Home > Work > The Star Thrower

The Star Thrower QUOTES

The Star Thrower QUOTES

1 " The evolutionists, piercing beneath the show of momentary stability, discovered, hidden in rudimentary organs, the discarded rubbish of the past. They detected the reptile under the lifted feathers of the bird, the lost terrestrial limbs dwindling beneath the blubber of the giant cetaceans. They saw life rushing outward from an unknown center, just as today the astronomer senses the galaxies fleeing into the infinity of darkness. As the spinning galactic clouds hurl stars and worlds across the night, so life, equally impelled by the centrifugal powers lurking in the germ cell, scatters the splintered radiance of consciousness and sends it prowling and contending through the thickets of the world. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

2 " Black magic, the magic of the primeval chaos, blots out or transmogrifies the true form of things. At the stroke of twelve the princess must flee the banquet or risk discovery in the rags of a kitchen wench; coach reverts to pumpkin. Instability lies at the heart of the world. With uncanny foresight folklore has long toyed symbolically with what the nineteenth century was to proclaim a reality - namely, that form is an illusion of the time dimension, that the magic flight of the pursued hero or heroine through frogskin and wolf coat has been, and will continue to be, the flight of all men. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

3 " The venture into space is meaningless unless it coincides with a certain interior expansion, an ever-growing universe within, to correspond with the far flight of the galaxies our telescopes follow from without. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

4 " As we passed under a streetlamp I noticed, beside my own bobbing shadow, another great, leaping grotesquerie that had an uncanny suggestion of the frog world about it . . . judging from the shadow, it was soaring higher and more gaily than myself.
'Very well,' you will say, 'Why didn’t you turn around. That would be the scientific thing to do.'
But let me tell you it is not done ― not on an empty road at midnight. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

5 " Once, on ancient Earth, there was a human boy walking along a beach. There had just been a storm, and starfish had been scattered along the sands. The boy knew the fish would die, so he began to fling the fish to the sea. But every time he threw a starfish, another would wash ashore. "An old Earth man happened along and saw what the child was doing. He called out, 'Boy, what are you doing?' " 'Saving the starfish!' replied the boy. " 'But your attempts are useless, child! Every time you save one, another one returns, often the same one! You can't save them all, so why bother trying? Why does it matter, anyway?' called the old man. "The boy thought about this for a while, a starfish in his hand; he answered, "Well, it matters to this one." And then he flung the starfish into the welcoming sea. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

6 " In the days of the frost seek an minor sun. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

7 " Primitives of our own species, even today are historically shallow in their knowledge of the past. Only the poet who writes speaks his message across the millennia to other hearts. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

8 " There is nothing more alone in the universe than man. He is alone because he has the intellectual capacity to know that he is separated by a vast gulf of social memory and experiment from the lives of his animal associates. "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower

9 " Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung... For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together, beside an unknown hurler of suns... I have caught a glimpse of what man may be, along an endless wave beaten coast at dawn "

― Loren Eiseley , The Star Thrower