Moon Crater Quotes

The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It's always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Everyday it's a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

You sit at the edge of the world, I am in a crater that's no more. Words without letters Standing in the shadow of the door. The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard, Little fish rain from the sky. Outside the window there are soldiers, steeling themselves to die. (Refrain) Kafka sits in a chair by the shore, Thinking for the pendulum that moves the world, it seems. When your heart is closed, The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx, Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams. The drowning girl's fingers Search for the entrance stone, and more. Lifting the hem of her azure dress, She gazes -- at Kafka on the shore

The moon is fat, but half of her is missing. A ruler-straight line divides her dark side from her light. She hangs low over the bustling Castro, noticeably earlier than the night before. Autumn is coming. For as long as I can remember, I’ve talked to the moon. Asked her for guidance. There’s something deeply spiritual about her pale glow, her cratered surface, her waxing and waning. She wears a new dress every evening, yet she’s always herself.

The scent of growth, quiet and green, hung heavy in the air. I heard everything. I saw everything. I could count the craters on the moon. I could count every mosquito buzz past, bypassing my tender skin out of respect for a fellow bloodsucker.

They say asteroids hit the moon pretty often, which is how the moon gets its crater, but this one is going to be the biggest asteroid ever to hit it and on a clear night you should be able to see the impact when it happens, maybe even with the naked eye but certainly with binoculars. They made it sound pretty dramatic, but I still don't think it's worth three homework assignments.

My body is not unlike the moon, cratered so thoroughly by brutality it’s hard to imagine it untouched by violence.

The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

It's great to know that others can feel shy like me, too," smiled Luna, "and that I can make them laugh with my funny Moon Crater Face

The moon stays beautiful with its craters So why then are you afraid of your scars?

she has craters but only a fool can deny her beauty. She silently stare sun whole night & reflects his light his love with stars at times.

She’s has craters you didn’t create and darkness you don’t deserve. She’s as stunning as the moon on a cloudless night, but it may take millennia for her to find and manifest her own internal sunlight.

Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

My eyes are so close together that when I cross my eyes, my irises actually trade places. My skin is so craterous that Neil Armstrong annually rubs my face just to reminisce about his time on the moon. And my nose is so long that my penis is jealous. But enough about how handsome I am.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

you were the flaming meteor about to send me in smoke but i kissed you anyways. there's a burning crater on my lips from your touch and i think i may always be in love with you. we looked at each other like we were the sun and the moon and we knew we'd only eclipse for so long.

I think of winter, which is nothing but a rift in the firmament through which the winds break loose, the shreds of cloud over the hilltops in the new blue of the morning -- and dew-drops, those false pearls, and frost, that beauty powder, and mankind in disarray and events out of joint, and so many spots on the sun and so many craters in the moon and so much wretchedness everywhere -- when I think of all this I can't help feeling that God is not rich. He has the appearance of riches, certainly, but I can feel his embarrassment. He gives us a revolution the way a bankrupt merchant gives a ball. We must not judge any god by appearances. I see a shoddy universe beyond that splendour of the sky. Creation itself is bankrupt, and that's why I'm a malcontent.

There is no necessity for nervousness," said the turbaned man, the light catching like sequins in the moon craters of his cheeks. "Your hand shows a calm and sanguine life. You will never want. You will never suffer any serious illness or misfortune. You will marry where you wish and where it is auspicious. You will have one child, a boy, easily and without peril. You will live into a long and comfortable old age." He released her hand and, rather astonishing her, it dropped down limp and cold. "You will," he said, "Be very unhappy.

Somehow, from this Gilbert concluded that the Moon’s craters were indeed formed by impacts—in itself quite a radical notion for the time—but

The moon understands what it means to be human.Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

You are the kind of beautiful that leaves craters in the moon,

You sit at the edge of the world, I am in a crater that's no more.   Words without letters   Standing in the shadow of the door.   The moon shines down on a sleeping lizard, Little fish rain down from the sky.   Outside the window there are soldiers, steeling themselves to die.   (Refrain)   Kafka sits in a chair by the shore, Thinking of the pendulum that moves the world, it seems.   When your heart is closed, The shadow of the unmoving Sphinx, Becomes a knife that pierces your dreams.   The drowning girl's fingers   Search for the entrance stone, and more.   Lifting the hem of her azure dress, She gazes—at Kafka on the shore.

The Sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The Moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It's always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Everyday it's a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of life. The Moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It's always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it's a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

Harl whirled round, all his attention ... on Skulker. "What is that on your carapace?""What?" Skulker tried to peer back... A tinny voice issued from somewhere... It took Skulker a moment to recognize it as that of the human male he earlier encountered. "It's CTD gecko mine - yield of about five kilotones." Skulker's shriek terminated in a blast that peeled back four square kilometers of jungle canopy and sunk a crater down to the bedrock.

Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown. It is an enormous pit reaching below the deepest crater of the earth, or it is the thinnest air far beyond the moon. But it is frightening and essentially “unlike” man as he knows himself familiarly, so we spend all our days living at the other antipodes of ourself.

It is not surprising that Ibn Sina is a national icon in Iran today, and one can find countless schools and hospitals named after him in many countries around the world. Indeed, his legacy stretches even further, for there is an 'Avicenna' crater on the moon, and in 1980 every member country of Unesco celebrated the thousand-year anniversary of Ibn Sina's birth. As a philosopher he is referred to as the Aristotle of Islam; as a physician he is known as the Galen of Islam.

