Sirius Star Quotes

Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitch-hiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counsellor for neurotic elevators.

Contrary to general belief, stars don’t twinkle. There is only one star that sparkles that scientists can agree on. It twinkles so bright, sometimes people mistake it for a UFO. It’s not big, but it stands out. That’s Sirius, and it’s also you. You shine, Baby LeBlanc. So fucking bright sometimes you’re the only thing I see.” - Dean "Ruckus" Cole

Once upon a time, there was Candy and Dan. Things were very hot that year. All the wax was melting in the trees. He would climb balconies, climb everywhere, do anything for her, oh Danny boy. Thousands of birds, the tiniest birds, adorned her hair. Everything was gold. One night the bed caught fire. He was handsome and a very good criminal. We lived on sunlight and chocolate bars. It was the afternoon of extravagant delight. Danny the daredevil. Candy went missing. The days last rays of sunshine cruise like sharks. I want to try it your way this time. You came into my life really fast and I liked it. We squelched in the mud of our joy. I was wet-thighed with surrender. Then there was a gap in things and the whole earth tilted. This is the business. This, is what we're after. With you inside me comes the hatch of death. And perhaps I'll simply never sleep again. The monster in the pool. We are a proper family now with cats and chickens and runner beans. Everywhere I looked. And sometimes I hate you. Friday -- I didn't mean that, mother of the blueness. Angel of the storm. Remember me in my opaqueness. You pointed at the sky, that one called Sirius or dog star, but on here on earth. Fly away sun. Ha ha fucking ha you are so funny Dan. A vase of flowers by the bed. My bare blue knees at dawn. These ruffled sheets and you are gone and I am going to. I broke your head on the back of the bed but the baby he died in the morning. I gave him a name. His name was Thomas. Poor little god. His heart pounds like a voodoo drum.

If Brett is Sirius, brighter than anything else in the night sky, Lennon in the moon: often dark and hidden, but closer than any star. Always there.

Light is the shadow of god

I look for you my curl of sleep my breathing wave on the night shore my star in the fog of morning I think you can always find me I call to you under my breath I whisper to you through the hours all your names my ear of shadow I think you can always hear me I wait for you my promised day my time again my homecoming my being where you wait for me I think always of you waiting

When the best friends come together, the shining spirit of solidarity replaces the brightest star Sirius!

we trust without giving it a thought that we will always see it as we see it once and that what we know is only a moment of what is ours and will stay we believe it as the moment slips away as lengthening shadows merge in the valley and a window kindles there like a first star what we see again comes to us in secret

Contrary to general belief, stars don’t twinkle. There is only one star that sparkles that scientists can agree on. It twinkles so bright, sometimes people mistake it for a UFO. It’s not big, but it stands out. That’s Sirius, and it’s also you. You shine, Baby LeBlanc. So fucking bright sometimes you’re the only thing I see.

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariable delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaint department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings. Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket. ‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’ Pecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’ ‘What is the point of it all?’ ‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’ ‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say.

They lay together, side by side. Their hearts beat. The moon shone. The stars glittered. Sirius held a love like a universe, beautiful and dark and bright, tucked impossibly in the space behind his ribs. He looked up, into the eyes of the man who had placed it there, and saw the same infinity reflected back—despite everything. Because of everything. For a moment, forever stretched between them, threaded into blood and breath and bone. Eventually, Sirius closed his eyes. He fell asleep to the sound of Moony’s heart, the steady beat of it wrapped in his hand. And when he slept, he dreamed.

He has two hunting dogs. The bright star over there is Sirius, and that’s part of Canis Major, and Procyon is part of Canis Minor.” Travis

If you must know, the brightest star in the nighttime sky is Sirius, the Dog Star.

It’s all strange to me. I know I live on a fierce and magical planet, which sheds or surrenders rain or even flings it off in whipstroke after whipstroke, which fires out bolts of electric gold into the firmament at 186,000 miles per second, which with a single shrug of its tectonic plates can erect a city in half an hour. Creation … is easy, is quick. There’s also a universe, apparently. But I cannot bear to see the stars, even though I know they’re there all right, and I do see them, because Tod looks upward at night, as everybody does, and coos and points. The Plough. Sirius, the dog. The stars, to me, are like pins and needles, are like the routemap of a nightmare. Don’t join the dots.… Of the stars, one alone can I contemplate without pain. And that’s a planet. The planet they call the evening star, the morning star. Intense Venus.

The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaints department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system. Arthur

All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning

But what a universe, anyhow! No use blaming human-beings for what they were. Everything was made so that it had to torture something else. Sirius himself was no exception, of course. Made that way! Nothing was responsible for being by nature predatory on other things, dog on rabbit and Argentine beef, man on nearly everything, bugs and microbes on man, and of course man himself on man. (Nothing but man was really cruel, vindictive, except perhaps the loathly cat). Everything desperately struggling to keep its nose above water for a few breaths before its strength inevitably failed and down it went, pressed under by something else. And beyond, those brainless, handless idiotic stars, lazing away so importantly for nothing. Here and there some speck of a planet dominated by some half-awake intelligence like humanity. And here and there on such planets, one or two poor little spirits waking up and wondering what in the hell everything was for, what it was all about, what they could make of themselves; and glimpsing in a muddled way what their potentiality was, and feebly trying to express it, but always failing, always missing fire, and very often feeling themselves breaking up as he himself was doing. Just now and then they might feel the real thing, in some creative work, or in sweet community with another little spirit, or with others. Just now and then they seemed somehow to create or to be gathered up into something lovelier than their individual selves, something which demanded their selves’ sacrifice and yet have their selves new life. But how precariously, torturingly; and only just for a flicker of time! Their whole life-time would only be a flicker in the whole of titanic time. Even when all the worlds have frozen or exploded, and all the suns gone dead and cold there’ll still be time. Oh God, what for?

One thing seems certain. Our galaxy is now in the brief springtime of its life—a springtime made glorious by such brilliant blue-white stars as Vega and Sirius, and, on a more humble scale, our own Sun. Not until all these have flamed through their incandescent youth, in a few fleeting billions of years, will the real history of the universe begin. It will be a history illuminated only by the reds and infrareds of dully glowing stars that would be almost invisible to our eyes; yet the sombre hues of that all-but-eternal universe may be full of colour and beauty to whatever strange beings have adapted to it. They will know that before them lie, not the millions of years in which we measure eras of geology, nor the billions of years which span the past lives of the stars, but years to be counted literally in the trillions. They will have time enough, in those endless aeons, to attempt all things, and to gather all knowledge. They will be like gods, because no gods imagined by our minds have ever possessed the powers they will command. But for all that, they may envy us, basking in the bright afterglow of creation; for we knew the universe when it was young.

If Brett is Sirius, brighter than anything else in the sky, Lennon is thee moon: often dark and hidden, but closer than any star. Always there.

If Brett is Sirius, brighter than anything else in the night sky, Lennon is the moon: often dark and hidden, but closer than any star. Always there.

If you cant be a Sirius, be a Polaris

A nice row there'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said, "Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's an offense against star-regulations.

Love has earth to which she clings With hills and circling arms about Wall within wall to shut fear out. But Thought has need of no such things, For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings. On snow and sand and turf, I see Where Love has left a printed trace With straining in the world's embrace. And such is Love and glad to be. But Thought has shaken his ankles free. Thought cleaves the interstellar gloom And sits in Sirius' disc all night, Till day makes him retrace his flight, With smell of burning on every plume, Back past the sun to an earthly room. His gains in heaven are what they are. Yet some say Love by being thrall And simply staying possesses all In several beauty that Thought fares far To find fused in another star.

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations? Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

I used to study the night, the stars, while camping next to my car. I learned names from an old star chart that I carried along with my highway maps. Mintaka, in Orion’s Belt, the bright left eye of the Bull. Sirius. Vega. Trying for a direction beyond anywhere possible, I looked at distant points of bright light. I wished that I could find out where I was going by navigating by the light that had traveled forever.

Sirius is the Hidden God or "the sun behind the sun". As the moon reflects the sun, so does the sun reflect Sirius. This concept was expressed in The Book of the Law when Crowley wrote "The Khabs is in the Khu, not the Khu is in the Khabs." The word Khab means star while Khu refers to light. What is being taught here is that collective "wisdom" often assumes that the stars emanate light. The truth of the matter is that the stars are in the light and are merely reflecting it.

