Steering By Starlight Quotes

The poet Mary Oliver did this in one of her poems, brazenly asking, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” If you’re afraid you’ve come to this question too late, you are wrong. Ask your Stargazer self. It will tell you what my fallen-noble friend Marianna told me in one of my darker hours: that the world is re-created in every instant of time, and this moment is always your life’s beginning. No matter how many years have been stolen from you by your own ignorance, by cruel fate, or by the acts of others, you have a clean, broad slate before you. In this instant—this one now—you can begin steering by starlight, and if you do, the rest of creation will conspire to guide, teach, and help you.

if two people agree on everything, one of them is superfluous.

You will never realize your best destiny through the avoidance of fear. Rather, you will realize it through the exercise of courage, which means taking whatever action is most liberating to the soul, even when you are afraid.

Laughter is the highest form of prayer.

Every experience that’s part of your best destiny is beautiful to your soul.

enlightenment always tastes of freedom.

External circumstances do not create feeling states. Feeling states create external circumstances.

The way to find your own North Star is not to think or feel your way forward but to dissolve the thoughts and feelings that make you miserable. You don’t have to learn your destiny—you already know it; you just have to unlearn the thoughts that blind you to what you know.

By two A.M. the first waves had turned toward shore, using the burning wheat straw as a beacon or following compass headings. Gunboats with blue lights stood in toward shore, hailing the first waves: “Straight ahead. Look out for mines. Good luck.” Now the Navy guns opened up, their concussive booms and smoke rings carrying on the wind. Shells glowed cherry red against the starlight. In graceful arcs they floated over the puttering boats before splattering in sprays of white and gold on the distant shore. Coxswains steered by the shells, but soldiers instinctively slumped in their vessels, peering over the gunwales. Major General John P. Lucas, dispatched by Eisenhower as an observer of HUSKY, watched the spectacle from Monrovia’s bridge with Hewitt and Patton, then confided a small, filthy secret to his diary: “War, with all its terror and dirt and destruction, is at times the most beautiful phenomenon in the world.