Orbit Quotes

1. "Mathematics is a terrible calling. It's as merciless as gravity. It swallows the soul. There's a point near a black hole called the last stable orbit. Once you drop below that radius, no force in the universe can stop you falling all the way in. That's what happened to your mother – she swam too close to theory, fell below the last stable orbit."
Author: Alastair Reynolds

2. "Should a man, to preserve his life, pay everything that gives life colour, scent and excitement? Can one accept a life of digestion, respiration, muscular and brain activity - and nothing more? Become a walking blueprint? Is this not an exorbitant price? Is it not mockery?"
Author: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

3. "Now don't warp your orbit, Mac."
Author: Alfred Bester

4. "Fortunately, most things around the supermassive black hole are just going to go around it. They're going to orbit it. They don't actually get sucked in."
Author: Andrea M. Ghez

5. "Nineteen years, three months, and one week before I found Seivarden in the snow, I was a troop carrier orbiting the planet Shis'urna."
Author: Ann Leckie

6. "Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself."
Author: Baron D'Holbach

7. "A mathematician tells you that the wall of warped space prevents the Moon from flying out of its orbit yet can't tell you why an astronaut can go back and forth across that same space."
Author: Bill Gaede

8. "Those who are in the orbit, but nonetheless on the edges, can often be the real discoverers. It was why at times, the journalist, the historian and even the novelist paints the fullest picture of an era"
Author: Bob Woodward

9. "Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created."
Author: Bryan Stevenson

10. "The best way to study Mars is with two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars... and then on the surface."
Author: Buzz Aldrin

11. "Dar noi glumim cu nemuritorii, lucram cu ei, ne casatorim cu ei, îi exploatam si îi jignim - avea de-a face fie cu orori vesnice fie cu spendori nemuritoare. În fiecare zi, într-o anumita masura, ne împingem unii pe altii înspre una dintre aceste destinatii... Nu exista oameni de rând. Nu ai vorbit niciodata cu un simplu muritor."
Author: C.S. Lewis

12. "Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world."
Author: Carl Sagan

13. "Sharpie—the preferred writing utensil on orbit since you can hold it any which way and it still works."
Author: Chris Hadfield

14. "[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again."
Author: Christopher Hitchens

15. "Within his orbit, I was nothing but a flat noodle. And I don't know how much longer I can keep this up."
Author: Dee

16. "This is very American, too - the insecurity about whether we have earned our happiness. Planet Advertising in America orbits completely around the need to convince the uncertain consumer that yes, you have actually warranted a special treat. This Bud's for You! You Deserve a Break Today! Because You're Worth It! You've Come a Long Way, Baby! And the insecure consumer thinks, Yeah! Thanks! I AM gonna go buy a six-pack, damn it! Maybe even two six-packs! And then comes the reactionary binge. Followed by the remorse. Such advertising campaigns would probably not be as effective in the Italian culture, where people already know that they are entitled enjoyment in this life. The reply in Italy to "You Deserve a Break Today" would probably be, Yeah, no duh. That's why I'm planning on taking a break at noon, to go over to you house and sleep with your wife."
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert

17. "Woman cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appea something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate? Women are reputed never to be disgusted. The sad fact is that they often are, but not with men; following the lead of men, they are most often disgusted with themselves."
Author: Germaine Greer

18. "She had been a solitary child, and then solitary as a woman, drawn into an orbit of her own that took her away from others, even those who would be her friends."
Author: Guy Gavriel Kay

19. "It feels like everything's been decided in advance that I'm following a path somebody else has already mapped out for me. It doesn't matter how much I think things over, how much effort I put into it. In fact, the harder I try, the more I lose my sense of who I am. It's like my identity's an orbit that I've strayed far away from, and that really hurts. But more than that, it scares me. Just thinking about it makes me flinch."
Author: Haruki Murakami

20. "I arrived to work on the wrong foot. I was jumpy and agitated, constantly watching the doors. A loud fart would have sent me skyrocketing into orbit."
Author: J.A. Saare

21. "Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events."
Author: James Joyce

22. "After assembly complete, when we have a larger crew on orbit, a more complex vehicle, more laboratories and more robot arms, maybe we'll have room for specialists. But right now we don't."
Author: John L. Phillips

23. "Anyway.I'm not allowed to watch TV, although I am allowed to rent documentaries that are approved for me, and I can read anything I want. My favorite book is A Brief History of Time, even though I haven't actually finished it, because the math is incredibly hard and Mom isn't good at helping me. One of my favorite parts is the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, "But it's turtles all the way down!"I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises."
Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

24. "If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves..."If the veil were rent today, and the great God who holds the world in its orbit, and who upholds all worlds and all things by His power, was to make Himself visible, - I say, if you were to see Him today, you would see Him like a man in form - like yourself in all the person, image, and very form as a man."
Author: Joseph Smith Jr.

25. "— Il grasso Taskinar!Il nome corse di bocca in bocca. Sì! il grasso Taskinar! Era conosciutissimo! La sua corpulenza aveva fornito l'argomento di più di un articolo ai giornali dell'Unione. Non so più quale matematico aveva perfino dimostrato, con certi suoi calcoli trascendentali, che la sua massa era abbastanza grande da influenzare quella del nostro satellite e da turbare, in proporzione apprezzabile, gli elementi dell'orbita lunare."
Author: Jules Verne

26. "He doesn't move a muscle except for his eyes that follow her path as though somehow he can see her contrails. His whole existence revolves around a girl who left his orbit, and he was the one who spun her off her axis."
Author: Kat Kruger

27. "This simple idea served to provide information on the geometrical shape of reacting molecules, and I was able to make the role of the frontier orbitals in chemical reactions more distinct through visualization, by drawing their diagrams."
Author: Kenichi Fukui

28. "Psychopaths are shadowmancers', the agent tells me, a large-scale map of the US dotted with timelines, hotspots and murderous crimson trajectories plastered across the wall behind his desk. 'They survive by moving around. They don't have the same need for close relationships that normal people do. So they live in an orbit of perpetual drift, in which the chances of running into their victims again is minimised."
Author: Kevin Dutton

29. "Sam rocked backwards and felt all the breath leave his body. Sam felt all his breath leave the room, the apartment, the building. the city. Sam felt all his breath leave the world, the night, and travel up to the stars where it turned to ice and stretched atom-thin into every corner of the galaxy. Then it retracted, gathering up all the black world, and wound its way back through interstellar space and dark matter and the secrets of infinity, back into the earth's orbit, back into his night in his city, back into his very lungs. It was okay. He was just trying to help, to ease woes and mend hearts and cool seared souls, to guide the bereaved out of the land of the lost, to make the mourning a little less lonesome. He was forgiven."
Author: Laurie Frankel

30. "Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a world about which we know almost nothing? They return more frequently than comets do, in fact. It would be better, then, to speak of them as loyal satellites, a bit capricious and therefore even troublesome: they appear, disappear, suddenly come back to badger our memory at night when we cannot sleep. But, little as we may care to, as our hearts tell us to, we can also observe them at will, coldly, scrutinize their shadows, colors, and relief. Only, they are dead stars: from them we shall never grasp anything other than the certainty that we have already seen them, examined them, questioned them without really understanding the laws that the line of their mysterious orbits obeyed."
Author: Marc Augé

31. "I can't wait to use a BabyBjoern. I'm in love with the Orbit Baby stroller, and I also really like the Bugaboo."
Author: Marisol Nichols

32. "Beverly had thought how strange and wonderful it would be if the earth were hurled far from its orbit, into the cold extremes of black space where the sun was a faint cool disc, not even a quarter-moon, and night was everlasting. Imagine the industry, she thought, as every tree, every piece of coal, and every scrap of wood were burned for heat and light. Though the sea would freeze, men would go out in the darkness and pierce it's glassy ice to find the stilled fish. But finally all the animals would be eaten and their hides and wool stitched and woven, all the coal would be burned, and not a tree would be left standing. Silence would rule the earth, for the wind would stop and the sea would be heavy glass. People would die quietly, buried in their furs and down."
Author: Mark Helprin

33. "The first two missions have some test objectives, some new capabilities that we're going to try to develop on orbit to possibly be used on later flights."
Author: Mark Kelly

34. "This space station [Yang Liwei] was little more than a giant Orbital Denial Station. If those charges were to detonate, the debris...any future space launch would be grounded for years. It was a "Scorched Space" policy. "If we can't have it, neither can anyone else."
Author: Max Brooks

35. "Like your marriage, everything in the universe is trying to find its orbit. In the midst of this constant readjustment, both partners should be able to go to bed knowing that neither one is going to abandon a wounded, or struggling marriage. There is a comforting reassurance being with someone who keeps their promise.pg iv"
Author: Michael Ben Zehabe

36. "În afara actului sexual, sunt putine clipe în viata când trupul exulta de simpla bucurie de a trai, când se umple de bucurie prin simplul fapt al prezentei sale în lume. Ziua de întâi ianuarie a fost plina de asemenea clipe. Pastrez doar amintirea acelei plenitudini, nimic altceva. Probabil c-am înotat, ne-am încalzit la soare si-am facut dragoste. Nu cred sa fi vorbit ori sa ne fi plimbat pe insula. Îmi amintesc mirosul pe care-l avea Valérie, gustul sarii ce i se usca pe sex. Îmi amintesc c-am adormit în ea, si c-am fost trezit de contractiile vaginului ei."
Author: Michel Houellebecq

