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The shuttle is not one piece of machinery. It is three. On launch, it is a rocket. In orbit, it is a spaceship. On landing, it is an airplane.
Because space was time.
The space between you and the star is time.
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?
She has been through enough in her life to know that there is no value in long-term thinking right now. In a crisis of this magnitude, you are best served by evaluating second by second.
Anyway, nobody is one thing all the time.
When we learn about the constellations, we also learn how earlier generations made sense of the world. The stars are connected to so many other elements of our life. It’s the gray areas that are most fascinating: ‘Is this astronomy or history?’ ‘Is this time or space?’ ”
“Well, we are the stars,” Joan said. “And the stars are us. Every atom in our bodies was once out there. Was once a part of them. To look at the night sky is to look at parts of who you once were, who you may one day be.”
We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets. Remembering that connection brought Joan comfort.
“I think I just wanted to feel something other than sad,” Vanessa said.
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.
“Great: for fourteen minutes, try to calm down, and then you can go right back to shoving coal up your butt and pulling out diamonds.”
Life’s not easy for anybody,
“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.”
Everyone should be free to live their lives, love anyone they choose.
“Because there are so many ways to define God and there’s still so much unknown about the universe. I could never say that science has obliterated the possibility of God. Certainly I don’t see that happening in my lifetime. And I think something would be lost, if it did. Or maybe I should say that I hope that if it did happen, it would only be because something even more incredible was discovered.”
“The Jewish philosopher Spinoza said that God did not necessarily make the universe, but that God is the universe. The unfolding of the universe is God in action. Which would mean science and math are a part of God.” “And we are a part of God because we are a part of the universe,” Vanessa said. “Or better yet, we are the universe. I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time—when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after. The air I’m breathing
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“When you die, someone will bury you or turn your body into ashes. Eventually, you will return to the Earth. You already are a part of the Earth. What better reason do we have to take care of this Earth and everything on it than the knowledge that we are of one another?”
“The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees,”
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.
Supposedly, children are resilient. But Joan suspected this was merely something we tell ourselves because we are terrified they are just as delicate as we are.
“Happiness is so hard to come by. I don’t understand why anyone would begrudge anyone else for managing to find some of it.”
Even if Joan had never fallen in love, she would still matter. She wasn’t a child just because her life looked different from Barbara’s. She wanted to tell her that there were many, many people in this world who had full, rich lives the likes of which Barbara could not fathom because of her tiny little brain.
and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy.
Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all. Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there. Humans had gone to the moon.
Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.
