Quotes about sunlight

A collection of quotes on the topic of sunlight, likeness, light, lighting.

Quotes about sunlight

“Percy, let me go" she croaked. "You can't pull me up."
His face was white with effort. She could see in his eyes that he knew it was hopeless.
"Never," he said. He looked up at Nico, fifteen feet above.
"The other side, Nico! We'll see you there. Understand?"
Nico's eyes widened. "But-"
"Lead them!" Percy shouted. "Promise me!"
"I-I will."
Below them, the voice laughed in the darkness. Sacrifices. Beautiful sacrifices to wake the goddess.
Percy tightened his grip on Annabeth's wrist. His face was gaunt, scraped and bloody, his hair dusted with cobwebs, but when he locked eyes with her, she thought he had never looked more handsome.
"We're staying together," he promised. "You're not getting away from me. Never again."
Only then did she understand what would happen. A one-way trip. A very hard fall.
"As long as we're together," she said.
She heard Nico and Hazel still screaming for help. She saw sunlight far, far above- maybe the last sunlight she would ever see.
Then Percy let go of his ledge, and together, holding hands, he and Annabeth fell into the endless darkness.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

Beauty, Way, Understanding, Effort

“Sunlight comes into your house not because you want it. It happens because you open the windows.”

Sadhguru (1957) Yogi, mystic, visionary and humanitarian

Source: Of Mystics & Mistakes

Housing

“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn't people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?”

Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890–1995) American philanthropist and mother of John F. Kennedy

People, Feeling, Bird, Singing

“lovers alone wear sunlight”

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

91
95 poems (1958)

Lovers

“It's a brilliant surface in that sunlight.”

Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) American astronaut; first person to walk on the moon

60 Minutes interview (2005)

“The ways of love are all the same, whether infantile, childish, sexual, tender, sadistic, erotic, or whispered. It's simply a question of understanding, of understanding oneself above all: in bed, in broad daylight, madly or not at all, in shadow, in sunlight, in despair or at table. Otherwise, it's no use. Any of it. And the little time we have left for living, while we're still alive, in other words capable of giving pleasure, and the little time we have left for thinking (or pretending to) in this vast, mindless cacophony that daily life has become, ineluctable, uncontrollable, and truly unacceptable to any civilized person, we must make absolutely certain that we share.”

Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) French writer

Scars on the Soul (1972)

Love, Life, Pleasure, Way

“In streams of light I clearly saw
The dust you seldom see,
Out of which the Nameless makes
A Name for one like me…
All busy in the sunlight
The flecks did float and dance,
And I was tumbled up with them
In formless circumstance.”

Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) Canadian poet and singer-songwriter

Business, Light, Dance

“Wine is sunlight, held together by water.”

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) Italian mathematician, physicist, philosopher and astronomer

His description of wine, as quoted in Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo (1957) by Stillman Drake, p. 5
Other quotes
Variant: Light held together by moisture.

Water, Wine

“Let yourself go. Pull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them.”

E.M. Forster book A Room with a View

Source: A Room with a View

Understanding

“Nature is pitiless; she never withdraws her flowers, her music, her fragrance, and her sunlight from before human cruelty or suffering.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Source: Quatrevingt-Treize

Music, Flowers, Nature, Suffering

“Life today is an autopoietic, photosynthetic phenomenon, planetary in scale. A chemical transmutation of sunlight, it exuberantly tries to spread, to outgrow itself. Yet by reproducing, it maintains itself and its past even as it grows. Life transforms to meet the contingencies of its changing environment and in doing so changes that environment. By degrees the environment becomes absorbed into the processes of life, becomes less a static, inanimate backdrop and more and more like a house, nest, or shell—that is, an involved, constructed part of an organic being.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

What is Life? (1995)

Life, Change, Past, Parting

“God is pure Being, a waste of calm seclusion…much nearer than anything is to itself in the depth of the heart, but He is hidden from all our senses. He is far above every outward thing and every thought, and is found only where thou hidest thyself in the secret place of thy heart, in the quiet solitude where no word is spoken, where is neither creature nor image nor fancy. This is the quiet Desert of the Godhead, the Divine Darkness—dark from His own surpassing brightness, as the shining of the sun is darkness to weak eyes, for in the presence of its brightness our eyes are like the eyes of the swallow in the bright This is the quiet Desert of the Godhead, the Divine Darkness—dark from His own surpassing brightness, as the shining of the sun is darkness to weak eyes, for in the presence of its brightness our eyes are like the eyes of the swallow in the bright sunlight sunlight.”

Johannes Tauler (1300–1361) German theologian

Sermons, From "Christian Mystics"

God, Secret, Sense, Solitude

“What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
What peace I feel begotten at that source!
When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
Time's air is sparkling, dream is certainty —
Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
Maint diamant d'imperceptible écume,
Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
Quand sur l'abîme un soleil se repose,
Ouvrages purs d'une éternelle cause,
Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.
As translated by by C. Day Lewis
Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

Peace, Dreams, Feeling, Light

“"Twas grace that taught
My heart to fear,
And grace my fears reliev'd;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believ'd!"
And I want to feel sun on my face,
And I feel a shadow in its place,
With the sunlight shines through cloud,
When we're standing free, proud.”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, The Millennium Bell (1999)

Fear, Feeling, Appearance, Sun

“Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

"James Lovelock: The Earth is about to catch a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years" The Independent (January 16, 2006)

People, Fools

“I tend to follow a very nocturnal sort of existence mainly because I don't much care for sunlight. Bright colors of any kind depress me, in fact. And my moods are more or less inversely related to the clarity of the sky, on any given day. A matter of fact, my private motto has always been that behind every silver lining there is a cloud.”

Glenn Gould (1932–1982) Canadian pianist

transcribed from The Life and Times of Glenn Gould

Color, Mood

“He held up his watch to sunlight, letting it drink in the wherewithal that was to solar watches what money was to Earth men.”

Kurt Vonnegut book The Sirens of Titan

Source: The Sirens of Titan (1959), Chapter 1 “Between Timid and Timbuktu” (p. 17)

Men, Money, Drink

“Why is honesty so vital? Because where honesty and integrity are present, other virtues follow. … Men and women of integrity understand intrinsically that theirs is the precious right to hold their heads in the sunlight of truth, unashamed before anyone. Embodied within this simple principle and character trait rests the foundational virtue of every person and of every society.”

Gordon B. Hinckley book Standing for Something

Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes.

Women, Men, Truth, Understanding

“The child would grow up, a saviour, to give life to everything again. Starting at the dark bottom he would ascend the ladder and begin life over again, life, the only paradise there is, the bouquet of nature. He would make beauty beautiful. He would make eternity over again with his voice and his song. And clasping the new-born infant close, she looked at all the sunlight she had given the world.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

The Inferno (1917), Ch. XVI
Context: The woman from the depths of her rags, a waif, a martyr — smiled. She must have a divine heart to be so tired and yet smile. She loved the sky, the light, which the unformed little being would love some day. She loved the chilly dawn, the sultry noontime, the dreamy evening. The child would grow up, a saviour, to give life to everything again. Starting at the dark bottom he would ascend the ladder and begin life over again, life, the only paradise there is, the bouquet of nature. He would make beauty beautiful. He would make eternity over again with his voice and his song. And clasping the new-born infant close, she looked at all the sunlight she had given the world. Her arms quivered like wings. She dreamed in words of fondling. She fascinated all the passersby that looked at her. And the setting sun bathed her neck and head in a rosy reflection. She was like a great rose that opens its heart to the whole world.

Life, World, Beauty, Nature

“LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time.”

Thomas Pynchon book Vineland

First lines
Vineland (1990)
Context: LATER than usual one summer morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig that hung in the window, with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof. In his dream these had been carrier pigeons from someplace far across the ocean, landing and taking off again one by one, each bearing a message for him, but none of whom, light pulsing in their wings, he could ever quite get to in time. He understood it to be another deep nudge from forces unseen, almost surely connected with the letter that had come along with his latest mental-disability check, reminding him that unless he did something publicly crazy before a date now less than a week away, he would no longer qualify for benefits. He groaned out of bed.

Dreams, Light, Time, Summer

“The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight.”

