James Joyce - A E Housman - Carl Sagan - Oscar Wilde - Vincent van Gogh - Leonardo da Vinci - W H Auden - Michelle Thaller - Edward Fitzgerald - World’s Strangest: Fell From the Sky TV - Paranatural: Blood Rain & Star Jelly TV - K D Lang - Euripides - Virginia Woolf - Lord Byron - William Wordsworth - J G Ballard - George Bernard Shaw - Real Crime TV -
The heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit. James Joyce, Ulysses
Shoulder the sky, my lad, and drink your ale. A E Housman
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. Carl Sagan
I never saw a man who looked
With such a wistful eye
Upon that little tent of blue
Which prisoners call the sky. Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol 1898
The lamps are burning and the starry sky is over it all. Vincent van Gogh
It will seem to men
That they see strange
Destruction in the sky.
It will look as though
Flames fly up into the sky
And flee in terror
Down from it. Leonardo da Vinci
The sky is darkening like a stain;
Something is going to fall like rain,
And it won’t be flowers. W H Auden, The Witnesses, 1935
Why is the sky blue? There’s nothing blue about the gasses of our atmosphere. But as sunlight comes through our atmosphere the shorter wavelengths – the blue light – gets scattered more than the longer wavelengths do. Professor Michelle Thaller, NASA & Caltech
That inverted bowl we call The Sky. Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubdiyat of Omar Khayyam
Like fish falling in cities, and toxic jelly that kills livestock, black space rock that’s worth eighteen times more than gold ... World’s Strangest: Fell From the Sky, Discovery 2014
Every year thousands of tons of material from outer space rains down on our planet’s surface. Most of the time we’re unaware. But sometimes it can’t be ignored. Around the world people have reported finding strange matter where these meteors fall. Sometimes it’s a gelatinous goo. Other times it looks like it’s raining blood. Paranatural s1e3: Blood Rain and Star Jelly, Blaze 2010
November 28th 2001, Manchester, England ... Mera [Paranormal Investigator] searches for anything that could have fallen from a recent meteor shower. And finds something completely unexpected. A gelatinous blob. It has a smell often associated with meteoric rock. An odour similar to rotten eggs. ibid.
Dr Dan Rolph of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania has found hundreds of historical accounts of strange substances falling from the sky. But one story in particular stands out ... ‘Flying Saucer Just Dissolves’. ibid.
August 1994 ... A strange gelatinous rain pummels the tiny town of Oakville, Washington. ibid.
Murchison, Australia, September 28th 1969: In the morning hours residents of this coastal town see a bright ball of fire shooting through the sky. Then, moments later, it rains rocks. Scientists later collect more than ninety kilograms of meteoric material ... They find amino acids. ibid.
On the other side of the planet meteor showers bring another strange rain. July 2001 India: people hear an explosion in the sky. Then as it does every year the summer monsoon brings heavy rainfall in southern India. When the rain comes it is blood-red. ibid.
Star jelly sightings after meteor showers occur around the world. But recently many reports are coming from Scotland. ibid.
The sky is an infinite movie to me. I never get tired of looking at what’s happening up there. K D Lang
There is the sky, which is all men’s together. Euripides
So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in Heaven. Lord Byron, The Dream
‘Darkly, deeply, beautifully blue,’
As some one somewhere sings about the sky. Lord Byron, Don Juan IV:110
The soft blue sky did never melt
Into his heart; he never felt
The witching of the soft blue sky! William Wordsworth, Peter Bell
Above us, along the motorway embankment, the headlamps of the waiting traffic illuminated the evening sky like lanterns hung on the horizon. J G Ballard, Crash p92
Beware of the man whose god is in the skies. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, Maxims for Revolutionists
This is Stephen Hilder’s last sky-dive. The straps on his parachute have been cut. He’s falling 13,000 feet to his death … This was no accident. Real Crime [with Mark Austin] s5e1: Skydiver: Murder or Suicide, ITV 2006
Both Stephen’s main and reserve chutes had been sabotaged. ibid.
There were over 70 competitors from all over the country and all had access to the kit room. ibid.
‘The emphasis of the investigation switched from murder to suicide.’ ibid.
First there were his debts … Steven was having difficulties academically … Steven’s relationship with his girlfriend was coming to an end … Motives for suicide were looking far from certain. ibid.