Dea

“She was outside for hours – almost seven, so she was told. You have no idea at all of the passing of time. You install or repair whatever you are tasked to install or repair; you photograph some of the hatches, the external tools, you do a litter-pick of debris, plucking from space a few of these tens of thousands of remnants of jettisoned or exploded satellites and launch-vehicle stages and craft; wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it, perhaps the nature of all life, to do this.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“True sisterhood, the kind where you grew fingernails in the same womb, were pushed screaming through identical birth canals, is not the same as friendship. You don’t choose each other, and there’s no furtive period of getting to know the other. You’re part of each other, right from the start. Look at an umbilical cord—tough, sinuous, unlovely, yet essential—and compare it to a friendship bracelet of brightly woven thread. That is the difference between a sister and a friend.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters

“When he thinks of the six of them here, or the astronauts now going to the moon, he hears that haunting call – that’s what we’re doing when we come into space, asserting our species by extending its territory. Space is the one remaining wilderness we have. The solar system into which we venture is just the new frontier now our earthly frontiers have been discovered and plundered. That’s all this great human endeavour of space exploration really is, he thinks, an animal migration, a bid for survival. A looping song sent into the open, a territorial animal song.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“The funny thing about their father was that he wasn’t cold, or at least not always. Mercurial was how she would describe him. Changeable as the weather. And like the weather, he had to be regularly checked to work out what kind of day they were going to have. Lucky and her sisters could tell his mood by the way he closed the front door. Just like you wouldn’t have a picnic in a hailstorm, you couldn’t do certain things around an angry dad. No bickering over the remote, no chatting loudly with friends on the phone, no crying over a bad grade, no laughing over a silly joke, no whining to their mom that they were hungry. He was the only man in the house, but he also was the house. They lived inside his moods.”
― Coco Mellors, Blue Sisters