The Patron Saint of Shiny Objects

(Nota bene: The quotes below do not so much reflect my own reality, as the reality which I need to remember, again and again.)



Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.
~ Patrick Rothfuss

All I want is a kind word, a warm bed, and unlimited power.
~ Ashleigh Brillant

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.
~ Diana Wynne Jones

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.
~ Anaïs Nin

When I was young, I admired clever people. Now that I am old, I admire kind people.
~ Abraham Joshua Heschel

To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;
To earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty, to find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition;
To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is to have succeeded.
~ Unknown

Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.
~ Desiderius Erasmus

Stories aren't souvenir tee-shirts or Game-Boys. Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.
~ Stephen King, On Writing

You can’t do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
~ Shira Tehrani

To be playful is not to be trivial or frivolous, or to act as if nothing of consequence will happen. On the contrary, when we are playful with one another, we relate as free persons, and the relationship is open to surprise; everything that happens is of consequence, for seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for unlimited possibility.
~ James Carse

Do what you can, want what you have, and be who you are.
~ Rev. Forrest Church

"Do you know, I always thought unicorns were fabulous monsters, too? I never saw one alive before!"
"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you."
~ Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

You are an ocean in a drop of dew,
all the universes in a thin sack of blood.

What are these pleasures then,
these joys, these worlds
that you keep reaching for.,
hoping they will make you more alive?
~ Rumi

...have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

A free woman in an unfree society will be a monster.
~ Angela Carter

Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.
~ Marion Woodman

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
~ Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster’s revenge plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable or uncomfortable or dangerous.
~ Bruce Sterling

People won't remember what you say or did, they will remember how you make them feel.
~ Maya Angelou

We cannot give what we do not have. We cannot bring peace to the world if we ourselves are not peaceful. We cannot bring love to the world if we ourselves are not loving. Our true gift to ourselves and others lies not in what we have but in who we are.
~ Marianne Williamson

The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish.
~ Terence McKenna

You look at trees and called them ‘trees,’ and probably you do not think twice about the word. You call a star a ‘star,’ and think nothing more of it. But you must remember that these words, ‘tree,’ ‘star,’ were (in their original forms) names given to these objects by people with very different views from yours. To you, a tree is simply a vegetable organism, and a star simply a ball of inanimate matter moving along a mathematical course. But the first men to talk of ‘trees’ and ‘stars’ saw things very differently. To them, the world was alive with mythological beings. They saw the stars as living silver, bursting into flame in answer to the eternal music. They saw the sky as a jeweled tent, and the earth as the womb whence all living things have come. To them, the whole of creation was ‘myth-woven and elf patterned’.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, Mythopoeia

Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God's eyes. If only they could see themselves as they really are, if only we could see each other that way, there would be no more need for war or hatred or cruelty or greed. I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.
~ Thomas Murton

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
~ Camille Pissarro

If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
~ Albert Einstein

We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.
~ Ray Bradbury

Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
~ Lao Tzu

Happiness belongs to those who are sufficient unto themselves. For all external sources of happiness and pleasure, are by their very nature, highly uncertain, precarious, ephemeral and subject to chance.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer

The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
~ W.B. Yeats

Get a life in which you are generous. Look around at the azaleas making fuchsia starbursts in spring; look at the full moon hanging silver in a black sky on a cold night. And realize that life is glorious, and that you have no business taking it for granted. Care so deeply about its goodness that you want to spread it around.
~ Anna Quindlen

Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.
~ William James

Whoever injected our collective brain with the idea that love is something we earn by making ourselves want only smaller, appropriate, manageable things needs to come here and fight me, with fists.
~ Captain Awkward

We have a saying, my people. "Don’t kill if you can wound, don’t wound if you can subdue, don’t subdue if you can pacify, and don’t raise your hand at all until you’ve first extended it."
~ Wonder Woman

But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.
~ Robert Ardrey

"Speaking of livers," the unicorn said, "Real magic can never be made by offering up someone else's liver. You must tear out your own, and not expect to get it back. The true witches know that."
~ Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

