“
O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me;
O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you;
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
”
”
Walt Whitman
“
I was too tired to think. I merely felt the town as a unique unreality. What was it? I knew -- the moon's picture of a town. These streets with their houses did not exist, they were but a ludicrous projection of the moon's sumptuous personality. This was a city of Pretend, created by the hypnotism of moonnight. -- Yet when I examined the moon she too seemed but a painting of a moon and the sky in which she lived a fragile echo of color. If I blew hard the whole shy mechanism would collapse gently with a neat soundless crash. I must not, or lose all.
”
”
E.E. Cummings (The Enormous Room)
“
One of these days, I'm going to astral project myself up into the skies," he boasted. "I'll be going to the stars and the moon. I want to fly and see what's up there.
"I want to go up to the sky," he said, looking at his aunt, "from star to star.
”
”
Charles R. Cross (Room Full of Mirrors: A Biography of Jimi Hendrix)
“
What you think of as they past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace -- and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is "borrowed" from the Now.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle
“
When you deeply love someone from that space that is beyond attachment to certain projections or desires, when you love someone just deeply, totally, completely, without any games that the mind or emotions play, then that love remains eternal in the heavens forever, and that is what pulls you back to remembering that love.
”
”
Tony Samara
“
Businesses are great structures for managing big projects. It’s like trying to develop the ability to walk without developing a skeleton. Once in a blue moon, you get an octopus, but for the most part, you get skeletons. Skeletons are good shit.
”
”
Cory Doctorow (Makers)
“
The whole scene had an imaginary quality to it. I knew that it was real, but at the same time it was better than reality, more nearly a projection of what I wanted from reality than anything I had experienced before.
”
”
Paul Auster (Moon Palace)
“
It's the fricking reality that destroys plans.
”
”
Sally Gardner (Maggot Moon)
“
Toute la scène avait quelque chose d’imaginaire. J’étais conscient qu’elle était réelle, mais en même temps c’était mieux que la réalité, plus proche d’une projection de ce que j’attendais de la réalité que tout ce qui m’étais arrivé auparavant.
Avec le temps, je commençai à remarquer que les bonnes choses m’arrivaient que lorsque j’avais renoncé à les espérer.
”
”
Paul Auster
“
What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?
Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its unplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including millions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and islands, its persistent formation of homothetic islands, peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents, gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, Artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the well by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe), numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90 percent of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon.
”
”
James Joyce (Ulysses)
“
Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,)
Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it mostly to me?
For I, that was a child, my tongue’s use sleeping,
Now I have heard you,
Now in a moment I know what I am for—I awake, 150
And already a thousand singers—a thousand songs, clearer, louder and more sorrowful than yours,
A thousand warbling echoes have started to life within me,
Never to die.
O you singer, solitary, singing by yourself—projecting me;
O solitary me, listening—nevermore shall I cease perpetuating you; 155
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what there, in the night,
By the sea, under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous’d—the fire, the sweet hell within, 160
The unknown want, the destiny of me.
”
”
Walt Whitman
“
It was then between one o'clock in the morning and half-past that hour; the sky soon cleared a bit before me, and the lunar crescent peeped out from behind the clouds - that sad crescent of the last quarter of the moon. The crescent of the new moon, that which rises at four or five o'clock in the evening, is clear, bright and silvery; but that which rises after midnight is red, sinister and disquieting; it is the true crescent of the witches' Sabbath: all night-walkers must have remarked the contrast. The first, even when it is as narrow as a silver thread, projects a cheery ray, which rejoices the heart, and casts on the ground sharply defined shadows; while the latter reflects only a mournful glow, so wan that the shadows are bleared and indistinct. ("Who Knows?")
”
”
Guy de Maupassant (Ghostly By Gaslight)
“
The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.
”
”
Octavio Paz (The Blue Bouquet)
“
The next time the Four Blood Moons begin to appear will be in April of 2014. NASA has projected that the Tetrad will begin on April 2014 and end in September 2015.1 It will occur in the following sequence: 1. Passover, April 15, 2014 2. Feast of Tabernacles, October 8, 2014 3. Passover, April 4, 2015 4. Feast of Tabernacles, September 28, 2015
”
”
John Hagee (Four Blood Moons: Something Is About to Change)
“
Naturally we project that the moon is always there in space-time, even when we are not looking. Quantum physics says no. When we are not looking, the moon’s possibility wave spreads, albeit by a minuscule amount. When we look, the wave collapses instantly; thus the wave could not be in space-time. It makes more sense to adapt an idealist metaphysic assumption: There is no object in space-time without a conscious subject looking at it.
”
”
Amit Goswami (The Self-Aware Universe)
“
Three times as many people worked on Apollo as on the Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb.
”
”
Charles Fishman (One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon)
“
Merrows,” the project leader shouted over the hovertruck’s whining stabilizers. “Mermaids! Merfolk! Whatever you folks call ‘em. They are under the citizenship of Huron and in need of help. If they are to be saved, I must have access to the voice of Huron. I may access the voice through my grandson, Nikolas.
”
”
Kevin McGill (The Merman and the Moon Forgotten (Nikolas and Company #1))
“
Oh, 'impressed' is not the right word! Treading the soil of the moon gives one, I imagine (or rather my projected self imagines), the most remarkable romantic thrill ever experienced in the history of discovery.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Strong Opinions)
“
Eat your cadence
Drip my head down your chin
It’s so much more comfortable
To watch the sun fall into the ocean
Orange County license plates
Say things that make no sense
You are beautiful projected against purple
You are everything wrapped in orange
Yeah when you talk you lick my heart
I taste you when I breathe
The moon is a fingernail on the floor
Your shadow goes to sleep with mine
I love you forever and ever and
Ever
”
”
Joshua Espinoza
“
You lie awake, staring through a small open window at a full blue moon complete with a silly face. This is the dream. Sustainable employment. Some semblance of work-life balance. Talk white. Not a lot. Get contact lenses. Smile. They will assume you’re smart. The less you say the better. Try to project: responsible, harmless. An unthreatening amount of color sprinkled in. That’s the dream. A dream of blending in. A dream of going from “generic Asian man” to just plain “generic man”.
