The Wanderers Quotes

“Everything you say matters," Yoshi's father had once said to him. "Whenever you say something, you are now the person who has said that.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“It was that you had to be so careful with grief. Grief sought connections: it stacked, or swarmed. It was only the first time you experienced sorrow that it stood alone, with nothing attached to it.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“She feels a little sad. Is she sad? Helen considers an alternative: She is dehydrated.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Everyone is in pain. Most people think pain in massage means something is happening, and if they can endure it, they will be improved, but sometimes the only thing pain means is pain.
It a very easy mistake to make, though.. She’d refused for the longest time to get therapy or take any psychoactive drugs because she’d felt that the “darkness” was necessary, not just for her as an actor, but as a human being.
You didn’t have to feel slightly terrible all the time, as it turns out. Her only worry now was that slightly terrible was not a flaw in her chemistry, but an appropriate response to being the kind of person that she was. “You’re very hard on yourself,” Luke said.
“Can you imagine the kind of person that I’d be if I wasn’t hard on myself?” she said back. Luke should be sympathetic. He was hoping to improve the human race, and it would be hard to get there if the human race thought it was already fantastic, thanks very much.
Well, she could still go dark, if she needed to, she could go dark right now. Yesterday she had done Terror. She’d done Fear and Dejection and Remorse. And because she had done Remorse as fully as a person could do it, she knew that she hadn’t ever experienced that kind of pure Remorse before. What she’d felt in the past was polluted Remorse, because half the time she was sorry she was also privately resentful and building a case about why the actions that had led to Remorse could be justified.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“But it wasn't Neil or Buzz that had interested her, or even the moon itself. She had been attracted to the missions' most unsung hero: Michael Collins, alone in Columbia, drifting around the moon in exquisite solitary splendor while Buzz and Neil had gone about the terrestrial work of putting down a plaque, erecting a flag, and gathering rocks. Every two hours Michael Collins had gone out of radio contact for forty-eight minutes when the moon stood between himself and Earth, and during those minutes he was the most alone person in the history of people. Helen still liked to think about that. That had always been her dream: space, not a location with it, just space.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Men stayed enthusiastic about feminism if they believed it was their idea.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Being depressed is not the worst thing. It depends on how you address the feeling. Perhaps Sergei is luckier than his crewmates. Americans always desire happiness, so they fear sadness, unlike Russians, who can draw strength from mourning. The Japanese too, Sergei understands, have an easier relationship with melancholy. Sergei is very glad that Helen is a woman and not a man. Depressed American men on spaceships are embarrassing.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“A wish is always serious, even if the game is silly.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Color corrected, yes, but I am reminding myself that it is still an image worthy of awe.” Yoshi is looking at the screen. “Why shouldn’t we feel awe? In front of a beautiful painting we do not ask ourselves is it real? We know that it is not real. It is a painting. But we can still be filled with awe at its beauty.” It”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Except she cannot escape this feeling of containment, of hindrance, and this is not a rational feeling, since the tower she has been shut in is only all of Earth. It is not anyone's fault, or responsibility, that the best of her exists in space, that she knows she's at the height of her powers, that if she doesn't go back up, then she has run out of road before she has run out of breath.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“It's a moment to learn. This was the thing about miscalculations, errors, and mistakes. You admitted them, you used them as teachable moments, and then you moved on. You didn't forget, but you didn't dwell.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“And imagine if we did it. Imagine if this little side project of the cosmos -- humans on Earth -- turned out to be a thing that survived its infancy, matured, flourished. Not a blink-and-you-missed-it-species, not bipedal bacteria, but the thing that we're hoping to find: intelligent life. Wise, creative, benevolent, possessed with an understanding about the fundamental nature of reality, sort of pretty once you got used to it. We could be the aliens we hoped to meet.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Sometimes Madoka is able to grasp what Yoshi talks about, this incredible thing they are -- they will be -- doing. Human presence on another planet, a monumental breakthrough for the species, for the history of human life. And other times, like now, this huge thing breaks down to the tiniest of particles, the brume of Martian dust, as Yoshi has described it. Why should a woman bound by her own feet to her planet and suffocating, or a man caught between worlds while his children sing "Happy Birthday" to him, why should these things not stop us all, in awe, in terror?”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“She is conscious that she is using some of her scheduled seven minutes of feelings to remind herself not to have too many feelings. To not think about how a Helen two thousand years ago would have looked at a distant tiny dot in the firmament and not known the first thing about it. To not think of all the hundreds of Helens that had been born and died, not knowing, until we reached a Helen -- her! -- who sound *stand* on that tiny dot. To not think about all the people who had taken a problem as enormous as putting humans on another planet and broken that down into manageable portions and solved it. To not become lost in the observation of a plan so wondrously -- so almost heartbreakingly -- close to our own, and yet entirely alien. It's too soon to think all this.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“What she was talking about, what she had discovered in this moment, was the real thing. Creation without object or purpose or audience.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“You didn’t go on and on about how you wanted to go to space so bad. You clobbered people over the head with your qualifications and then talked about luck when you were selected.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“As a child she had imagined workarounds for stories where maidens needed rescue, had never understood why Rapunzel, for instance, didn’t engineer her own escape. If Rapunzel’s hair was capable of sustaining a man on the ascent, then surely she could have cut herself free from her hair with utensils or sewing implements or broken-off bedroom furniture and then used it to rappel herself down from the tower. Helen had even drawn up several viable contingency options for Rapunzel, should things not go as planned.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“The romantic in Yoshi has always appreciated the fact that Mars has no visible North Star. It points not at Polaris, as Earth does, but at a position in the sky that aligns neither with Deneb in Cygnus, nor Alderamin in Cepheus, but at some midway point too dim to have a name. You could say that the planet named for the God of War points at darkness.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“These friends are giving Mireille what she wants, but she doesn’t want to be the person who wants what she wants, and so she goes on wanting inaccurately and still her eyes shine.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“But people like my grandmother knew the truth. They knew the truth about how fragile everything is, because they had stitched every stitch of that fragile truth.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“...It wasn’t only the color that suggested war to the ancients—it was the strange motion of Mars and the other visible disks that did not behave like the stars, seemingly fixed in the firmament, but advanced and retreated and advanced again along their paths. These disks were given the name planets, meaning wanderers.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers

“Before Luke had come to Prime he had considered the question of why so much money should be spent on space exploration when the problems of Earth were so desperate. Now he sees that it is the wrong question. Humans were going to go on savaging Earth and savaging each other i no one ever spent another penny on space exploration.

Going to Mars could make us better humans. And we had to be better. "When we eventually colonize Mars," Boon Cross has said, "then we need to do so as an enlightened species moving forward, not as panicked refugees clinging to survival by our fingernails.”
― Meg Howrey, The Wanderers