โ
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
โ
โ
Roald Dahl (The Twits)
โ
I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.
Silent and starving, I prowl through the streets.
Bread does not nourish me, dawn disrupts me, all day
I hunt for the liquid measure of your steps.
I hunger for your sleek laugh,
your hands the color of a savage harvest,
hunger for the pale stones of your fingernails,
I want to eat your skin like a whole almond.
I want to eat the sunbeam flaring in your lovely body,
the sovereign nose of your arrogant face,
I want to eat the fleeting shade of your lashes,
and I pace around hungry, sniffing the twilight,
hunting for you, for your hot heart,
Like a puma in the barrens of Quitratue.
โ
โ
Pablo Neruda
โ
If you have good thoughts they will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
โ
โ
Roald Dahl
โ
If a person has ugly thoughts, it begins to show on the face. And when that person has ugly thoughts every day, every week, every year, the face gets uglier and uglier until you can hardly bear to look at it.
A person who has good thoughts cannot ever be ugly. You can have a wonky nose and a crooked mouth and a double chin and stick-out teeth, but if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams and you will always look lovely.
โ
โ
Roald Dahl (The Twits)
โ
Happiness. It was the place where passion, with all its dazzle and drumbeat, met something softer: homecoming and safety and pure sunbeam comfort. It was all those things, intertwined with the heat and the thrill, and it was as bright within her as a swallowed star.
โ
โ
Laini Taylor (Daughter of Smoke & Bone (Daughter of Smoke & Bone, #1))
โ
I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty.
โ
โ
Pablo Neruda
โ
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
โ
โ
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
โ
Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul.
โ
โ
Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain)
โ
I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wont' just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...
โ
โ
Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials Trilogy: The Golden Compass / The Subtle Knife / The Amber Spyglass)
โ
A single sunbeam is enough to drive away many shadows.
โ
โ
Francis of Assisi
โ
Just like a sunbeam can't separate itself from the sun, and a wave can't separate itself from the ocean,
we can't separate ourselves from one another.
We are all part of a vast sea of love, one indivisible divine mind.
โ
โ
Marianne Williamson
โ
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
โ
โ
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
โ
The keeping of bees is like the direction of sunbeams.
โ
โ
Henry David Thoreau
โ
Such was a poet and shall be and is
-who'll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam's architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain's heartbeat in his hand.
โ
โ
E.E. Cummings
โ
Go to sleep, baby, Mama will sing. Of blue butterflies, and dragonfly wings. Moonlight and sunbeams, raiment so fine. Silver and gold, for baby of mine. Go to sleep, baby. Sister will tell, of wolves and of lambs, and demons who fell.
โ
โ
Kim Harrison (Black Magic Sanction (The Hollows, #8))
โ
And that taught me you can't have anything, you can't have anything at all. Because desire just cheats you. It's like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it - but when we do the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you've got the inconsequential part, but the glitter that made you want it is gone.
โ
โ
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Beautiful and Damned)
โ
Marvelous,โ she said. โTell me about this tapestry.โ
Arachneโs lips curled over her mandibles. โWhy do you care? You're about to die.โ
โWell, yes,โ Annabeth said. โBut the way you captured the light is amazing. Did you use real gold thread for the sunbeams?
โ
โ
Rick Riordan (The Mark of Athena (The Heroes of Olympus, #3))
โ
There is more to a boy than what his mother sees. There is more to a boy then what his father dreams. Inside every boy lies a heart that beats. And sometimes it screams, refusing to take defeat. And sometimes his father's dreams aren't big enough, and sometimes his mother's vision isn't long enough. And sometimes the boy has to dream his own dreams and break through the clouds with his own sunbeams.
โ
โ
Ben Behunin (Remembering Isaac: The Wise and Joyful Potter of Niederbipp (Remembering Isaac, #1))
โ
The moment I stopped spending so much time chasing the big pleasure of life. I began to enjoy the little ones, like watching the stars dancing in moonlit sky or soaking in the sunbeams of a glorious summer morning.