Larry McMurtry Lonesome Dove

Variant: It's like I told you last night son. The earth is mostly just a boneyard. But pretty in the sunlight, he added
Source: Lonesome Dove

“He was alone. He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

James Joyce book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Source: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Life, Water, Heart, Happiness

“Laughter went on and on, like sunlight and stone, even if the human beings who laughed did not.”

Robin McKinley Chalice

Source: Chalice

Laughter

“Each thought, each action in the sunlight of awareness becomes sacred.”

Thich Nhat Hanh (1926) Religious leader and peace activist

Source: Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

“I want something else. I'm not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it's drenched in sunlight and it's weightless and I know it's not cheap. Probably not even real”

Mark Z. Danielewski book House of Leaves

Variant: I want something else. I’m not even sure what to call it anymore except I know it feels roomy and it’s drenched in sunlight and it’s weightless and I know it’s not cheap. It’s probably not even real.
Source: House of Leaves

Feeling

“I nodded, pretending I was relaxed. I watched the sunlight sparkling on the water and practiced mind-body integration for a few seconds by quietly hyperventilating.”

Miranda July (1974) American performance artist, musician and writer

Source: It Chooses You

Water

“So it's true. You can walk in sunlight. I thought perhaps it might have worn off."
"If I feel the urge to burst into flames, I'll let you know.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Glass

Source: City of Glass

Feeling

“Outside, the September air was enticingly fragrant, yellow with pollen and rich, lemony sunlight.”

Alice Hoffman (1952) Novelist, young-adult writer, children's writer

Source: The River King

“The sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What are all these kissings worth
If thou kiss not me?”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Love's Philosophy

Love's Philosophy (1819), st. 2

Kiss, Sea

“Wild honey smells of freedom
The dust - of sunlight
The mouth of a young girl, like a violet
But gold - smells of nothing.”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Girl, Freedom

“What… are you?" she choked out.

"No sunlight. Funky choppers." he inhaled raggedly. "Take a guess.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Eternal

Source: Lover Eternal

“Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather—storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.”

Anne Michaels book Fugitive Pieces

Source: Fugitive Pieces

History, Tree, Memory, Reading

“I just want God. I want God inside me. I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on water.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Variant: I want God to play in my bloodstream the way sunlight amuses itself on the water.
Source: Eat, Pray, Love

God, Way, Water

“[…] even in the cruelest human being there can exist a flower of good. Maybe just the tiniest blossom, in need of water and sunlight, but a flower just the same.”

Meg Cabot book Shadowland

Source: Shadowland

Flowers, Water

“My soul is wrapped in harsh repose,
Midnight descends in raven-colored clothes,
But soft… behold!
A sunlight beam
Butting a swath of glimmering gleam.
My heart expands,
'tis grown a bulge in it,
Inspired by your beauty…
Effulgent.”

Joss Whedon (1964) American director, writer, and producer for television and film

Beauty, Color, Soul, Heart

“He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”

Jon Krakauer book Into the Wild

Source: Into the Wild

Life, Water, Heart, Happiness

“The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

Tree

“She was spirit and presence, as rare and brilliant as snowflakes in sunlight, and he could not bring himself to harm her.”

Shana Abe U.S. American novelist

Source: The Smoke Thief

“Good and bad; shade and sunlight, there's but a hair's breath between them. It's all one in the end.”

Juliet Marillier book Child of the Prophecy

Source: Child of the Prophecy

“What? I bring joy to the world. I am filled with mirth and sunlight. Also, I am Batman.”

Warren Ellis (1968) English comics and fiction writer

World, Joy

“Perhaps sunlight had always been luminous, and doorways signs of greater passage than that of one room to another. But she’d not noticed it until now.”

Clive Barker book Imajica

Source: Imajica

“I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.”

Margaret Atwood book The Handmaid's Tale

Source: The Handmaid's Tale

“the sweet juices of your mouth
are like castles bathed in honey.
i've never had it done so gently before.
you have put a circle of castles
around my penis and you swirl them
like sunlight on the wings of birds.”