”
”
Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown)
“
Long before the Aryan Judeo-Christian plagiarization of the Semite's Scripture took place, the ancient Egyptian concept of the Trinity was a calendrical system of theology. The Aryan Osirian Jew annexed the ancient Egyptian calendar through Osiris' Scepter, while the Aryan Atenian Christian did so through Horus' Scepter. Both Scepters, however, symbolize that very same calendrical anchor when the cow-god YHWH annually rested in ancient Egypt; an event which the Jew and the Christian projected weekly and commemorated on Scepterday and Sonday, consecutively. The Jew has temporally reduced the symbol of the Scepter to the Sabbath, whereas the Christian has spatially reduced it to the Sun; a temporospatial ancient Egyptian unholiness of plagiarizing Semitic Scripture and its seven-days week calendar. That Judeo-Christian Trinity -which the former is trying so hard to conceal while the latter shies not from proclaiming- consists of the three ancient Egyptian calendrical elements: Sky, Moon and Sun. These elements were Hathor, Osiris and Horus who later on became to be identified as YHWH, the departed King coming as the Holy Spirit and the Son.
”
”
Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Mill of Egypt: The Complete Series Fused)
“
I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist)
“
We worship life on Usonia. Nature... The moon, the sun, the stars, the rivers.
”
”
L.T. Gibbons (Project Ark)
“
the centrifuge will fling me off into space and I’ll become Adrian’s newest moon.
”
”
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
“
In that first of nine such [Project Apollo] missions, our goal was to explore the moon, but while doing so, we looked back over our shoulders and discovered Earth for the first time.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
“
Instead they made a high-pitched whine that was shrill enough to rattle my eardrums. Plus, there was a strange side effect where Zan would lose control of her projected self and her eyeballs would swell
”
”
Stuart Gibbs (Spaced Out (Moon Base Alpha #2))
“
On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012:
Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism.
Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations,
everyone!
”
”
Rachel Maddow
“
His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master’s vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the ’thirties and ’forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast.
”
”
H.P. Lovecraft
“
Look at her good, Lily," she said, "'cause you're seeing the end of something."
"I am?"
"Yes, you are, because as long as people have been on this earth, the moon has been a mystery to us. Think about it. She is strong enough to pull the oceans, and when she dies away, she always comes back again. My mama used to tell me Our Lady lived on the moon and that I should dance when her face was bright and hibernate when it was dark."
August stared at the sky a long moment and then, turning toward the house, said, "Now it won't ever be the same, not after they've landed up there and walked around on her. She'll be just one more science project.
”
”
Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees)
“
What has become of critique when someone as eminent as Stanley Fish, the “enemy of promises” as Lindsay Waters calls him, believes he defends science studies, my field, by comparing the laws of physics to the rules of baseball? What has become of critique when there is a whole industry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon? What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge?
”
”
Bruno Latour
“
The United States once planned to nuke the Moon. According to physicist Leonard Reiffel, one of the leaders of the project, hitting the Moon with an intercontinental ballistic missile would have been relatively easy to accomplish.
”
”
Jake Jacobs (The Giant Book Of Strange Facts (The Big Book Of Facts 15))
“
Do you remember the suburbs and the plaintive flock of landscapes
The cypress trees projected their shadows under the moon
That night when as summer waned I listened
To a languorous bird forever wroth
And the eternal noise of a river wide and dark
(The Voyager)
”
”
Pierre Albert-Birot (The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology (French Modernist Library))
“
What you think of as the past is a memory trace, stored in the mind, of a former Now. When you remember the past, you reactivate a memory trace — and you do so now. The future is an imagined Now, a projection of the mind. When the future comes, it comes as the Now. When you think about the future, you do it now. Past and future obviously have no reality of their own. Just as the moon has no light of its own, but can only reflect the light of the sun, so are past and future only pale reflections of the light, power, and reality of the eternal present. Their reality is “borrowed” from the Now.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
My honey child, them housing projects
Cannot contain her multitudes
A sunbeam, hard upon her
Just a fly strugglin’ through her braid loops
Watch me prove to ‘em I’m more than nothin’
But a ragamuffin with homesick eyes
Yes, when it gets to be the same old thing
Shorty you ought to come and see about me
My love, she is a drummer
Than industrial steel, her backbone tougher
The eloping night and the honey moon that trails
Just dirt ‘neath her finger nails
I’ll be down on them crossroads
‘Til daybreak winks a bright eye
And if it gets to be the same old thing
Shorty you ought to come and see about me
She’s heard all the right things
And they did not persuade her
She has no use for your words
What she wants is your labor
‘Cause when gringos speak of minorities
They tend to keep their voices low
Ah, but when that gets to be the same old thing
Shorty you ought to come and see about me
”
”
Valentine Xavier
“
Possibly,' Hannah said. 'And what about your metaphorical moon project here, Damian? Is it also a comedy?'
'No, of course not,' Bardfield-Saling replied. 'That would be the entirely wrong scaffolding for such a story.'
'I'm happy to hear you say that,' Hannah admitted.
'It would be a musical,' Bardfield-Saling said.
