“But I am constant as the Northern Star,
Of whose true fixed and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament.”

“They are trying to make me into a fixed star. I am an irregular planet.”

“They had become a fixed star in the shifting firmament of the high school's relationships, the acknowledged Romeo and Juliet. And she knew with sudden hatefulness that there was one couple like them in every white suburban high school in America.”

“Without fixed ideas, no fixed feelings. (Whoever has no constant opinions has no constant emotions.)”

“Last night I by my casement leant,
And looked on the bright firmament;
And marked a group of stars, which met,
Almost as if on purpose set
Together for their loveliness,”

“It's all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.”

“I greet you, my educated fellow bourgeois, whose interests and whose doubts I share.”

“I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

“Success is an ugly thing. Men are deceived by its false resemblances to merit…. They confound the brilliance of the firmament with the star-shaped footprints of a duck in the mud.”

“The clouds, and not the stars, to them
The omen and the sign be given—
The clouds, the vapours of our soil,
Not stars, whose element is heaven.
The deepening shade, the flitting light,
Mark what each coming month will know—
The passing joy, the constant care,
Of life's sad pilgrimage below.”