Richard Brautigan (1935–1984) American novelist, poet, and short story writer

Source: Trout Fishing in America / The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster / In Watermelon Sugar

Bird

“the late afternoon sunlight, warm as oil, sweet as childhood…”

Stephen King book Carrie

Source: Carrie

Childhood

“even after all these winters, I see you sitting there, perched at the edge of sunlight, feeling like the invitation of spring”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Feeling, Spring, Winter

“Quiet Prayer:
As long as the sun shall rise goes the old lovers vow. But we are children of a scientific age & have no time for poetry. Still, I offer a quiet prayer of thanks for the sunlight each time I see your face.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Children, Age, Lovers, Time

“The pillow smells like the sunlight, a precious smell.”

Haruki Murakami book Kafka on the Shore

Source: Kafka on the Shore

“Doesn't sunlight kill them? Doesn't it turn them to dust, or make them burst into flames or something?"
"Nope. Vampires tan, just like you and me. Well, just like you. I tend to bleach.”

Derek Landy Skulduggery Pleasant

Source: Skulduggery Pleasant

“She dropped her shyness like a nightgown, and in the liquid glare of sunlight on old boards she held up her hands-as if, in the terror of the upcoming skirmish, she had at last understood that she was beautiful. In her own way.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Beauty, Way

“He had the effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight being let in”

Elizabeth von Arnim book Vera

Source: Vera

“he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Grass

“And even if they don't find what they're looking for, isn't it enough to be out walking together in the sunlight?”

Jess Walter book Beautiful Ruins

Source: Beautiful Ruins

“One moment flying in green sunlight, then the sky suddenly grey and dark.”

Elizabeth Wein book Code Name Verity

Source: Code Name Verity

Flying

“Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

Conversation with Whitman (16 May 1888) as quoted in With Walt Whitman in Camden (1906) http://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/disciples/traubel/WWWiC/1/med.00001.49.html by Horace Traubel, Vol. I  Context: There was a kind of labor agitator here today—a socialist, or something like that: young, a rather beautiful boy — full of enthusiasms: the finest type of the man in earnest about himself and about life. I was sorry to see him come: I am somehow afraid of agitators, though I believe in agitation: but I was more sorry to see him go than come. Some people are so much sunlight to the square inch. I am still bathing in the cheer he radiated. … Cheer! cheer! Is there anything better in this world anywhere than cheer — just cheer? Any religion better? — any art? Just cheer!

People

“And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof?”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence

Tree

“Moroi shied from the sunlight but as I watched Sydney, I knew without a doubt that humans had been made for the sun.”

Richelle Mead book The Fiery Heart

Source: The Fiery Heart

Sun

“She left pieces of her life behind her everywhere she went. It's easier to feel the sunlight without them, she said.”

Brian Andreas (1956) American artist

Source: Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Life, Feeling

“Moonlight is sculpture; sunlight is painting.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) American novelist and short story writer (1804 – 1879)

1838
Notebooks, The American Notebooks (1835 - 1853)

Painting

“Life is a storm, my young friend. You will bask in the sunlight one moment, be shattered on the rocks the next. What makes you a man is what you do when that storm comes.”

Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) French writer and dramatist, father of the homonym writer and dramatist

For Men, Life

“You are my sunlight in the dark and the ground beneath my feet.”

Kristin Hannah book The Nightingale

Source: The Nightingale

“I just want to escape my own body and project sunlight on to the walls for her to see, so she warms up and yearns for my arms.”

Mathias Malzieu book La Mécanique du cœur

Source: La Mécanique du cœur

“She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbor:
"Winter is dead.”

A.A. Milne book When We Were Very Young

Source: When We Were Very Young

Winter, Dead

“You were the leaves, basking in the sunlight.
I was the root, growing in the darkness
~Danzo”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Source: NARUTO -ナルト- 51 巻ノ五十一

“Maybe I'll greet sunlight after all
I'm sorry”

Kris Roe (1978) American composer and singer

Act 5: Scene IV- So It Ends Like It Began
Song lyrics

“Any day, any minute we bless God for our being or for anything, for food, for sunlight, we do and are what we were meant for, made for — things that give and mean to give God glory.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

The Principle or Foundation

God, Food

“You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Montgomery Bus Boycott speech, at Holt Street Baptist Church (5 December 1955) http://www.blackpast.org/?q=1955-martin-luther-king-jr-montgomery-bus-boycott 1950s Variant: You know my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. There comes a time.

