One More for Neil. . .



 “It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” 

― Neil Armstrong

“I look up at the night sky, and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up—many people feel small, because they’re small and the Universe is big, but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars.” 

― Neil deGrasse Tyson

 

Frank O’Hara

By: Ted Berrigan

Winter in the country, Southampton, pale horse

as the soot rises, then settles, over the pictures

The birds that were singing this morning have shut up

I thought I saw a couple kissing, but Larry said no

It’s a strange bird. He should know. & I think now

“Grandmother divided by monkey equals outer space.” Ron

put me in that picture. In another picture, a good-

looking poet is thinking it over, nevertheless, he will

never speak of that it. But, his face is open, his eyes

are clear, and, leaning lightly on an elbow, fist below

his ear, he will never be less than perfectly frank,

listening, completely interested in whatever there may

be to hear. Attentive to me alone here. Between friends,

nothing would seem stranger to me than true intimacy.

What seems genuine, truly real, is thinking of you, how

that makes me feel. You are dead. And you’ll never

write again about the country, that’s true.

But the people in the sky really love

to have dinner & to take a walk with you

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.” 

 ― Kurt Vonnegut

 

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
― Carl Sagan

 

 

 

 

After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty, and I need no other flight to convince me that the reason flyers fly, whether they know it or not, is the esthetic appeal of flying."
-Amelia Earhart

 

 

Not just beautiful, though--the stars are like the trees in the forest, alive and breathing. And they're watching me.”
― Haruki Murakami,

 

 

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”
― John F. Kennedy

 

“Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.”
― Isaac Asimov
 

 

“And when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrows) you will be content that you have known me. You will always be my friend. You will want to laugh with me. And you will sometimes open your window, so, for that pleasure . . . And your friends will be properly astonished to see you laughing as you look up at the sky! Then you will say to them, 'Yes, the stars always make me laugh!' And they will think you are crazy. It will be a very shabby trick that I shall have played on you...”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
 

 

“I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase--nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it.”
― R.J. Anderson