"beauty is the ache of mortality"

"'Gods fly through space in bubbles of glass, and their powers exceed ours as ours exceed those of the stones we stand on, who know only to endure.  And once long ago gods voyaged through this forgotten bay of the night sea, and to pass the time they argued a point of philosophy.'  And here the speaker's voice grew harsh, the edge of every word sharper until they were as edged as the taste of Garth's shoulder fruit, sending the same kind of bitter shock through Thel.  'They argued aesthetics, the most metaphysical of philosophical problems.  One of them said that beauty was a quality of the universe independent of any other, that it  was inlaid in the fabric of being like gravity, in a pattern that no one could pull out.  Another disagreed: beauty is the ache of mortality, this god said, an attribute of consciousness, and nothing is beautiful except perceived through the love of lost time, so that wherever there is beauty, love was there also, and first.'"

-- Kim Stanley Robinson, A Short, Sharp Shock