Life, People, Time, Despair

“Let the power of running be in my thighs, let me never grow tired! Let there be strength in my arms, let me stretch my arms wide, let my arms never become weak! Moving like the sunlight, like Inana, like the seven storms, those of Iškur, let me leap like a flame, blaze like lightning! Let me go wherever I look to, set foot wherever I cast my glance, reach wherever my heart desires and let me loosen my shoes in whatever place my heart has named to me! When Utu lets me reach Kulaba my city, let him who curses me have no joy thereof; let him who wishes to strive with me never say "Just let him come!" I shall have the woodcarvers fashion statues of you, and you will be breathtaking to look upon. Your name will be made famous thereby in Sumer and will redound to the credit of the temples of the great gods.”

Lugalbanda

To Anzud, in Lugalbanda and the Anzud Bird, Ur III Period (21st century BCE). http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.8.2.2#

God, Shoe, Fashion, Heart

“That is what he used to do, what he is doing now for the last hears. He is the only painter who paints like that.... like the wind, like the ocean, like the light, like the sunlight, like the moonlight, far away from everything, without any image..”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

quotes from Appel's poem '..and now I want to talk about Willem de Kooning, February 1990 http://beeldgedicht.info/Reprocitaat/appel-kooning.htm

Light, Painting

“In order to receive in the eye all the light diffracted through a narrow opening, and to see the phenomena strongly magnified; still more in order to directly measure the inflection of the light, I placed in front of the objective of a theodolite-telescope a screen in which there was a narrow vertical opening which could be made wider or narrower by means of a screw. By means of a heliostat I threw sunlight into a darkened room through a narrow slit so that it fell upon this screen, through whose opening the light was therefore diffracted. I could then observe through the telescope the phenomena produced by the diffraction, magnified, and yet seen with sufficient brightness; and at the same time I could measure the angles of inflection of the light by means of the theodolite.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

Prismatic and Diffraction Spectra: Memoirs (1899) Tr. & Ed. J. S. Ames p. 14-15

Light, Time

“She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding.”

Thomas Pynchon book The Crying of Lot 49

Source: The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Chapter 1

Communication, Understanding, Sense, Time

“Life itself seeks fulfillment as plants seek sunlight. The Universe did not create Life in the hope that the failure of the majority would underscore the success of the few. Spirtiuality atleast, we live in a democracy, an equal opportunity society.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Source: Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom, p.xiv

Life, Hope, Democracy, Failure

“Trellises for leafy vines, which will lose their foilage in the fall, should be set up over southern windows so that sunlight will penetrate into the house through the winter months.”

Ken Kern American writer

The Owner Built Home: A How-to-do-it Book (1972)

Winter, Housing

“It would let me protect the Earth from asteroids. In fact, for a small fee I would protect the Earth on a monthly basis, locating rocks that could be steered into the Earth and then not doing it if the cheque didn't bounce.
We could finally commodify sunlight. A large solar collector at the Earth Sun L1 would block all the light that otherwise falls on the unworthy and could be sold to those that deserve it (Litmus test is the same as with Operation Nice Planet You Have, Shame If Anything Were To Happen To It).”

James Nicoll (1961) Canadian fiction reviewer

Livejournal comment http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/226271.html?thread=2139359#t2139359 2000s

Light, Sun

“Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom´
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.”

T.S. Eliot book The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men (1925)

Death, Dreams, Star, Tree

“I studied a good deal in the museum at Naples; the Pompeian paintings are extremely interesting from every aspect. So I am staying in the sun – not to paint portraits but while I am warming myself and looking hard at things I hope I will have acquired some of the grandeur and simplicity of the old masters. Raphael didn't work out-of-doors, but he studied the sunlight all the same – his frescoes are full of it. So, by looking around outside, I have finished by seeing only the broad harmonies, and am no longer preoccupied with the little details, which only extinguish the sunlight, instead of increasing its brilliance. I hope therefore, when I get back to Paris, to produce something which will be the outcome of all these general studies, and to give you the benefit of them”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

in a letter written during his three-weeks-stay, working with Paul Cezanne at l'Estaque, near Marseille
Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 169 in a letter to madame Charpentier, l'Estaque, January 1882