It's true,' he begins, 'that the universe is this big, vast thing, and humans will probably never explore even a tiny fraction of it. But that doesn't mean we're alone or we're displaced from it. All these elements, everything around us, the building blocks of the Earth and life -- even the very air you're breathing -- originated from those stars. We're a part of them. Orion, Draco, Sirius . . . they're a part of us, too.' Just like that, I can't keep my eyes off Chance. Even Rachael is momentarily entranced, looking bewildered and amazed all at once. I can't help thinking about it, how we could've all come from different stars, light-years away. Wondering, maybe, if Chance and I came from the same star. If that's what they mean when two people feel they've known each other in a past life. No, not in a past life -- but that the building blocks of one person's existence could have originated right alongside that of another's. I wonder if that's why I can't seem to shake him. Why so much of my life has been focused on someone like him. 'So we're all made of stars,' I murmur. So much for not opening my mouth. Chance twists around, a sad smile on his face as his eyes meet mine. 'We're all made of stars,' he agrees. 'We burn bright, then we flicker away.

Liam gets to be Sirius.” Jase shook his head. “Sirius dies.” “Lupin?” “Also dies.” “A Weasley twin?” “Liam isn’t that funny, and Fred dies.” I searched over the entire cast ofHarry Potter. “All the cool people die.” “Which is why we should stick to Star Wars and Jedi. What kind of cool team name would we get if we went with the wizards? Team Gryffindor?” “Or, you know, Order of the Phoenix.” “I think we’re more like Dumbledore’s Army,” was Talley’s sleepy reply. “Although, we’re more like Liam’s Army.

Betelgeuse. Sirius. Orion. Antares. The sky is very large, and you are very small. Let the words wash through him, the voice and its memories pass over him, shivering his skin like the touch of a ghost, vanishing into darkness. The Pleiades. Cassiopeia. Taurus. Heaven is wide, and you are very small. Dead, but none the less powerful for being dead. He spread his hands wide, gripping the fence—those were powerful, too. Enough to beat a man to death, enough to choke out a life. But even death was not enough to loose the bands of rage. With great effort, he let go. Turned his hands palm upward, in gesture of surrender. He reached beyond the stars, searching. The words formed themselves quietly in his mind, by habit, so quietly he was not aware of them until he found them echoed in a whisper on his lips.

I compared what was really known about the stars with the account of creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of the inspired book had no knowledge of astronomy -- that he was as ignorant as a Choctaw chief -- as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the sun -- its size? that he was acquainted with Sirius, the North Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of the clusters of stars so far away that their light, now visiting our eyes, has been traveling for two million years? If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah worked nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afternoon of the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the stars? Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was inspired by the Creator of all worlds. Now, intelligent men, who are not frightened, whose brains have not been paralyzed by fear, know that the sacred story of creation was written by an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all known facts, and every star shining in the heavens testifies that its author was an uninspired barbarian. I admit that this unknown writer was sincere, that he wrote what he believed to be true -- that he did the best he could. He did not claim to be inspired -- did not pretend that the story had been told to him by Jehovah. He simply stated the "facts" as he understood them. After I had learned a little about the stars I concluded that this writer, this "inspired" scribe, had been misled by myth and legend, and that he knew no more about creation than the average theologian of my day. In other words, that he knew absolutely nothing. And here, allow me to say that the ministers who are answering me are turning their guns in the wrong direction. These reverend gentlemen should attack the astronomers. They should malign and vilify Kepler, Copernicus, Newton, Herschel and Laplace. These men were the real destroyers of the sacred story. Then, after having disposed of them, they can wage a war against the stars, and against Jehovah himself for having furnished evidence against the truthfulness of his book.

The Romans called the Canaanites in Latin Cananaei, or Canaorum. These words are related etymologically to the Latin word for female dog “Canarius.” The rite called by the mystery schools the canarium (sacrificium) was a sacrifice of a russet-red female dog (at the time of the heat wave, for the goods of the ground).[710] The Latin adjective canîculâris meant “pertaining to the Dog Star”: the time referred to as the “dog days” was related to the rising of Isis’s star canicula, that is, Sirius.

