Lyr

“We placed his remains under a cypress, the upright mountain being scooped out to receive them. And then Clara said, ‘If you wish me to live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us. I earnestly entreat you to take me away.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man

“His land may burst the galling chain
His people may be free again
For them a thousand hopes remain
But hope is dead for him
Soft falls the moonlight on the sea
Whose wild waves play at liberty
And Gondal’s wind sings solemnly
Its [native] midnight hymn

Around his prison walls it sings
His heart is stirred through all its string
Because that sound remembrance brings
Of scenes that once have been

His soul has left the storm below
And reached a realm of sunless snow
The region of [unchanging] woe
Made voiceless by despair”
― Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems

“That thought, I can’t find the right words, is based not on something negative but on something positive. On the positive awareness that art is something great and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man’s soul, while much of the proficiency and technical expertise associated with art reminds me of what would be called self-righteousness in religion.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society has possessed such a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of the one old man’s head? All that history, and if … when I die …? He did not see anyone having time to attend history classes in Karst’s new survivalist Eden.
He shivered – not from the usual human sense of mortality, but from a feeling of vast, invisible things falling away into oblivion, irretrievable and irreplaceable. Grimy he turned to the message that Alpash was now showing him.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky