β
In order to rise
From its own ashes
A phoenix
First
Must
Burn.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2))
β
Well, my dear, take heart. Some day, I will kiss you and you will like it. But not now, so I beg you not to be too impatient.
β
β
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
β
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Fledgling)
β
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
is Change.
God
is Change.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.
β
β
Samuel Butler
β
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Land of Heart's Desire)
β
Butler could kill you a hundred different ways without use of his armoury. Though I'm sure one would be quite sufficient.
β
β
Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl (Artemis Fowl, #1))
β
Until you've lost your reputation, you never realize what a burden it was or what freedom really is.
β
β
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
β
In order to rise from its own ashes, a Phoenix first must burn.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Dear Scarlett! You aren't helpless. Anyone as selfish and determined as you are is never helpless. God help the Yankees if they should get you." -Rhett Butler
β
β
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
β
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Wind Among the Reeds)
β
There is another world, but it is in this one.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you're inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won't. Habit is persistence in practice.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Bloodchild and Other Stories)
β
Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Never pass up new experiences [Scarlett], They enrich the mind." - Rhett Butler
β
β
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
β
In dreams begin responsibilities.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (Responsibilities)
β
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
I am unarmed. But Butler here, my ...ah...butler, has a Sig Saucer in his shoulder holster, two shrike-throwing knives in his boots, aderringer two-shot up his sleeve, garrotte wire in his watch, and three stun greanades concealed in variouse pockets. Anything else, Butler?
β
β
Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl (Artemis Fowl, #1))
β
...I'm looking for the face I had, before the world was made...
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Think like a wise man but communicate in the language of the people.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.
β
β
Samuel Butler
β
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income
β
β
Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh)
β
There are no strangers, only friends you have not met yet.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
People have the right to call themselves whatever they like. That doesn't bother me. It's other people doing the calling that bothers me.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
There is no end
To what a living world
Will demand of you.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
β
All empty souls tend toward extreme opinions.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
We lose ourselves in what we read, only to return to ourselves, transformed and part of a more expansive world.
β
β
Judith Butler
β
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O Never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (In the Seven Woods: Being Poems Chiefly of the Irish Heroic Age)
β
I bring you with reverent hands
The books of my numberless dreams.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Wind Among the Reeds)
β
All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
β
Say youβll marry me when I come back or, before God, I wonβt go. Iβll stay around here and play a guitar under your window every night and sing at the top of my voice and compromise you, so youβll have to marry me to save your reputation.
β
β
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
β
The worst thing about some men is that when they are not drunk they are sober.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it.
That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
Yes, My Lord.
β
β
Yana Toboso
β
Choose your leaders
with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
is to be controlled
by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
is to be led
by the opportunists
who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
is to offer up
your most precious treasures
to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
is to ask
to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
is to sell yourself
and those you love
into slavery.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2))
β
The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.
β
β
William Francis Butler (Charles George Gordon)
β
It figuresβitβs always either the butler or the resurrected mate.
β
β
Kresley Cole (Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night (Immortals After Dark, #3))
β
I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
β
β
Samuel Butler (The Note Books Of Samuel Butler)
β
To long a sacrifice can make a stone of a heart
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Wine enters through the mouth,
Love, the eyes.
I raise the glass to my mouth,
I look at you,
I sigh.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those who are not entirely beautiful.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
I like black for clothes, small items, and jewelry. It's a color that can't be violated by any other colors. A color that simply keeps being itself. A color that sinks more somberly than any other color, yet asserts itself more than all other colors. It's a passionate gallant color. Anything is wonderful if it transcends things rather than being halfway...
β
β
Yana Toboso (Black Butler, Vol. 1 (Black Butler, #1))
β
Any fool can fight a winning battle, but it needs character to fight a losing one, and that should inspire us; which reminds me that I dreamed the other night that I was being hanged, but was the life and soul of the party.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of "wrong" ideas.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Kindred)
β
THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.
