KF

“Then the syncretist Ficino, sitting hunched with Lorenzo standing at his side, put all the ideas together, along with Lorenzo's new song: chariots blazing between the worlds as gods fought rebel gods, the destruction of a city -- a planet? -- by fire, beasts beyond imagining both to terrify and befriend the heroes.

"It needs a title," Signorina Scala said.

Pulci had his mouth open, but Ficino beat him to the pun.

"It shall be dedicated to Isis and Mars," he said, "and we will call it Stella Martis.”
― John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting

“Trees into sweaters! Brute matter uplifted to serve human purposes! What could be more dialectical?”
― Francis Spufford, Red Plenty

“I was obsessed with public acclaim, posters, and pyrotechnics. More modest people might condemn this as a fault; I trust, though, that the more astute will acknowledge it as a gift.”
― Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis

“The eye is a delicate instrument, but it is blind to half the universe—far more than half. The night sky is black, we say: between the stars is void and darkness. But turn the telescope-eye on that space between the stars, and lo, the stars! Stars too faint and far for the eye alone to see, rank behind rank, glory beyond glory, out to the uttermost boundaries of the universe. Beyond all imagination, in the outer darkness, there is light: a great glory of sunlight. I have seen it. I have seen it, night after night, and mapped the stars, the beacons of God on the shores of darkness. And here too there is light! There is no place bereft of the light, the comfort and radiance of the creator spirit. There is no place that is outcast, outlawed, forsaken. There is no place left dark. Where the eyes of God have seen, there light is. We must go farther, we must look farther! There is light if we will see it. Not with eyes alone, but with the skill of the hands and the knowledge of the mind and the heart's faith is the unseen revealed, and the hidden made plain. And all the dark earth shines like a sleeping star.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Wind's Twelve Quarters