A Mast in the Cloud

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white Moon-shine. -Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 1798

High Stars

I take the omen! Eve lets down her veil,     The white fog creeps from bush to bush about,         The west unflushes, the high stars grow bright,     And in the scatter'd farms the lights come out. -Matthew Arnold, Thyrsis: A Monody, 1866

Visible Darkness

As one great Furnace flam'd, yet from those flames No light, but rather darkness visible -John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667

Virtical Being

The sensual mysticism of entire vertical being. -E. E. Cummings, Architectural Digest (Sept. 1986), said of New York City.

Infinite Distance

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower. -Denis Diderot, On the Interpretation of Nature, 1753

Empire State
(top of Empire State Building)

How is the Empire? -George V, King of Great Britain and Ireland, Attributed Last Words, 1936

Desert Island

Manhattan. Sometimes from beyond the skyscrapers, across the hundreds of thousands of high walls, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia in the middle of the night, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island. -Albert Camus, 1946