Light from Other Stars Quotes

“Nothing made you angry like missing someone.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Inventions were not like your children. Your children were all your flaws shown to you in a way that made you love them: your worst made good. Inventions were your best attempt at beautiful thought. They were objective; they worked or they did not. They had purpose, whether they achieved it or not. They were yours always, in that they did not leave you, or turn away.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“When customers asked why Betheen's baking was better than anyone else's, she forced herself to blush and say her kitchen was downwind from Prater Grove; everything had a little orange blossom in it. She did not say, 'Because I'm a chemist, asshole,' though the words always threatened to escape. Women from the Society House wanted folksy comfort. Chemistry - though it kept them alive with their heart pills, made their food sweet, and held their dentures in their mouths - was not desired, not from her.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Before the call buzzed in, Nedda wound her fingers in the small knot of hair at the back of Evgeni’s head. Light, scratchy—a warm steel-wool pad, but soft. She gave it a gentle tug. “See? I like you fine.” When Mission Control appeared on-screen, Evgeni was laughing. They said nothing about blindness. Nothing about energy spikes or which government made the swap from plutonium to strontium. The space between Earth and Chawla filled with all the things that could not be said.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Everything felt wrong. She needed to go home, to her dad’s small lab in the basement, to curl up on one of the tables like she used to. It had been a long time since she’d last brought a quilt down and made a nest for herself among the books, tubes, and wires—a million years or however long it took light to travel. She’d rest her cheek on the table and listen to her dad talk about space. She’d been little when he’d told her about the beginning of the universe and how the solar system was born. How the sun was like an island, and the planets were ships sailing around it. He’d said, “Pluto is our far star sailor,” the way other people said Once upon a time. His words opened a door inside her. She wished she’d brought her NASA book, with six full pages on the “Thirty-Five New Guys,” the Astronaut Class of 1978, NASA’s first new group of astronauts since 1969. On Sally Ride, on Challenger—which she realized was gone now—on Judy Resnik, mission specialist, the second American woman in space. Who Nedda wanted to be. Who was gone now too. They were gas and carbon—and what else? They had to be something else. She wanted her stupid little-kid pony, but it was in the classroom. She wanted to go fishing with Denny, even if it was too cold. She wanted to smell her mother’s perfume until she was sick from it. She wanted to eat all the icing roses off that stupid cake until Betheen yelled.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Every week Dr. Stein asked, “What do you see out the window?” Her stylus was never on camera, but Nedda could hear it sliding across a tablet. It was difficult to explain what she saw, harder still to parse its meaning. Space between stars made for easy misery, contemplating how small you were when faced with the universe. Though he was mission commander, Amit Singh looked out as little as possible, preferring star maps, feeds from the telescopes, and data from the probes and terraformers. He remained intent on viewing himself as a person and not a single cell in an organism the size of the universe. Nedda liked feeling small. “Endless space is endless potential,” she’d told Dr. Stein. It was good to sound hopeful. It was trickier to explain that she was looking for light, picking it apart, trying to sense the different wavelengths, searching for the familiar. There was light in the black, on its way to and from distant planets, light from stars crashing into one another, meeting in the space between. Light carried thoughts and hopes, the essence of what made everyone.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“She'd been taught that fear was worry that something bad would happen to you. It wasn't. Fear was something horrible happening to someone you love, someone you need, and you being left alone.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“To Nedda, psychology and gynecology were similar in that a doctor saw more of your most intimate parts than you did.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Theo!” Betheen’s voice carried down the laundry chute. He heard the crying before he saw her. She gripped the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Betheen was art, empirically beautiful, engendering awe in its full capacity—wonder and fear. He adhered to their rhythm of wait, approach, and retreat. “Beth?” “They’re dead. They died.” Her body clenched, a stiff extension of the bentwood chairback. Knuckles bloodless. She’d held his hand like that once, squeezing his fingers until the joints popped. Now, that too-tight grasp could break him. They pretended they didn’t miss those things. “What happened?” “It’s gone, the whole shuttle. An explosion.” A flicker from the living room showed that the television was on. Smoke against blue sky. “They’re supposed to be safe now,” she said.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Raising Nedda was painful in ways he hadn’t anticipated, as though a cord connected them, its pull as strong as any chemical bond. One day, it would break and she would leave. Eleven was a spectacular age. Her brain was blooming, her mind ripe for learning. She was building new cells to contain everything she learned, forging new neural pathways, and each day she was different, a little more, a little brighter. All the while, his brain was wearing down; every brain over twenty-five was. Nedda was at the point of infinite potential, the moment where genius was born. What an incredible thing it would be to hold on to that precise moment.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“She’d seen her father as a little boy, as an old man, and all the people in between, but none of those fathers were him. When sine crossed X, she knew him like she knew home, the cracks in the front porch steps she walked over every day, the creaky spot in the kitchen floor, how the living room smelled like all of them together. She knew him the way you know the smell of chocolate chip cookies in the oven, or the nap of a favorite blanket snuggled”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Inventions were not like your children. Your children were all your flaws shown to you in a way that made you love them: your worst made good.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“But what’s adulthood but managed expectations and disappointment.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Boys, he knows, are brutal and awful. They beat you with their bodies. He is this thing. Girls, women, are smarter. They break you just by living.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Judy Resnik was Jewish, and Nedda didn't believe in Heaven or Hell. If her dad was right, people who died were just thoughts traveling like light, continuing. It was sad, but not. Being sure about things, like Denny was, seemed easier.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Last winter, in a fit of attentive parenting, Betheen had demanded that Nedda clean up her language. To do it properly, Nedda wanted to know every single forbidden