”
”
John Scalzi (When the Moon Hits Your Eye)
“
If my time-sense wasn’t entirely shot, it was still daylight somewhere above us. Bella and Arabella had to be on the far side of the world of which Empis was a part, but here those two moons were just the same, projected out of a black void that had no business existing, washing this hellhole in their pallid and eldritch light.
”
”
Stephen King (Fairy Tale)
“
We're living in a strange, complex epoch. As Hamlet says, our 'time is out of joint.' Just think. We're reaching for the moon and yet it's increasingly hard for us to reach ourselves; we're able to split the atom, but unable to prevent the splitting of our personality; we build superb communications between the continents, and yet communication between Man and Man is increasingly difficult. In other words, our life has lost a sort of higher axis, and we are irresistibly falling apart, more and more profoundly alienated from the world, from others, from ourselves. Like Sisyphus, we roll the boulder of our life up the hill of its illusory meaning, only for it to roll down again into the valley of its own absurdity. Never before has Man lived projected so near to the very brink of the insoluble conflict between the subjective will of his moral self and the objective possibility of its ethical realization. Manipulated, automatized, made into a fetish, Man loses the experience of his own totality; horrified, he stares as a stranger at himself, unable not to be what he is not, nor to be what he is.
”
”
Václav Havel (The Memorandum)
“
The Raccoon
It happened in the dead of night while I was slicing bread for a guilty snack.
My attention was caught by the scuttering of a raccoon outside my window.
That was, I believe, the first time I noticed my strange tendencies as an unordinary human.
I gave the raccoon a piece of bread, my subconscious well aware of the consequences.
Well aware that a raccoon that is fed will always come back for more.
The enticing beauty of my cutting knife was the symptom.
The bread, my hungry curiosity.
The raccoon, an urge.
The moon increments its phase and reflects that much more light off of my cutting knife.
The very same light that glistens in the eyes of my raccoon friend.
I slice the bread, fresh and soft. The raccoon becomes excited.
Or perhaps I'm merely projecting my emotions onto the newly-satisfied animal.
The raccoon has taken to following me.
You could say that we've gotten quite used to each other.
The raccoon becomes hungry more and more frequently, so my bread is always handy.
Every time I brandish my cutting knife, the raccoon shows me its excitement.
A rush of blood. Classic Pavlovian conditioning. I slice the bread.
And I feed myself again.
”
”
Dan Salvato
“
As psychologist Bruce Hood writes in his book The Self Illusion, you have an origin story and a sense that you’ve traveled from youth to now along a linear path, with ups and downs that ultimately made you who you are today. Babies don’t have that. That sense is built around events that you can recall and place in time. Babies and small children have what Hood calls “unconscious knowledge,” which is to say they simply recognize patterns and make associations with stimuli. Without episodic memories, there is no narrative; and without any narrative, there is no self. Somewhere between ages two and three, according to Hood, that sense of self begins to come online, and that awakening corresponds with the ability to tell a story about yourself based on memories. He points to a study by Alison Gopnik and Janet Astington in 1988 in which researchers presented to three-year-olds a box of candy, but the children were then surprised to find pencils inside instead of sweets. When they asked each child what the next kid would think was in the box when he or she went through the same experiment, the answer was usually pencils. The children didn’t yet know that other people have minds, so they assumed everyone knew what they knew. Once you gain the ability to assume others have their own thoughts, the concept of other minds is so powerful that you project it into everything: plants, glitchy computers, boats with names, anything that makes more sense to you when you can assume, even jokingly, it has a sort of self. That sense of agency is so powerful that people throughout time have assumed a consciousness at the helm of the sun, the moon, the winds, and the seas. Out of that sense of self and other selves come the narratives that have kept whole societies together. The great mythologies of the ancients and moderns are stories made up to make sense of things on a grand scale. So strong is the narrative bias that people live and die for such stories and devote whole lives to them (as well as take lives for them).
”
”
David McRaney (You Are Now Less Dumb: How to Conquer Mob Mentality, How to Buy Happiness, and All the Other Ways to Outsmart Yourself)
“
During the glory days of the Apollo project, a young astronomer who analyzed Moon rocks at a university laboratory fell in love with my friend Carolyn, and risked his job and the national security to give her a quantum of moon dust. “Where is it? Let me see!” I demanded at this news. But she answered quietly, “I ate it.” After a pause she added, “There was so little.” As though that explained everything.
”
”
David Sorbel
“
---
"That first day when we met, when I gave you my estimate for the deck project and you wouldn't shake my hand..." I laced my fingers with hers. "There was something sad and lonely in your eyes. I knew all about your reputation, your nickname the Ice Queen, but that wasn't what I saw that day. When I looked into your blue eyes, I saw a princess locked away in a tower, a prisoner. I wanted to set you free.
”
”
Lisa Kessler (Ice Moon (Moon #5))
“
I saw with colourless interest that the rocks of the basin ... were all veined and splattered with gold, that here and there bosses of rounded and wrinkled gold projected from among the litter. What did that matter now? ... Then I supposed I should exert myself, obeying that unreasonable imperative that urges a man before all things to preserve and defend his life, albeit he may preserve it only to die more painfully in a little while.
”
”
H.G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon)
“
La Dicha
He who embraces a woman is Adam.
The woman is Eve.
Everything happens for the first time.
I have seen a white thing in the sky. They tell me it's the moon, but what can I do with a word and a mythology.
The trees frighten me a bit. They are so beautiful.
The calm animals come near for me to tell them their names. The books in the library have no letters.
When I open them, they come up.
When I peruse the atlas I project the shape of Sumatra.