37. "Science literacy is being plugged into the forces that power the universe. There is no excuse for thinking that the Sun, which is a million times the size of Earth, orbits Earth."
Author: Neil DeGrasse Tyson

38. "Astronauts have been stuck in low-Earth orbit, boldly going nowhere. American attempts to kick-start a new phase of lunar exploration have stalled amid the realisation that NASA's budget is too small for the job."
Author: Paul Davies

39. "What an awful thing then, being there in our house together with our daughter gone, trying to be equal to so many sudden orders of sorrow, any one of which alone would have wrenched us from our fragile orbits around each other."
Author: Paul Harding

40. "I'm no expert on types of cars. As far as i'm concerned, you could send all the cars in the world through a compactor and shoot them out into the stratosphere and put them in orbit around Mars. Except, of course, the taxis that have to be at my disposal when I need them."
Author: Peter Høeg

41. "It was like resolution. The circling antagonisms collapsed inward like orbitals crashing and burning, surrendering to a mutual gravity that had dragged like chains while it endured but in release was a streak of fire through the nerves."
Author: Richard K. Morgan

42. "Da quando la nave era stata catturata dall'orbita terrestre, la vista del pianeta era divenuta per lei così irresistibile che difficilmente riusciva a privarsene. La Terra. Era la sua casa e non lo era. La conosceva bene e non la conosceva affatto. Vi era nata e cresciuta e allo stesso tempo non vi aveva mai messo piede prima. Le contraddizioni dovute a quella sua dualità avevano, però, l'inatteso effetto di farle godere soltanto del lato positivo di entrambe le condizioni."
Author: Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

43. "We were only on orbit a little over two days, so we had no adverse effects from being weightless."
Author: Robert Crippen

44. "You're going very fast when you're on orbit, going around the world once every hour and a half."
Author: Robert Crippen

45. "Science is possible only where situations repeat themselves, or where you have some control over them, and where do you have more repetition and control than in the army? A cube would not be a cube if it were not just as rectangular at nine o'clock as at seven.The same kind of rules work for keeping the planets in orbit as in ballistics. We'd have no way of understanding or judging anything if things flitted past us only once. Anything that has to be valid and have a name must be repeatable, it must be represented by many specimens, and if you had never seen the moon before, you'd think it was a flashlight.Incidentally, the reason God is such an embarrassment to science is that he was seen only once, at the Creation, before there were any trained observers around."
Author: Robert Musil

46. "There's one tiny little gap in the universe left, just about to close. And it takes a lot of power to send this projection. I'm in orbit around a supernova. I'm burning up a sun just to say goodbye."
Author: Russell T. Davies

47. "Currently where you are is on a huge globe with a relatively thin crust of stone, containing fire in its bowels, rotating on its own slightly tilted axis at 1,000 miles per hour in an easterly direction while simultaneously traveling in orbit around an enormous ball of burning hydrogen, 93,000,000 miles away at 66,000 miles per hour. That's 66,000 miles per hour, or nineteen miles per second, which is much faster that you've maybe ever imagined, and means that you will be traveling nearly 60,000,000 miles this coming year.Beauty is, you don't have to imagine it, you can feel it instead. And if you want to know what it's like, simply stop. Be still, and in that stillness, whatever you are feeling in your belly: that's it. this is what it feels like to go 66,000 miles per hour while spinning at one thousand."
Author: Stephen Russell

48. "Like a comet pulled from orbit, As it passes a sun. Like a stream that meets a boulder, Halfway through the wood. Who can say if I've been changed for the better? But because I knew you, I have been changed for good It well may be, That we will never meet again, In this lifetime. So let me say before we part, So much of me, Is made of what I learned from you. You'll be with me, Like a handprint on my heart. And now whatever way our stories end, I know you have re-written mine, By being my friend... Like a ship blown from its mooring, By a wind off the sea. Like a seed dropped by a skybird, In a distant wood. Who can say if I've been changed for the better? But because I knew you, Because I knew you, I have been changed for good."
Author: Stephen Schwartz

49. "Putting seven people in orbit should not cost more than flying a commercial jet around Earth."
Author: Steve Jurvetson

50. "No! Please! I'll tell you whatever you want to know!" the man yelled. "Really?" said Vimes. "What's the orbital velocity of the moon?""What?""Oh, you'd like something simpler?"
Author: Terry Pratchett

Orbit Quotes Pictures