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

by Olivia Waite

The thing nobody had told her about becoming a relic was how very quiet it would be.

A purpose, as well as a husband.

Really, she was so glad not to have to be a wife anymore. She just wished the duties required of a widow were a little more clear-cut, that’s all. It was doing her no good to linger at the crossroads. She wanted to be moving; she just didn’t know which path was the correct one.

But science always wounds the ones who love her.”

“Science merely exists. She can’t raise a hand to anyone. It’s people who do all the wounding.”

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.

Catherine and Lucy passed the next two weeks orbiting one another like a double star: ever moving, never touching, never truly separating.

“She was my very soul.”

Of course it was a love affair. It had been love the whole time.

“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.”

love could exist—could even thrive—quite apart from the paper forms of marriage and classifications of sex.

The inescapable truth: women could fall in love with other women.

Everyone can admire the sparkle—but only another embroiderer can recognize the skill it took to create the design, and to make it a concrete reality. I told you once your stitches looked like brushstrokes—and I’ve spent enough time around artists to know a gifted eye when I see someone use it. Catherine,” she said more softly, “this is art. You are an artist.”

“Art is only art because people call it so. Art is an illusion: a reflection of something, meant to communicate a thought or a feeling or the sense of a scene. There’s no possible way to be concretely, completely, objectively correct about it. Is the painting a sunrise or a sunset? And if it’s a sunrise, what does that mean? Six people fought about it for half an hour and no solid consensus was reached. Because no consensus could be reached.”

“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.”

“Because a love silenced is something like death.”

“It’s much easier to leave the past behind when you can leave the place it happened in.”

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.”