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

by Olivia Waite

She felt . . . rudderless. Sluggish as a ship becalmed. The long span of her future stretched out toward the horizon, a flat opaque nothingness as terrible as any sea.

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.

The moon took twenty-nine days to show off all her phases in the heavens. The sun allowed himself the whole of the calendar year to creep back and forth along the horizon. Rarer events, such as Halley’s celebrated comet, only graced the Earth once every several decades. In such astronomical terms, two weeks was nothing. A minute. A moment. A blink, here and gone.

Nothing in the universe stands alone.

“It’s a little unusual, I admit.” Catherine’s lips quirked. “Most beautiful ideas are.”

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.

“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.”

Catherine wanted Lucy, but more than that, Catherine wanted Lucy to want her back.

Let Future Lucy make the ultimate decision during revisions to the text. Future Lucy was always so much more decisive, somehow. Maybe because she was ever-so-slightly closer to death than Present Lucy?

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.”

Because it’s not about you doing, or me doing—it’s what we do together.”

“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.”

“Everything I want is right here, because you are here.”

maybe being an artist is also really about the work. It’s not about standing up and trumpeting one’s own genius to a throng of adoring inferiors, agog with admiration. Maybe an artist is simply one who does an artist’s work, over and over. A process, not a paragon.”

So Newton looked at a perfectly ordinary apple, doing something that apples do every autumn in every orchard in the world—and not only apples, but other fruits, too, every plum and peach and orange and mango—and he came up with one of the most brilliant discoveries about the physical world, something no other living being on earth had ever realized before.”

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.

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.”

“I am asking you to stay with me for the rest of our lives. I am asking you to join me in making this world a better place, insofar as we are able. We cannot stand up in a church and make vows—but we can stand up, publicly, and declare that we are important. Together.”