So when a little girl asks her father where the moon came from, he might tell her that the moon circles around the earth and reflects light from the sun. He might tell her that the moon likes to play hide-and-seek with the sun, so sometimes the moon looks like it’s peeking out from behind a black curtain; sometimes all you can see is the top of its head, and sometimes you can’t even see it at all! He might tell her about how the moon has invisible arms that can pull the oceans back and forth, making tides rise and fall. He might tell her that astronauts have walked on the moon and played golf on the moon and collected rocks from the moon. He might tell her that the moon has dimples and craters and basins that we can see only with a telescope and that there’s a special place on the moon called the Sea of Tranquility that isn’t really a sea. Then the father might take the little girl outside, hoist her up onto his shoulders, and let her stare at the moon for a while. He might recite a poem about a cow jumping over the moon or sing a song about a dreamy-eyed kid slow-dancing with it. Soon the little girl will become so lost in her father’s beautiful stories that she will forget she ever had a question to begin with.

There was a girl who used to hide behind the moon with her legs bent against it like tiny fishhooks, as if she were the only thing keeping all that grey from tilting on it’s orbit and grazing against the skin of the Earth. The stars left tiny burn marks on her skin that sizzled when she touched them so that she sounded like raindrops in summer when she walked. The stars fell on her back so often it wore away in the shape of a fin. She bathed in the white moonlight and it made her skin more pale so her eyes looked wider. Her eyes were so wide that she could take much more in as she watched earth like the clouds over it were stage curtains being drawn back. Ta-da-do-rah! And then at the end the people cried and their tears fell from the earth and into the craters making pools for her fishhook legs to catch their stories in. One letter at a time falling away into the velvet black backdrop curtain before she could hold them. And the people sighed, mouths all open wide, people always cry at endings.

Science has robbed the sun and moon of magic, leaving a spotted ball of gasses and a dead crater-pocked world in place of gold god and silver queen: a poor trade. Worse, men and women no longer live by intuition, but by ideas. The chittering dictums of the head and the will block out the spontaneous voices of the blood and the impulse. . . . Deprived of the rhythm of savage song, the meaning of the animal yell, we exist for the mechanical screak of steel on steel . . . . We must get back “in touch.

The first egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it's now in the watery sunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning, brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon. It's a barren landscape, yet perfect; it's the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure. The sun goes and the egg fades. I

The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

We are all of us pockmarked by the scars of things that should have been otherwise, the way the moon bears the craters of collisions in space that it could do nothing to avoid.

Slice up the moon for me sweetheart, cover me up with its craters after a midnight of just desserts.

If you love someone, you must love all of them. Even the dark parts—the craters of the moon.

Some rooms could not be entered because of rubble. One bomb crater allowed moon and rain into the library downstairs—

Finally, power-law distributions have “thick tails,” meaning that they have a nonnegligible number of extreme values. You will never meet a 20-foot man, or see a car driving down the freeway at 500 miles per hour. But you could conceivably come across a city of 14 million, or a book that was on the bestseller list for 10 years, or a moon crater big enough to see from the earth with the naked eye—or a war that killed 55 million people.

Yes," he replied, "absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me." "She will have nothing to eat--you will starve her," observed Adèle. "I shall gather manna for her morning and night; the plains and hell-sides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adèle." "She will want to warm herself; what will she do for a fire?" "Fire rises out of the lunar mountains; when she is cold, I'll carry her up to a peak and lay her down on the edge of a crater." "Oh, she'll be uncomfortable there! And her clothes, they will wear out; how can she get new ones?" Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled. "Hem!" said he. "What would you do, Adèle? Cudgel your brains for an expedient. How would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow." "She is far better as she is," concluded Adèle, after musing some time; "besides, she would get tired of living with only you in the moon. If I were mademoiselle, I would never consent to go with you.

In time the glowing, cratered moon began its seeming rise from the sea, casting a prism of light across the slowly darkening water, splitting itself into a thousand different parts, each more beautiful than the last. At exactly the same moment, the sun was meeting the horizon in the opposite direction, turning the sky red and orange and yellow, as if heaven above had suddenly opened its gates and let all its beauty escape its holy confines. The ocean turned golden silver as the shifting colors reflected off it, waters rippling and sparkling with the changing light, the vision glorious, almost like the beginning of time. The sun continued to lower itself, casting its glow as far as the eye could see, before finally, slowly, vanishing beneath the waves. The moon continued its slow drift upward, shimmering as it turned a thousand different shades of yellow, each paler than the last, before finally becoming the color of the stars.

—Please, V says. Scribble. James opens his notebook and writes, The island was a separate place, situated partway between America and the moon. Some clear nights out with the telescope—moon full or gibbous—I felt about equidistant between the sharp-edged craters and the sparkling lights of America across the harbor. I knew that off the island very particular rules and laws and customs about skin color and blood degree applied, that the entire stretch of country from ocean to ocean was a strange place with a very strict borderline, and that I didn’t exactly fit on either side of it. Then across the bottom of the page—in a larger, more swooping hand—he writes: The island felt like home to a degree I’ve never experienced before or since.

Love was like walking on the moon. A springy step in your heel like you had a heart for cushioning to step on until it burst and the blood floating in red pods among the glowing craters to be boiled into a refining mist in the naked, eternal sunlight.

