To him the stars seemed like so many musical notes affixed to the sky, just waiting for somebody to unfasten them. Someday the sky would be emptied, but by then the earth would be a constellation of musical scores
Interpretation
The quote portrays the stars as potential musical notes, suggesting a deep connection between the universe and creativity.
Machado De Assis uses the metaphor of stars as musical notes to convey the idea that the universe is full of untapped creativity waiting to be expressed. He suggests that while the sky may eventually be emptied of stars, the earth will remain vibrant with the music of life created from those inspirations, highlighting the relationship between the cosmos and artistic expression.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about the importance of artistic expression.
Let Pascal say that man is a thinking reed. He is wrong; man is a thinking erratum. Each period in life is a new edition that corrects the preceding one and that in turn will be corrected by the next, until publication of the definitive edition, which the publisher donates to the worms.
In ordinary life, the action of a third party does not free the contractor from an obligation; but the advantage of making a contract with heaven is that intentions are valid currency.
There is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.
Por que bonita, se coxa? Por que coxa, se bonita?
I don't really need to be remembered. I hope the music's remembered.
It is Ireland's sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theater from inarticulate glumness.
It's hell writing and it's hell not writing. The only tolerable state is having just written.
Your acting will not be good until it is only yours. That's true of music, acting, anything creative. You work until finally nobody is acting like you.
When we paint, whether it is on our bodies for ceremony or on bark or canvas for the market, we're not just painting for fun or profit, we're painting as we always have done to demonstrate our continuing link with our country and the rights and responsibilities we have to it.
An exact poetic duplication of a man is for the poet a negation of the earth, an impossibility of being, even though his greatest desire is to speak to many men, to unite with them by means of harmonious verses about the truths of the mind or of things.
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