Rhiannon Bacon’s Reviews > The Music of the Spheres > Status Update

He respected his cats more than people: they didn't respond to love, or to efforts at care; they simply demanded their due.

All his life, Alexander had felt excluded from normal companionship. All his life, there had been a barrier between himself and other people that could only be broken through by means of an excess of wine, or music; and afterward, his solitude returned.

"Perhaps," said Raultier, "we were all good at heart once. Perhaps the woman is fortunate in that, through her madness, she has stayed so."

"Ah, yes. And surely, sir, surely it has been good to turn our eyes from the hateful turmoil of war and lift them to the skies!"

How cruel is the creature we call God, to regiment so brightly the beauty of the universe, and yet to allow such fetid decay here below.

How could anyone not realize that it was mere chance that ruled us all? How could anyone not see that the most dazzling calculations of which the human brain was capable could be overturned by the unexpected journey of a meteor, or by an exploding star, or by the gradual, relentless gravitational pull of the giants of the heavens?

Overhead, far beyond the clouds and the blazing sun, the stars clustered inauspiciously, waiting for the night to come.

If comets be burnt, consumed and wasted in the Starrie Heavens, it seemeth that there is no great difference between them and things here below. - John Swan

"But why should mankind, in its presumption, dare to conclude that everything has been discovered? Herschel assumed nothing; he studied the skies as if he was the first astronomer ever to observe its vastness. And so, without the preconceptions that have blinded so many scientists to what actually lies before them, he was able to discover a planet, the first person to do so since ancient times."