2
" Aeneas' mother is a star?" " No; a goddess." I said cautiously, " Venus is the power that we invoke in spring, in the garden, when things begin growing. And we call the evening star Venus." He thought it over. Perhaps having grown up in the country, among pagans like me, helped him understand my bewilderment. " So do we, he said. " But Venus also became more...With the help of the Greeks. They call her Aphrodite...There was a great poet who praised her in Latin. Delight of men and gods, he called her, dear nurturer. Under the sliding star signs she fills the ship-laden sea and the fruitful earth with her being; through her the generations are conceived and rise up to see the sun; from her the storm clouds flee; to her the earth, the skillful maker, offers flowers. The wide levels of the sea smile at her, and all the quiet sky shines and streams with light..." It was the Venus I had prayed to, it was my prayer, though I had no such words. They filled my eyes with tears and my heart with inexpressible joy. "
4
" Then they wondered if there were men in the stars. Why not? And as creation is harmonious, the inhabitants of Sirius ought to be huge, those of Mars middle-sized, those of Venus very small. Unless it is the same everywhere. There are businessmen, police up there; people trade, fight, dethrone their kings.
Some shooting stars suddenly slid past, describing a course in the sky like the parabola of a monstrous rocket.
‘My Word,’ said Bouvard, ‘look at those worlds disappearing.’
Pecuchet replied: ‘If our world in its turn danced about, the citizens of the stars would be no more impressed than we are now. Ideas like that are rather humbling.’
‘What is the point of it all?’
‘Perhaps there isn’t a point.’
‘Yet…’ and Pecuchet repeated the word two or three times, without finding anything more to say. "
― Gustave Flaubert , Bouvard and Pecuchet
7
" Women, he would say, are not Muses. Muses are Muses. To confuse one with the other is to mistake the Devouring Void for the Seminal Light. Earthly Women and the Muses are ancient, sworn enemies. The battlefield is the Creative Male. On the one side is the encampment of Discordia, of Diana, of Venus located in his Heart and in his Groin. On the other is the Bastion of Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania, in his Brain and in his Mind. The Muses are tolerant and understanding of border raids, skirmishes, and harassing maneuvers. Throughout the history of the Male Light, there have been few painters, few writers, who have not had a She Who Must Be Accommodated. For some it was their mothers. For many their wives, their mistresses, their girlfriends. For many it was their daughters, a favourite waitress, a stripper, a whore. To the Muses, they are all one. Mother, whore, wife, daughter, stripper, waitress, mistress, girlfriend. "
― Dave Sim
8
" Beauty! Wasn't that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers, 'beauty' smacked of the rarefied, the indulgent, the superfluous, the effete. How could persons of good conscience pursue the beautiful when there was so much suffering and injustice in the world? Ellen Cherry's answer was that if one didn't cultivate beauty, soon he or she wouldn't be able to recognize ugliness. The prevalence of social ugliness made commitment to physical beauty all the more essential. And the very presence in life of double-wide mobile homes, Magic Marker graffiti, and orange shag carpeting had the effect of making ills such as poverty, crime, repression, pollution, and child abuse seem tolerable. In a sense, beauty was the ultimate protest, and, in that it generally lasted longer than an orgasm, the ultimate refuge. The Venus de Milo screamed 'No!' at evil, whereas the Spandex stretch pant, the macrame plant holder were compliant with it. Ugly bedrooms bred ugly habits. Of course, it wasn't required of beauty that it perform a social function. That was what was valuable about it. "
― Tom Robbins , Skinny Legs and All
9
" Lark’s SongThat child who from Diana’s thought is bornA huntress swift, who doth the world adornWith strength and passion worthy of the GreenMay wax, and one day rise to be a queen.That child who in the eye of Phoebus growsOf visage fair, that none would dare opposeMay in her hand hold light and glory too,And to the Light hold sternly staunch and true.That child who with the face of Venus smiles,Will bear a heart of mischief and of wiles,And may in time love’s faithful bonds fulfilWhile bending lesser hearts unto her will.That child who with Athena’s grace doth moveMay to all eyes her worldly wisdom proveAnd make right wise and fulsome use thereofTo measure all who seek to win her love.That child who with grim Circe’s tongue foretells Enmeshing faithful hearts within her spellsBy dint of sly mendacity and guile,All innocence and virtue may defile.That child who by her cunning doth conniveMay by fair Tyche’s fortune wax and thriveAnd come in time to sit upon a throne;Or fail and fall, forsaken and alone.That child may choose to hark to glory’s callAnd shine in splendour, loved by one and all;Or cleave to darkness, hated and reviled:Chance crafts the fate of every fate-touched child. "
12
" The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin. "
― Cornell Woolrich
14
" ROSEMARY
Beauty and Beauty’s son and rosemary—
Venus and Love, her son, to speak plainly—
born of the sea supposedly, at Christmas each, in company,
braids a garland of festivity.
Not always rosemary— since the flight to Egypt, blooming differently.
With lancelike leaf, green but silver underneath,
its flowers—white originally—
turned blue. The herb of memory,
imitating the blue robe of Mary,
is not too legendary
to flower both as symbol and as pungency.
Springing from stones beside the sea,
the height of Christ when thirty-three—
it feeds on dew and to the bee
“hath a dumb language”; is in reality
a kind of Christmas-tree. "
― Marianne Moore , Complete Poems
19
" (...)Through the ship's telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth.
That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ...
... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ...
... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift...
... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ...
... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ...
... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ...
In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History's closing act. "
― Arthur C. Clarke