He who lights a match in the dark is inventing fire.
In the mirror there's someone else lurking.
He who looks at the sea sees England.
He who utters a verse by Liliencron has entered the battle.
I have dreamed Carthage and the legions that devastated Carthage.
I have dreamed the sword and the scales.
Praised be the love in which there is no possessor or possessed, but the two surrender themselves.
Praised be the nightmare, which reveals to us that we can create hell.
He who comes down to a river comes down to the Ganges.
He who watches a sand clock sees the dissolution of an empire.
He who plays with a knife foretells the death of Caesar.
He who sleeps is all men.
In the desert I saw the young Sphinx, that they just finished carving. There's nothing old under the sun.
Everything happens for the first time,
but in an eternal fashion.
He who reads my words is inventing them.
”
”
Jorge Luis Borges
“
He was stricken anew by her, overcome with the knowledge that in the morning he would have to relinquish her. In Prison 33, little by little, you relinquished everything, starting with your tomorrows and all that might be. Next went your past, and suddenly it was inconceivable that your head had ever touched a pillow, that you'd once used a spoon or a toilet, that your mouth had once known flavors and your eyes had beheld colors beyond gray and brown and the shade of black that blood took on. Before you relinquished yourself--Ga had felt it starting, like the numb of cold limbs--you let go of all the others, each person you'd once known. They became ideas and then notions and then impressions, and then they were as ghostly as projections against a prison infirmary. Sun Moon appeared to him now like this, not as a woman, vital and beautiful, making an instrument speak her sorrow, but as the flicker of someone once known, a photo of a person long gone.
”
”
Adam Johnson
“
Image intensifiers, which ultimately became “night vision” Fiber optics Supertenacity fibers Lasers Molecular alignment metallic alloys Integrated circuits and microminiaturization of logic boards HARP (High Altitude Research Project) Project Horizon (moon base) Portable atomic generators (ion propulsion drive) Irradiated food “Third brain” guidance systems (EBE headbands) Particle beams (“Star Wars” antimissile energy weapons) Electromagnetic propulsion systems Depleted uranium projectiles
”
”
Philip J. Corso (The Day After Roswell)
“
How much beauty was I projecting upon him, and how much was the moon? And if I was not projecting the beauty, and it was not the moon, how much of him was real beyond the beauty? I wondered if we were ever not projecting. We think we’ve grown or learned something, but maybe it’s always just a new projection. Were my incessant thoughts and feelings just a mechanism to escape the nothingness, or was the nothingness comprised of my thoughts and feelings themselves? Was there another way besides out?
”
”
Melissa Broder (The Pisces)
“
We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow.
She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.
They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.
”
”
James Curcio (Party at the World’s End)
“
The Letter"
Little cramped words scrawling all over
the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncertain window and the
bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing
in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth,
virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.
I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart
against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.
”
”
Amy Lowell (Amy Lowell: Selected Poems: (American Poets Project #12))
“
… the human brain is not equipped to juggle more than a hundred and fifty meaningful relationships.
The problem is that while a hundred and fifty guests make for a great party, it’s nowhere near enough to build a pyramid or send a rocket to the moon. Projects on that scale call for cooperation in much larger groups, so leaders needed to incentivise us.
How? With myths. We learned to imagine kinship with people we’d never met. Religions, states, companies, nations – all of them really only exist in our minds, in the narratives our leaders and we ourselves tell.
”
”
Rutger Bregman (Humankind: A Hopeful History)
“
They had all comprehended the idea in an instant, and saw no real difficulty in it. An American sees no real difficulty in anything. Whoever said that the word "impossible" is not French, was certainly wrong: he mistook the dictionary. In America everything is easy, everything is simple, from throwing off 50,000 printed impressions in an hour, to moving monster hotels, guests and all, to any quarter of the city at pleasure. In America, engineering difficulties seem to be all still-born. Between Barbican's project and its complete realization, no true American could see the shadow of a difficulty. To say it, meant to do it.
”
”
Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon)
“
a.m. Max Shepherd knew few people who loved working the graveyard shift. But for him, working nights at the institute was about as plum a job as he could have wished for. Just a year into his doctoral program, he had landed a position as research assistant to Dr. Elliot Seaborne, the noted seismologist currently heading up the Lunar Seismology Initiative. A NASA-sponsored project, the LSI was yet another component of the agency’s increasing desire to mount a return to the Moon. A new series of lunar missions had been talked about since Shepherd had been in grammar school. But since NASA had scrapped its shuttle program back in 2011, the Moon had become
”
”
Christopher Mari (Ocean of Storms)
“
Matt officially died in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. He actually died in the outskirts of Laramie, tied to a fence. You, Mr. McKinney, with your friend Mr. Henderson left them out there by himself, but he wasn't alone. There were his lifelong friends with him, friends that he had grown up with. You're probably wondering who these friends were. First, he had the beautiful night sky and the same stars and moon that we used to see through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him. And through it all he was breathing in the scent of pine trees from the snowy range. He heard the wind, the ever-present Wyoming wind, for the last time. He had one more friend with him, he had God. And I feel better knowing he wasn't alone.
”
”
Moisés Kaufman (The Laramie Project)
“
Out of that global audience, four hundred thousand NASA employees, contractors, and military support watched with particular interest, seeing in the craft that approached the Moon the measure of a screw, the blueprint of a hatch, the filament in a circuit, the fulfillment of a promise made by a president who hadn’t lived to see it carried out. They dotted the globe, those who had worked on Project Apollo, those who had made possible the day that had come. They clustered around displays and switchboards and dials and computers, monitoring every heartbeat of the spacecraft that had slipped out of the influence of its home planet and was now being enticed by the gravitational pull of the Moon. Most of them joined their friends and families in gathering around the televisions as well.
”
”
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
“
No more Boston! This comes on the heels of Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that Miami’s days are numbered: apparently that city is projected to be underwater in “a few years.” And Astra Taylor warns that the flooding of coastal cities and even inland towns and farms may force people to “escape to New Zealand, to the moon, or to Mars.”12 But here’s an anomaly. The Obamas recently acquired property in Martha’s Vineyard for nearly $12 million.13 Very interesting! The property, purchased from the owner of the Boston Celtics, doesn’t merely have ocean views; it sits right on the Atlantic Ocean. The Obamas know about the literature on disappearing coastlines. Obama himself has repeatedly warned of rising sea levels engulfing coastal properties. And presumably everyone who lives on the coasts has access to this literature and has heard these dire warnings.
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (United States of Socialism: Who's Behind It. Why It's Evil. How to Stop It.)
“
What would have made [seeing Göbekli Tepe from Harran] easier, in antiquity, would have been a tall tower annexed to the temple that once stood here--a temple dedicated to Su-En (usually contracted to Sin), the Moon God of the Sabians. After telling us that there were "powerful images in this temple," the Greek Philosopher Libanius (AD 314-394), describes the tower, noting that "from its top one could overlook the entire plain of Harran."
[...]
A team from the Chicago Oriental Institute was about to start a major dig around the ruins of the Grand Mosque in 1986, but it seems that the Turkish authorities insisted on such restrictive practices that the project had to be abandoned. Current excavations by Harran University and the Sanliurfa Museum Directorate show little interest in recovery of substantive remains from the city's pre-Islamic period.
”
”
Graham Hancock (Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
Kennedy was clear that the Apollo project would cost a lot of money – and it did. And while he and NASA had to constantly defend the use of the budget, in the end the pressure and urgency to ‘beat the Russians’ made the money come through. Indeed, the urgency to win is why money is always available for wartime missions – whether in the world wars or Vietnam or Iraq. Money seems to be created for this purpose. There is no reason why a ‘whatever it takes’ mentality cannot be used for social problems. Yet the conventional approach is to assume that budgets are fixed, and so if money is spent in one area, it will be at the expense of another area. For example, if you want new energy infrastructure, you can’t have new hospitals as well. But what if budgets were based on outcomes to be reached, as they were for the moon landing and in wars? What if the first question is not ‘Can we afford it?’ but ‘What do we really want to do? And how do we create the resources required to realize the mission?
”
”
Mariana Mazzucato (Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism)
“
She rubbed the skin off your headstone of a sternum and painted a sad picture of herself in your eyes. We fell in love with that little peep-show projection on the inside of an iris, pictures that amount to nothing more than the thirsty moon over a spot of bloody ground. Those weren’t the nothings we restless sleepwalkers knew, no place no home no song. So we heard her and we followed until she went where we couldn't follow.
She went down beyond the mountains and disappeared between the crease of sky and land, like a great eyelid folding shut. No one knows what happened out in the Black Hills, but I imagine she lies buried in a rusty coffin under the stars. And on nights when the desert crickets sing her tune, they say one day she will rise again. On that day, there is no telling the kind of vengeance she'll demand of us. Fair is fair.
They say when she fell from Heaven she wore a crown of jagged stars that slit the skies throat. They say she loved them all, in the secret corners of their shallow sleep. Strangers, at the last. They say a lot of things. They’re all lies. Everything is already written.
”
”
James Curcio (Party at the World’s End)
“
We send out the Voyager probes into interstellar space in a big-hearted fanciful spasm of hope. Two capsules from earth containing images and songs just waiting to be found in – who knows – tens or hundreds of thousands of years if all goes well. Otherwise millions or billions, or not at all. Meanwhile we begin to listen. We scan the reaches for radio waves. Nothing answers. We keep on scanning for decades and decades. Nothing answers. We make wishful and fearful projections through books, films and the like about how it might look, this alien life, when it finally makes contact. But it doesn’t make contact and we suspect in truth that it never will. It’s not even out there, we think. Why bother waiting when there’s nothing there? And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone. Maybe one day we’ll look in the mirror and be happy with the fair-to-middling upright ape that eyes us back, and we’ll gather our breath and think: OK, we’re alone, so be it. Maybe that day is coming soon. Maybe the whole nature of things is one of precariousness, of wobbling on a pinhead of being, of decentring ourselves inch by inch as we do in life, as we come to understand that the staggering extent of our own non-extent is a tumultuous and wave-tossed offering of peace. Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there? To become superb in our technology, knowledge and intellect, to itch with a desire for fulfilment that we can’t quite scratch; to look to the void (which still isn’t answering) and build spaceships anyway, and make countless circlings of our lonely planet, and little excursions to our lonely moon and think thoughts like these in weightless bafflement and routine awe. To turn back to the earth, which gleams like a spotlit mirror in a pitch-dark room, and speak into the fuzz of our radios to the only life that appears to be there. Hello? Konnichiwa, ciao, zdraste, bonjour, do you read me, hello?
”
”
Samantha Harvey (Orbital)
“
It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up.
