chirysalis’s Reviews > Orbital > Status Update

"How are we writing the future of humanity? We’re not writing anything, it’s writing us. We’re windblown leaves. We think we’re the wind, but we’re just the leaf."

"But all the same the disc and its recordings will wander, trapped for eternity, around the Milky Way. In five billion years when the earth is long dead, it’ll be a love song that outlives spent suns. The sound signature of a love-flooded brain, passing through the Oort Cloud, through solar systems, past hurtling meteorites, into the gravitational pull of stars that don’t yet exist."

"she tried to keep to her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things had shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the dark brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching."

"So she asked him, Who is the more unknown? And his reply to that: Both differently but equally unknown. Your mind full of acronyms and mine full of sheep ailments. Both of us equally unknown."

"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."

"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."

"Chie (methodical, fair, wise, not-quite definable or pin-downable) its conscience"

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yep sounds very much like me

"In the slowing and cooling he hears his thoughts more, they’re distant bells chiming one at a time in his head. In orbit his sense of life is simpler and gentler and more forgiving, not that his thoughts are different but that his thoughts are fewer and more distinct. They don’t avalanche like they used to. They come and they interest him for as long as they need to and then they go."

"The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want."

"They come to see the politics of want. The politics of growing and getting, a billion extrapolations of the urge for more, that’s what they begin to see when they look down. They don’t even need to look down since they, too, are part of those extrapolations, they more than anyone–on their rocket whose boosters at lift-off burn the fuel of a million cars."