Quotes about meteor

A collection of quotes on the topic of meteor, likeness, earth, time.

Quotes about meteor

“I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

Jack London (1876–1916) American author, journalist, and social activist

The Bulletin, San Francisco, California, December 2, 1916, part 2, p. 1.
Also included in Jack London’s Tales of Adventure, ed. Irving Shepard, Introduction, p. vii (1956)

Time, Wise

“I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”

Jack London (1876–1916) American author, journalist, and social activist

The Bulletin, San Francisco, California, December 2, 1916, part 2, p. 1.
Also included in Jack London’s Tales of Adventure, ed. Irving Shepard, Introduction, p. vii (1956)
Context: I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

“Better was it to go unknown and leave behind you an arch, a potting shed, a wall where peaches ripen, than to burn like meteor and leave no dust.”

Virginia Woolf book Orlando: A Biography

Source: Orlando: A Biography (1928), Ch. 2

“I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt.”

Guy De Maupassant (1850–1893) French writer

As quoted in "Guy De Maupassant : A Study" by Pol Neveux, in Original Short Stories http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3090

Life

“Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible — though I know not in what proportion — still remains.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Fiction, The Colour Out of Space (1927)

“Your test had cheese meteor questions?”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

United We Spy

Question

“(DVD introduction) Well, welcome to your very own DVD of me, DVB, and ‘Mind Control’. If you weren’t expecting me and thought you were buying Reginald Perrin, then press eject now before you begin vomiting. Otherwise, please, please ensure that you are sitting in an extreme level of comfort, preferably in pre-worn slippers and, I trust, with your extended family around you. If you have seen the film ‘Signs’ and would like to wear the pointy tin foil hats now would be a good time to put them on you can’t be too careful. Well, pphhh, goodness me, er, it’s been a meteoric rise over these last years. The money and sex are exhausting and I have you the viewer to thank. Thanks. We’ve put together some of the pieces from the specials and series in glistening digital format, each pixel hand picked and gently polished and brought to you in wide-sound, surround-screen enjoyment. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I’ll enjoy the royalties from this, which is enormously. If you don’t like it and HMV won’t take it back because you’ve got sticky all over it then the disc makes an excellent beer coaster or wheels for a space truck or can be immense fun just putting it on your finger and [waggling it], like that. But I hope you do like it. When I first started developing these techniques I had no idea that they were going to prove at all popular and for all my nancing about and staring I’m actually really excited to have a DVD out and can’t wait to go and find it in Discount Books & Puzzles next to the Dizzie Gillespie CD box sets and disappointing erotica. I hope you like it and if you do, please go and buy another one.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV Series and Specials (Includes DVDs), Mind Control (1999–2000) or Inside Your Mind on DVD

Money, Books, Family, Hope

“The meteor flag of England
Shall yet terrific burn,
Till danger's troubled night depart,
And the star of peace return.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Stanza 4 Ye Mariners of England http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Campbell/ye%20mariners_of_england.htm (1800)

Peace, Star, Night

“You should feel what it is like to pleasure a falcon. You lock talons with her in the sky and do it while you both are falling like meteors. You would like it; they never complain if you come too fast.”

Christopher Moore book Coyote Blue

Coyote Blue (1994)

Pleasure, Feeling

“My tears, O Ryno! are for the dead; my voice for those that have passed away. Tall thou art on the hill; fair among the sons of the vale. But thou shalt fall like Morar; the mourner shall sit on thy tomb. The hills shall know thee no more; thy bow shall lie in thy hall, unstrung!
Thou wert swift, O Morar! as a roe on the desert; terrible as a meteor of fire. Thy wrath was as the storm. Thy sword in battle, as lightning in the field. Thy voice was a stream after rain; like thunder on distant hills. Many fell by thy arm; they were consumed in the flames of thy wrath. But when thou didst return from war, how peaceful was thy brow! Thy face was like the sun after rain; like the moon in the silence of night; calm as the breast of the lake when the loud wind is laid.
Narrow is thy dwelling now! dark the place of thine abode! With three steps I compass thy grave, O thou who wast so great before. Four stones, with their heads of moss, are the only memorial of thee. A tree with scarce a leaf, long grass, which whistles in the wind, mark to the hunter's eye the grave of the mighty Morar.”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"The Songs of Selma"
The Poems of Ossian

War, Lie, Peace, Art

“Meteors are not needed less than mountains:
shine, perishing republic.”

Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) American poet

"Shine, Perishing Republic" (1939)

Mountain

“Man's skull represents the same infinity for the movement of conceptions. It is equal to the universe, for in it is contained all that sees in it. Likewise the sun and whole starry sky of comets and the sun pass in it and shine and move as in nature... Is not the whole universe that strange skull in which meteors, suns, comets and planets rush endlessly?”

Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) Russian and Soviet artist of polish descent

1921 - 1930
Source: 'God is not cast down', Malevich, 1922; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 65

Nature, Universe, Sun

“We do not live that we may become more godlike. We become more godlike that we may live. We turn to the future to live in the present. The practices by which we invent different futures bring down upon us a storm of impalpable meteors. The risks to which these practices subject us, the commotions, the hurts, the joys, strike and break the coats of armor within which we are all slowly dying. They enable each of us to live in action and in the mind until he dies all at once.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 236-7.

Future, Joy, Hurt

“Humans are proud of themselves. The guiding principle of the modern age is "Man is the measure of all things." And our bodies have excited physiologists and philosophers to a profound awe of the basic mammalian design. But the history of the dinosaurs should teach us some humility… If our fundamental mammalian mode of adaptation was superior to the dinosaurs', then history should record the meteoric rise of the mammals and the eclipse of the dinosaurs. Our own Class Mammalia did not seize the dominant position in life on land. Instead, the mammal clan was but one of many separate evolutionary families that succeeded as species only by taking refuge in small body size during the Age of Dinosaurs. As long as there were dinosaurs, a full 130 million years, remember, the warm-blooded league of furry mammals produced no species bigger than a cat.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 17
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Age, Family, History

“If the Lord has you saved, you're saved, ok? You can't get out of God's hand. Then this 300 degree below zero ice meteor came flying through the solar system. Some of it broke apart. It made craters on Mercury and craters on the Moon. Four of the planets today still have rings around them. And the rings around these planets are made of rock and ice. Very interesting. Now Walt Brown thinks some of the craters on the Moon were formed when the fountains of the deep broke open and rocks went flying up out of Earth's gravitational pull, drifted around for a while, and clobbered into the Moon. He may be right on that. I don't know but it's interesting. He thinks the comets came from Earth, and water on Mars came from Earth, when the fountains of the deep broke upon. You could read about it for yourself if you would like. The super cold snow would land mostly around the north and south poles because super cold ice is not only affected by the magnetic field, it is easily statically charged. […] As this ice meteor came flying towards the earth it broke apart, pieces would settle in around the poles mostly, causing the earth to wobble for a few hundred years. Or maybe even a few thousand years. The canopy of water overhead collapsed, then it rained 40 days, the water underneath the bottom, under the crust came shooting to the surface, and the water kept going up for 150 days. And everybody drowned. It probably took six or eight months to kill everybody during that flood. We all get the idea, "Well it rained and everybody died first day."”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

No, it took a long time for people to die. People would be running and fighting for higher ground. As that got more and more rare as the water keeps coming up, and up, and up, for 150 days, the water increased. By the way, they are still discovering chunks of ice flying around in space.
Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

God, People, Way, Idea

“I think the Earth got struck by a meteor and the water underneath went shooting out to the surface. And the Earth was covered with water.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Thinking, Water