”
”
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
“
heu, uatum ignarae mentes! quid uota furentem,
quid delubra iuuant? est mollis flamma medullas
interea et tacitum uiuit sub pectore uulnus.
uritur infelix Dido totaque uagatur
urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerua sagitta,
quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit
pastor agens telis liquitque uolatile ferrum
nescius: illa fuga siluas saltusque peragrat
Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo.
nunc media Aenean secum per moenia ducit
Sidoniasque ostentat opes urbemque paratam,
incipit effari mediaque in uoce resistit;
nunc eadem labente die conuiuia quaerit,
Iliacosque iterum demens audire labores
exposcit pendetque iterum narrantis ab ore.
post ubi digressi, lumenque obscura uicissim
luna premit suadentque cadentia sidera somnos,
sola domo maeret uacua stratisque relictis
incubat. illum absens absentem auditque uidetque,
aut gremio Ascanium genitoris imagine capta
detinet, infandum si fallere possit amorem.
non coeptae adsurgunt turres, non arma iuuentus
exercet portusue aut propugnacula bello
tuta parant: pendent opera interrupta minaeque
murorum ingentes aequataque machina caelo.
(Alas, poor blind interpreters! What woman
In love is helped by offerings or altars?
Soft fire consumes the marrow-bones, the silent
Wound grows, deep in the heart.
Unhappy Dido burns, and wanders, burning,
All up and down the city, the way a deer
With a hunter’s careless arrow in her flank
Ranges the uplands, with the shaft still clinging
To the hurt side. She takes Aeneas with her
All through the town, displays the wealth of Sidon,
Buildings projected; she starts to speak, and falters,
And at the end of the day renews the banquet,
Is wild to hear the story, over and over,
Hangs on each word, until the late moon, sinking,
Sends them all home. The stars die out, but Dido
Lies brooding in the empty hall, alone,
Abandoned on a lonely couch. She hears him,
Sees him, or sees and hears him in Iulus,
Fondles the boy, as if that ruse might fool her,
Deceived by his resemblance to his father.
The towers no longer rise, the youth are slack
In drill for arms, the cranes and derricks rusting,
Walls halt halfway to heaven.)
Book IV 65-89
”
”
Virgil (The Aeneid)
“
In many fields—literature, music, architecture—the label ‘Modern’ stretches back to the early 20th century. Philosophy is odd in starting its Modern period almost 400 years earlier. This oddity is explained in large measure by a radical 16th century shift in our understanding of nature, a shift that also transformed our understanding of knowledge itself. On our Modern side of this line, thinkers as far back as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) are engaged in research projects recognizably similar to our own. If we look back to the Pre-Modern era, we see something alien: this era features very different ways of thinking about how nature worked, and how it could be known.
To sample the strange flavour of pre-Modern thinking, try the following passage from the Renaissance thinker Paracelsus (1493–1541):
The whole world surrounds man as a circle surrounds one point. From this it follows that all things are related to this one point, no differently from an apple seed which is surrounded and preserved by the fruit … Everything that astronomical theory has profoundly fathomed by studying the planetary aspects and the stars … can also be applied to the firmament of the body.
Thinkers in this tradition took the universe to revolve around humanity, and sought to gain knowledge of nature by finding parallels between us and the heavens, seeing reality as a symbolic work of art composed with us in mind (see Figure 3).
By the 16th century, the idea that everything revolved around and reflected humanity was in danger, threatened by a number of unsettling discoveries, not least the proposal, advanced by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), that the earth was not actually at the centre of the universe. The old tradition struggled against the rise of the new. Faced with the news that Galileo’s telescopes had detected moons orbiting Jupiter, the traditionally minded scholar Francesco Sizzi argued that such observations were obviously mistaken. According to Sizzi, there could not possibly be more than seven ‘roving planets’ (or heavenly bodies other than the stars), given that there are seven holes in an animal’s head (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth), seven metals, and seven days in a week.
Sizzi didn’t win that battle. It’s not just that we agree with Galileo that there are more than seven things moving around in the solar system. More fundamentally, we have a different way of thinking about nature and knowledge. We no longer expect there to be any special human significance to natural facts (‘Why seven planets as opposed to eight or 15?’) and we think knowledge will be gained by systematic and open-minded observations of nature rather than the sorts of analogies and patterns to which Sizzi appeals. However, the transition into the Modern era was not an easy one. The pattern-oriented ways of thinking characteristic of pre-Modern thought naturally appeal to meaning-hungry creatures like us. These ways of thinking are found in a great variety of cultures: in classical Chinese thought, for example, the five traditional elements (wood, water, fire, earth, and metal) are matched up with the five senses in a similar correspondence between the inner and the outer. As a further attraction, pre-Modern views often fit more smoothly with our everyday sense experience: naively, the earth looks to be stable and fixed while the sun moves across the sky, and it takes some serious discipline to convince oneself that the mathematically more simple models (like the sun-centred model of the solar system) are right.
