Katherine

“Maybe we’re the new dinosaurs and need to watch out. But then maybe against all the odds we’ll migrate to Mars where we’ll start a colony of gentle preservers, people who’ll want to keep the red planet red, we’ll devise a planetary flag because that’s a thing we lacked on earth and we’ve come to wonder if that’s why it all fell apart, and we’ll look back at the faint dot of blue that is our old convalescing earth and we’ll say, Do you remember? Have you heard the tales? Maybe there’s another parent-planet – earth was our mother and Mars, or somewhere, will be our father. We are not such orphans-in-waiting after all.”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“The soul is placed in the body like a rough diamond, and must be polished, or the luster of it will never appear.”
― Daniel Defoe

“Her husband says that Africa from space looks like a late Turner; those near-formless landscapes of thick impasto shot with light. He’d told her once that if he were ever to be where she is, he’d spend his whole time in tears, helpless in the face of the earth’s bare beauty. But that he’d never be where she is because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe. And though he’d give his leg to be the latter, it’s not the kind of thing you can trade a leg for – in any case who’d want his leg if they already had limitlessness?”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital

“Until then what can we do in our abandoned solitude but gaze at ourselves? Examine ourselves in endless bouts of fascinated distraction, fall in love and in hate with ourselves, make a theatre, myth and cult of ourselves. Because what else is there? To become superb in our technology, knowledge and intellect, to itch with a desire for fulfilment that we can’t quite scratch; to look to the void (which still isn’t answering) and build spaceships anyway, and make countless circlings of our lonely planet, and little excursions to our lonely moon and think thoughts like these in weightless bafflement and routine awe. To turn back to the earth, which gleams like a spotlit mirror in a pitch-dark room, and speak into the fuzz of our radios to the only life that appears to be there. Hello? Konnichiwa, ciao, zdraste, bonjour, do you read me, hello?”
― Samantha Harvey, Orbital