Hope, Study, Sun, Painting

“…ignorant of all that man had ever thought or hoped, their minds burst open like flowers at the sunlight of a suggestion. They were quick to respond; plastic to a mould; and incapable of fatigue. Their faith in education was so full of pathos that one dared not ask them what they thought they could do with education when they got it.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Faith, Hope, Flowers

“Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' and let himself loose... Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part.... perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts.... the parade of the queens of the halls [Paris’ markets] is also one of the events.... Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects – perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastly white in the sunlight.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

In a letter to his mother, Paris, May 11, 1907; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 27
1905 - 1910

Girl, Sun, Parting, Painting

“Landscapes are useful to a figure painter, too; out-of-doors one uses colours one would never think of in the weaker studio light. But landscape painting is a thankless job; you waste half a day for the sake of one hour's painting. You only finish one painting out of ten, because the weather keeps changing. You start work on a sunlight effect and it comes on to rain – or you had a few clouds in the sky, and the wind blows them away. It's always the same story!”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

Source: undated quotes, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 196 : on painting landscape in open air, to art-buyer George Riviere.

Thinking, Light, Change, Painting

“Passing round Point Conception, and steering easterly, we opened the islands that form, with the mainland, the canal of Santa Barbara. There they are, Santa Cruz and Santa Rosa, and there is the beautiful point, Santa Buenaventura; and there lies Santa Barbara on its plain, with its amphitheater of high hills and distant mountains. There is the old white mission with its belfries, and there the town, with its one-story adobe houses, with here and there a two-story wooden house of later build; yet little is it altered — the same repose in the golden sunlight and glorious climate, sheltered by its hills; and then, more remindful than anything else, there roars and tumbles upon the beach the same grand surf of the great Pacific… the same bright-blue ocean, and the surf making just the same monotonous, melancholy roar, and the same dreamy town.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Beauty, Mountain, Distant, Housing

“There is a fair woman in the west,
who is as bright as sunlight.
She wears a dress of the finest silk
and jewelry shines from her left, her right.
Her face is a charm, so full of grace,
lightly perfuming the breeze.
Climbing upward, she keeps watch for her loved one,
holding her sleeves, she faces the morning sun.
She hovers, she drifts through the sky,
waving her sleeves, she dances,
flies like the wind, like a cloud, in [a] trance.
Every so often, she glances at me,
but for me this beauty is out of reach.
Left alone, I lament my fate.”

Ruan Ji (210–263) One of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove

Poem XIX, translated by Wu Fusheng and Graham Hartill in The Poem of Ruan Ji (2006), p. 39, as reported in Constructing Irregular Theology (2009) by Paul S. Chung, p. 13

Love, Fate, Beauty, Sun

“Long ago we parted,” said the slight, still man of the Fiia. “Longer ago we were one. What we are not, they are. What we are, they are not. Think of the sunlight and the grass and the trees that bear fruit, Semley; think that not all roads that lead down lead up as well.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Prologue
Hainish Cycle, Rocannon’s World (1966)

Thinking, Tree, Grass, Parting

“The purpose of consciousness is to illuminate the world. If we try to run consciousness at half its proper voltage, the result will be a 'devalued' world. But that is not the fault of the world; it is our fault. Low-voltage consciousness shows us less of the world that high-voltage consciousness, just as we would see an art gallery less clearly by candlelight than by sunlight.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

An Essay On the 'New' Existentialism (1986)

World, Art

“A builder. A rough and ready plasterer. A colour grinder. He Courbet is like a Roman bricklayer. And yet he's another true painter. There's no one in this century that surpasses him. Even though he rolls up his sleeves, plugs up his ears, demolishes columns, his workmanship is classical!... His view was always compositional. His vision remained traditional. Like his palette-knife, he used it only out of doors. He was sophisticated and brought his work to a high finish... His great contribution is the poetic introduction of nature - the smell of damp leaves, mossy forest cuttings - into nineteenth century painting; the murmur of rain, woodlands shadows, sunlight moving under trees. The sea. And snow, he painted snow like no one else!”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 198 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

Nature, Tree, Painting, Sea

“The leaf that spreads in the sunlight is the only holiness there is. I haven’t found holiness in the faiths of mortals, nor in their music, nor in their dreams: it’s out in the open field, with the green rows looking at the sky. I don’t know what it is, this holiness: but it’s there, and it looks at the sky.”

Kage Baker book In the Garden of Iden

Source: In the Garden of Iden (1997), Chapter 5 (p. 46)

Faith, Dreams, Music

“Therefore the earth is dark to me, the sunlight blackness,
Therefore I go in tears and alone, by night and day;
Therefore I find no love in heaven, no light, no beauty,
A heaven taken by storm, where none are left but the slain!”

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922) English poet and writer

The Desolate City, from Collected Poems (1914)

Love, Beauty, Tear, Light

“the sunlight will become the medicine, first for the health of the eye and then for the health of the mind”

Hira Ratan Manek (1937)

The lecture in Ashland, Oregon (8th of July 2005)

Health

“Again and again Gould has been seen to charge into battle, sometimes hardly visible in the struggling mass. Strangely immune to seemingly lethal lunges he finally re-emerges. Eventually the dust and confusion die down. Gould announces to the awestruck onlookers that our present understanding of evolutionary processes is dangerously deficient and the theory is perhaps in its death throes. We look beyond the exponent of doom, and there standing in the sunlight is the edifice of evolutionary theory, little changed.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 10.

Death, Understanding, Change

“Past the flannel plains and the blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a. m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscatine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.”

David Foster Wallace book The Pale King

The Pale King (2011)

Tree, Grass, Water, Past

“Religion disapproves of original thought the way Dracula disapproves of sunlight.”

Pat Condell (1949) Stand-up comedian, writer, and Internet personality

As quoted in Matt Hern, The Wit and Blasphemy of Atheists (2011), p. 86
2011

Religion, Way

“I wished to find out whether a similar bright line could be seen in the spectrum of sunlight as in the spectrum of lamplight, and I found, with the telescope, instead of this, an almost countless number of strong and feeble vertical lines which, however, were darker than the other parts of the spectrum, some appearing to be almost perfectly black.”

Joseph von Fraunhofer (1787–1826) German optical physicist

Joseph von Fraunhofer's Gesammelte Schriften (1888) p. 10, as quoted by Florian Cajori, A History of Physics in its Elementary Branches http://books.google.com/books?id=eegKAQAAIAAJ (1917)

Strong, Appearance, Parting

“I come to you tonight with a plea that we stop seeking out the storms and enjoy more fully the sunlight. I am suggesting that as we go through life we try to "accentuate the positive." I am asking that we look a little deeper for the good, that we still our voices of insult and sarcasm, that we more generously compliment virtue and effort.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Be Not Afraid, Only Believe, CES Fireside for Young Adults, September 9, 2001.

Life, Effort

“Be kind, Helen, I am so tired of thinking;
There are so many difficult corridors of thought,
With equal iron banisters leading back again:
So many stone stairs, Helen, up which I sought
To rediscover the windy sky, and stand, blinking,
In the lost sunlight: as bright as pain,
Helen. I would give almost anything now
Even for pain.”

T. H. White (1906–1964) author

"Lost".

Pain, Thinking

“I unlatched the shutters. The light was as intense as a love affair. I was blinded, delighted, not just because it was warm and wonderful, but because nature measures nothing. Nobody needs this much sunlight. Nobody needs droughts, volcanoes, monsoons, tornadoes either, but we get them, because our world is as extravagant as a world can be. We are the ones obsessed by measurement. the world just pours it out.”

Jeanette Winterson book Lighthousekeeping

Lighthousekeeping (2004)

Love, World, Nature, Light

“[…] then the necessary decline of non-voluntary learning and rise of the self-assured will which perfects itself in the glorious sunlight of the free person may be somewhat expressed as follows: knowledge must die and rise again as will and create itself anew each day as a free person.”