โ
โ
Robin S. Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Remarkable Story About Living Your Dreams)
โ
Oh, Will," she said, "What can we do? Whatever can we do? I want to live with you forever. I want to kiss you and lie down with you and wake up with you every day of my life till I die, years and years and years away. I don't want a memory, just a memory..."
"No," he said. "Memory's a poor thing to have. It's your own real hair and mouth and arms and eyes and hands I want. I didn't know I could ever love anything so much. Oh, Lyra, I wish this night would never end! If only we could stay here like this, and the world could stop turning, and everyone else could fall into a sleep..."
"Everyone except us! And you and I could live here forever and just love each other."
"I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, I'll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you again..."
"I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you...We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pin trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams...And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight..."
They lay side by side, hand in hand, looking at the sky.
โ
โ
Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3))
โ
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
โ
โ
Lucy Christopher
โ
I know a girl from whose body sunbeams rose to the clouds as if theyโd fallen from the sun.
Her laugh was like a bangle of bells.
โYour hair is wet,โ I told her one day, โDid you take a bath?โ
โIt is dew!โ she laughed, โIโve been lying in the grass. All morning long, I lay here waiting for the dawn.
โ
โ
Roman Payne
โ
The sacred rights of mankind are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written, as with a sunbeam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the Hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased or obscured by mortal power.
โ
โ
Alexander Hamilton
โ
Eureka" can be an answer to a question we have never asked. It can be the articulation of a sudden and unforeseen idea or the expression of a magic moment that throws us into a new world. It acts like a radiant sunbeam that comes out of the blue and illuminates a dim past, opening a new, dynamic horizon. It may even be a trivial but lucky encounter with new friends, who let us be what we are in our imagination: original and undifferentiated. (โWaiting for Eurekaโ )
โ
โ
Erik Pevernagie
โ
My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
He'll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway of the morrows.
He'll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart, --
And I wish somebody'd shoot him.
โ
โ
Dorothy Parker (The Portable Dorothy Parker)
โ
Being in love with someone didn't mean you only loved them during the sunbeams. It meant you stood by their side during the cloudy nights, too.
โ
โ
Brittainy C. Cherry (The Silent Waters (Elements, #3))
โ
I will love you forever; whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead, Iโll drift about forever, all my atoms, till I find you againโฆ Iโll be looking for you, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again, weโll cling together so tight that nothing and no oneโll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of youโฆ Weโll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeamsโฆ And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wonโt just be able to take one, theyโll have to take two, one of you and one of me, weโll be joined so tightโฆ
โ
โ
Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3))
โ
To look upon its grass grown yard, where the sunbeams seem to sleep so quietly, one would think that there at least the dead might rest in peace.
โ
โ
Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
โ
It was unicorns vomiting sunbeams.
โ
โ
Becky Albertalli (Leah on the Offbeat (Simonverse, #3))
โ
Here is little habit that can make a big difference. Send sunbeams. Intentionally send a word of encouragement or appreciation every day to one person.
โ
โ
Steve Goodier
โ
As a sunbeam perishes when cut off from the sun, so man apart from God would pass back into the void of nothingness from which he first leaped at the creative call.
โ
โ
A.W. Tozer (The Knowledge of the Holy)
โ
Gratitude exclaims... 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says, 'What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!' One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.
โ
โ
C.S. Lewis (Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer)
โ
The juice of the grape is the liquid quintessence of concentrated sunbeams.
โ
โ
Thomas Love Peacock (Melincourt; Or Sir Oran Hautton)
โ
I am the daughter of Earth and Water,
And the nursling of the Sky;
I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores;
I change, but I cannot die.
For after the rain when with never a stain
The pavilion of Heaven is bare,
And the winds and sunbeams with their convex gleams
Build up the blue dome of air,
I silently laugh at my own cenotaph,
And out of the caverns of rain,
Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb,
I arise and unbuild it again.
