The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics (Feminine Pursuits, #1)

by Olivia Waite

Did he really expect her to sacrifice her passions to support his?

This project would have been an illumination. It would have let her hold up a torch to lead the way, instead of stumbling along behind the masses of scholarly, important men.

You couldn’t reason with ambition. All you could do was moderate the damage it did. Try to get ahead of it, imagine problems before they started, smooth out the road for the impractical person with their gaze on the heavens.

Apparently science was not done with her yet.

She’d felt like a book pulled down from the shelf, splayed open by a determined reader, and held firmly in place until she gave up all her secrets.

But science always wounds the ones who love her.”

Even a love in mourning still had sparks in it.

You could take a robin, put it in a cage, and carry it with you around the world—but if you never opened the cage door, how much of a difference would you have made to the robin’s life? All it would know was the view through the bars.

I thought they might question your expertise, yes. I never thought they might question your existence!”

Anyone who’s ever looked through a telescope should know: perspectives can be distorting.”

Whole territories were beginning to burn in parts of her soul that she’d always kept carefully darkened.

It was as though someone had taken the case off the universe, and let the reader peer at the naked machinery that powered the stars.

Falling in love with a genius was a daunting thought.

“They don’t let you have anything whole, you know. If you don’t follow the pattern. You have to find your happiness in bits and pieces instead. But it can still add up to something beautiful.”

She’d believed she could bear a widow’s loneliness more peacefully than the misery of a bad marriage. But that was like choosing whether hemlock or belladonna was the better poison. In the end, they both sapped the life from you.

Future Lucy was always so much more decisive, somehow. Maybe because she was ever-so-slightly closer to death than Present Lucy?

The countess had been right: astronomers spent a great deal of time being wrong before they recognized the truth.

“You can’t always judge by what came before. Sometimes, there is a revolution.”

“But all those ideas depend on you wanting those things done to you. Or wanting to do things to me. Because it’s not about you doing, or me doing—it’s what we do together.”

“You’d rather have science a wild weed growing in the lane, discoverable by any urchin and liable to take over any ground where it’s planted?”

“You’ve got to paint the colors right, even if they won’t stay that way forever. Nothing lasts.”

“It’s about two people reaching out to take what they want, and getting burned.”

Bravery had done well by her in recent months—but when did one cross the line from bravery into foolhardiness?

“I am tired of twisting myself into painful shapes for mere scraps of respect or consideration. Tired of bending this way and that in search of approval that will only ever be half granted.”

Loving someone shouldn’t be the end of anything. It should be a beginning.”

“I would make anything for you.”

“I am not a songbird. I am an astronomer.”

You make me feel expansive, as though my heart is big enough and strong enough to contain the whole world.

But just because one part of us is secret, doesn’t mean our whole lives have to be lived in the shadows.”

How strange, Lucy thought, to watch history and the future overlap.

A discovery isn’t something you make alone, not really—it always has to be confirmed by someone else, whether you’re doing an experiment or making an observation or building a new theory about how the universe works. Truth doesn’t belong to any one scholar: it requires all of us.”

She nipped at Lucy’s lips until they opened for her, then she sank her tongue into the sweet, wet heat of Lucy’s mouth and devoured her like a comet was screaming down out of the sky, and they only had time for one last kiss before the world ended.

“So you became an astronomer one piece of sky at a time?”

Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist’s work, over and over. A process, not a paragon.”

You could never sit back and let the official pieces of paper do the work for you, oh no: you had to choose the other person over and over again, every time. What’s worse, you had to trust them to choose you. It was horribly frightening—as though you started every day by reminding your heart to keep beating.

And after all, Lucy was only a translator, stringing pretty words around someone else’s thoughts.

She would navigate by someone else’s star, until her own shone clear again.

Nobody deserved to have their heart broken twice in the span of a single year.

Every generation had women stand up and ask to be counted—and every generation of brilliant, insightful, educated men has raised a hand and wiped those women’s names from the greater historical record.”

“We thought we were separate satellites, but we aren’t. We’re stars, and though we might burn separately, we’ll always be in one another’s orbit.”

No matter what happened tonight, at the end of it she would have this beautiful, stalwart, thoughtful, fierce woman by her side.

Well, astronomers did spend most of their time being wrong. What mattered was what they did when they realized the truth.

We cannot stand up in a church and make vows—but we can stand up, publicly, and declare that we are important. Together.”