I rise and turn back…. leaving the rest of the world to coyotes who are now running across the mountain together, howling and yipping behind me, calling for the frozen night to come. – Craig Childs, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild

It was a night so beautiful that your soul seemed hardly able to bear the prison of the body. – W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence, 1919

If the Stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile. – Ralph Waldo Emerson