Adèle heard him, and asked if she was to go to school “sans mademoiselle?” “Yes,” he replied, “absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me.” “She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her,” observed Adèle. “I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adèle.” “She will want to warm herself: what will she do for a fire?” “Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold, I’ll carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater.” “Oh, qu’ elle y sera mal—peu comfortable!  And her clothes, they will wear out: how can she get new ones?” Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled.  “Hem!” said he.  “What would you do, Adèle?  Cudgel your brains for an expedient.  How would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think?  And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow.

Summer is like a slow-walker bringing everything in the world to boil 1 degree at a time. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It's always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Everyday it's a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

The moon is the better storyteller for this event. Our ancient craters are smoothed over by erosion and tectonic motion. With no erosion, no wind, and no liquid water on the moon, craters can remain perfectly visible for billions of years, an orbiting catalog of impacts.

When an object impacts the Moon at high speed, it sets the Moon slightly wobbling. Eventually the vibrations die down but not in so short a period as eight hundred years. Such a quivering can be studied by laser reflection techniques. The Apollo astronauts emplaced in several locales on the Moon special mirrors called laser retroreflectors. When a laser beam from Earth strikes the mirror and bounces back, the round-trip travel time can be measured with remarkable precision. This time multiplied by the speed of light gives us the distance to the Moon at that moment to equally remarkable precision. Such measurements, performed over a period of years, reveal the Moon to be librating, or quivering with a period (about three years) and amplitude (about three meters), consistent with the idea that the crater Giordano Bruno was gouged out less than a thousand years ago.

Are these black cats like the hare?" "No. They're smaller; they only want me to play with them. Fly away with them to a place on the other side of the moon. There's a garden there, all silvery-gold, and the cats and hares dance and jump round and round. They can jump so much farther than they can on earth; it's like flying, and they love it so. Sometimes I've felt as if I'd like to dance and jump through the air too, they looked so happy, and I've thought maybe if I did I wouldn't be afraid any more, but when I look they're all dancing round a Figure that sits still in the middle of the garden. A big black Figure with a hood on. And It hasn't got any face. Its face is so awful that It keeps it covered. And then I get so terribly afraid. And everything stops." "And you see all that in the picture?" "I don't know." She hesitated again. "I think it's partly dreams. After I've thought they were at the windows - the cats and the big hare. They sit there and watch, you see, after I've gone to sleep. But they don't come often. I don't usually know what's there." She came closer and whispered, her blue eyes earnest and weird, "I don't think it's an animal hare. I think it's Aunt Sarai's hare, that maybe it came from hell. It isn't swearing to say that word just as the name of a place, is it? That's why people used to be so scared of witches' black cats, isn't it, because they thought they weren't earth-cats, they were from the devil? Mother says there isn't any hell or any witches. But Aunt Sarai was a witch; that's why she can come back. I think they've all been witches here; the house is mad because mother wouldn't be; that's why it wants me now." Carew said, "It was all dreams, Betty. There is no hell. There is no garden on the other side of the moon. It's a dead world, full of volcanic craters, with no air for anything to grow in or breathe. A hare frightened you and, being nervous, you've had nightmares about it - pictures that fear paints on your mind just as an artist would on canvas, with paints and brushes. "Every dream is now a movie we make for ourselves in our sleep...

The moon! It smiled at her with all its might, she could see it! through the broken wood beams of a crude ceiling, nearly touch its cratered surface, stroke its circumference; oh, moon! bulbous and benevolent, guiding herds across planes on forlorn journeys; elucidating wisps of mist to lovers at midnight; absent to her for years but treasured still.

Summer is like a slow-cooker bringing everything in the world to a boil 1 degree at a time. It promises a million happy adjectives only to pour stench and sewage into your nose for dinner. I hate the heat and the sticky, sweaty mess left behind. I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It's always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it's a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The mood understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

Do you remember our conversation? Do you remember the places we went and the things we saw? The bindery was our access, the point in space that contains all other points, and that night you were a boy unbound, a tiny astronaut, taking your first leap into an infinite and unknowable universe. For the first time you could see the voices of the things you'd been hearing for so long, all that clamorous matter vying for your attention. With your supernatural ears, you were able to perceive, with absolute clarity, the sinuous shapes and contours of the sounds that matter makes as it moves through space and time and mind. Some of these sounds were so beautiful they made you laugh out loud and clap your hands with delight, and others were so sad they made tears run down your face. And, oh, the visions we had! Container ships glittering on a moonlit night off the coast of Alaska. Pyramids of sulfur, rising yellow in the mist. The plundered moon and all its craters; globes and stars and asteroids; a jet black crow with a diamond tiara; a flock of rubber duckies, spinning through the Pacific gyres. At the sound of a footstep, a young girl freezes, and Andromeda sparkles in the firmament. Fires rage as the redwoods burn; and in the deep ocean, a pilot whale carries her dead baby on her nose, while sea turtles weep briny tears onto nets of plastic.

But there, set as in the crater of a mountain of sand, and inaccessible to mortal footstep, stands unperishing the glory of the earth. And its fragrance is drawn up to heaven, as through a wide chimney; and from its branches hangs the undying fruit, lustrous and opalescent; and in each shining globe the world and its starry system are reflected in miniature, moving westwards; but at night they glow, a cluster of tender moons. ("The Accursed Cordonnier")

Altogether it is thought—though it is really only a guess, based on extrapolating from cratering rates on the Moon—that some two thousand asteroids big enough to imperil civilized existence regularly cross our orbit. But even a small asteroid—the size of a house, say—could destroy a city. The number of these relative tiddlers in Earth-crossing orbits is almost certainly in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, and they are nearly impossible to track.