โ
โ
Percy Bysshe Shelley
โ
When true friends meet in adverse hour; 'Tis like a sunbeam through a shower. A watery way an instant seen, The darkly closing clouds between.
โ
โ
Walter Scott
โ
At dawn the waves looked like mountain ranges tipped with gold as sunbeams slanted low under burgundy clouds.
โ
โ
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
โ
Donโt be afraid; Iโll keep looking at you for ever and ever, without a flutter of my eyelids, and youโll live in my gaze like a mote in a sunbeam.
โ
โ
Jean-Paul Sartre (No Exit)
โ
You don't get to decide what's important for us. You can choose for yourself, but no one else.
โ
โ
Tillie Walden (On a Sunbeam)
โ
It is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
โ
โ
Robert Southey
โ
Acknowledge that some moments are just plain awfulโdesperate and gloomy and painful and miserable and nothing at all but anguish. No truthful, cheerful thought in the world will fix it. So let me cry awhile. Don't try to find a sunbeam where a shroud of darkness encloses me. Let me mourn. Then, after the storm, when the tears have run dry and my eyes choose to open, I will look for your rainbow of hope.
โ
โ
Richelle E. Goodrich (Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year)
โ
They're gone. I let them chase me. I led them like a sunbeam and vanished like a shadow.
โ
โ
Erin Bow (Plain Kate)
โ
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there โ on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
โ
โ
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
โ
Consider again that dot [Earth]. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
โ
โ
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
โ
ENTER THIS DESERTED HOUSE
But please walk softly as you do.
Frogs dwell here and crickets too.
Ain't no ceiling, only blue
Jays dwell here and sunbeams too.
Floors are flowers - take a few.
Ferns grow here and daisies too.
Whoosh, swoosh - too-whit, too-woo,
Bats dwell here and hoot owls too.
Ha-ha-ha,hee-hee,hoo-hoooo,
Gnomes dwell here and goblins too.
And my child, I thought you knew
I dwell here...and so do you.
โ
โ
Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)
โ
Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass. A solar anus. And rest assured that it works.
โ
โ
Gilles Deleuze
โ
If you would be pungent, be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams. The more they are condensed, the deeper they burn.
โ
โ
Robert Southey
โ
As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.
โ
โ
Ernst Haeckel (The Riddle of the Universe (Great Minds Series))
โ
It's like the older you get the more you forget that you can change things.
โ
โ
Tillie Walden (On a Sunbeam)
โ
Ty?โ I said, trying out your name, liking the way it sounded. โSo whatโs it like anyway? Australia?โ
You smiled then, and your whole face changed with it. It kind of lit up, like there were sunbeams coming from inside you.
โYouโll find out,โ you said.
โ
โ
Lucy Christopher (Stolen (Stolen, #1))
โ
I'm not dating the 12% of you that I understand, I'm dating 100% of you. Including all your secrets that I don't know.
โ
โ
Tillie Walden (On a Sunbeam)
โ
I think I was a cat in another life, because all I want is to lie around sleeping in the world's biggest sunbeam.
โ
โ
Leigh Bardugo (Wonder Woman: Warbringer)
โ
You see, proteins, as I probably needn't tell you, are immensely complicated groupings of amino acids and certain other specialized compounds, arranged in intricate three-dimensional patterns that are as unstable as sunbeams on a cloudy day. It is this instability that is life, since it is forever changing its position in an effort to maintain its identity--in the manner of a long rod balanced on an acrobat's nose.
โ
โ
Isaac Asimov (Pebble in the Sky (Galactic Empire, #3))
โ
It was hopeless. She was flawless. She was a sunbeam. Mosca gave up and got on with hating her.
โ
โ
Frances Hardinge (Fly Trap)
โ
I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.
โ
โ
Charles Baudelaire
โ
Aunt Alexandra was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches, when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn't supposed to do things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra's vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father's life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants as well, but Aunty said that one had to behave like a sunbeam, that I was born good but had grown progressively worse every year.
โ
โ
Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)
โ
I never realized my ugliness till now. When I compared myself with you, I pity myself indeed, poor unhappy monster that I am! I must seem to you like some awful beast, eh? You,-you are a sunbeam, a drop of dew, a bird's song! As for me, I am something frightful, neither man nor beast,- a nondescript object, more hard, shapeless, and more trodden under foot than a pebble!
โ
โ
Victor Hugo (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame)
โ
O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?
โ
โ
Wilfred Owen (The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen)
โ
Behind the cloud the starlight lurks,
Through showers the sunbeams fall;
For God, who loveth all His works,
Has left His hope with all!
โ
โ
John Greenleaf Whittier
โ
I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport.
We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already.
โ
โ
Mary Stewart (Nine Coaches Waiting)
โ
That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
โ
โ
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
โ
I watch my loved ones weep with sorrow,
death's silent torment of no tomorrow.
I feel their hearts breaking, I sense their despair,
United in misery, the grief that they share.
How do I show that, I am not gone...
but the essence of life's everlasting song
Why do they wee? Why do they cry?
I'm alive in the wind and I am soaring high.
I am sparkling light dancing on streams,
a moment of warmth in the fays of sunbeams.
The coolness of rain as it falls on your face,
the whisper of leaves as wind rushes with haste.
Eternal Song, a requiem by Avian of Celieria
from Crown of Crystal Flame by C.L. Wilson
โ
โ
C.L. Wilson (Crown of Crystal Flame (Tairen Soul, #5))
โ
Oh, the world needs those standing on the Bridge, For they know how Eternity reaches to earth In the wind that brings music to the leaves Of the forest: in the drops of rain that caress The sleeping life of the desert: in the sunbeams Of the first spring day in an alpine meadow. Only they can blow the dust from the seeing eyes Of those who are blind.
โ
โ
Jane Goodall (Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey)
โ
I will love you for ever, whatever happens. Till I die and after I die, and when I find my way out of the land of the dead I'll drift about for ever, all my atoms, till I find you again...
I'll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again we'll cling together so tight that nothing and no one'll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of you... We'll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeams... And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they won't just be able to take one, they'll have to take two, one of you and one of me, we'll be joined so tight...
โ
โ
Philip Pullman (The Amber Spyglass (His Dark Materials, #3))
โ
Catch sunbeams in a mirror! A reflection of a sunbeam can melt an iceberg.
โ
โ
Lara Biyuts
โ
May you always have A sunbeam to warm you, A moonbeam to charm you, A sheltering angel so nothing can harm you. An Irish Blessing
โ
โ
Julie Garwood (Fast Track (Buchanan-Renard, #12))
โ
I have no doubt that we will be successful in harnessing the sun's energy. ... If sunbeams were weapons of war, we would have had solar energy centuries ago.
โ
โ
George Porter
โ
Bewildering. If it was truly in woman's nature to be an ever demure and pleasant sunbeam in the gloom, why then, it took an awful lot of ink and instructions to keep reminding woman of this nature of hers..
โ
โ
Evie Dunmore (A Rogue of One's Own (A League of Extraordinary Women, #2))
โ
Planet earth, which Carl Sagan described as a โmote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,โ is an evanescent bloom in an exquisite cosmos that will ultimately be
barren. Motes of dust, nearby or distant, dance on sunbeams for merely a moment.
โ
โ
Brian Greene (Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe)
โ
Her eyes were the eyes of one who can remember; one whose childhood does not fade like a dream, nor whose youth vanish like a sunbeam. She would not take life loosely and incoherently, in parts, and let one season slip as she entered on another: she would retain and add; often review from the commencement, and so grow in harmony and consistency as she grew in years.
โ
โ
Charlotte Brontรซ (Villette)
โ
I believe that every particle of dust that dances in the sunbeam does not move an atom more or less than God wishes โ that every particle of spray that dashes against the steamboat has its orbit, as well as the sun in the heavens โ that the chaff from the hand of the winnower is steered as the stars in their courses. The creeping of an aphid over the rosebud is as much fixed as the march of the devastating pestilence โ the fall of . . . leaves from a poplar is as fully ordained as the tumbling of an avalanche.
โ
โ
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
โ
This dim coolness of my room was to the broad daylight of the street what the shadow is to the sunbeam, that is to say equally luminous, and presented to my imagination the entire panorama of summer, which my senses, if I had been out walking, could have tasted and enjoyed only piecemeal; and so it was quite in harmony with my state of repose which (thanks to the enlivening adventures related in my books) sustained, like a hand reposing motionless in a stream of running water, the shock and animation of a torrent of activity.
โ
โ
Marcel Proust
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The hands of those I meet are dumbly eloquent to me. The touch of some hands is an impertinence. I have met people so empty of joy, that when I clasped their frosty finger-tips, it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm. Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart. It may be only the clinging touch of a child's hand; but there is as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others. A hearty handshake or a friendly letter gives me genuine pleasure.
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Helen Keller (The Story of My Life)
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Molecules form and dissolve, returning to the primordial soup of atoms. But consciousness survives the death of the molecules on which it rides. What was once a bundle of energy in a sunbeam turns into a leaf, only to fall and change again into soil. The change of state crosses many boundaries. A sunbeam is invisible, whereas leaves and soil are visible.A leaf is alive and growing,whereas sunbeams aren't.the colors of light, leaf, and soil are different, and so on.
But all these transformations exist as constructs of the mind.The actual energy present in the sunbeam experiences no change at all.
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Deepak Chopra (The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want)
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Like the sweet moon keeps the sky
Like the wind goin' whooshing by
When those ol' sunbeams break the day
I will keep you while you play
Just as ol' river keeps the fishes
And little stars keep silver wishes
Just as the ocean keeps the blue
I will stand here close to you.
When all around is dark and deep
When them ol' shadows slowly creep
Even when you're fast asleep
It's you I'll keep, it's you I'll keep
No need to cry, no need to fear
I will always be right here.
I will always be right here.
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Kathi Appelt (The Underneath)
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All God's revelations are sealed to us until they are opened to us by obedience. You will never get them open by philosophy or thinking. Immediately you obey, a flash of light comes. Let God's truth work in you by soaking in it, not by worrying into it. Obey God in the thing He is at present showing you, and instantly the next thing is opened up. We read tomes on the work of the Holy Spirit when... five minutes of drastic obedience would make things clear as a sunbeam. We say, "I suppose I shall understand these things some day." You can understand them now: it is not study that does it, but obedience. The tiniest fragment of obedience, and heaven opens up and the profoundest truths of God are yours straight away. God will never reveal more truth about Himself till you obey what you know already. Beware of being wise and prudent.
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Oswald Chambers
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...and one of those neat spiral stairways in the far corner-I wonder where it leads. Spiral staircases always seem to me like they must lead somewhere special.
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Helen Phillips (Here Where the Sunbeams Are Green)
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As the seasons age us
I close my eyes and wish for snow
Alas the Irish seasons been foretold
For Spring will dawn and I will go
Into another season Jack Frost cold.
And when its here, I wish for night
As childhood memories flash right by
To see the birds in humble flight
I wish for Summer with a sigh
And on I go to months so sweet
Dawns sweet chorus and sunbeams bright
I yearn for Autumn leaves under feet
Yet now I dream of Winters night
As Auld Lang Syne rings in New Year
Alas! Iโm one year older as Spring draws near.
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Michelle Geaney (Under These Rebel Skies)
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When you live your life doing the things that turn you on, that youโre good at, that bring you joy, that make you shove stuff in peopleโs faces and scream, โcheck this out!!!โ you walk around so lit up that you shoot sunbeams out of yer eyeballs. Which automatically lights up the world around you. Which is precisely why you are here: to shine your big-ass ball of fire onto this world of ours. A world that literally depends upon light to survive. You
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Jen Sincero (You Are a Badassยฎ: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life)
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The room into which Ivan Ivanovich stepped was quite dark, because the shutters were closed and the sunbeam that penetrated through a hole in the shutter was broken into rainbow hues and painted upon the opposite wall a multicolored landscape of thatched roofs, trees, and clothes hanging in the yard, but all upside down. This made an uncanny twilight in the whole room.
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Nikolai Gogol
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He went into the kitchen. It was eight in the evening. He tried to shut the bright spring evening out with the curtains, but it forced its way past them in places, dust-filled sunbeams that lit up the gloom in his flat. Spring and summer were not Erlendur's seasons. Too bright. Too frivolous. He wanted heavy, dark winters. Finding nothing edible in the kitchen, he sat down at the table with his chin resting in his hand.
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Arnaldur Indriรฐason (Silence of the Grave (Inspector Erlendur #4))
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He saw nature - he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of the field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam - of the landscape before us; of the weather round us and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye.
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Charlotte Brontรซ (Jane Eyre)
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Iโll be looking for you, Will, every moment, every single moment. And when we do find each other again weโll cling together so tight that nothing and no oneโll ever tear us apart. Every atom of me and every atom of youย .ย .ย . Weโll live in birds and flowers and dragonflies and pine trees and in clouds and in those little specks of light you see floating in sunbeamsย .ย .ย . And when they use our atoms to make new lives, they wonโt just be able to take one, theyโll have to take two, one of you and one of me, weโll be joined so tightย .ย .ย .
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Philip Pullman (His Dark Materials)
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Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, โinhale great draughts of space,โ wonder, wonder at the windโs unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human handsโฆ
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Helen Keller (The Open Door)
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She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique sunbeams, her arms streaked and pocked like relief maps of vast planets, her massive calves stuffed like forcemeat into lung-colored support hose. She was quixotically vain about her appearance and spent an hour each morning making up her face.
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Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay)
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The distant sea, lapping the sandy shore with measured sound; the nearer cries of the donkey-boys; the unusual scenes moving before her like pictures, which she cared not in her laziness to have fully explained before they passed away; the stroll down to the beach to breathe the sea-air, soft and warm on the sandy shore even at the end of November; the great long misty sea-line touching the tender-coloured sky; the white sail of a distant boat turning silver in some pale sunbeam: - it seemed as if she could dream her life away in such luxury of pensiveness, in which she made her present all in all, from not daring to think of the past, or wishing to contemplate the future.
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Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South)
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Sometimes, a day comes along that seems possessed by a certain shade of magic. You know those moments. There is a peculiar pattern to the silhouettes of leaves quivering against the sunbeam on the floor. The dust in the air glows white, charmed. Your voice is a note suspended in the breeze. The sounds outside your window seem very far away, songs of another world, and you imagine that this is the moment just before something unusual happens. Perhaps it is happening right now.
My day of magic arrived on a bright autumn morning, when the poplar trees swayed against a golden city.
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Marie Lu (The Kingdom of Back)
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Maybe there are moments between any two adults in love when the age of one of them dissolves before the other's eyes, when the first refuge of the soul at its creation is laid bare and skinless as a sunbeam through a window. Innocence and vulnerability, two unmeasurable quantities...Perhaps that is the essence of the protection's intimacy, that it dwells in camouflage and justifies itself in stillness.
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Marianne Wiggins (Evidence of Things Unseen)
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Love Song
My own dear love, he is strong and bold
And he cares not what comes after.
His words ring sweet as a chime of gold,
And his eyes are lit with laughter.
He is jubilant as a flag unfurledโ
Oh, a girl, sheโd not forget him.
My own dear love, he is all my world,โ
And I wish Iโd never met him.