“Eight simple steps of what I think caused the Flood and explain all these strange phenomena on the planet. Then we'll go into a little bit more detail and then we'll close this down.
1. Noah and the animals got safely in the ark.
2. A 300 degree below zero ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space. As it was breaking up, some of the fragments got caught and became the rings around the planets. They made the craters on the Moon, the craters on some of the planets, and what was left over came down and splattered on top of the North and South pole.
3. This super cold snow fell on the poles mostly, burying the mammoths, standing up.
4. The dump of ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep. The spreading ice caused the Ice Age effects. The glacier effects that we see. It buried the mammoths. It made the earth wobble around for a few thousand years. And it made the canopy collapse, which used to protect the earth. And it broke open the fountains of the deep.
5. During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals would settle out, and dead plants, and all get buried. They would become coal, if they were plants, and oil if they're animals. And those are still found today in huge graveyards. Fossils found in graveyards. Oil found in big pockets under the ground.
6. During the last few months of the flood, the unstable plates of the earth would shift around. Some places lifted up; other places sank down. That's going to form ocean basins and mountain ranges. And the runoff would cause incredible erosion like the Grand Canyon in a couple of weeks.
7. Over the next few hundred years, the ice caps would slowly melt back retreating to their current size. The added water from the ice melt would raise the ocean level creating what's called a continental shelf. It would also absorb carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere which allows for radiation to get in which is going to shorten people's life spans. And in the days of Peleg, it finally took affect.
8. The earth still today shows the effects of this devastating flood.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Hovind theory

Life, People, Age, Mountain

“In point of fact, the meteor was something like 30 km when it exploded. It was over north Waterloo and I was north of St Agatha. Two spherical clouds, and two explosions. Unfortunately, I was dealing with a goat that was trying to eat an oil truck's fuel line, goats having this optimistic 'Well, maybe it has become edible since they last time I tried this' worldview, and I missed seeing the explosions.”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

[cbp39u$gbq$1@panix1.panix.com, 2004]
2000s

Time

“I believe that there are things which humanity will never fully understand, for in the understanding of them, we will no longer be "human." One of these things is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. I don't know how it works, and I don't want to know. It's a big universe and even with our limited understanding of it, it's pretty clear that the universe is in no way equipped to keep up with the bureaucracy of its particles and/or strings. There are things lurking in the dark, unwatched, unguarded recesses of reality. Things as beyond you or I as we are beyond an amoeba. It is quite obvious that Mr. Clean Magic Erasers draw their power from these unknowable horrors. They probably found it in the core of a meteor still half buried in the Earth, hideously pulsing with a light not unlike the color of blood and hate. So use your Magic Erasers while you still can, before they run out of meteor or they discover it causes cervical cancer or testicular cancer in men and women respectively.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=070106

Women, Men, Hate, Color

“What concerns me fundamentaly is a meteoric burlesk melodrama, born of the immemorial adage love will find a way.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

A Foreword to Krazy (1946)

Love, Way

“The pale stars are gone!
For the sun, their swift shepherd,
To their folds them compelling,
In the depths of the dawn,
Hastes, in meteor-eclipsing array, and the flee
Beyond his blue dwelling,
As fawns flee the leopard.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound

Voice of Unseen Spirits, Act IV, l. 1
Prometheus Unbound (1818–1819; publ. 1820)

Star, Sun

“As it had been explained to David long ago, genetic diversity was very, very important. The more diverse the human gene pool was, the better were humanity’s chances of adapting to any new and unexpected conditions it might encounter, now that it was beginning to push outward into Space, to say nothing of surviving any unexpected natural disasters such as polar shifts or meteor strikes on Earth.
Unfortunately, humanity had been both unlucky and foolish. Out of the dozens of races that had once lived in the world, only a handful had survived into modern times. Some ancient races had been rendered extinct by war. Some had been simply crowded out, retreating into remote regions and forced to breed amongst themselves, which killed them off with lethal recessives.
That had been the bad luck. The foolishness had come when people began to form theories about the process of Evolution. They got it all wrong: most people interpreted the concept of “survival of the fittest” to mean they ought to narrow the gene pool, reducing it in size. So this was done, in genocidal wars and eugenics programs, and how surprised people were when lethal recessives began to occur more frequently! To say nothing of the populations who died in droves when diseases swept through them, because they were all so genetically similar there were none among them with natural immunities.”