word and derivation. The shelf by her bed began accumulating lists of every cuss she encountered, and her mother's reaction to them. Gradually the project became
less about documentation and more about the evolution of swearing. When she'd exhausted standard swears and their traditional permutations, she invented new ones, compound swears, swears that were only swears on certain occasions, and swears for things most people didn't understand were awful. A stack of pages grew, list after list of a filthy, silent scream. So when Nedda called Jimmy La Morte a cunt, it was based on long hours of copious research.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Nedda’s dream eye kept traveling as she slept, searching for all the things she missed: the town, the buildings inside it, the houses, rooms, and people, like dolls, whose hearts she knew. The seismic hiccup of the launch rolled through her. She saw glasses break at the Bird’s Eye, and Ellery Rees sweeping up a shattered sundae dish. The gators at Jonny’s Jungle World sank into their ponds like beans in soup, hugging the murk at the bottom. Then the surge from Crucible ran through her like an electric shock, hot and cold at once. Strong. It coursed through power lines, the lines to the college, the wires in the walls, through the outlets in the labs. It pulsed across a gold-plated switch, shattering a glass divider beneath it. Light spilled from Crucible, infrared and ultraviolet, escaping everything meant to contain it. Her father’s machine was as much hope and wish as it was metal and glass.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Singh will crunch numbers, Evgeni will work the logistics of a fix, and I’ll make sure we don’t die from our own mutated bacteria in the meantime. Oh. And fix our eyes. Easy as pie. Nothing to worry about.” “Your bedside manner is amazing.” “I know; I’m a born healer. Keep your legs straight. We don’t want your veins cramping up. There you go.” The sleep sack moved body fluids from the extremities back to the center. At first the pressure was like crawling ants, but gradually the rhythmic pulsing had become as necessary to sleep as darkness. Sadly, it did little for sight. Evgeni’s vision loss was ahead of the curve, but Nedda had noticed a significant softening in her own world. The pressure suits, contacts, goggles, and sleep sacks were supposed to help, but the progressive astigmatism continued. “When I’m up again, test my eyes, okay?” “Sure thing.” Sleep weeks were to slow vision loss and ease the passage of time, making a five-year trip feel like half that. Crew morale was supposed to benefit from them; less time awake with your crewmates meant less time to learn to dislike them, and less time to look out into the blackness of space, dissociating, dislocating.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Sure. But you’re cool, and I know I’m dumb. Jimmy’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s stupid.” She hated when he said things like that. “You’re not dumb.” “Then I’m lazy. Did you ask your dad about the monkey?” “We talked about other stuff.” “Like what?” He picked at one of the rug loops with fingernails still dirty from the truck. “What happens after you die.” “Easy,” he said. “You go to Heaven or Hell. Unless you’re Jewish. Josh Ast said Jews don’t believe in Heaven or Hell. I bet they’re super surprised when they wind up there. Think how pissed off you’d be, being dead and finding out you’re totally wrong.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“She cut him off before he could start in on marbles. “Why would you want to stop time?” “Ah. Better question.” He sat, letting her look down on his hair, the wiry curled mop, thick as his beard and streaked with white. It looked like steel wool. “You’re growing up too fast, Little Twitch. Maybe I want to keep you with me longer.” He smiled, but it was tight, square. “What if you could stop all the wear on things like bridges? Or make food that lasts twice as long before it goes rotten? A doctor could stop joints from breaking down.” “You want to use it on your hands.” “It might eventually help someone like me. I’m looking for a contained area of effect. And I’m also looking for a patent, so everyone will know you’re the smartest daughter of the smartest man in the world.” That smile was a good one.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Crying in a lab didn’t feel right. If you broke something or made a mistake, you could get mad, but sad didn’t fit. So she talked. “She had one hundred forty-five hours in orbit and helped design Discovery’s arm. She was an electrical engineer.” It was like opening a closet door—everything fell out. “Judy Resnik played piano and had a picture of Tom Selleck in her locker.” Mr. Pete had a bank of lockers from NASA in his house and she could fit inside them. It was good to be small in an orbiter because there was no extra room in them. Mid-mission, Judy Resnik had held up a sign that said HI DAD. Nedda loved her dad too. She told him about Challenger’s insulation, the felt that made it lighter, about how much it could haul, about ceramic tiles. His hand stilled when she stopped talking, like he knew when she was empty. “That’s an awful lot. Do you feel better?” “I guess.” But she didn’t. She pulled away and climbed onto the lab table. She wished she’d brought a quilt.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars

“Betheen wouldn’t want her to on a school night. Her dad wouldn’t either, because he’d kept her up last night. And something bad had happened, so they’d have to sit and talk, until everybody agreed on the right amount of upset to be. They walked to the turnoff for their houses. Her insides started humming again and they hummed wrong. She needed to light flash paper on fire, or read something, or throw more rocks. Anything. “Hey, can I see the patch again?” Denny looked at it for a long time, turning it around and around again before giving it back. “It’s awesome. I wish I could draw stuff like that. I bet they would have loved it.” Then he turned and walked to his house. She wasn’t crying, no matter what. Crying would only make the anxious buzz inside her worse.”
― Erika Swyler, Light from Other Stars