell

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his. — Ted Kooser

I watch the white stars darken;
the day comes and the
white stars dim
and lessen
and the lights fade in the city. — H.D.

It does
not matter; there's many a heavenly body in the lot crowding upon us of
a night that mankind had never heard of, it being outside the sphere
of its activities and of no earthly importance to anybody but to the
astronomers who are paid to talk learnedly about its composition,
weight, path
the irregularities of its conduct, the aberrations of its
light
a sort of scientific scandal-mongering. — Joseph Conrad

The road was dark, edged with trees. Looking up, he could see a few leaves against the stars; the leaves were twisted and dry, ready to fall. There were distant lights in the windows of houses scattered through the countryside; but the lights made the road seem lonelier.
He never felt loneliness except when he was happy. — Ayn Rand

There was a sky somewhere above the tops of the buildings, with stars and a moon and all the things there are in a sky, but they were content to think of the distant street lights as planets and stars. If the lights prevented you from seeing the heavens, then preform a little magic and change reality to fit the need. The street lights were now planets and stars and moon. — Hubert Selby Jr.

We sit in silence and watch the stars, I suppose because there are no words, not in all the languages on earth, that can properly describe the feeling of being in love. And perhaps those little burning lights out there in the dark, are the closest we come to something that does. — Beau Taplin

For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn't conspire against you, but it doesn't go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. "Someday" is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it's important to you and you want to do it "eventually," just do it and correct course along the way. — Timothy Ferriss

In the months to come, I would look back on this time in my life almost as a kind of out-of-body travel, from which I had returned with nothing but a sense memory of having been somewhere inexpressibly exciting and far away. It wasn't like a dream, exactly, although it had a dream's strange internal logic. It was like looking through the window of an airplane at night, the way the city below appears so near, yet untouchable beyond the glass--a network of lights, flames, stars. — Katha Pollitt

There are faerie lights in Faerie - not the tiny paper lanterns that you might see strung up high upon a tree, and not the fat neon fireflies that sprinkle the forests at night - no, these lights are actually the beings themselves, visible as just a pinpoint of light, like stars on the sky, the etheric beings grace our world with fleeting sparks of brilliant radiance. — Gabriel Brunsdon

Betelgeuse, Achenar. Orion. Aquila. Centre the Cross and you have a steady compass. But there's no compass for my ever disoriented soul, only ever beckoning ghost lights. In the one sure direction, to the one sure end. — Keri Hulme

On all sides of us, spread out below, are little white lights and black pockets of trees. Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It's hard to tell where the sky ends and the earth begins. I hate to admit it, but it's beautiful. — Jennifer Niven