“Rather nice night, after all. Stars are out and everything. Exceptionally tasty assortment of them.”— F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Thereafter were the stars persuaded to depict compasses and quadrants, stripped of their names, given numbers, all but regimented into a grid, before they had had enough and reverted to their old subjects: dogs, dragons, herdsmen, bears. Take heed, worldly fashion—someone may trust you up to a point, but if you push him too far you will lose all the power you ever had over him and he will blaze up and turn into a bear.”— Amy Leach
“This probably isn’t something you’re supposed to say at a moment like this, but I think the moon is seriously overrated.” A moment like what? I bite my cheeks, taming the grin that threatens to take over my face.“And the stars?” I ask, once the smile is under control.“Wildly underrated,” he declares with a grin. He looks up again. “The sky is a storybook,” he says then. “Every constellation’s like its own fairy tale.”— Lauren Miller
“The constellation she’s named after tells the story of a princess, who was shackled to a rock as a sacrifice to a sea monster–punishment for her mother Casseopeia, who had bragged to Poseidon about her own beauty. Perseus, flying by, fell in love with Andromeda and saved her. In the sky, she’s pictured with her arms outstretched and her hands chained.”— Jodi Picoult
“Felipe focused on the smattering of freckles across her bare left shoulder. For the next hour, he counted each of them out of the corner of his eye–an entire universe’s worth. Lost in the constellations, he barely noticed the lurch of the small plane.”— Amanda Heger
“If this were an indie movie, we’d start talking about the constellations,” Solomon said, looking up at the stars.”— John Corey Whaley
“Some people are born with tornadoes in their lives, but constellations in their eyes. Other people are born with stars at their feet, but their souls are lost at sea.”— Nikita Gill
“Mr. Arsenikos said if you knew the constellations you would never get lost. You could always find your way home.”— Bryn Greenwood
“Thus are many identities, over time, shown to be temporary alignments of components involved in a deeper allegiance.”— Amy Leach
“Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks.”— Joe Hill
“The sky [above Tehran] was like a star-eaten black blanket, and so far as I could read them its constellations were unfamiliar. Lawrence speaks somewhere of drawing ‘strength from the depths of the universe’; Malcolm Lowry speaks about the deadness of the stars except when he looked at them with a particular girl; I had neither feeling. The founder of the Jesuits used to spend many hours under the stars; it is hard to be certain whether his first stirrings of scientific speculation or pre-scientific wonder about space and the stars in their own nature were some element in his affinity with starlight, or whether for him they were only a point of departure, but in this matter I think I am about fifty years more modern than Saint Ignatius; stars mean to me roughly what they meant to Donne’s generation, a bright religious sand imposing the sense of an intrusion into human language, and arousing a certain personal thirst to be specific.”— Peter Levi
“I felt like I was riding into infinity, and soon I forgot I existed as the sky surrounded us in a blanket of stars, constellations the texture of slushies, swirling blue and violet and gold. I was swallowed b the universe, riding on a white horse in a midnight dream…”— Aishabella Sheikh
“I wish I could read what she’s written there. Instead, I pretend the letters are stars. The words, constellations.”— Isaac Marion
“Under her thick pancake makeup, her sin had been pockmarked, but he would stare at her adoringly from his cot at night and imagine her scars were constellations, a secret map to a far-off, happy place.”— Sarah Addison Allen
“~Tonight’s Sea~Meet me by the sea, Under the stars. Where we can gaze With our hearts. Today, I am restless, Waiting for tonight’s meet. I cannot believe how endlessThese hours can be. I hope the constellationsAre aligned. For tonight we’ll seeWhere our connection wanders. I’ll hold on to this dream. My grip isn’t fading. My memory isn’t gone. Tonight we will be wadingIn the sea waters of love. -Rachel Nicole Wagner Original”— Rachel Nicole Wagner
“He was there alone with himself, collected, tranquil, adoring, comparing the serenity of his heart with the serenity of the skies, moved in the darkness by the visible splendors of the constellations, and the invisible splendor of God, opening his soul to the thoughts which fall from the Unknown. In such moments, offering up his heart at the hour when the flowers of night inhale their perfume, lighted like a lamp in the center of the starry night, expanding his soul in ecstasy in the midst of the universal radiance of creation, he could not himself perhaps have told what was passing in his own mind; he felt something depart from him, and something descend upon him, mysterious interchanges of the depths of the soul with the depths of the universe.”— Victor Hugo