The sky was clear - remarkably clear - and the twinkling of all the stars seemed to be but throbs of one body, timed by a common pulse. The North Star was directly in the winds eye, and since evening the Bear had swung round it outwardly to the east, till he was now at a right angle with the meridian. A difference of colour in the stars - oftener read of than seen in England - was really perceptible here. The sovereign brilliancy of Sirius pierced the eye with a steely glitter, the star called Capella was yellow, Aldebaran and Betelgueux shone with a fiery red.

This had serious implications for the ultimate fate of massive stars. If a star’s mass is less than the Chandrasekhar limit, it can eventually stop contracting and settle down to a possible final state as a ‘white dwarf’ with a radius of a few thousand miles and a density of hundreds of tons per cubic inch. A white dwarf is supported by the exclusion principle repulsion between the electrons in its matter. We observe a large number of these white dwarf stars. One of the first to be discovered is a star that is orbiting around Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.

Spinoza was a pantheist: He believed that God was within nature, not a separate Being with an independent will. “In Spinoza’s system,” Jewish philosopher Louis Jacobs has written, “God and Nature are treated as different names for the same thing. God is not ‘outside’ or apart from Nature. He did not create Nature but is Nature.” This doctrine set Spinoza at loggerheads with both Judaism and Christianity. It was absurd in his view to credit God with attributes such as will or intellect; that was like demanding that Sirius bark, just because people refer to it as the Dog Star. Spinoza tried to posit a system of ethics based on reason, not supernatural revelation.

he looked so different, asleep. without his sharp, watchful eyes open, remus's face softened, making him look younger; more fragile. silvery scars caught the grey winter light, the only outward sign of how impossibly strong remus was. how resilient. tough. sirius could remember wanting to be remus, very early on. the rock stars sirius adopted as heroes during those years had all seemed so much more like moony, they had belonged to his world. remus was fierce, and cool, slightly feral - he didn't take shit from anyone, least of all adults. at grimmauld place, in the holidays, sirius would think about his half-blood friend, wonder what he might say when walpurga got in his face. he wouldn't be frightened. he wouldn't give in

Now, Sirius was no longer the boy from those fantasies. He was no longer young, and beautiful, and full of life. He was no longer the person Moony had fallen in love with - though he remembered that person, as if from far away. He remembered being loud, and vibrant, and reckless. He remembered the love he'd held for mischief, and for his friends; he remembered laughing with his head thrown back, sweeping his hair behind one ear, smirking with that devilish confidence that he'd always projected. But that boy felt more like a dream than anything else. And Sirius couldn't bear the thought of going to Moony now, as he was, and watching the fantasy wither before his eyes. Who could be expected to love a black hole, where there had once been a star?

Even more interesting is that with all these millions of "fortuitous" colors, it appears that particularity is so rampant that any object we identify as, say, "blue" shares almost nothing in common with any other object we might identify as the same color. We tend to think that color operates like crayons. We use one crayon to fill in a tree, a bird, jacket, and a roof. But it appears that the same color can be served by very different microstructures. For example, what we see as simple blue can be produced by incandescnce, transitions, vibrations, refraction, scattering, diffraction, etc. As Hardin points out, the "same blue" found in the sky, water, a rainbow, a beetle, a sapphire, the star Sirius, and a television dot results from very different microstructures. This may be a tough swallow for some Platonists who hope for a uniform basis for each color, but it should be a joy for those who seek to honor our God of the details. Like the true particularity of the persons of the Trinity, creation boasts in real individuality too.

He lay under the great bearskin and stared out of the window at the stars of spring, no longer frosty and metallic, but as if they had been new washed and had swollen with the moisture. It was a lovely evening, without rain or cloud. The sky between the stars was of the deepest and fullest velvet. Framed in the thick western window, Alderbaran and Betelgeuse were racing Sirius over the horizon, the hunting dog-star looking back to his master Orion, who had not yet heaved himself above the rim. In at the window came also the unfolding scent of benighted flowers, for the currants, the wild cherries, the plums and the hawthorn were already in bloom, and no less than five nightingales within earshot were holding a contest of beauty among the bowery, the looming trees...He watched out at the stars in a kind of trance. Soon it would be the summer again, when he could sleep on the battlements and watch these stars hovering as close as moths above his face and, in the Milky Way at least, with something of the mothy pollen. They would be at the same time so distant that unutterable thoughts of space and eternity would baffle themselves in his sighing breast, and he would imagine to himself how he was falling upward higher and higher among them, never reaching, never ending, leaving and losing everything in the tranquil speed of space.

