A Responsibility to Awe Quotes

“ANTIDOTES TO FEAR OF DEATH

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometimes it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.”
― Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe: Poems

“For the most part school science was textbook learning: memorising names and arrangements of human organs or plant parts. Experiments were essentially like following recipes, trying to make the results come out the way you knew they were supposed to. The subject may have been science, but the process wasn't.”
― Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe