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We are so determined to learn what lies beyond our grasp that we have figured out how to ride a rocket out of the atmosphere. A thrilling ability that seems ripe to attract cowboys, but is best done by people like her. Nerds.
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? Joan knew that society was changing and some men were changing with it. Some of them now understood that a woman’s career, her life, her passions were just as important as their own. But still, all Joan could think was that it was now just two people cutting off parts of themselves to make themselves fit together. A world of
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Being human was such a lonely endeavor. We alone have consciousness; we are the only intelligent life force that we know of in the galaxy. We have no one but one another.
“Women couldn’t join the military as pilots, and now NASA will only take military pilots. Ergo, women can’t be NASA pilots. It’s a nice little work-around they’ve got themselves there.
You make yourself afraid so you don’t feel sad. But the more you put yourself in terrifying situations, the braver you become. So you have to put yourself in more and more danger
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 mean, it’s 1981, Joan,” Lydia said. “It’s time to stop getting upset at stupid jokes and start getting stuff done.” “I would say the exact opposite to you,” Joan countered, her breathing shallow. “It’s 1981, and I’m done pretending sexist jokes are funny just so men will give me a chance at something I’m probably better at than they are.”
“I can’t stand up in front of everyone we know and announce how good it feels to love you,”
“I want to live in a little bungalow with you and if the cabinet door started to feel loose, I would tighten it the moment you said something. And I’d make you anything you wanted for breakfast every weekend morning. And I’d take your name, if I could. Or give you mine.”
“I would give you anything,” Vanessa said, “if it wasn’t going to cost us everything.” “I would never ask it,” Joan said, shaking her head. Her tears began to fall, and she dried them. “Which is how I know that you’d be worth giving it to,” Vanessa said.
“I can wake up every single day and choose you, over and over and over again. If you’re in bed next to me, I will take your hand. If you are not, I will go find you. I will spend the rest of my life, if I get that lucky, seeking you out. Not because I promised you or because you’re there. But because I will want to. I will want to be beside you. Every day. Forever.”
“Listen to me, kiddo. For some people, childhood is the best part of their lives, and later, all they are trying to do is go back to it. But for people like us, it’s different. The good part hasn’t started yet. But it’s coming. It’s just ahead, when your life is in your own hands and, listen to me, you are going to soar.”
“It’s good how you women do that, the ‘taking care of each other’ thing.”
The world was full of Barbaras. That was the whole problem.
Intelligent life was her meaning. People were her meaning.
“Listen to me,” Joan said. “I was circling two hundred miles above the Earth, and all I wanted was to get home and see you. Do you understand that? Do you understand that I don’t care how big or small this world is, that you are the center of mine? Do you understand that, to someone, you are everything that matters on this entire planet?”
How entirely undemanding of yourself it was to believe that everything happened to you. And everything was about you. And that your feelings were the only ones that mattered. Worse yet, to afford yourself the role of the victim always—regardless of how grotesquely it required you to twist reality—so that you never had to look in the mirror and admit you were the perpetrator.