Live with intention. Walk to the edge. Listen hard. Practice wellness. Play with abandon. Laugh. Choose with no regret. Continue to learn. Appreciate your friends. Do what you love. Love as if this is all there is.
~ Mary Anne Radmacher

Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte

A gentleman is one who never hurts anyone's feelings unintentionally.
~ Oscar Wilde

There were always in me, two women at least, one woman desperate and bewildered, who felt she was drowning and another who would leap into a scene, as upon a stage, conceal her true emotions because they were weaknesses, helplessness, despair, and present to the world only a smile, an eagerness, curiosity, enthusiasm, interest.
~ Anaïs Nin

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can totally transform a million realities.
~ Maya Angelou

We all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss.
~ Paulo Coelho

Ego says, "Once everything falls into place, I'll feel peace." Spirit says, "Find your peace, and then everything will fall into place."
~ Marianne Williamson

Advice to the witch children:
1. Step softly.
2. Coat your words in honey, but keep your nails as claws.
3. Listen to the ghosts.
4. Carry always a bird in your chest and a lion in your head.
5. Know that age is not wisdom, and there is as much to be learned from trees as from the books they become.
6. You were not born with a family. Make one.
7. Remember that a thing does not need purpose to have beauty.
8. Do not allow yourself to become chained to logic and order.
9. Revel in chaos, then bend it to your will.
10. Use your wide eyes for watching, your rabbit feet for running, your small size for slipping away unseen.
11. Let them underestimate you.
12. When you open your mouth and frogs leap out, do not be ashamed.
13. You are the changeling children, magic born into small bodies with untried hearts. Do not waste them.
~ KEM

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
~ Oscar Wilde

Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you never stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no whenever you don't want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you're doing here. Believe in kissing.
~ Eve Ensler

Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
~ Simone Weil

We are all connected -
To each other, biologically;
To the earth, chemically;
To the rest of the universe, atomically.
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

The best portion of a good man's life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love.
~ William Wordsworth

We've bought into the idea that education is about training and "success", defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge. We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.
~ Chris Hedges

Like a magpie, I am a scavenger of shiny things: fairy tales, dead languages, weird folk beliefs, fascinating religions, and more.
~ Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times

Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it.
~ David Foster Wallace

You have enemies? Good. That means that somewhere, some time in your life, you stood up for something.
~ Sir Winston Churchill

For me, part of what fantasy does, part of what makes it valuable, is how it can tell a story about the real world in such a way that it jars you out of the endlessly repeated sadnesses of human life and makes you consider it all in another way. How it, mythology and folklore and fantasy, provides a set of narratives through which to see one's own experience, and understand it as part of a much bigger story of the world. Because the world likes to tell stories, the same ones, over and over.
~ Catherynne M. Valente

Some things exist whether you believe in them or not.
~ Unknown

Have patience with all things but first with yourself. Never confuse your mistakes with your value as a human being. You're a perfectly valuable, creative, worthwhile person simply because you exist. And no amount of triumphs or tribulations can ever change that. Unconditional self-acceptance is the core of a peaceful mind.
~ St. Francis de Sales

There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
~ Albert Einstein

Remember your name.
Do not lose hope - what you seek will be found.
Trust ghosts. Trust those that you have helped
to help you in their turn.
Trust dreams.
Trust your heart, and trust your story.
When you come back, return the way you came.
Favors will be returned, debts will be repaid.
Do not forget your manners.
Do not look back.
~ Neil Gaiman, Instructions

Trust, which is a virtue, is also a habit, like prayer. It requires exercise. And just as no one can run five miles a day and cede the cardiovascular effects to someone else, no one can trust for us.
~ Sue Halpern

Beware of the stories you read or tell; subtly, at night, beneath the waters of consciousness, they are altering your world.
~ Ben Okri

In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away - until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.
~ Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.
~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived, and lived well.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

They're all reactions! One thing begets the next. A man has a weakness, he's flawed. That flaw leads him to guilt. The guilt leads him to shame. The shame he compensates with pride and vanity. And when pride fails, despair takes over and they all lead to his destruction. It will become his fate... Something's gotta stop the flow.
~ Jacob, Ink

Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without, and now we cannot live within.
~ James Baldwin

I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don't respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
~ Brendan Behan

While it’s true you’re haunted by your past, it’s truer that you’ve traveled spectacularly far away from it. You swam across a wide and wild sea and you made it all the way to the other side. That it feels different here on this shore than you thought it would does not negate the enormity of the distance you traversed and the strength it took you to do it.
~ Dear Sugar

Kind words shouldn't go unspoken, nor should the sweet gesture go unfulfilled. Wishes should not rot into regrets.
~ June Nadle

If you truly believe that your God or Gods will like you better as a result of fucking up someone else's day, there is something wrong with you, your particular sub-brand of religion, or, most likely, both.
~ YouAreDumb.net

We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.
~ John Lennon

You keep trying to make me into the queen of hearts, when I have always been the queen of spades.
~ Kathy Journeay

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."
~ Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

The mind I love must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody's fathomed the depth of, and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.
~ Katherine Mansfield

There is no intimacy like that between two women who have chosen to be sisters.
~ Warsan Shire

Dance when you're broken open.
Dance when you've torn the bandage off.
Dance in the middle of the fighting.
Dance in your blood.
Dance, when you are perfectly free.
~ Rumi

What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
~ G.K. Chesterton

As a general rule, if someone is actually a good person, you don’t need to add "but they’re actually a good person" to justify their behavior.
~ Emm Roy

Being a monster is not the same as being a bad person. It just means you’re willing to eat the world if that’s what you have to do to keep yourself alive...You’re not willing to admit that you’re a monster too, and you should. You should just let yourself be the monster you want to be.
~ Mira Grant, Chimera

Somewhere, there is a story which will suit you, enable you to grow, and it is not necessarily the story of your own personal ancestors, your own personal culture. It may be half a globe away from them, or fourteen hundred years, and you may have to seek long through space/time before you find it. But you will know it when you have found it because it will let you see at last that there is no qualitative difference between thought and matter, and that the creative imagination is more healing than any medicine. Don't settle for someone else's story. Find yours. Create a truth which is your truth. And remember that while the facts remain the same, the truth is always changing.
~ Elizabeth Arthur

You discover that only because someone doesn't love you the way you would like her to,
It doesn't mean that this person doesn't love you the most she can,
Because there are people who love us,
But just don't know how to show or live that.
~ Veronica A. Shoffstal, After A While, You Learn...

My religion, such as it is, is that we are shaped by the universe to be its consciousness. We tell the universe what it is... in my religion, the building of a telescope is the building of a cathedral.
~ Terry Pratchett

Shame is the lie someone told you about yourself.
~ Anaïs Nin

Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations of me. Isn't that generous?
~ Jareth, the Goblin King, Labyrinth

All of my life has been a relearning to pray - a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and the vain repetition 'Me, Lord, me,' instead watching attentively for the light that burns at the center of every star, every cell, every living creature, every human heart.
~ Chet Raymo

Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.
~ Edwidge Danticat

Peace is not something you wish for; it's something you make, something you do, something you are, and something you give away.
~ Robert Fulghum

All girls continue to be taught when they are young, if not by their parents then by the culture around them, that they must earn the right to be loved — that "femaleness" is not good enough. This is a female’s first lesson in the school of patriarchal thinking and values. She must earn love. She is not entitled. She must be good enough to be loved. And good is always defined by someone else, someone on the outside.
~ bell hooks

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury; and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable; and wealthy, not rich; to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly... to listen to stars and buds, to babes and sages, with open heart; await occasions, hurry never... this is my symphony.
~ William Henry Channing

You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before and she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect - you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.
~ Bob Marley

Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone."
~ Kurt Vonnegut

A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word "darkness" on the walls of his cell.
~ C.S. Lewis

Live a good life.
If there are gods and they are just, then they will not care how devout you have been, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by.
If there are gods, but unjust, then you should not want to worship them.
If there are no gods, then you will be gone, but will have lived a noble life that will live on in the memories of your loved ones.
~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return.
~ Oscar Wilde

When a person tells you you hurt them, you don’t get to decide you didn’t.
~ Louis C.K.

