MxMorden

“He found himself wishing he could go back and start again and do everything differently. But time was the worst thing; time, it seemed to him now, was the only thing you couldn't change; whatever you did, it kept coming.”
― Carys Davies, Clear

“C’mon, don’t be like that.” Mungo rammed his shoulder into his.
When he did this to Jodie, she would shove him back, and soon they would be tormenting each other until whatever had first ailed them would have dissolved for a while. Mungo rammed him again. James didn’t move. Mungo felt foolish, pressed against his side. He was going to straighten himself when James shifted slightly. James raised his arm out from under the weight and draped it across Mungo’s shoulders. It made Mungo flinch in anticipation of a blow, a flick, a chokehold. But as he waited for retaliation, it slowly dawned on him that no hurt was coming. Instead of rejecting him James had made more space for him.”
― Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo

“The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“We send out the Voyager probes into interstellar space in a big-hearted fanciful spasm of hope. Two capsules from earth containing images and songs just waiting to be found in – who knows – tens or hundreds of thousands of years if all goes well. Otherwise millions or billions, or not at all. Meanwhile we begin to listen. We scan the reaches for radio waves. Nothing answers. We keep on scanning for decades and decades. Nothing answers. We make wishful and fearful projections through books, films and the like about how it might look, this alien life, when it finally makes contact. But it doesn’t make contact and we suspect in truth that it never will. It’s not even out there, we think. Why bother waiting when there’s nothing there? And now maybe humankind is in the late smash-it-all-up teenage stage of self-harm and nihilism, because we didn’t ask to be alive, we didn’t ask to inherit an earth to look after, and we didn’t ask to be so completely unjustly darkly alone.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital