Excerpts and Inspirations

"...Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise."
Kubla Khan, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (closing lines)

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"...A moment later I thought, 'But when alone - really alone - everyone is a child: or no one?' Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives...."
That Hideous Strength, C. S. Lewis (p. 21, 1967 printing of 1965 Macmillan Paperbacks Edition)

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"I.
Many a hearth upon our dark globe sighs
after many a vanish'd face,
Many a planet by many a sun may roll
with the dust of a vanish'd race.
"II.
Raving politics, never at rest–as this poor
earth's pale history runs,–
What is it all but a trouble of ants in the
gleam of a million million of suns?..."
Vastness, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (opening lines)

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"...And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge, like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought..."

"...for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die..."

"...Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson

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Related post:

• "Excerpts and Inspirations II"
  (July 2, 2009)