”
”
Jennifer Nagel (Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction)
“
All the many successes and extraordinary accomplishments of the Gemini still left NASA’s leadership in a quandary. The question voiced in various expressions cut to the heart of the problem: “How can we send men to the moon, no matter how well they fly their ships, if they’re pretty helpless when they get there? We’ve racked up rendezvous, docking, double-teaming the spacecraft, starting, stopping, and restarting engines; we’ve done all that. But these guys simply cannot work outside their ships without exhausting themselves and risking both their lives and their mission. We’ve got to come up with a solution, and quick!” One manned Gemini mission remained on the flight schedule. Veteran Jim Lovell would command the Gemini 12, and his space-walking pilot would be Buzz Aldrin, who built on the experience of the others to address all problems with incredible depth and finesse. He took along with him on his mission special devices like a wrist tether and a tether constructed in the same fashion as one that window washers use to keep from falling off ledges. The ruby slippers of Dorothy of Oz couldn’t compare with the “golden slippers” Aldrin wore in space—foot restraints, resembling wooden Dutch shoes, that he could bolt to a work station in the Gemini equipment bay. One of his neatest tricks was to bring along portable handholds he could slap onto either the Gemini or the Agena to keep his body under control. A variety of space tools went into his pressure suit to go along with him once he exited the cabin. On November 11, 1966, the Gemini 12, the last of its breed, left earth and captured its Agena quarry. Then Buzz Aldrin, once and for all, banished the gremlins of spacewalking. He proved so much a master at it that he seemed more to be taking a leisurely stroll through space than attacking the problems that had frustrated, endangered, and maddened three previous astronauts and brought grave doubts to NASA leadership about the possible success of the manned lunar program. Aldrin moved down the nose of the Gemini to the Agena like a weightless swimmer, working his way almost effortlessly along a six-foot rail he had locked into place once he was outside. Next came looping the end of a hundred-foot line from the Agena to the Gemini for a later experiment, the job that had left Dick Gordon in a sweatbox of exhaustion. Aldrin didn’t show even a hint of heavy breathing, perspiration, or an increased heartbeat. When he spoke, his voice was crisp, sharp, clear. What he did seemed incredibly easy, but it was the direct result of his incisive study of the problems and the equipment he’d brought from earth. He also made sure to move in carefully timed periods, resting between major tasks, and keeping his physical exertion to a minimum. When he reached the workstation in the rear of the Gemini, he mounted his feet and secured his body to the ship with the waist tether. He hooked different equipment to the ship, dismounted other equipment, shifted them about, and reattached them. He used a unique “space wrench” to loosen and tighten bolts with effortless skill. He snipped wires, reconnected wires, and connected a series of tubes. Mission Control hung on every word exchanged between the two astronauts high above earth. “Buzz, how do those slippers work?” Aldrin’s enthusiastic voice came back like music. “They’re great. Great! I don’t have any trouble positioning my body at all.” And so it went, a monumental achievement right at the end of the Gemini program. Project planners had reached all the way to the last inch with one crucial problem still unsolved, and the man named Aldrin had whipped it in spectacular fashion on the final flight. Project Gemini was
”
”
Alan Shepard (Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America's Race to the Moon)
“
To put a man on the moon, NASA asked several major contractors and many subcontractors to work together, each on a different aspect of the project. An unintended consequence of the moon shot was the development of a new organizational approach: matrix management.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
Dark Moon: During the day right before a new moon, most witches won’t work magic. They choose to refresh their energy for the next waxing cycle. There are others who find the dark moon is the best time to work the magic that is related to closure and this will bring things to a full circle. The moon’s energy holds a destructive potential that you can use to release any karma that keeps popping into your life over and over again like things related to betrayal, abandonment, or lack. Some gems you can use during this time are clear quartz, obsidian, and tektite. Waning Moon: This would be the time for you to release energy outwardly and align yourself with inward energy. This will eliminate all negative experiences and energies. Your main goal is to do spells that help you get rid of anything that is causing sickness, resolve conflicts, and overcome obstacles. Some gems you can use during this time are unakite jasper, angelite, obsidian, petalite, black tourmaline, and calcite. Full Moon: This moon phase is the most powerful in the whole lunar cycle. Most Witches consider the day of the full moon the most magically powerful day during the whole month. They usually save their spell work that is related to important goals for this day. All magic is favored when done during a ritual under the full moon. Some gems you could use during this time are quartz, selenite, and moonstone. Waxing Moon: This is the perfect time to take action toward your goals. Beginning these goals during this time will bring you to them faster. This energy is action energy and it will push your intentions out into the Universe. The magical work you do during this time should be related to strengthening or gaining partnerships with other people. It might be a business partner, romantic partner, or making new friends. It is also a time to improve your well-being and physical health. Gems you can use during this time are emerald, rainbow moonstone, citrine, carnelian, and fluorite, and nuumite. New Moon: This is the start of the lunar cycle. This is the time to dream about what you want to create in life. Magic meant to begin new ventures or projects are great to do during this time. Basically, anything that involves increasing or attracting the things you desire would be great. Some gems you can use during this time are the clear quartz, obsidian, tektite, iolite, black moonstone, and labradorite.
”
”
Harmony Magick (Wicca 2nd Edition: A Book of Shadows to Learn the Secrets of Witchcraft with Wiccan Spells, Moon Rituals, and Tools Like Runes, and Tarots. Become a Witch by Mastering Crystal, Candle, Herbal Magic)
“
The Blue Moon Wish Spell The “Blue Moon” is when there are 2 full moons in one month, it is in the horoscopic symbol of Pisces. To see the dates for the blue moon click here. It illuminates intuition, creativity, and compassion. This is the time that you should start thinking about all your wishes and intentions. As a practitioner of witchcraft, you should make sure that you perform this ritual since such an astrological opportunity only occurs “once in a Blue Moon”. Requirements a quartz crystal a cinnamon stick A blue pen a blue candle a sheet of parchment paper 3 safety pins a glass of spring water or wine A piece silver cord or string, of a length of 24 inches a square of blue cloth Vial of success potion (not mandatory) 1 book of matches On the day before of the Blue Moon, collect all the above items and then set a specific time for performing the spell without any distractions. Quietly sit down with all your items as listed above and place them before you on a table. Shut your eyes and bring your mind to silence, after that, concentrate on your breathing. The moment you feel clear and grounded, you can open your eyes and start the spell. While lighting the candle, think of 3 things that you would like to occur by the year’s end. You can also wish for something that takes place once in a blue moon. (rarely) Pat success oil on your, wrists, temple and your neck for a boost in case you have some. Envision one particular wish coming true while holding the quartz crystal in your hands. Vision yourself doing the thing you are wishing for, or clearly see something that you wish for happen before you. Pick your pen and paper up and start writing down your wishes as you keenly visualize them. Note them down in their order of importance to you. After you note down the three wishes on your piece of parchment, separately tear them out Attach each of your wishes to the square piece of cloth using a safety pin Place the cinnamon stick in the middle of the cloth and then inwardly fold the sides of the cloth. After that, roll it up. Tightly seal your projections by wrapping the string around the cloth nine times and after that, tie steadily with a knot. Take your wishes and walk outside with them while holding the libation of your choice. Look up to the sky or the moon. Lift up your glass and say the following words; “On this eve of the Blue Moon, out my intents go. I request they be received, and it is so” Place the cloth containing your wishes in a concealed place where you are the only one who can see it often all the way through the coming few months as a reminder to the wishes you have made.