This is what you shall do:
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
Despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks,
Stand up for the stupid and crazy,
Devote your income and labors to others,
Hate tyrants, argue not concerning God,
Have patience and indulgence toward the people,
Take off your hat to nothing known or unknown,
Or to any man or number of men,
Go freely with powerful uneducated persons,
And with the young and with the mothers of families,
Read these leaves in the open air,
Every season of every year of your life,
Reexamine all you have been told,
At school at church or in any book,
Dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
And your very flesh shall be a great poem,
And have the richest fluency not only in its words,
But in the silent lines of its lips and face,
And between the lashes of your eyes,
And in every motion and joint of your body.
~ Walt Whitman

Be humble, for you are made of earth. Be noble, for you are made of stars.
~ Serbian proverb

Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered, I have fought my way here to the castle beyond the Goblin City to take back the child that you have stolen, for my will is as strong as yours, and my kingdom as great: you have no power over me.
~ Sarah, Labyrinth

If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
~ J.R.R. Tolkien

What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.
~ Albert Pine

The one thing a creator can bring to the table when everybody else has all the money and power is a centeredness and the ability to walk away. Never sit at a table you can’t walk away from.
~ Joss Whedon

I have love in me the likes of which you can scarcely imagine and rage the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.
~ Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Never put your faith in a Prince. When you require a miracle, trust in a Witch.
~ Catherynne M. Valente

Mercy’s a fine thing, but judgin’ comes first. Otherwise you don’t know what you’re bein’ merciful about.
~ Granny Weatherwax (Terry Pratchett), Carpe Jugulum

humans are so cute, when we say goodbye we put our arms around each other and to show we love someone we bring them flowers. we say hello by holding each other’s hand, and sometimes tiny little dewdrops form in our eyes. for pleasure we listen to arrangements of sounds, press our lips together, smoke dried leaves, get drunk off of old fruit. we’re all just little animals, falling in love and having breakfast beneath billions of stars.
~ youphoric

A Witch is born out of the true hungers of her time. I am a child of the poisonous wind that copulated with the river on an oil-slick, garbage infested midnight. I turn about on my own parentage. I inoculate against those very biles that brought me to light. I am a serum born of venoms. I am the antibody of all time.
~ Ray Bradbury, Long After Midnight

...No artist is ever pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive than the others.
~ Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille

Blessed is he, who has learned to bear what he cannot change, and to give up with dignity, what he cannot save.
~ Friedrich Schiller

Fairy tales are more than moral lessons and time capsules for cultural commentary; they are natural law. The child raised on folklore will quickly learn the rules of crossroads and lakes, mirrors and mushroom rings. They’ll never eat or drink of a strange harvest or insult an old woman or fritter away their name as though there’s no power in it. They’ll never underestimate the youngest son or touch anyone’s hairpin or rosebush or bed without asking, and their steps through the woods will be light and unpresumptuous. Little ones who seek out fairy tales are taught to be shrewd and courteous citizens of the seen world, just in case the unseen one ever bleeds over.
~ S.T. Gibson

SHE is neither pink nor pale,
And she never will be all mine;
She learned her hands in a fairy-tale,
And her mouth on a valentine.

She has more hair than she needs;
In the sun ’tis a woe to me!
And her voice is a string of colored beads,
Or steps leading into the sea.

She loves me all that she can,
And her ways to my ways resign;
But she was not made for any man,
And she never will be all mine.
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay, Witch-Wife

Always keep mint on your windowsill in August, to ensure that buzzing flies will stay outside, where they belong. Don’t think the summer is over, even when roses droop and turn brown and the stars shift position in the sky. Never presume August is a safe or reliable time of year. It is the season of reversals, when birds no longer sing in the morning and the evenings are made of equal parts golden light and black clouds. The rock-solid and the tenuous can easily exchange places until everything you know can be questioned and put into doubt.
~ Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
~ Ernest Hemingway

Treat these remains with care; some of them are fragile and all of them are irreplaceable.
~ Tim D. White, The Human Bone Manual

We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
~ Arthur O'Shaughnessy, Ode (verse 1)