My love, heโs mad, and my love, heโs fleet,
And a wild young wood-thing bore him!
The ways are fair to his roaming feet,
And the skies are sunlit for him.
As sharply sweet to my heart he seems
As the fragrance of acacia.
My own dear love, he is all my dreams,โ
And I wish he were in Asia.
My love runs by like a day in June,
And he makes no friends of sorrows.
Heโll tread his galloping rigadoon
In the pathway of the morrows.
Heโll live his days where the sunbeams start,
Nor could storm or wind uproot him.
My own dear love, he is all my heart,โ
And I wish somebodyโd shoot him.
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Dorothy Parker
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You don't get to decide what's important for us. You can choose for yourself, but no one else.
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Have you ever considered that something that's trivial to you could mean ... [sic.] so much more to someone else?
You don't get to take the easy road out and just respect the parts of people that you recognize.
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Tillie Walden (On a Sunbeam)
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Nachkland - Roland Leighton
Down the long white road we walked together
Down between the grey hills and the heather,
Where the tawny-crested
Plover cries.
You seemed all brown and soft, just like a linnet,
Your errant hair had shadowed sunbeams in it,
And there shone all April
In your eyes.
With your golden voice of tears and laughter
Softened into song 'Does aught come after
Life,' you asked 'When life is
Laboured through?
What is God and all for which we're striving?'
'Sweetest sceptic, we were born for living;
Life is Love, and Love is---
You, dear, you.
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Roland Leighton
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Mr. Rochester continued to be blind the first two years of our union; perhaps it was that circumstance that drew us so very near -- that knit us so very close; for I was then his vision, as I am still his right hand. Literally, I was (what he often called me) the apple of his eye. He saw nature -- he saw books through me; and never did I weary of gazing for his behalf, and of putting into words the effect of the field, tree, town, river, cloud, sunbeam -- of the landscape before us; of the weather around us -- and impressing by sound on his ear what light could no longer stamp on his eye. Never did I weary of reading to him; never did I weary conducting him where he wished to go; of doing for him what he wished to be done. And there was a pleasure in my services, most full, most exquisite, even though sad -- because he claimed these services without painful shame or damping humiliation. He loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in profiting by my attendance; he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes.
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Charlotte Brontรซ (Jane Eyre)
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If you have a monster inside of you, please teach it how to jump, and laugh, and fly and catch fish! Please teach it to climb mountains to watch sunsets and wade in ponds to feel moonlight. Please love your monster, tell it that it has a home, teach it that it has a place in this world, maybe it likes ice cream, maybe marshmallows make it smile, maybe it goes to beautiful places in its dreams at night. One day it will sit atop a clocktower and cast sunbeams onto everyone! Because it will learn that! Because angels are too busy to do that, but monsters are not. Monsters would love to catch sunbeams and eat sugar donuts. Teach your monsters, they will form moonbeams one day!
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C. JoyBell C.
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there โ on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
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Carl Sagan
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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
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Carl Sagan
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We succeeded in taking that picture from [deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideaologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitands of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness-- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us... To my mind, there is perhaps no better demostration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
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Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
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Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing in the garden, nodding your heads to the bees as they sing of the dews and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you? Dream on, sway and frolic while you may in the gentle breezes of summer. To- morrow a ruthless hand will close around your throats. You will be wrenched, torn asunder limb by limb, and borne away from your quiet homes. The wretch, she may be passing fair. She may say how lovely you are while her fingers are still moist with your blood. Tell me, will this be kindness? It may be your fate to be imprisoned in the hair of one whom you know to be heartless or to be thrust into the buttonhole of one who would not dare to look you in the face were you a man. It may even be your lot to be confined in some narrow vessel with only stagnant water to quench the maddening thirst that warns of ebbing life.
