Quote: Karel and Josef Capek

And to flash from the forge for a moment, and perish, is all our desire.

From the somewhat obscure Czech piece, The Insect Play, by the brothers Capek in the ’20s. (Nowadays, it usually comes printed with their other major work, RUR—for Rossum’s Universal Robots—which, as a little piece of trivia, is the first coinage of the word “robot.”) It is a somewhat bizarre work, but it has some bedeviling lines, and this one I particularly enjoyed, strongly reminiscent of Don Marquis’s the lesson of the moth, which I also love.