When you die, the surface of the moon will not change. The difference between the landscape and lighting of that barren little world from a moment where you exist, to a moment where you do not, will be minimal, and unrelated to your passing. From a car window driving on a highway, looking up at a moon framed by incidental clouds, the surface will be the same muddle of mystery and distance it always is. And even a methodical study of your absence as it pertains to moon geology and cartography will find nothing. Searching through a powerful telescope, and analyzing with computer algorithms built around your nonexistence – even that study will find that all craters and rocks appear to be where we left them a few years back, that it is the same distance, orbiting at the same rate, and that the researches feel just the way they did about the moon as they did before you died. Nothing will change about the moon when you die. It will be the same – still the moon, still there. Still the moon.

The city's earthly lights blotted out the stars as always. The sky was nice and clear, but only a few stars were visible, the very bright ones that twinkled as pale points here and there. Still, the moon stood out clearly against the sky. It hung up there faithfully, without a word of complaint concerning the city lights or the noise or the air pollution. It he focused hard on the moon, he could make out the strange shadows formed by its gigantic craters and valleys. Tengo's mind emptied as he stared at the light of the moon. Inside him, memories that had been handed down from antiquity began to stir. Before human beings possessed fire or tools or language, the moon had been their ally. It would calm people's fears now and then by illuminating the dark world like a heavenly lantern. Its waxing and waning gave people an understanding of the concept of time. Even now, when darkness had been banished from most parts of the world, there remained a sense of human gratitude toward the moon and its unconditional compassion. It was imprinted upon human genes likes a warm collective memory.

Out beyond and way back and further past that still. And such was it since. But after all appearances and some afternoons misspent it came to pass not all was done and over with. No, no. None shally shally on that here hill. Ah, but that was idle then and change was not an old hand. No, no. None shilly shilly on that here first rung. So, much girded and with new multitudes, a sun came purple and the hail turned in a year or two. And that was not all. No, no. None ganny ganny on that here moon loose. Turns were taken and time put in, so much heft and grimace, there, with callouses, all along the diagonal. Like no other time and the time taken back, that too like none other that can be compared to a bovine heap raising steam, or the eye-cast of a flailing comet. Back and forth, examining the egg spill and the cord fray and the clowning barnacle. And all day with no break to unwrap or unscrew or squint and flex or soak the brush. No, no. None flim flim on that here cavorting mainstay. From tree to tree and the pond there deepening and some small holes appearing and any number of cornstalks twisting into a thing far from corn. That being the case there was some wretched plotting, turned to stone, holding nothing. No, no. None rubby rubby on that here yardstick. Came then from the region of silt and aster, all along the horse trammel and fire velvet, first these sounds and then their makers. When passed betwixt and entered fully, pails were swung and notches considered. There was no light. No, none. None wzm wzm on that here piss crater. And it being the day, still considered. Oh, all things considered and not one mentioned, since all names had turned in and handed back. Knowing this the hounds disbanded and knowing that the ground muddled headstones and milestones and gallows and the almond-shaped buds of freshest honeysuckle. And among this chafing tumult fates were scrambled and mortality made untidy and pithy vows took themselves a breather. This being the way and irreversible homewards now was a lifted skeletal thing of the past, without due application or undue meaning. No, no. None shap shap on that here domicile shank. From right foot to left, first by the firs, then by the river, hung and loitered, and the blaze there slow to come. All night waking with no benefit of sleeping and the breath cranking and the heart-place levering and the kerosene pervading but failing to jerk a flame from out any one thing. No, none. None whoosh whoosh on that here burnished cunt. Oh, the earth, the earth and the women there, inside the simpering huts, stamped and spiritless, blowing on the coals. Not far away, but beyond the way of return.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellite dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inamrmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribih’ty of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.

The Fable of the Comet and the Moon I have betrothed the O so inconstant moon, with a band of six of Saturn's seven rings, leaving the gas giant's last ring unpilfered as a cosmic lagniappe. The astrological charts cautioned me against such a star-crossed marriage, but I, being a headstrong comet hung with an enormous tail, and impetuous Luna, being a headlong stellar slut (satellites known to be as submissive as Asians for the right price), well, we both threw caution to the solar winds. Our wedding proceeded on cycle, with Luna luminescent and draped in silvery white (the craters of her complexion conveniently masked behind a veil of clouds). It was downhill from day one, Luna losing a sliver of herself every night and bit by bit revealing to me her dark side. Luna and I went our separate elliptical ways after a domestic disturbance where I called her a professional tailgater. and she called me a dirty snowball.

What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman ? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations : her nocturnal predominance : her satellitic dependence : her luminary reflection : her constancy under all the phases, rising, and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning : the forced invariability of her aspect : her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation : her potency over effluent and refluent waters : her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to rener insane, to incite to and aid delinquency : the tranquil inscrutability of her visage : the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity ; her omens of tempest and of calm : the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence : the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence : her splendour, when visible : her attraction, when invisible.

