Martin MacInnes > Quotes

“The silence that surrounds us, the un-meaning of deep space. Terrifying, endless directionless plane. It wasn't possible to domesticate and cultivate this non-place.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“I questioned what else I had already missed so far, in my own life, simply through the limits of my character.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“You’re flawed, and the world you see corresponds to these flaws. Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Everyone should be acknowledged. Everyone should be missed when they are not right there with you because of what they carry, this very distinct way they have of bearing themselves that is like no one else and that is built by everything they have done and everything they have seen.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“A family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“as the stars were like punctures through darkness the vents such as the Atlantic crater and the Mariana Trench were similar holes cut in Earth's crust, the light of distant stars and the light of Earth's furnace, contrasting indications of a generally hidden illumination.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Galaxy' comes from the Ancient Greek for milk. People looked at the density of stars and saw birth, maternal sustenance scattered across the sky.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to ever aspect of our behavior; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Weaknesses define you, drive new and original strategies to cover them, and they make you who you are. You don’t exist without them. Correcting the errors – seeing perfectly and objectively – is neither desirable nor possible.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“I kind of love it. It's so macabre. The reason we haven't seen or heard from anything off-world is that reaching off-world status is a civilisational death knell. Life either gets stuck there or destroyed there. It still doesn't really explain anything though - we can't see anyone because it's impossible to see anyone. It's circular. It doesn't say why becoming space proficient dooms us.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Helena was taking responsibility for our mother. She was the true older sibling, with a courage and grit I’d never come close to. She didn’t get overwhelmed. She dealt with things, she took responsibility. And I never felt younger, or more inadequate, than when I saw her showing such courage.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“In my mind, the world is not reasonable, and can never be made reasonable. It is much more interesting than that.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Once he had committed to this life, there was no way he could get out of it. He was angry at us, his daughters, because the financial demands of our existence bound him to it.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“family is a group of strangers with a destructive desire for common nostalgia.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“The cell is basically an ocean capsule. A preserved primordial capsule, holding the original marine environment inside. This is . . . this is just beyond incredible, isn’t it? I mean, you could describe us as both people, and as mobile assemblages of ocean. I am not ready to get over this.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“I reasoned that if a message couldn’t reach me, its potential content could never be realised.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“There was something under this, a low, gentle humming. I didn't know enough to identify it, didn't want to expose my ignorance. The sound of the universe itself, or the sound of our listening to it?”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“[Carlos is] a temporary euphemism hung upon a large amalgamation of disparate biological material, memory and feeling. The name attached as a country is assigned to a stretch of land and water - nobody is expected to believe that it is real”
― Martin MacInnes, Infinite Ground

“the experimenter interfering with and invalidating the results. It was all but impossible to gain direct, immediate access to these threads of information, which is why they studied the fruiting bodies, the mushrooms blooming and bursting over the soil surface, instead.”
― Martin MacInnes, Gathering Evidence

“I looked into the water with eyes that were born there, several billion years before,”
― Martin MacInnes

“As soon as the train pulled away I felt the first pangs of regret - already the experience was trailing behind and I hadn't savoured it, hadn't captured it as I should have, as I'd promised myself I would the night before. [...] As we stepped reluctantly back onto the departing early-evening train, I was possessed by an unbearably bittersweet awareness of the preciousness of each moment passing, each moment that would never be retrieved. Even at the peak of it, the two of us quietly eating our sandwiches on the lawn on a plaid blanket, I couldn't lose the sense that this was ending, that the more the experience developed, the more I lost it. The closer it got, the quicker it fled.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Objects creating themselves in a frenzy of feeling, striving not to end, briefly distinct from what surrounds them before coming apart again.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“really knew what we were doing here,”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“In some ways someone as conservative as Tyler was the perfect choice to lead an exploratory mission. Tyler’s whole ethic was war-like, imperious: control the world by telling it what it is. Meet challenges through resistance and attrition. It hurt him so much to be in an unpredictable situation precisely because that was where he thrived. He would begin a process of simplification through classification and he would negotiate a corridor through it. He was addicted to it, energised by it, metabolising strangeness and novelty, turning the real world”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension

“Having received the gift for my eleventh birthday, I became increasingly interested in microscopy. I got better at looking, expanding the world by diminishing it, peering down into the smallest crevices. Digging deeper and deeper into the micro-scale brought out unimagined receptacles of time and space. These creatures were complex and purposeful and beautiful in their own way – tight knots of DNA circled by drifting flagella propelling themselves through water. I peered in awe at the oval nucleus of an amoeba. Individual bacteria were intelligent and wilful: they had a sensory system, they reacted to stimuli and experienced and acknowledged time. At this same magnification, I could see the composite cells of my own body. Ordinarily I couldn’t see any of this. Only through careful and deliberate study could I witness what had been in front of me all along. And so I did this, at home and at school. I remember this as a great period of visibility, the world bursting into appearance. The air was thick with teeming life, just as the oceans and the rivers were. A spoonful of seawater or a pinch of soil between your fingers held billions of living things. We were blind to this out of necessity, because if we saw what was really there we would never move. It was around us, between us, on the edge of us and inside us. It coated our bodies and we released waves of it when we breathed and spoke. It was in every skin cell and in the eyelashes that fluttered when we dreamed. It adapted to every aspect of our behaviour; if animals were shaded out, and microorganisms illuminated, then our ghosts would be clear in these bright peripheries. My favourite species were those that lay dormant in husk form before reanimating, such as the rotifers discovered in Arctic ice-sheets after 24,000 lifeless years. Able to withstand almost any force, they seemed to challenge the distinction between life and death, annihilating the concept of straight and linear time to suggest something more circular and repetitious instead.”
― Martin MacInnes, In Ascension