Roberta

“Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers
be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a
dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective
walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was
shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing
expanse of greens, whites, and blues - wild and free - that stopped at the
city walls.

In time, the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they
simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that
girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit. Some claim that the
barriers do not exist, and disparage them. Although they themselves can
penetrate the new walls with no effort, their spirits (which, also, they
claim do not exist) cannot, and are left like orphans around the periphery.

To enter a city intact it is necessary to pass through one of the new gates.
They are far more difficult to find than their solid predecessors, for they
are tests, mechanisms, devices, and implementations of justice.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“They danced on the shore in marvelous, civilized, humorous reels in which the old contributed wit when they could not contribute grace, and the young listened to their elders, who told them in their dancing to hold on, to love, to be patient, and most of all, to trust.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“The abandoned stars were hers for the many rich hours os sparkling winter nights, and, unattended, she took them in like lovers. She felt that she looked out, not up, into the spacious universe, she knew the names of every bright star and all the constellations, and (although she could not see them) she was familiar with the vast billowing nebulae in which one filament of a wild and shaken mane carried in its trail a hundred million worlds. In a delirium of comets, suns, and pulsating stars, she let her eyes fill with the humming, crackling, hissing light of the galaxy's edge, a perpetual twilight, a gray dawn in one of heaven's many galleries.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“When you die, you know, you hear the insistent pounding that defines all things, whether of matter or energy, since there is nothing in the universe, really, but proportion.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale