“The Cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” — Carl Sagan

Effing words, from a mad Yank in a Brit madhouse, pervade the premier edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.*

Small wonder that effing words skew the lens through which we view, upside-down and inside-out, the ineffable being in us.

Cosmic Selfies, by contrast, render a madman’s inner being effable, as few effing words can.

Everything in the universe is within you. Ask all from yourself. — Rumi

Our world isn’t made of earth, air and water or even molecules and atoms; our world is made of language.

— Tom Robbins

The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

You have to look at the value of different kinds of words. Adjectives weaken, and adverbs come even farther down the line. Verbs are strong; verbs and nouns.

— Ethan Canin

Banal words function as a feeble phenomena that fall into their own mental bogs of meaning.

— Robert Smithson

You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.

— C.S. Lewis

God is a verb, not a noun.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

— Aldous Huxley

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

— Leonard Cohen

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between.

— Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The poet’s body even is not fed like other men’s, but he sometimes tastes the genuine nectar and ambrosia of the gods, and lives a divine life.

— Henry David Thoreau

You’ve got to distill the ineffable je ne sais quoi down into something that’s clearly effable.

— Oxford Languages Dictionary

Listen; there’s a hell of a good universe next door: let’s go.

— Rumi

*Fascinating,” said the New York Times review of  the 1998 “literary history,” The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester.