# Wind, Sand and Stars  ## Metadata - Author: [[Antoine de Saint-Exupéry]] - Full Title: Wind, Sand and Stars - Category: #books ## Highlights - Guillaumet, did not teach Spain to me, he made the country my friend. - And with that we knew ourselves to be lost in interplanetary space among a thousand inaccessible planets, we who sought only the one veritable planet, our own, that planet on which alone we should find our familiar countryside, the houses of our friends, our treasures. - The joy of living, I say, was summed up for me in the remembered sensation of that first burning and aromatic swallow, that mixture of milk and coffee and bread - One cannot buy the friendship of a Mermoz, of a companion to whom one is bound forever by ordeals suffered in common. - You never felt the need of cheapening your adversaries before confronting them. When you saw a foul storm you said to yourself, "Here is a foul storm." You accepted it, and you took its measure. - If its roots are not sunk deep in an acceptance of responsibility, this contempt for death is the sign either of an impoverished soul or of youthful extravagance. - perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away - True, that man who struggles in the unique hope of material gain will harvest nothing worth while. - The life of the past seems to us nearer our true natures, but only for the reason that it is nearer our language. - Happy are the lands of the North whose seasons are poets, the summer composing a legend of snow, the winter a tale of sun. Sad the tropics, where in the sweating-room nothing changes very much. But happy also the Sahara where day and night swing man so evenly from one hope to the other. - One year after crashing in the desert I made a tour of the Catalan front in order to learn what happens to man when the scaffolding of his traditions suddenly collapses. To Madrid I went for an answer to another question: How does it happen that men are sometimes willing to die? - A city outlives its inhabitants. Madrid, loaded with emigrants, is ferrying them from one shore to the other of life. It has a generation on board. Slowly it navigates through the centuries. Men, women, children fill it from garret to hold. Resigned or quaking with fear, they live only for the moment to come. A vessel loaded with humanity is being torpedoed. The purpose of the enemy is to sink Madrid as if she were a ship.