We tend to be unaware that stars rise and set at all. This is not entirely due to our living in cities ablaze with electric lights which reflect back at us from our fumes, smoke, and artificial haze. When I discussed the stars with a well-known naturalist, I was surprised to learn that even a man such as he, who has spent his entire lifetime observing wildlife and nature, was totally unaware of the movements of the stars. And he is no prisoner of smog-bound cities. He had no inkling, for instance, that the Little Bear could serve as a reliable night clock as it revolves in tight circles around the Pole Star (and acts as a celestial hour-hand at half speed - that is, it takes 24 hours rather than 12 for a single revolution). I wondered what could be wrong. Our modern civilization does not ignore the stars only because most of us can no longer see them. There are definitely deeper reasons. For even if we leave the sulphurous vapours of our Gomorrahs to venture into a natural landscape, the stars do not enter into any of our back-to-nature schemes. They simply have no place in our outlook any more. We look at them, our heads flung back in awe and wonder that they can exist in such profusion. But that is as far as it goes, except for the poets. This is simply a 'gee whiz' reaction. The rise in interest in astrology today does not result in much actual star-gazing. And as for the space programme's impact on our view of the sky, many people will attentively follow the motions of a visible satellite against a backdrop of stars whose positions are absolutely meaningless to them. The ancient mythological figures sketched in the sky were taught us as children to be quaint 'shepherds' fantasies' unworthy of the attention of adult minds. We are interested in the satellite because we made it, but the stars are alien and untouched by human hands - therefore vapid. To such a level has our technological mania, like a bacterial solution in which we have been stewed from birth, reduced us. It is only the integral part of the landscape which can relate to the stars. Man has ceased to be that. He inhabits a world which is more and more his own fantasy. Farmers relate to the skies, as well as sailors, camel caravans, and aerial navigators. For theirs are all integral functions involving the fundamental principle - now all but forgotten - of orientation. But in an almost totally secular and artificial world, orientation is thought to be un- necessary. And the numbers of people in insane asylums or living at home doped on tranquilizers testifies to our aimless, drifting metaphysic. And to our having forgotten orientation either to seasons (except to turn on the air- conditioning if we sweat or the heating system if we shiver) or to direction (our one token acceptance of cosmic direction being the wearing of sun-glasses because the sun is 'over there'). We have debased what was once the integral nature of life channelled by cosmic orientations - a wholeness - to the ennervated tepidity of skin sensations and retinal discomfort. Our interior body clocks, known as circadian rhythms, continue to operate inside us, but find no contact with the outside world. They therefore become ingrown and frustrated cycles which never interlock with our environment. We are causing ourselves to become meaningless body machines programmed to what looks, in its isolation, to be an arbitrary set of cycles. But by tearing ourselves from our context, like the still-beating heart ripped out of the body of an Aztec victim, we inevitably do violence to our psyches. I would call the new disease, with its side effect of 'alienation of the young', dementia temporalis.

He looked up and saw one star shining brighter than the others. Logically, Owen knew it to be Sirius, but his heart tried to tell him it was his mother looking down and smiling at him.

must feel to be speeding along at this height with no visible means of support. Twilight fell: the sky was turning to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars, and soon only the lights of Muggle towns gave them any clue of how far from the ground they were, or how very fast they were travelling. Harry’s arms were wrapped tightly around his horse’s neck as he willed it to go even faster. How much time had elapsed since he had seen Sirius lying on the Department of Mysteries floor? How much longer would Sirius be able to resist Voldemort? All Harry knew for sure was that his godfather had neither done as Voldemort wanted, nor died, for he was convinced that either outcome would have caused him to feel Voldemort’s jubilation or fury course through his own body, making his scar sear as painfully as it had on the night Mr Weasley was attacked. On they flew through the gathering darkness; Harry’s face

RAIN LIGHT All day the stars watch from long ago my mother said I am going now when you are alone you will be all right whether or not you know you will know look at the old house in the dawn rain all the flowers are forms of water the sun reminds them through a white cloud touches the patchwork spread on the hill the washed colors of the afterlife that lived there long before you were born see how they wake without a question even though the whole world is burning — W.S. Merwin, from his Pulitzer-Prize winning book The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon Press, 2008).

The apparent brilliance of the Sun outshines Sirius, brightest star seen in the nighttime sky, by a factor of nearly 11 billion. At age 4 ½ billion years, converting hydrogen to helium, it will deplete its stellar core to then become a red giant, eventually and finally fading and shrinking into an inert white dwarf.

Jules has the patience of a saltwater crocodile, willing to wait for the opportune moment to snap. Am I immune to their enchantments? Absolutely not. Have I tried to be? Certainly, no.

The Queen’s Huntsman is Fabian Wruck. She gifted him both names, with the latter translating loosely to mean ‘cantankerous’. Which, I find, turned out to be very well-suited.

There is no one who is more melancholy or full of self-loathing than Cahal.

There is nothing I can say about Hester Primus that would be flattering. He is hated, and he deserves every bit of it.

The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for the star Sirius was a pentagon.

As she left the cold arena Angel had to laugh, Beaten by that of a wisp girl and her subliming cunning craft. —Jove lay silent in his orbit; brooding, deep, dreamless forweep, And faithful dog Sirius rising tracked behind on dusk’s purpling adeep. Scratched he his chin; counted the cold and early evening stars, He had miles to go that night, they being so very far. Only the music of the wint’ring span, Vanished he away in the shimmering land. . . . . . .

She named him after the Dog Star, the brightest star in the night sky.

I thought about my mom when I was little, her arm around my shoulders as we stood on the back deck of our house in L.A. She'd pointed out the stars to me: Polaris, Orion's Belt, Sirius. Then she's smile at me, and I'd feel like I was more important than any constellation in the sky.

You’re like Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Next to you, everything else looks dimmed.

Hesperus. The Evening Star. Brows rising, Bryce strode to the next pipe and plaque. Polaris. The North Star. Plaque after plaque, pipe after pipe, Bryce read the individual names of each Asteri. Eosphoros. Octartis. Austrus. She nearly tripped at the penultimate. Sirius. The Asteri the Prince of the Pit had devoured. She knew what the last plaque would say before she reached it. Rigelus. The Bright Hand.

Do you know how many days & night I've been taken thinking about you ? If I told you , you'll never imagine the true. I've stay up all night , finding answers b/n stars. From Sirius to Arcturus huge amount from shining don't know from where to start . Shining , shining sta

Lord Sirius possesses unsurpassable radiance. Stardust like you and I could never hope to compare. I am but a missionary spreading the word of the lord. To begin with, I was a mere fortune-teller drawn to the light of the blue star…and a failure of one by reputation at that.

I do not know how to help [Ephraim]. I suspect that none of us do, although we love him, and we fear he will be the next target of the queen’s wrath.

It is at this point that I will address a remarkable force of nature that has been sorely neglected in my narrative up until this point. There is a pirate by the name of Sweeney, known for one reason or another to be a proven terror on the high seas and a canker in the mouth of every monarch from here to Simisola.

I hope that I am the last royal astronomer this palace ever sees.

Ephraim did not care whether he heard singing ever again. No voice could be as beautiful, no tenor as bright, and no lips as perfectly formed as his Ferdinand’s—and they would never grace the halls again. Such dismal, empty chambers lacking life and luster—for all the gilded molding and brightly painted walls, for all the murals on the arched ceilings and tapestries draped beside ostentatiously tall windows—it was no longer a palace. It was a tomb.

The love that existed between Ferdinand Bauer and Ephraim Holst was unrivaled. The maestro and the singer. Gods, the stars would never forget how Ferdinand could sing.

Maybe I AM a bitch!

The climate changes; mountain ranges form and continents are remodelled. But the one constant in this ever-changing environment, since the earth and the moon locked into their orbits, is that the earth will turn on its axis, within a minute or two, every 24 hours; that every 365.25 days, Sirius the Dog Star will rise with the sun; the moon will wax and wane every 29.5 days; and twice a day the tides will roll over the shore. It is small wonder that these basic rhythms are etched into living creatures; and small wonder that the ability to anticipate and exploit these changes has an evolutionary advantage.