Kage Baker book The Machine's Child

Source: The Machine's Child (2006), Chapter 29, “Still Another Morning in 500,000 BCE” (p. 330)

War, Bad luck, People, World

“I must here acknowledge that the best naturall philosophic that I ever coulde learn in this point, was neither out of Aristotle's Physicks, nor Velcurie's Naturall Philosophy, nor garseous meteors, nor out of any of the olde philosophicall fathers, that writ so many hundred years past; but that little which I have, I gathered it on the backside of Moore fieldes, where, by sundrie undoubted argument, I did heare it maintained, that all the elementes doo onely differ in attenuation and condensation: so as earth beeing attenuated becommeth water; and water condensate, becommeth earth; water attenuated becommeth aier, and aier condensate becommeth water; and so likewise aier attenuated becommeth fire, and fire condensate becommeth aier; and thus all of them spring from one roote, which being admitted is a manifeste proofe that there is a greate and neere affinity betweene the lande and the sea, wherein we shall finde salte water enough for our purpose.”

Hugh Plat (1552–1608) writer

As cited in: Robert Kemp Philp (1859, p. 74)
The Jewell House of Art and Nature, 1594

Spring, Learning, Water, Bee

“No, there is nothing on the face of the earth that can, for a moment, bear a comparison with Christianity as a religion for man. Upon this the hope of the race hangs. From the very first, it took its position, as the pillar of fire, to lead the race onward. The intelligence and power of the race are with those who have embraced it; and now, if this, instead of proving indeed a pillar of fire from God, should be found but a delusive meteor, then nothing will be left to the race but to go back to a darkness that may be felt, and to a worse than Egyptian bondage.”

Mark Hopkins (educator) (1802–1887) American educationalist and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 133.

God, Religion, Hope, Intelligence

“Their fear deepened with the night as they beheld the face of the heavens turning and the mountains and all places rapt from view and all around thick darkness. The very stillness of Nature, the silent constellations in the heavens, the firmament starred with streaming meteors filled them with fear. And as a traveller by night overtaken in some unknown spot upon the road keeps ear and eye alert, while the darkening landscape to left and right and trees looming up with shadows strangely huge do but make heavier the terrors of night, even so the heroes quailed.”
Auxerat hora metus, iam se vertentis Olympi ut faciem raptosque simul montesque locosque ex oculis circumque graves videre tenebras. ipsa quies rerum mundique silentia terrent astraque et effusis stellatus crinibus aether; ac velut ignota captus regione viarum noctivagum qui carpit iter non aure quiescit, non oculis, noctisque metus niger auget utrimque campus et occurrens umbris maioribus arbor, haud aliter trepidare viri.

Gaius Valerius Flaccus book Argonautica

Auxerat hora metus, iam se vertentis Olympi
ut faciem raptosque simul montesque locosque
ex oculis circumque graves videre tenebras.
ipsa quies rerum mundique silentia terrent
astraque et effusis stellatus crinibus aether;
ac velut ignota captus regione viarum
noctivagum qui carpit iter non aure quiescit,
non oculis, noctisque metus niger auget utrimque
campus et occurrens umbris maioribus arbor,
haud aliter trepidare viri.
Source: Argonautica, Book II, Lines 38–47

Fear, Travel, Mountain, Star

“Music, and mood, she loves, but love she hates
(As curious ladies do, their public cates),
This train, with meteors, comets, lightenings,
The dreadful presence of our empress sings:
Which grant for ever (O eternal Night)
Till virtue flourish in the light of light.”

