The Last Astronaut Quotes

“There was only motion. Planets, stars, galaxies—always they turned, they rotated, revolved. Rocks tumbled between worlds, comets’ tails twisted and braided in the stellar wind. The flow of charged particles swept through infinity. The endless howling cry of stars, the cold and ever-falling shafts of cosmic rays. There were eddies, vortices, currents, and that was all. Things changed over time, mutation and metamorphosis swirling across seconds hours centuries millennia, even on the scale of billions of years nothing stood still, nothing ever would.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“You’re scared,” she said. “Damn right,” he told her. “You’re scared that these aliens have come across light-years of space to invade the Earth and kill us all.” He shook his head. “Don’t be stupid. How does that make any sense? An invasion that takes millennia? What would be the point? If they wanted what we’ve got, our gold or our water or something—it would take way too long to get it back to their planet. No. I’m not worried about an invasion.” Jansen laughed. “Seriously? Then what are you scared about?” “I’m worried they come in peace,” he said.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“The grain of sand the oyster cannot spit out. So instead it grows a pearl around it, because it has no choice.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“She carried that bitterness inside her still. She always would. She had learned to pile life atop it, like a comforter on a lumpy bed. But still she slept in that bed every night.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“Jansen had heard a metaphor for life once, a poetic image of a bird flying through a dark winter storm. Purely by accident the bird flies in through the window of a well-lit hall, where a banquet is in progress—a room full of light and warmth and music, of rich smells and fragrant smoke—but only for an instant. Before the bird even has time to understand where it is, it flies out through another window, back into the storm, never to see the light or feel the warmth again. This… was the opposite”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“Or like the church meetings she remembered from her youth, when all the congregants turned to shake the hands of their neighbors.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“In the years since then, she’d just assumed that life was like that. You dreamed and you worked hard and then—something bad happened, and it was over.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“God, how she hated being old. She remembered what it was like having a hangover when she was twenty. You rolled out of bed with a headache, but one greasy breakfast later and you were back in action, ready to party.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“Without light, our circadian rhythms quickly get decalibrated and we lose all sense of time. You can sleep for an entire day and think you’ve just taken a quick catnap. You can be down underground for months and think it was just weeks. Artificial light doesn’t help, because you can turn that on and off. If you take away the difference between night and day, you start pushing the human mind right to the brink of insanity.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“She supposed different people handled fear different ways. For her it was focusing on what she was doing. Paying perfect attention to each step, to maintaining a routine of checking her compass, checking her radio, sweeping her lights back and forth. Repeated actions that rewarded her with exactly the same results every time, which made her feel a kind of security”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“Do you happen to know,” he asked Rao—she could barely understand him over the music—“how loud music has to be before it damages the human ear?” “Why don’t you tell me?” she asked. She actually did know—eighty-five decibels with prolonged exposure, or a hundred for even a short duration—but she assumed this was one of those times people asked a question so they could tell you the answer.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“How much of life was made of close enoughs and almost the sames, she wondered? Most of it, maybe.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“When one culture meets another, and one of those cultures has a technological edge—they win. They win whether they come in peace or war,”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“Sometimes you don’t get to choose your battles in this life. Sometimes you take what’s handed to you.”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut

“cylindrical”
― David Wellington, The Last Astronaut