Historically, much of Earth exploration has been rooted in colonialism and subjugation. What kind of remnant legacies and unexamined assumptions thread through today’s discussions to colonize Mars?

history is what it is. it knows what it did.

There is no fellowship in Hell, the only relationship possible is that of tormenting one another.

I felt that I’d been here before, had walked into these grassy slopes on a sunny day, horses in the distance lifting their heads, watching me pass. Wildflowers would have been blowing in a warm breeze.

trees! y’all! they look like slow green explosions!

For I will consider my boyfriend Jeffrey. For he is an atheist but makes room for the unseen, unsayable. For he is a vegetarian but makes room for half-off Mondays at the conveyor belt sushi place.

“It’s normal to feel conflict. You were part of something for a long time. You hate it, and it was a terrible thing. But it created you, and you were part of it.”

Karen, meanwhile, tried to disentangle herself from Nellie’s conception of her as a “best friend,” but it was like trying to get gum out of your hair.

All of Northern California was a botanical garden, with wildflowers springing up between busy freeways and chamomile thriving in sidewalk cracks.

We talked less and less, and I felt it, how easy it was to lose people

Cities are juxtaposition engines, instruments for bringing people and things together.

She had spoken such words often but, always before, the harshness had been cut by an exasperation in her voice that betrayed affection. Now the tone, like the words, was only hard.

That failure of the sympathetic imagination, when it occurs between two people who have been intimate, is like natural disaster to me. It fills me with dread and amazement.

We thought because we were always talking we were connecting.

He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made.

Afterward, I would mourn her as if she’d died, because something had: someone we had created together

How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy, and you need to find out what it is so she will stop being unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.

Your body is brilliant, even when you are not. It doesn’t just heal—it learns. It remembers. (All of this, of course, if the virus doesn’t kill you first.)

“You were an orphan?” Stephen frowned. “I’m so sorry.” “Almost everyone is, eventually,” said Grace. “It’s not a big deal.”

I had my first existential crisis when I realized that it was not possible to have a pony in the city.

Such is the inconvenient truth of globalization: it is based more on market sleight of hand than on Adam Smith’s invisible hand.

…the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor.

…there is no escape and nowhere to run. There is no outside capitalism anymore. Capitalism has contacted all of our tribes.

When I think of my father, I think of my heart breaking in stages.