“To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores”
Source: The Devil's Church and Other Stories
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Machado de Assis 16
Brazilian writer 1839–1908Related quotes
“The stars looked like nail heads in the sky--pull a few of them out and the darkness would fall.”
Source: Let the Great World Spin
Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001)
Source: Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics
Context: Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.
“I thought my life would seem more interesting with a musical score and a laugh track.”
“Rain is grace; rain is the sky condescending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.”
Source: Self-Consciousness : Memoirs (1989), Ch. 1