George Chapman (1559–1634) English dramatist, poet, and translator

Hymnus in noctem, line 398
The Shadow of Night (1594)

Love, Hate, Music, Mood

“We are not sent into this world to walk it in solitude. We are born to love, as we are born to breathe and eat and drink. The babe is hardly separated from his mother’s womb before he stretches out a tiny clasping hand, and from that time forth he will constantly stretch out to touch the world that lies about him and the folk that dwell therein. The purpose of our growth in life is to bring us into unity with the universe into which we are born, to make us aware that we are not lonely individual meteors hurtling blindly through an abysmal dark, but living parts of a living whole. As we grow we learn to love more and more: first ourselves; then the family within the small kingdom of the home; then the school, the wider circle of friends, the home community, the college, and the still wider community of the nation; and finally, the greatest country of all, which has no boundaries this side of Hell, and perhaps not even there.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1942) " The Practice of The Love of God http://www.quaker.org/pamphlets/wpl1942a.html", William Penn Lecture, delivered at Arch Street Meetinghouse, Philadelphia, 1942. In: Friends' Intelligencer, Vol. 99 p. 231-261 1940s

Love, Life, World, School

“Wisdom and truth, the offspring of the sky, are immortal; while cunning and deception, the meteors of the earth, after glittering for a moment, must pass away.”

Robert Hall (1764–1831) British Baptist pastor

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 241.

Wisdom, Truth

“Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars — points of light and reason. …And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything.”

Stephenie Meyer (1973) American author

Edward Cullen, p. 514
Twilight series, New Moon (2006)

Life, Beauty, Star, Light

“In the dreams of the villagers a huge bear, a mythical apparition from the fading past, restored like Phoenix, walked around powerfully. Standing on her hind legs, moving towards them proudly, roaring with rage, and the horrified villagers, who could not fire in their dreams and could not even find their own voices, would open their eyes, bathed in sweat and would listen, listen in terror for the nocturnal screeches of eagle-owls scratching the darkness of the Cherith gorge, like meteors, disturbing and trembling.”

Miho Mosulishvili book A Big She-Bear

Source: A Big She-Bear (2013), p. 11

Dreams, Rage, Past

“In the 1950s, industrial workers had become the largest single group in every developed country, and unionized industrial workers in mass-production industry (which was then dominant everywhere) had attained upper-middle-class income levels. They had extensive job security, pensions, long paid vacations, and comprehensive unemployment insurance or "lifetime employment." Above all, they had achieved political power… Thirty-five years later, in 1990, industrial workers and their unions were in retreat. They had become marginal in numbers. Whereas industrial workers who make or move things had accounted for two fifths of the American work force in the 1950s, they accounted for less than one fifth in the early 1990s--that is, for no more than they had accounted for in 1900, when their meteoric rise began… By the year 2000 or 2010, in every developed free-market country, industrial workers will account for no more than an eighth of the work force. Union power has been declining just as fast… By the year 2000 or 2010, in every developed free-market country, industrial workers will account for no more than an eighth of the work force. Union power has been declining just as fast.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

About the rise and fall of the blue-collar worker
1990s and later, "The Age of Social Transformation." 1994

Country

“For ordinary books are like meteors; each has its moment, that instant when it flies shrieking into the air, like a phoenix, all of its pages ablaze. For that moment, that single instant, we love them; although they are mere ashes by then. Sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, whilst they go on insisting, with their wooden clattering, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ.”

Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) Polish novelist and painter

“The Book” http://www.schulzian.net/translation/sanatorium/book1.htm His father, Books

Love, Books, Night, Dead

“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
An amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening. Moments earlier, he had noticed a blur flourishing in the vicinity of the Reiner Gamma formation, near the moon’s equator. He assumed it was a dust cloud thrown up by a meteor strike. He pulled out his phone and blogged the event.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

Opening paragraphs of the novel; "The Age of the One Moon"
Seveneves (2015), Part One

Time, Personality

“Misled by fancy's meteor ray,
By passion driven;
But yet the light that led astray
Was light from heaven.”

