The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut Universe, #1)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

It’s hard to convince people that catastrophic weather changes are coming on a nice day.”

I think he meant it to be romantic, but it left us standing in a darkness of my making.

“Elle va le faire, mais Dieu sait ce qu’elle va parler. Les bébés dans l’espace, probablement. Les femmes, eh?”

We had a saying: Engineers caused problems. Computers solved them.

Nathaniel was crying with me, because that’s the sort of wonderful man I married.

There might be cousins out there somewhere, but between the Holocaust and the Meteor … it was just the two of us.

Someone had brought gin, and of course that meant we had to experiment with other cocktail variations. For science. Chemistry is a very important part of rocketry.

You make math seem interesting.” “Well, it is.” I shrugged. “Oh, I know it isn’t for most folks, but I think they’ve just been put off by people who taught them to be afraid of numbers.”

the food had been solid, if uninspired.

it was less about me and more about elevating them—not because it was me, but because I was something out of the ordinary. It was easy to confuse that with extraordinary. I wasn’t. I could have been anybody so long as I was Somebody, if that makes any sense.