Orbital quotes

Quotes about death

• all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.

• But since when did death wait, and what sort of a homecoming would it be anyway?

• Four inches of titanium away from death. Not just death, obliterated non-existence. (shaun questioning what hes doing)

Quotes about time

• The past comes, the future, the past, the future. It’s always now, it’s never now.

• In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these planets will be home to some life form

• '(earth is) 'mother waiting for her children to return'

Quotes about connection

• The thoughts left him momentarily embittered and drunk with longing (pietro thinking about wife)

• The south coast of Ireland – where her husband is

• He has that postcard in his crew quarters (shaun with les mininas)

Quotes about beauty

• he’d spend his whole time in tears, helpless in the face of the earth’s bare beauty.

• The earth, from here, is like heaven

• to be able to move about the ballroom of space; no. Its beauty echoes – its beauty is its echoing

Quotes about belonging

• This is home.

• At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides;

• They’re everything to each other for this short stretch of time because they’re all there is… they’re each other’s lifelines.

transformation quotes

• In the morning everything, but everything, was new

• Just a few weeks here leaves you paler and thinner.

• and day by day the tethers of their lives have broken one after the other and everything they are now is a new invention.

reflection quotes

• what the hell am I doing here, in a tin can in a vacuum? A tinned man in a tin can

• The lovelessness of his marriage is a fact that has come upon him gradually, one gentle dawning after the other.

• I can’t stop thinking of that now, she says. (chie talking about mother)