No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Beware:
Ignorance
Protects itself.
Ignorance
Promotes suspicion.
Suspicion
Engenders fear.
Fear quails,
Irrational and blind,
Or fear looms,
Defiant and closed.
Blind, closed,
Suspicious, afraid,
Ignorance
Protects itself,
And protected,
Ignorance grows.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2))
β
Think where man's glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
We can only begin to live when we conceive life as
Tragedy.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Drowning people
Sometimes die
Fighting their rescuers.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren't any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
β
So what? You're another person, so of course you look different. What do you need to be ashamed for?
β
β
Yana Toboso
β
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Embrace diversity.
Uniteβ
Or be divided,
robbed,
ruled,
killed
By those who see you as prey.
Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
β
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
Artemis: "Right, brothers. Onward. Imagine yourself seated at a cafe in Montmartre."
Myles: "In Paris."
Artemis: "Yes, Paris. And try as you will, you cannot attract the waiter's attention. What do you do?"
Beckett: "Umm...tell Butler to jump-jump-jump on his head?"
Myles: "I agree with simple-toon."
Artemis: "No! You simply raise one finger and say clearly 'ici, garcon.'"
Beckett: "Itchy what?
β
β
Eoin Colfer
β
Her butler opened it for her. His name was Boredom. She said, 'Boredom, fetch me a plaything.' He said 'Very good ma'am,' and putting on his white gloves so that fingerprints would not show he tapped at my heart and I thought he said his name was Love.
β
β
Jeanette Winterson (Written on the Body)
β
We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Celtic Twilight: Faerie and Folklore)
β
Still dressed in matching butler suits with pink bow ties, the redcaps filed into the dining room, every one of them scowling at me. Ash's eyes widened and he quickly hid his mouth under his laced fingers, but I saw his shoulders shaking with silent laughter.
Luckily, the redcaps didn't notice.
β
β
Julie Kagawa (The Iron Queen (The Iron Fey, #3))
β
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
β
β
Samuel Butler
β
Beware:
At war
Or at peace,
More people die
Of unenlightened self-interest
Than of any other disease.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2))
β
My pet, the world can forgive practically anything except people who mind their own business" - Rhett Butler
β
β
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
β
Kindness eases change.
Love quiets fear.
And a sweet and powerful
Positive obsession
Blunts pain,
Diverts rage,
And engages each of us
In the greatest,
The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Talents (Earthseed, #2))
β
If I make the lashes dark
And the eyes more bright
And the lips more scarlet,
Or ask if all be right
From mirror after mirror,
No vanity's displayed:
I'm looking for the face I had
Before the world was made.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Scarlett, always save something to fearβeven as you save something to love.
β
β
Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind)
β
All struggles are essentially power struggles. Who will rule? Who will lead? Who will define, refine, confine, design? Who will dominate? All struggles are essentially power struggles, and most are no more intellectual than two rams knocking their heads together.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
We taste and feel and see the truth. We do not reason ourselves into it.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Hope and Memory have one daughter and her name is Art, and she has built her dwelling far from the desperate field where men hang out their garments upon forked boughs to be banners of battle. O beloved daughter of Hope and Memory, be with me for a while.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black,...an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler
β
People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Better to stay alive," I said. "At least while there's a chance to get free." I thought of the sleeping pills in my bag and wondered just how great a hypocrite I was. It was so easy to advise other people to live with their pain.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Kindred)
β
Everything exists, everything is true and the earth is just a bit of dust beneath our feet.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Morning is an important time of day, because how you spend your morning can often tell you what kind of day you are going to have. For instance, if you wake up to the sound of twittering birds, and find yourself in an enormous canopy bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of freshly made muffins and hand-squeezed orange juice on a silver tray, you will know that your day will be a splendid one. If you wake up to the sound of church bells, and find yourself in a fairly big regular bed, with a butler standing next to you holding a breakfast of hot tea and toast on a plate, you will know that your day will be O.K. And if you wake up to the sound of somebody banging two metal pots together, and find yourself in a small bunk bed, with a nasty foreman standing in the doorway holding no breakfast at all, you will know that your day will be horrid.