The French Crown was brought into the pogroms later in the summer by the alarming “discovery” of a secret covenant between the Jews, the Muslims, and the lepers. The compact first came to light at the end of June, during a solar eclipse in Anjou and Touraine. For a period of four hours on the twenty-sixth, the afternoon sun appeared swollen and horribly engorged, as if bursting with blood; then, during the night, hideous black spots dimpled the moon, as if the craters on its acned face had turned inside out. Certain that the world was coming to end, the next morning the populace attacked the Jews. During the rampage, a copy of the secret covenant was discovered inside a casket in the home of a Jew named Bananias. Written in Hebrew and adorned with a gold seal weighing the equivalent of nineteen florins, the document was decorated with a carving of a Jew—though the figure could have been a Muslim—defecating into the face of the crucified Christ. On

Yes,’ he replied, ‘absolutely sans mademoiselle; for I am to take mademoiselle to the moon, and there I shall seek a cave in one of the white valleys among the volcano-tops, and mademoiselle shall live with me there, and only me.’ ‘She will have nothing to eat: you will starve her,’ observed Adele. ‘I shall gather manna for her morning and night: the plains and hillsides in the moon are bleached with manna, Adele.’ ‘She will want to warm herself: what will she do for a fire?’ ‘Fire rises out of the lunar mountains: when she is cold, I’ll carry her up to a peak, and lay her down on the edge of a crater.’ ‘Oh, qu’ elle y sera mal—peu comfortable! And her clothes, they will wear out: how can she get new ones?’ Mr. Rochester professed to be puzzled. ‘Hem!’ said he. ‘What would you do, Adele? Cudgel your brains for an expedient. How would a white or a pink cloud answer for a gown, do you think? And one could cut a pretty enough scarf out of a rainbow.

We blasted out of the crater and rocketed around the moon’s opposite side, and the fragile Earth became visible to us once again, hovering in the blackness ahead. Over the comm channel, I heard my father gasp at the sight—one he hadn’t seen with his own eyes in an entire lifetime. My lifetime. “There it is,” he said softly. “Home sweet home. Man, I really missed it.” I’d missed it, too, I realized. And I’d been gone less than a day. As our five ships moved into formation and turned homeward, toward Earth, I checked my scope and saw that the three unmanned Interceptors were heading in the opposite direction, out into space, toward whatever destination my father had programmed into them. I turned my gaze back to Earth and watched it begin to grow in size as we approached, until its blue curve completely filled the view outside of my spacecraft. My father sent a tactical map to the display screens inside our cockpits. “They’re dividing their forces in half again,” my father said over the comm. “See?

Summer is like a slow-cooker bringing everything in the world to a boil 1 degree at a time. It promises a million happy adjectives only to pour stench and sewage into your nose for dinner. I hate the heat and the sticky, sweaty mess left behind. I hate the lackadaisical ennui of a sun too preoccupied with itself to notice the infinite hours we spend in its presence. The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections. I stare out the window for so long I forget myself. I hold out my hand to catch a snowflake and my fist closes around the icy air. Empty. I want to put this fist attached to my wrist right through the window. Just to feel something. Just to feel human.

The bombs fell until 6:15 A.M. The blackout ended at 7:54. The moon still shone in the clear dawn sky, but the bombers were gone. The cathedral was a ruin, with melted lead still dripping from its roofs, and fragments of charred timber now and then coming loose and falling to the ground. Throughout the city, the most common sound was that of broken glass crunching under people’s shoes. One news reporter observed glass “so thick that looking up the street it was as if it was covered with ice.” Now came scenes of horror. Dr. Ashworth reported seeing a dog running along a street “with a child’s arm in its mouth.” A man named E. A. Cox saw a man’s headless body beside a bomb crater. Elsewhere, an exploded land mine left behind a collection of charred torsos. Bodies arrived at a makeshift morgue at a rate of up to sixty per hour, and here morticians had to deal with a problem they had rarely, if ever, been compelled to confront: bodies so mangled that they were unrecognizable as bodies. Between 40 and 50 percent were classified as “unidentifiable owning to mutilation.

The first egg is white. I move the eggcup a little, so it’s now in the watery sunlight that comes through the window and falls, brightening, waning, brightening again, on the tray. The shell of the egg is smooth but also grained; small pebbles of calcium are defined by the sunlight, like craters on the moon. It’s a barren landscape, yet perfect; it’s the sort of desert the saints went into, so their minds would not be distracted by profusion. I think that this is what God must look like: an egg. The life of the moon may not be on the surface, but inside. The egg is glowing now, as if it had an energy of its own. To look at the egg gives me intense pleasure. The sun goes and the egg fades. I pick the egg out of the cup and finger it for a moment. It’s warm. Women used to carry such eggs between their breasts, to incubate them. That would have felt good. The minimalist life. Pleasure is an egg. Blessings that can be counted, on the fingers of one hand. But possibly this is how I am expected to react. If I have an egg, what more can I want? In reduced circumstances the desire to live attaches itself to strange objects. I would like a pet: a bird, say, or a cat. A familiar. Anything at all familiar. A rat would do, in a pinch, but there’s no chance of that. This house is too clean. I slice the top off the egg with the spoon, and eat the contents.