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Kakuzล Okakura (The Book of Tea)
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For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All 'spirit and fire and dew,' as she was, the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity. Marilla felt this and was vaguely troubled over it, realizing that the ups and downs of existence would probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate. Therefore Marilla conceived it to be her duty to drill Anne into a tranquil uniformity of disposition as impossible and alien to her as to a dancing sunbeam in one of the brook shallows. She did not make much headway, as she sorrowfully admitted to herself. The downfall of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into 'deeps of affliction.' The fulfillment thereof exalted her to dizzy realms of delight. Marilla had almost begun to despair of ever fashioning this waif of the world into her model little girl of demure manners and prim deportment. Neither would she have believed that she really liked Anne much better as she was.
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L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables)
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As the wind swelled, my tree started to sway. Almost like a human body it swung back and around, gently at first, then more and more wildly. While the swaying intensified, so did my fears that the trunk might snap and hurl me to the ground. But in time my confidence returned. Amazed at how the tree could be at once so flexible and so sturdy, I held on tight as it bent and waved, twisted and swirled, slicing curves and arcs through the air. With each graceful swing, I felt less a creature of the land and more a part of the wind itself.
"The rain began falling, it's sound merging with the splashing river and the singing trees. Branches streamed like waterfalls of green. Tiny rivers cascaded down every trunk, twisting through moss meadows and bark canyons. All the while, I rode out the gale. I could not have felt wetter. I could not have felt freer.
"When, at last, the storm subsided, the entire world seemed newly born. Sunbeams danced on rain-washed leaves. Curling columns of mist rose from every glade. The forest's colors shown more vivid, its smells struck more fresh. And I understood, for the first time in my life, that the Earth was always being remade, that life was always being renewed. That it may have been the afternoon of this particular day, but it was still the very morning of Creation.
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T.A. Barron (The Lost Years of Merlin (Merlin, #1))
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History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldnโt predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldnโt tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.
History is like that.
Of course, unlike your Auntโs cat, history is going on all around you, all the time, and is often quite lively. Sometimes it rests in a sunbeam for a peaceful century or two, but on the whole, history is always plotting, and it bites very hard. It stalks around the world, fickle and dissatisfied and often angry. It demands to be fed just a little earlier each day, until you find yourself carving meat from the bone as fast as you can, faster than you thought possible, just to satisfy it. Some people have a kind of marvelous talent for calming it and enticing it onto their laps. To some it will never even spare a glance.
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Catherynne M. Valente (The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland - For a Little While (Fairyland, #0.5))
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To fill the days up of his dateless year
Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere?
For first of all the sphery signs whereby
Love severs light from darkness, and most high,
In the white front of January there glows
The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose:
And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless
Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness,
A storm-star that the seafarers of love
Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of,
Shoots keen through February's grey frost and damp
The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp;
The star that Marlowe sang into our skies
With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes;
And in clear March across the rough blue sea
The signal sapphire of Alcyone
Makes bright the blown bross of the wind-foot year;
And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear
Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight
Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light
When air is quick with song and rain and flame,
My birth-month star that in love's heaven hath name
Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower,
My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower;
Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond
The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond
Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June
Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon
Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre
Shadowed her traitor's flying sail with fire;
Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone,
A star south-risen that first to music shone,
The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears
Light northward to the month whose forehead wears
Her name for flower upon it, and his trees
Mix their deep English song with Veronese;
And like an awful sovereign chrysolite
Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night,
The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars,
A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars,
The light of Cleopatra fills and burns
The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns;
And fixed and shining as the sister-shed
Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead,
The pale bright autumn's amber-coloured sphere,
That through September sees the saddening year
As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name
Francesca's; and the star that watches flame
The embers of the harvest overgone
Is Thisbe's, slain of love in Babylon,
Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs
A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines
An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras,
The star that made men mad, Angelica's;
And latest named and lordliest, with a sound
Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round,
Last love-light and last love-song of the year's,
Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's.
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Algernon Charles Swinburne (Tristram of Lyonesse: And Other Poems)