β
β
Lemony Snicket (Horseradish: Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid)
β
Ah, the patter of little feet around the house. There's nothing like having a midget for a butler.
β
β
W.C. Fields
β
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
β
β
Samuel Butler (The Note Books Of Samuel Butler)
β
Thatβs all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I donβt know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that wonβt matter if we donβt survive these times.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
β
If Lacan presumes that female homosexuality issues from a disappointed heterosexuality, as observation is said to show, could it not be equally clear to the observer that heterosexuality issues from a disappointed homosexuality?
β
β
Judith Butler (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity)
β
Butler snapped his fingers. "Focus, Artemis! Time enough for your Atlantis Complex later. We have the Atlantis Trench outside that door and six miles of water above it. If you want to stay alive, you need to stay alert." He turned to Holly. "This is ridiculous. I'm pulling the plug."
Holly's mouth was a tight line as she shook her head. "Navy rules, Butler. You're on my boat, you follow my orders."
"As I remember, I brought the boat."
"Yes, thanks for bringing my boat.
β
β
Eoin Colfer (The Atlantis Complex (Artemis Fowl, #7))
β
Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust, and I know sometimes you cannot even breathe deeply, and the night sky is no home, and you have cried yourself to sleep enough times that you are down to your last two percent; but nothing is infinite, not even loss. You are made of the sea and the stars, and one day you are going to find yourself again.
β
β
Finn Butler
β
The Lake Isle of Innisfree
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnightβs all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnetβs wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heartβs core.
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
- The Song of Wandering Aengus
β
β
W.B. Yeats (A Poet to His Beloved: The Early Love Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
When I meet a woman who attracts me, I prefer women,' she said. 'And when I meet a man who attracts me, I prefer men.'
'You mean you haven't made up your mind yet.'
'I mean exactly what I said. I told you you wouldn't like it. Most people who ask want me definitely on one side or the other.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Patternmaster (Patternmaster, #4))
β
Gansey leaned back, head thrown to the side, drunken and silly with happiness. "I love this car," he said, loud enough to be heard over the engine. "I should buy four more of them. I'll just open the door of one to fall in to the other. One can be a living room, one can be my kitchen, I'll sleep in one..."
"And the fourth? Butler's pantry?" Blue shouted.
"Don't be so selfish. Guest room.
β
β
Maggie Stiefvater (The Dream Thieves (The Raven Cycle, #2))
β
The child in each of us
Knows paradise.
Paradise is home.
Home as it was
Or home as it should have been.
Paradise is one's own place,
One's own people,
One's own world,
Knowing and known,
Perhaps even
Loving and loved.
Yet every child
Is cast from paradise-
Into growth and new community,
Into vast, ongoing
Change.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
β
Create no images of God. Accept the images that God has provided. They are everywhere, in everything. God is Changeβ Seed to tree, tree to forest; Rain to river, river to sea; Grubs to bees, bees to swarm. From one, many; from many, one; Forever uniting, growing, dissolvingβ forever Changing. The universe is Godβs self-portrait.
β
β
Octavia E. Butler (Parable of the Sower (Earthseed, #1))
β
Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something. If this seems so clearly the case with grief, it is only because it was already the case with desire. One does not always stay intact. It may be that one wants to, or does, but it may also be that despite one's best efforts, one is undone, in the face of the other, by the touch, by the scent, by the feel, by the prospect of the touch, by the memory of the feel. And so when we speak about my sexuality or my gender, as we do (and as we must), we mean something complicated by it. Neither of these is precisely a possession, but both are to be understood as modes of being dispossessed, ways of being for another, or, indeed, by virtue of another.