Truly, then, you must be a creature of unusually weak intellect. I see that now. Matter does not exist, then, there is no such thing, really--it is an appearance, a spectrum--every writer not imbecile from Plato to Fichte has, voluntarily or involuntarily, proved that for good. To create it is to produce an impression of its reality upon the senses of others; to destroy it is to wipe a wet rag across a scribbled slate." "Perhaps. I do not care. Since no one can do it." "No one? You are mere embryo--" "Who then?" "Anyone, whose power of Will is equivalent to the gravitating force of a star of the First Magnitude." "Ha! ha! ha! By heaven, you choose to be facetious. Are there then wills of such equivalence?" There have been three, the founders of religions. There was a fourth: a cobbler from Herculaneum [Winckelmann], whose mere volition induced the cataclysm of Vesuvius in '79 in direct opposition to the gravity of Sirius. There are more fames than you have ever sung, you know.

Truly, then, you must be a creature of unusually weak intellect. I see that now. Matter does not exist, then, there is no such thing, really--it is an appearance, a spectrum--every writer not imbecile from Plato to Fichte has, voluntarily or involuntarily, proved that for good. To create it is to produce an impression of its reality upon the senses of others; to destroy it is to wipe a wet rag across a scribbled slate." "Perhaps. I do not care. Since no one can do it." "No one? You are mere embryo--" "Who then?" "Anyone, whose power of Will is equivalent to the gravitating force of a star of the First Magnitude." "Ha! ha! ha! By heaven, you choose to be facetious. Are there then wills of such equivalence?" "There have been three, the founders of religions. There was a fourth: a cobbler from Herculaneum [Winckelmann], whose mere volition induced the cataclysm of Vesuvius in '79 in direct opposition to the gravity of Sirius. There are more fames than you have ever sung, you know.

angry with her. He had been the owner of the best broom in the world for a few short hours, and now, because of her interference, he didn’t know whether he would ever see it again. He was positive that there was nothing wrong with the Firebolt now, but what sort of state would it be in once it had been subjected to all sorts of anti-jinx tests? Ron was furious with Hermione too. As far as he was concerned, the stripping-down of a brand-new Firebolt was nothing less than criminal damage. Hermione, who remained convinced that she had acted for the best, started avoiding the common room. Harry and Ron supposed she had taken refuge in the library and didn’t try to persuade her to come back. All in all, they were glad when the rest of the school returned shortly after New Year, and Gryffindor Tower became crowded and noisy again. Wood sought Harry out on the night before term started. “Had a good Christmas?” he said, and then, without waiting for an answer, he sat down, lowered his voice, and said, “I’ve been doing some thinking over Christmas, Harry. After the last match, you know. If the dementors come to the next one . . . I mean . . . we can’t afford you to — well —” Wood broke off, looking awkward. “I’m working on it,” said Harry quickly. “Professor Lupin said he’d train me to ward off the dementors. We should be starting this week. He said he’d have time after Christmas.” “Ah,” said Wood, his expression clearing. “Well, in that case — I really didn’t want to lose you as Seeker, Harry. And have you ordered a new broom yet?” “No,” said Harry. “What! You’d better get a move on, you know — you can’t ride that Shooting Star against Ravenclaw!” “He got a Firebolt for Christmas,” said Ron. “A Firebolt? No! Seriously? A — a real Firebolt?” “Don’t get excited, Oliver,” said Harry gloomily. “I haven’t got it anymore. It was confiscated.” And he explained all about how the Firebolt was now being checked for jinxes. “Jinxed? How could it be jinxed?” “Sirius Black,” Harry said wearily. “He’s supposed to be after me. So McGonagall reckons he might have sent it.” Waving aside the information that a famous murderer was after his Seeker, Wood said, “But Black couldn’t have bought a Firebolt! He’s on the run! The whole country’s on the lookout for him! How could he just walk into Quality Quidditch Supplies and buy a broomstick?” “I know,” said Harry, “but McGonagall still wants to strip it down —” Wood went pale.