Source: Literary Years and War (1900-1918), The Riddle Of The Sands (1903), p. 217.
Compare: "Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own." Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925)
A Devil's Chaplain (2003)
A Hill-Top View (1904); This is one of his earliest poems, printed in the Aurora, a student publication of Occidental College.
Context: O that our souls could scale a height like this,
A mighty mountain swept o'er by the bleak
Keen winds of heaven; and, standing on that peak
Above the blinding clouds of prejudice,
Would we could see all truly as it is;
The calm eternal truth would keep us meek.
“Heaven grants us this hour: now from our gate
all mists have cleared; on high, clouds roll away.”
Source: The Tale of Kiều (1813), Lines 3121–3122; quoted by Joe Biden, while welcoming Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong in Washington (July 2015), as reported in "The Tale of Kieu, lotus and the US President" by Bui Hoang Tam, dtinews.vn (25 May 2016) http://dtinews.vn/en/news/027/45323/the-tale-of-kieu--lotus-and-the-us-president.html: "Thank heaven we are here today, to see the sun through parting fog and clouds."
“Illusions comes from heaven and mistakes come from us.”
American Acheivement interview (1996)
Source: The Joy Luck Club
Context: Reading for me was a refuge. I could escape from everything that was miserable in my life and I could be anyone I wanted to be in a story, through a character. It was almost sinful how much I liked it. That's how I felt about it. If my parents knew how much I loved it, I thought they would take it away from me. I think I was also blessed with a very wild imagination because I can remember, when I was at an age before I could read, that I could imagine things that weren't real and whatever my imagination saw is what I actually saw. Some people would say that was psychosis but I prefer to say it was the beginning of a writer's imagination. If I believed that insects had eyes and mouths and noses and could talk, that's what they did. If I thought I could see devils dancing out of the ground, that's what I saw. If I thought lightning had eyes and would follow me and strike me down, that's what would happen. And I think I needed an outlet for all that imagination, so I found it in books.
February 5 (1977), as quoted by Dawit Wolde Giorgis (1989) Red Tears: War, Famine and Revolution in Ethiopia, The Red Sea Press Inc., p. 31
Original: (de) Wir wollen stille sein und warten, bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt. Siehst du, wie oben Licht an Licht sich zündet zu einem Dom! Wir sitzen im Schweigen und falten die Hände zum Gebet. Wir wollen stille sein und warten bis ein Stern vom Himmel fällt.
Source: Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)