Robert Burns (1759–1796) Scottish poet and lyricist

The Vision, II, st. 18 (1786)

Light, Passion

“This does not mean a meteor has fallen. This is the discovery of a star.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Watts, Jonathan. “ Chinese Human Rights Activist Liu Xiaobo Sentenced to 11 Years in Jail http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/25/china-jails-liu-xiaobo.” Guardian, December 25, 2009. 2000-09, 2009

Star

“He [ Aristotle ] refers to many examples of changes now constantly going on, and insists emphatically on the great results which they must produce in the lapse of ages. He instances particular cases of lakes that had dried up, and deserts that had at length become watered by rivers and fertilized. He points to the growth of the Nilotic delta since the time of Homer, to the shallowing of the Palus Maeotis within sixty years from his own time… He alludes,… to the upheaving of one of the Eolian islands, previous to a volcanic eruption. The changes of the earth, he says, are so slow in comparison to the duration of our lives, that they are overlooked; and the migrations of people after great catastrophes, and their removal to other regions, cause the event to be forgotten…. He says [twelfth chapter of his Meteorics] 'the distribution of land and sea in particular regions does not endure throughout all time, but it becomes sea in those parts where it was land, and again it becomes land where it was sea, and there is reason for thinking that these changes take place according to a certain system, and within a certain period.' The concluding observation is as follows: 'As time never fails, and the universe is eternal, neither the Tanais, nor the Nile, can have flowed for ever. The places where they rise were once dry, and there is a limit to their operations, but there is none to time. So also of all other rivers; they spring up and they perish; and the sea also continually deserts some lands and invades others The same tracts, therefore, of the earth are not some always sea, and others always continents, but every thing changes in the course of time.”

Charles Lyell book Principles of Geology

Chpt.2, p. 17
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

People, Age, Spring, Thinking

“The sweetest teaching did he introduce,
Concealing truth under untrue speech.
The place he spoke of as the gods' abode
Was that by which he might awe humans most, —
The place from which, he knew, terrors came to mortals
And things advantageous in their wearisome life —
The revolving heaven above, in which dwell
The lightnings, and awesome claps
Of thunder, and the starry face of heaven,
Beautiful and intricate by that wise craftsman Time, —
From which, too, the meteor's glowing mass speeds
And wet thunderstorm pours forth upon the earth.”

Euripidés (-480–-406 BC) ancient Athenian playwright

Sisyphus as translated by R. G. Bury, and revised by J. Garrett

Life, God, Truth, Beauty

“An harmless flaming meteor shone for hair,
And fell adown his shoulders with loose care.”

Abraham Cowley (1618–1667) British writer

Book II, lines 801-802
Compare: "Loose his beard and hoary hair / Stream'd like a meteor to the troubled air", Thomas Gray, The Bard, i. 2
Davideis (1656)

“So sings the world's fond slave! so flies the dream
Of life's gay morn; so sinks the meteor ray
Of fancy into darkness; and no beam
Of purer light shines on the wanderer's way.”

Francis Scott Key (1779–1843) American lawyer and poet

"On Reading Fawcett's Lines On Revisiting Scenes Of Early Life" in Poems of the Late Francis Scott Key, Esq. (1857), p. 87.
Context: p>So sings the world's fond slave! so flies the dream
Of life's gay morn; so sinks the meteor ray
Of fancy into darkness; and no beam
Of purer light shines on the wanderer's way.So sings not he who soars on other wings
Than fancy lends him; whom a cheering faith
Warms and sustains, and whose freed spirit springs
To joys that bloom beyond the reach of death.And thou would'st live again! again dream o'er
The wild and feverish visions of thy youth
Again to wake in sorrow, and deplore
Thy wanderings from the peaceful paths of truth! Yet yield not to despair! be born again,
And thou shalt live a life of joy and peace,
Shall die a death of triumph, and thy strain
Be changed to notes of rapture ne'er to cease.</p

Life, World, Dreams, Way

“The fall of meteoric stones was occasionally reported by good witnesses during many ages. But science did not understand how stones should be formed in or beyond the atmosphere”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 10
Context: The fall of meteoric stones was occasionally reported by good witnesses during many ages. But science did not understand how stones should be formed in or beyond the atmosphere... The accounts of the fall of meteoric stones were held to be incompatible with the laws of nature, and specimens which had been seen to fall by hundreds of people were preserved in cabinets of natural history as ordinary minerals, 'which the credulous and superstitious regarded as having fallen from the clouds.' A committee of the French Academy of Sciences, including the celebrated Lavoisier, unanimously rejected an account of three nearly contemporary descents of meteorites which reached them on the strongest evidence. After two thousand years of incredulity, the truth in this matter was forced upon the scientific world about the beginning of the present century. There would have been at any time, of course, an instant cessation of skepticism if any one could have shewn, a priori, from ascertained principles in connection with the atmosphere, how stones were to be expected to fall from the sky. But what is this but to say that facts by themselves, however well attested, are wholly useless in such circumstances to the cultivators of physical science, while any kind of vague hypothesis can be brought forward in opposition to them? What is it but to put conjecture or prejudice above fact, and indeed utterly to repudiate the Baconian method?