Johannes Kepler, who was one of the first to apply mathematics to the motion of the planets, was an imperial adviser to Emperor Rudolf Il and perhaps escaped persecution by piously including religious elements in his scientific work. The former monk Giordano Bruno was not so lucky. In 1600, he was tried and sentenced to death for heresy. He was gagged, paraded naked in the streets of Rome, and finally burned at the stake. His chief crime? Declaring that life may exist on planets circling other stars. The great Galileo, the father of experimental science, almost met the same fate. But unlike Bruno, Galileo recanted his theories on pain of death. Nonetheless, he left a lasting legacy with his telescope, perhaps the most revolutionary and seditious invention in all of science. With a telescope, you could see with your own eyes that the moon was pockmarked with craters; that Venus had phases consistent with its orbiting the sun; that Jupiter had moons, all of which were heretical ideas. Sadly, he was placed under house arrest, isolated from visitors, and eventually went blind. (It was said because he once looked directly at the sun with his telescope.) Galileo died a broken man. But the very year that he died, a baby was born in England who would grow up to complete Galileo's and Kepler's unfinished theories, giving us a unified theory of the heavens.

My dear Marwan, in the long summers of childhood, when I was a boy the age you are now, your uncles and I spread our mattress on the roof of your grandfathers’ farmhouse outside of Hom. We woke in the mornings to the stirring of olive trees in the breeze, to the bleating of your grandmother's goat, the clanking of her cooking pots, the air cool and the sun a pale rim of persimmon to the east. We took you there when you were a toddler. I have a sharply etched memory of your mother from that trip. I wish you hadn’t been so young. You wouldn't have forgotten the farmhouse, the soot of its stone walls, the creek where your uncles and I built a thousand boyhood dams. I wish you remembered Homs as I do, Marwan. In its bustling Old City, a mosque for us Muslims, a church for our Christian neighbours, and a grand souk for us all to haggle over gold pendants and fresh produce and bridal dresses. I wish you remembered the crowded lanes smelling of fried kibbeh and the evening walks we took with your mother around Clock Tower Square. But that life, that time, seems like a dream now, even to me, like some long-dissolved rumour. First came the protests. Then the siege. The skies spitting bombs. Starvation. Burials. These are the things you know You know a bomb crater can be made into a swimming hole. You have learned dark blood is better news than bright. You have learned that mothers and sisters and classmates can be found in narrow gaps between concrete, bricks and exposed beams, little patches of sunlit skin shining in the dark. Your mother is here tonight, Marwan, with us, on this cold and moonlit beach, among the crying babies and the women worrying in tongues we don’t speak. Afghans and Somalis and Iraqis and Eritreans and Syrians. All of us impatient for sunrise, all of us in dread of it. All of us in search of home. I have heard it said we are the uninvited. We are the unwelcome. We should take our misfortune elsewhere. But I hear your mother's voice, over the tide, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Oh, but if they saw, my darling. Even half of what you have. If only they saw. They would say kinder things, surely.' In the glow of this three-quarter moon, my boy, your eyelashes like calligraphy, closed in guileless sleep. I said to you, ‘Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen.' These are only words. A father's tricks. It slays your father, your faith in him. Because all I can think tonight is how deep the sea, and how powerless I am to protect you from it. Pray God steers the vessel true, when the shores slip out of eyeshot and we are in the heaving waters, pitching and tilting, easily swallowed. Because you, you are precious cargo, Marwan, the most precious there ever was. I pray the sea knows this. Inshallah. How I pray the sea knows this.

How happy he must be, this Hobgoblin," exclaimed Sniff. "He isn't a bit," replied Snufkin, "and he won't be until he finds the King's Ruby. It's almost as big as the black panther's head, and to look into it is like looking at leaping flames. The Hobgoblin has looked for the King's Ruby on all the planets including Neptune -- but he hasn't found it. Just now he has gone off to the moon to search in the craters, but he hasn't much hope of success, because in his heart of hearts the Hobgoblin believes that the King's Ruby lies in the sun, where he can never go because it is too hot.

S e r p e n t Oh slithery serpent tongue, Work wonders with italics! ...Punctuate…punctuate… Parenthetic lips, appealing & concealing the precipice, The cratered, crescent moon Dipping, whipping, winding Lambent, luscious, luminous Waning, waxing, waning And swallowing the taper Burning, burning, brighter Brighter,whiter,whiter coming, coming, coming AHHHAHHHHAHHHHH Gently, gently expiring Like collapsing stars Blackholeofmass From which nothing, Nothing escapes, nothing

Copaface I'm quick learning lessons from the devil but can't decide whether I arrived or was contrived I view so many faces form a tower up above neglected inner wants and hungers for what I love cluttered bunched black eyed and voiceless I fill up the sugar cup to stay up at night in my black upabove where my face is a moon full of craters with crummy eyes and cyst-thighs a perfect beacon for the fictionettes who spread their legs wide open on the plasma embodiments of everything i hide about my self today hips rashed elastic crowded barely wrenched into my upmost ambition for attraction so I nurse fellow wilted and the withered shallow love smut love our love in my black upabove my face is a room full of mirrors with crummy eyes and blistered thighs a bent brain full of lies a beacon for the fiction body voodoo embodiments in morbid tense misplace your grace to chase your copaface

Red dwarf systems have a tendency toward tidal locking – a state in which an object’s rotational period is the same length of time as its orbital period. To illustrate this more simply: think about the way our Moon looks from Earth. When looking up at a full Moon on a clear night, you will always see the same friendly arrangement of craters shining back. Some cultures see a face in the Moon; others, a rabbit. Whatever the interpretation, the underlying truth remains the same. One side of the Moon is always facing Earth. The far side never does.

