“If the light is
It is because God said 'Let there be light.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator
At Sunrise, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Source: Hellas (1821), l. 682
“If the light is
It is because God said 'Let there be light.”
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator
At Sunrise, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“God Said: Let there be light!
I said: Say please.”
Karen Marie Moning (1964) author
Source: Shadowfever
“Remember that each light between sunrise and sunset is worth dying for at least once.”
Tad Williams (1957) novelist
Source: Shadowrise
Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) American clergyman and activist
Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 106
“Grey-eyed Athene sent them a favourable gale, a fresh West Wind, singing over the wine-dark sea.”
II. 420–421 (tr. S. H. Butcher and Andrew Lang).
Odyssey (c. 725 BC)
Gerald Durrell (1925–1995) naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter
Letter to his fiancée Lee, (31 July 1978), published in Gerald Durrell: An Authorized Biography by Douglas Botting (1999)
Context: I have seen a thousand sunsets and sunrises, on land where it floods forest and mountains with honey coloured light, at sea where it rises and sets like a blood orange in a multicoloured nest of cloud, slipping in and out of the vast ocean. I have seen a thousand moons: harvest moons like gold coins, winter moons as white as ice chips, new moons like baby swans’ feathers.
I have seen seas as smooth as if painted, coloured like shot silk or blue as a kingfisher or transparent as glass or black and crumpled with foam, moving ponderously and murderously. … I have known silence: the cold earthy silence at the bottom of a newly dug well; the implacable stony silence of a deep cave; the hot, drugged midday silence when everything is hypnotised and stilled into silence by the eye of the sun; the silence when great music ends.
I have heard summer cicadas cry so that the sound seems stitched into your bones. … I have seen hummingbirds flashing like opals round a tree of scarlet blooms, humming like a top. I have seen flying fish, skittering like quicksilver across the blue waves, drawing silver lines on the surface with their tails. I have seen Spoonbills fling home to roost like a scarlet banner across the sky. I have seen Whales, black as tar, cushioned on a cornflower blue sea, creating a Versailles of fountain with their breath. I have watched butterflies emerge and sit, trembling, while the sun irons their winds smooth. I have watched Tigers, like flames, mating in the long grass. I have been dive-bombed by an angry Raven, black and glossy as the Devil’s hoof. I have lain in water warm as milk, soft as silk, while around me played a host of Dolphins. I have met a thousand animals and seen a thousand wonderful things… but —
All this I did without you. This was my loss.
All this I want to do with you. This will be my gain.
All this I would gladly have forgone for the sake of one minute of your company, for your laugh, your voice, your eyes, hair, lips, body, and above all for your sweet, ever surprising mind which is an enchanting quarry in which it is my privilege to delve.