Age, Understanding, Science

“It's about a person who has a spectacular, meteor-like rise, but burns out or dies young.”

Mike Scott (1958) songwriter, musician

As quoted in in Uncut (July 2008) http://www.uncut.co.uk/the-waterboys/the-making-of-the-waterboys-the-whole-of-the-moon-feature Context: I recorded "…Moon" on my own with a drum machine, then brought musicians in as they were needed. It's about a person who has a spectacular, meteor-like rise, but burns out or dies young. Though the song ain't about him, the nearest equivalent would be Hendrix. Adding a list of all the things the hero/heroine saw raised the emotional temperature. The final chorus now had an extra fatefulness. To express this I inserted "you came like a comet, blazing your trail", then a "comet", a firework sample from a BBC sound effects record. That sweetly collided with Anthony's sax solo, so that it sounds as if the sax erupts from the comet itself. Magic like that just happens. … The Beatles' "Penny Lane" influenced the trumpet break — the sudden injection of super-fresh, bright and clear horns, a sound of optimism and clarity. Bowie's "Fame" inspired the final descending vocal, thought up and sung by Karl. I wanted the whole thing to sound like a carnival.

Personality

“Fire, the fiery meteor of the dawn.
Above the high gale,
Higher than every cloud.
Great his animal.”

Taliesin (534–599) Welsh bard

Book of Taliesin (c. 1275?), The Song of the Horses
Context: It broke out with matchless fury.
The rapid vehement fire.
Him we praise above the earth,
Fire, the fiery meteor of the dawn.
Above the high gale,
Higher than every cloud.
Great his animal.

Animals

“Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Vol. 2 "The Art of Literature" as translated in Essays and Aphorisms (1970), as translated by R. J. Hollingdale
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims
Context: Writers may be classified as meteors, planets, and fixed stars. A meteor makes a striking effect for a moment. You look up and cry “There!” and it is gone forever. Planets and wandering stars last a much longer time. They often outshine the fixed stars and are confounded by them by the inexperienced; but this only because they are near. It is not long before they must yield their place; nay, the light they give is reflected only, and the sphere of their influence is confined to their orbit — their contemporaries. Their path is one of change and movement, and with the circuit of a few years their tale is told. Fixed stars are the only ones that are constant; their position in the firmament is secure; they shine with a light of their own; their effect today is the same as it was yesterday, because, having no parallax, their appearance does not alter with a difference in our standpoint. They belong not to one system, one nation only, but to the universe. And just because they are so very far away, it is usually many years before their light is visible to the inhabitants of this earth.

Star

“Our habits of thinking so fondly connect the order of the universe with the fate of man, that this gloomy period of history has been decorated with inundations, earthquakes, uncommon meteors, preternatural darkness, and a crowd of prodigies fictitious or exaggerated.”

Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English historian and Member of Parliament

Vol. 1, Chap. 10.
The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire: Volume 1 (1776)

Fate, History, Thinking, Universe

“Once again, we can be sure that these Canadian blue-green-purple globes are not meteors, nor are they fragments of a comet or Venus. What, then, are they? Spacecraft from another world?”

Kenneth Arnold (1915–1984) American aviator and businessman

Discussing http://www.nicap.org/articles/ShalettsArticle1.pdf a fisherman's report http://www.waterufo.net/item.php?id=1148 of purplish spheres with portholes maneuvering over the Crow River, Ontario, Are Space Visitors Here?, Fate (summer 1948)

World