Max Stirner book The False Principle of our Education

Source: The False Principle of our Education (1842), p. 28

Knowledge, Learning, Personality, Perfection

“Immediately and definitively [after starting a painting] I determine the effect of sunlight, day and shadow, without being concerned with any detail. This enable me to see in the started painting the whole of it, which my mind already saw before I begun to work - I see it appearing on the panel or canvas rather soon and can consider in this way the harmony of the composed objects and colors.”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) Ik bepaal dadelijk en voor vast [nadat ik een schilderij begin] het effect van zonlicht, dag en schaduw, zonder mij met eenige uitvoerigheid op te houden. Hierdoor ben ik in staat gesteld, om in mijne aangelegde schilderij een geheel, dat mijn geest reeds vóór dat ik begon te arbeiden zag, binnen korten tijd op het paneel of doek te zien, en over de harmonie de zamengestelde voorwerpen en kleuren te kunnen oordelen..
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 99:

Color, Way, Appearance, Painting

“The encroachments of Slavery upon our national policy have been like those of a glacier in a Swiss valley. Inch by inch, the huge dragon with his glittering scales and crests of ice coils itself onward, an anachronism of summer, the relic of a bygone world where such monsters swarmed. But it has its limit, the kindlier forces of Nature work against it, and the silent arrows of the sun are still, as of old, fatal to the frosty Python. Geology tells us that such enormous devastators once covered the face of the earth, but the benignant sunlight of heaven touched them, and they faded silently, leaving no trace but here and there the scratches of their talons, and the gnawed boulders scattered where they made their lair. We have entire faith in the benignant influence of Truth, the sunlight of the moral world, and believe that slavery, like other worn-out systems, will melt gradually before it.”

James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat

The Election in November 1860 (1860)

Truth, World, Faith, Nature

“My dear Theo, Thanks for your letter of this morning. Yesterday I saw the Corot exhibition. It included a painting of the 'Mount of Olives'; I'm glad he painted that. On the right, a group of olive trees, dark against the darkening blue sky; in the background hills covered with shrubs and a couple of tall trees, above them the evening star.... I've also seen the Louvre and the Luxembourg, as you can imagine. The Ruisdaels in the Louvre are magnificent, especially 'The bush', 'The breakwater' and 'The ray of sunlight.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

I wish you could see the small Rembrandts there, the 'Supper at Emmaus', and two pendants, 'The philosophers'. quote from his Letter #034 to Theo (Paris, 31 May 1875) http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let034/letter.html 1870s

Imagination, Star, Tree, Painting

“I feel now if I think of it, it will come out in the painting. In other words, if I want to make the whole painting look like a bottle, like a lot of bottles - for instance maybe the end of the day, when everything is very light, but not in sunlight necessarily - and so if I have this image of this bottle and if I really think about it, it will come out in the painting. That doesn’t mean that people notice a bottle, but I know when I succeed in it – then the painting would have this.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

interview conducted by David Sylvester for the BBC, 1962; as quoted in Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics, edited by Clifford Ross, Abrahams Publishers, New York 1990, p. 49.
1960's

People, Feeling, Thinking, Light

“We are at that one of life's hours (it strikes for every man) when truth imposes itself, by itself, with irresistible obviousness, when each of us has only to stretch forth his arms to reach at a single bound the surface of shadows, even the sunlight of God. Then is human prudence but a snare and a delusion. Sanctity!' cried out the old priest in a deep voice; 'by saying this word in your presence and for you alone, I know the hurt I inflict upon you! You are not unaware of what sanctity is: a vocation, a calling. Up to the place where God awaits you you will have to climb—climb, or be lost. Expect no human help.”

Georges Bernanos book Under the Sun of Satan

Source: Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan), 1926, pp.101-102, Fr. Menou-Segrais to the young Fr. Donissan

Life, God, Truth, Help

“As on the crystal surface of a lake
The trembling shafts of sunlight mirrored are,
Leaping to roof-top, and, at random glancing,
Sparkle and gleam, in all directions dancing.”

Ludovico Ariosto book Orlando Furioso

Qual d'acqua chiara il tremolante lume,
Dal sol percossa o da' notturni rai,
Per gli ampli tetti va con lungo salto
A destra et a sinistra, e basso et alto.
Canto VIII, stanza 71 (tr. B. Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Dance