”
”
Edith Yates (Wicca for Beginners: A Guide to Bringing Wiccan Magic,Beliefs and Rituals into Your Daily Life)
“
HELLO, DAVE. YOU AND I NEED TO HAVE A CHAT.” “I have nothing to say to you, Herobrine!” Dave yelled up at the black clouds. “Dave, I believe that is just a projection,” said Spidroth. “I don’t believe my father will be able to hear you.” “Oh,” said Dave. “I bet you feel like a right idiot,” said Carl. “I WANT YOU TO COME UP AND MEET ME AT THE TOP OF JEB’S PEAK,” continued Herobrine. “YOU MUST COME ALONE. IF YOU DO NOT, OR IF YOU TRY TO TRICK ME, I WILL DESTROY THESE TWO VILLAGERS. IF YOU TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW, I WILL SET THEM FREE.” The black clouds swirled once more, transforming into an image of two villagers huddling against a wall in fear. They were two villagers who Dave knew very well. “Mom!” Dave yelled. “Dad!” The black clouds swirled again, transforming back into Herobrine’s face. “I HAVE YOUR PARENTS, DAVE,” said Herobrine. “IF YOU DO NOT COME AND MEET ME BY THE NIGHT OF THE FULL MOON, I SHALL SLAY THEM.” The black clouds swirled one final time, and then they were gone, leaving nothing but blue sky. “Ah, man, I’m sorry, Dave,” said Carl.
”
”
Dave Villager (Dave the Villager 29: An Unofficial Minecraft Novel (The Legend of Dave the Villager))
“
As the Nazi persecution of the Jews began in Germany in 1933, preparing the ground for the horrors of the Second World War, both the United States and Britain benefitted from the arrival on their shores of philosophers and scientists fleeing for their lives. Eventually, the United States would be the first nation to develop a nuclear weapon using the science brought there by German refugees, including Albert Einstein (1879–1955). When the war was over and the US and Soviet victors moved in to cherry pick the best Nazi scientists to come and work for them, the United States got Wernhervon Braun (1912–77). Braun was the physicist and rocket designer who created the deadly long-range V-2 rocket that rained death and destruction on London. But he was not merely a rocket designer; he was also a member of the Nazi Party and an SS officer. The Americans grabbed him before the Soviets could, giving them the edge in ballistic missiles with which to project thermonuclear weapons at targets several thousand miles away. Braun was responsible for the rocket science that made the United States the first nation to put a man on the moon.
”
”
Stephen Trombley (Fifty Thinkers Who Shaped the Modern World)
“
Everyone knows the full Moon turns some of us into werewolves, but how come it doesn’t happen when you’re in the basement, or if there’s complete overcast? Just because you can’t see the full Moon through the clouds doesn’t mean the Moon isn’t there. So it must be the light that temporarily converts your genetic profile to that of a wild canine. Holding aside the biological and physiological implausibility of this claim, did you know that moonlight is just reflected sunlight? Obtain a spectrum of the Moon’s light and it’s identical to that of the Sun. (A fact I demonstrated for my eighth-grade science fair project using a spectroscope I had built from scratch. Came in second place.) If the Moon turns you into a werewolf at night, then so should the Sun in the daytime.
”
”
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
“
Then she got to work.
Thinking a bit of organization would help, Rapunzel took out the wanted poster of Flynn and made a chart on the back, dividing the rectangle into twenty-eight days. She wrote the moon phases neatly on each. On Day One, New Moon, she wrote Murderhair. Now it was Day Six; Waxing Crescent. Under this she wrote Transformative-- Lizard to Dragon. Day 8 would be Waxing Half Moon-- that would be exciting, right? Maybe that would mean a really big change in her powers. For Day 15, Full Moon, she wrote Healing?
She looked at her neat little chart and felt very pleased with herself.
Projects.
They were the best.
”
”
Liz Braswell (What Once Was Mine)
“
Dere been some queer things white folks can't understand. Dere am folkses can see de spirits, but I can't. My mammy larned me a lots of doctorin', what she larnt from old folkses from Africy, and some de Indians larnt her. If you has rheumatism, jes' take white sassafras root and bile it and drink de tea. You makes lin'ment by bilin' mullein flowers and poke roots and alum and salt. Put red pepper in you shoes and keep de chills off, or string briars round de neck. Make red or black snakeroot tea to cure fever and malaria, but git de roots in de spring when de sap am high. "When chillen teethin' put rattlesnake rattles round de neck, and alligator teeth am good, too. Show de new moon money and you'll have money all month. Throw her five kisses and show her money and make five wishes and you'll git dem. Eat black-eyed peas on New Year and have luck all dat year: "'Dose black-eyed peas is lucky, When et on New Year's Day; You'll allus have sweet 'taters And possum come you way.' "When anybody git cut I allus burns
”
”
Work Projects Administration (Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves Texas Narratives, Part 1)