If you favor the explanation that the 'O' was devised by the Greeks without reference to their alphabet, its arbitrariness is lessened by noticing how often nature supplies us with circular hollows: from an open mouth to the faintly outlined dark of the moon; from craters to wounds. 'Skulls and seeds and all good things are round,' wrote Nabokov.

Look up on a coudless night and you might see the light from a star thousands of trillions on miles away, or pick out the craters left by asteroid strikes on the moon's face. Look down and your sight stops at topsoil, tarmac, toe.

The wide sky overhead can seem like an element we're deeply submerged in, one that overflows the mountains rimming the horizon as if these were the walls of an extinct volcano's vast crater, inside of which has arisen a city... The night sky, sponging up light from the city below, is blackish phosphorescence, in which low clouds drift like mesoglea. When the moon is out in late afternoon it looms low over streets and buildings, enormous and pale yellow in the softer blue sky, like a ghostly school bus coming right at us.

Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

For example, the moon’s Tyco crater is visible to the naked eye. Yet it’s only fifty-three miles wide. Impossible to see if the moon were two-hundred and thirty-eight-thousand miles away. The static moon appears upside-down when viewed from the southern hemisphere because the moon never changes perspective. Only you do.

Craters on Mercury have to be named for deceased poets; moon of Uranus are named for Shakespearean characters. For this type of object in the Kuiper belt, the rules said that the name had to be a creation deity in a mythology

Everywhere around the forts shell craters had broken up the ground, and at the Dardanos, a little further downstream on the Asiatic shore, the hillsides were pitted and scarred like the surface of the moon. Coins and pieces of pottery which had lain in the earth since classical times had been flung up into the air.

Eager. I like that, Manny." "Good morning to you too, Sleeping Beauty. Or should that be good afternoon?" "It's still morning, though I feel like I've slept away the day." "You must've needed it." "Is that your medical opinion?" "No. I'm off duty." Just hearing his deep voice had Harper snuggling back under the covers, wishing he was next to her. "Pity. Because I'm not feeling so good, and I was hoping you made house calls." "What's wrong?" "A distinct case of I-miss-you-itis." "Damn it, if I wasn't halfway along this Craters of the Moon geothermal hike, I'd be there in a flash." He muttered a curse. "I know. I can give you a more accurate diagnosis over the phone if you do one thing." Smiling, she said, "What?" "Tell me what you're wearing." Her thighs clenched as her smile extended into a grin. "My, my, Doctor, I didn't think this was one of those calls." "You're in bed. You're missing me. What did you expect?" "A little decorum." "Yeah, sure." "You're right. I want to torture you a little." "A lot, considering I'm now envisaging you cute and sleep rumpled." "What are you wearing?" "Why?" he asked. "Because I'm assuming there are families on that hike, and too much envisaging may lead to more than one tent pole in that national park." He laughed so loudly she had to hold the cell away from her ear. "You really are something else," he said. "And for the record? I miss you too." "So I'll meet you in the foyer at four for our picnic?" "Yeah. I found the perfect spot." "Secluded?" "Babe, you're killing me." "Not yet, but maybe this will help." She lowered her voice. "I'm wearing nothing and I'm thinking of you." She hung up on his garbled cry, grinning madly.

You're not going to believe where we went," I announced triumphantly. I wanted to tell him about the Milky Way and stardust and how the moon had large craters on it that could be filled with water and how gravity-assist worked and how wormholes near Earth could send you to different parts of the universe in less than a second and how— "Oh, my lovely darling," Dad began, smiling and ushering us into the kitchen, "once the hot chocolate is ready, you can tell me all about it—and I'll believe it all. I'll believe everything.

The moon understabds what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

Susan. who sat wide-eyed and silent. overawed by the presence of the great man, heard this in wonder. That she might go by train to school, and learn Latin and French, was a divine blessing, and if algebra, which surely came out of Arabian Nights, were added, her cup of bliss would be complete. Her mind flashed to unbounded knowledge, to the moon with its mountains and craters, to the stars, which were worlds. It dipped down into the earth and moved among caverns in the limestone hills and the springs running in secret places. Her heart beat wildly; heaven was there with doors which would unlock with the key of scholarship. The golden gates would fly apart and she would step into that world of books and language, and the knowledge of echoes and sound and lightning which the schoolmaster called "science".

The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections

Like the sifting ground, the scattered baleen, and this your body ancient turned upside down. Heart Swathing in Late Summer In the penumbra of an oak under sculpted Moonlight, we pile the last waking hours On our faces, breathe the wilderness of dry Heat waiting for fall ventilations. It feels Later than it is and the air is already mouthing The date for tomorrow. At least now, our eyes Can fall into the craters of a waterproof Reflection, and we stop for a moment to fill Ourselves with the kind of light that can only Be found in the dark. What is night if not for It being a repetition of unlit squares glued Jointly, plastered against the thought of midday. What is not seeing but to echolocate a name. It’s how I find your chin when I can’t sense The meaning of your hands. Weeks ago, it was Astral rebounds, shiny hinges. We harvested The fertile Perseids posed recumbent In the back of a flatbed, tallying the mineral Opulence reserved for those who wait. Not Ever so many in return. Now this moon in its Entirety has never looked so much like A distant circular kite set ablaze, doused by The kind of burning a man feels when he hears The humming of rain against a woman’s bare neck.

