Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

But I think it is also the relief I feel that those stars are immovable.

Nothing you or I could do will ever alter them. They are so much bigger than us. And they will not change within our lifetime. We can succeed or fail, get it right or get it wrong, love and lose the ones we love, and still the Summer Triangle will point south. And in that way, I know everything will be some type of okay—as impossible as that can seem sometimes.

The human body—intelligent as it is—was formed in response to the atmosphere of Earth.

my mom said that if I was going to be proud of myself for being generous, that I had to do it even when it meant I might lose something.

‘You have to have something on the line, for it to be called character.’ ”

Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.

To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

Bravery is being unafraid of something other people are afraid of. Courage is being afraid, but strong enough to do it anyway.”

You could develop your personality your entire life—pursue the things you wanted to learn, discover the most interesting parts of yourself, hold yourself to a certain standard—and then you marry a man and suddenly his personality, his wants, his standards subsume your own?

A world of vegetarians cooking meatloaf.

Alpha Herculis, or Rasalgethi, which is Arabic for ‘Head of the Kneeler.’ It’s almost four hundred years into the past you’re looking.

We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets.

You make yourself afraid so you don’t feel sad. But the more you put yourself in terrifying situations, the braver you become.

Because the world had decided that to be soft was to be weak, even though in Joan’s experience being soft and flexible was always more durable than being hard and brittle. Admitting you were afraid always took more guts than pretending you weren’t. Being willing to make a mistake got you further than never trying. The world had decided that to be fallible was weak. But we are all fallible. The strong ones are the ones who accept it.

I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-living thing around me. Life is God. My life is tied to yours, and to everyone’s on this planet. How does that not instantly make us more in debt to one another? And also offer us the comfort that we are not alone?”

the moments of legacy she found the most compelling: the chance to share something of the past with a person who could bring it further into the future.

But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used to be and falling in love again with the girl Frances was becoming.

Language is what allows us to communicate. But it also limits what we can say, perhaps even how we feel.

“But if it’s you or the space shuttle…fuck the space shuttle.”