It’s a dream still, the dream of being allowed full participation. The dream is alive, I suppose. The dream is still in the process of coming true.

Last night the Saturn V looked very graceful, suspended by a cross fire of searchlights which made it sparkle like a delicate opal and silver necklace against the black sky. Today it is a machine again

He could watch long, solitary waves rise up in the middle of a relative nowhere, deep in the South Atlantic or far off the Alaskan coast, giant walls of water that were built up until they broke over themselves, having come and gone, gorgeous, and having been invisible to everybody but him.

We might discover life in other solar systems someday, but for now there’s nothing but chaos and blackness and desolation for billions of light-years in every direction. Yet here in the middle of all that is this magnificent place, this brilliant blue planet, teeming with life. It really is a paradise.

I can remember with perfect clarity the night we found Jupiter.

“The problem with Challenger wasn’t the machine. The machine was trying to talk to us, but we didn’t listen.”

It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived here how much we start to miss nature. In the future there will be a word for the specific kind of nostalgia we feel for living things.

Human intelligence is not a gift. It’s an occasionally useful plague.

We wouldn’t exist without the obliterating smack of cosmic rock that plowed itself into the ancient Yucatán. Both stories are present in that moment. The rise and the fall are inextricable.

I know what it feels like to fear that there might not be many meaningful strategies left.

We act like our preferences matter, because that is the job late capitalism has given us.

Hyacinth recognizes what very few people wish to admit, that civilization has a price, and a high one.

In such hours the great roaring, indifferent world of London seemed to him a huge organization for mocking at his poverty

Everything you hold onto too tightly will die in your hands.

…you have to stop working from a place that is about making some invisible teacher happy.

…nothing humans do is real, and the trees don’t care, and we are all here together in dirt. This feels to me somehow like the opposite of despair.

So. Space settlements. Have we really thought this through?

Tenoxtitlan is unshakable, she said, but we are only passing through.

A sense of my own mediocrity, a general lack of courage, particularly when it comes to writing.

…in the years 1985 and 1986 the City of San Francisco’s AIDS budget exceeded the federal government’s.