Galileo also wanted to avoid the error of his colleague Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). For all his brilliant work, Kepler had insisted on making the five Platonic solids the basis for his model of the solar system, rendering it useless for further empirical research. It was a bizarre example of carrying the faith in the perfection of mathematics too far.35 By contrast, Galileo understood that even a divinely ordered cosmos could not be perfect. There were craters on the moon and spots on the sun. Kepler himself had shown that the planetary orbits were not perfect circles as Aristotle and even Copernicus had assumed, but ellipses.

I never grow tired of the moon. It’s cratered with imperfections, visible from light years away. And, at times, I feel like a walking, talking imperfection. The moon has a dark side, just like so many of us, and it sits alone in the sea of stars. For all intents and purposes, I feel like I am the moon.

The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It's always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it's a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

The Luna Maria The moon has two distinct terrains, the very old highlands, and the younger, smoother maria. The maria are lunar seas formed by impact craters striking the surface of the moon, but that's not their most interesting feature. Even more fascinating are the names that astronauts and physicists have given to the maria. These include Sea of Tranquility, Sea of Serenity, Sea of Fertility, Sea of Storms, Sea of Peace, and Sea of Clouds. Why is it that, with such romantic and imaginative names for the seas of the moon, the seas on earth get stuck with Black Sea, Red Sea, North Sea, and Baltic Sea?

The sun is an arrogant thing, always leaving the world behind when it tires of us. The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what is means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered with imperfections.

The moon understands what it is like to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

The man woke with a shudder in the hospital room and looked about him helplessly, spooked by some nameless night terror, and when he looked out of the window he saw not the city streets but the white dusty plains of a crater like something on the moon, and it was full of clowns.

Every other clan member aside from Hock smacks their fists to their chests four times, the thumping clamor filling the crater with a drone of respect. Kaan does it once—a vision of ruin and rage.

The moon understands to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.

Parked in the homestay lot, the car faced the black of the sea. A soft glow of light came from the hotel, but a tall stand of trees blocked the lobby from their view... The moon was out and I could see the grey of its craters. It shone on the light blue sedan, an odd colour for a beautiful car like that. His deep, dark eyes from the seafood stall flashed into my mind-sad, lonely and frantic. From the window of the car there was a small amber glow from what looked like a lit cigarette.

[A former croft worker] hated the industrial system and had found liberation by operating a market garden on the edge of the moors where he had the use of a powerful telescope erected on his land. Indoors he gave magic-lantern shows of the heavens and their constellations, and on clear evenings at the dark of the year we were invited to view the rings around Saturn, the beauty of the Milky Way or the craters and valleys of the Moon. After carefully sighting the objects he turned to us solemnly, “Sithee, lasses, isn’t that a marvelous seet; a stupendous universe, yet we fritter our lives away i’ wars and petty spites!” As youngsters we gazed, inclined to giggle; then came a moment of silent awe as awareness of “night clad in the beauty of a thousand inauspicious stars—the vast of night and its void”—seeped into consciousness.26

Apollo 13 was launched on 11 April 1970. It was to become the third manned spacecraft to land on the Moon, with a mission to explore formations near the 80 km (50 mile) wide Fra Mauro crater. The flight was commanded by James A. Lovell with John L. ‘Jack’ Swigert as Command Module pilot and Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module pilot. There was a small problem on takeoff when an engine shut down two minutes early during the second stage boost. But four other engines burned longer to compensate, and the craft reached orbit successfully. Then, on 14 April 1970, nearly sixty hours into the mission, the astronauts were 321,860 km (199,995 miles) from Earth when they heard a loud bang.

A period of renewed heavy bombardment began as large objects were deflected into the inner solar system by recently formed outer planets. The evidence for this is visible on any clear moonlit night. The large, dark marks that make up the features of ‘the man in the Moon’ are easily visible to the unaided eye. Our ancestors also saw these features and believed them to be seas on the surface of the Moon. In reality, they are enormous impact craters – and analysis of the rocks, brought back by the Apollo astronauts, shows that these craters formed 3.8 billion years ago. It seems obvious that similar-sized impacts must have also happened on Earth and that these would have sterilised the surface so that life only just clung on in the deep, dark places of the world. Much of the atmosphere and ocean would have been blasted off our planet in these cataclysms, to be slowly replaced, over millions of years, by exhaust from volcanoes.

What we are doing here is building a giant rocket ship, and we’re going to light the fuse. Then it’s either going to go to the moon or leave a giant smoking crater in the ground. Either way I want to be here when it happens.

Knowledge about the moon's surface is not based on and derived from mountains and craters but from factual statements about mountains and craters.

Then Bill Anders spoke, not just to CapCom, to all the world listening to his words from so far away. “For all the people on earth,” he said, his emotions unmasked, “the crew of Apollo 8 has a message we would like to send you.” A brief pause, and then Anders stunned his audience as he began reading from the verses of the book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth . . . ” As Anders concluded the fourth verse, Lovell read the next four. Borman concluded by beginning his reading of the ninth verse, and then sent to the world a special Christmas message: “And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good earth.” Later, Borman would add a passage that would be repeated by the men who would venture to the moon, words spoken with stark emotion, sometimes with tears. As Apollo raced around the cratered world below, Borman watched the earth “rising” above the lunar horizon. “This is the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” Suddenly