β
β
Judith Butler (Undoing Gender)
β
We'll build our own home."
The promise curled around her heart, a vivid ray of sunlight. "In Manhattan?"
"Of course." A slow, slow smile. "What kind of mansion would you like?"
Damn, but the archangel was playing with her again. The sunshine grew, filled her veins.
"Actually, I kind of like yours." She slid her arms around his neck. "Can I have it? Oh, and can I have Jeeves, too? I've always wanted a butler."
"Yes."
She blinked. "Just like that?"
"It's only a place."
"We'll make it more," she promised, her mouth to his. "We'll make it ours.
β
β
Nalini Singh (Archangel's Kiss (Guild Hunter, #2))
β
I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a clichΓ© but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.
β
β
Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven)
β
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
β
β
W.B. Yeats (The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats)
β
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
β
β
Smedley D. Butler (War Is a Racket)
β
Maybe I owe you something too, human," she said, drawing her pistol. Butler almost reacted, but decided to give Holly the benefit of the doubt.
Captain Short plucked a gold coin from her belt, flicking it fifty feet into the moonlit sky. With one fluid movement, she brought her weapon up and loosed a single blast. The coin rose another fifty feet, then spun earthward. Artemis somehow managed to snatch it from the air. The first cool movement of his young life.
"Nice shot," he said. The previously solid disk now had a tiny hole in the center.
Holly held out her hand, revealing the still raw scar on her finger. "If it wasn't for you, I would have missed altogether. No mech-digit can replicate that kind of accuracy. So, thank you too, I suppose."
Artemis held out the coin.
"No," said Holly. "You keep it, to remind you."
"To remind me?"
Holly stared at him frankly. "To remind you that deep beneath the layers of deviousness, you have a spark of decency. Perhaps you could blow on that spark occasionally."
Artemis closed his fingers around the coin. It was warm against his palm.
"Yes, perhaps.
β
β
Eoin Colfer (The Arctic Incident (Artemis Fowl, #2))
β
The Cat and the Moon
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.
β
β
W.B. Yeats
β
Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives.
To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates.
'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic.
They've served their purpose.
Nature is unsentimental.
Death is built in.
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Carl Sagan (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: Earth Before Humans by ANN DRUYAN' 'CARL SAGAN (1992-05-03))
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God spreads the heavens above us like great wings
And gives a little round of deeds and days,
And then come the wrecked angels and set snares,
And bait them with light hopes and heavy dreams,
Until the heart is puffed with pride and goes
Half shuddering and half joyous from God's peace;
And it was some wrecked angel, blind with tears,
Who flattered Edane's heart with merry words.
Come, faeries, take me out of this dull house!
Let me have all the freedom I have lost;
Work when I will and idle when I will!
Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
I would take the world
And break it into pieces in my hands
To see you smile watching it crumble away.
Once a fly dancing in a beam of the sun,
Or the light wind blowing out of the dawn,
Could fill your heart with dreams none other knew,
But now the indissoluble sacrament
Has mixed your heart that was most proud and cold
With my warm heart for ever; the sun and moon
Must fade and heaven be rolled up like a scroll
But your white spirit still walk by my spirit.
When winter sleep is abroad my hair grows thin,
My feet unsteady. When the leaves awaken
My mother carries me in her golden arms;
I'll soon put on my womanhood and marry
The spirits of wood and water, but who can tell
When I was born for the first time?
The wind blows out of the gates of the day,
The wind blows over the lonely of heart,
And the lonely of heart is withered away;
While the faeries dance in a place apart,
Shaking their milk-white feet in a ring,
Tossing their milk-white arms in the air;
For they hear the wind laugh and murmur and sing
Of a land where even the old are fair,
And even the wise are merry of tongue;
But I heard a reed of Coolaney say--
When the wind has laughed and murmured and sung,
The lonely of heart is withered away.
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W.B. Yeats (The Land of Heart's Desire)