Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I read Orbital by Samantha Harvey, the Booker Prize winner for 2024, and here are a few lines worth remembering from the book, at least for me!

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She finds she often struggles for things to tell people at home, because the small things are too mundane and the rest is too astounding and there seems to be nothing in between, none of the usual gossip, the he-said-she-said, the ups and downs; there is a lot of round and round.

The strongest, most deducible proof of life in the photograph is the photographer himself—his eye at the view-finder, the warm press of his finger on the shutter release.

I love the moon as it is, she said. Yes, yes, he'd answered, me too, but all those things are beautiful, because their beauty doesn't come from their goodness, you didn't ask if progress is good, and a person is not beautiful because they're alive, like a child. Alive and curious and restless. Never mind good. They're beautiful because there's a light in their eyes. Sometimes destructive, sometimes hurtful, sometimes selfish, but beautiful because alive. And progress is like that, by its nature alive.

is it necessarily the case that the further you get from something the more perspective you have on it?

Not to understand its mystery, but to understand that it is mysterious.

Sergei Krikalev, the first Russian on the first expedition to the space station, the man who helped build it, the man who, before that, was sent to space by the USSR and was in orbit on Mir for almost six months longer than planned, because, while he was there, the USSR ceased to exist and he couldn't get home.

An uncelebrated but quiet and clever and gentle man.

Let go, be bold.

why run a race you can never win, why set yourself up to fail- so please know, my daughter, that you are not inferior and hold that grandly in your heart and live your inconsequential life as well as you can with a dignity of being, will you do that for me?

you might regard in wonder these men walking on the moon but you must never forget the price humanity pays for its moments of glory, because humanity doesn't know when to stop, it doesn't know when to call it a day, so be wary is what I mean though I say nothing, be wary.

Don't squander a life so miraculously given, since I, your mother, could just as easily have been with my mother that day at the market if any number of tiny things had been different, and I would have been among the youngest of the victims of the atomic bomb and circumstances could have killed me and you would never have been born.

you are on the winning side, you are winning, and perhaps you can live a life that honours and furthers that?

Too bad for you that the Omega Speedmaster watch on your wrist with its chronograph and tachymeter and coaxial escapement has no grasp of the fact that this is your seventh time around the earth since you woke up this morning, that the sun is up-down-up-down like a mechanical toy. Too bad for you that your world's gone elastic and topsy-turvy and right-side-left and that now it's spring and in half an hour it's autumn and your body clock's blitzed and your senses have slowed and your superfast astronaut uber-being self has gone a bit loose and carefree and swimmy like seaweed or jetsam.

wherever mankind goes it leaves some kind of destruction behind it.

it seems that you are finally doing the thing for which your being was born

And how, for all that, a sense of friendliness and peace prevails, since even at night there's only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of lights between Pakistan and India. That's all civilisation has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.

Can we not stop tyrannising and destroying and ran-sacking and squandering this one thing on which our lives depend?

characters who for the most part have got where they are, not by  being in any way revolutionary or percipient or wise in their views, but by being louder, bigger, more ostentatious, more unscrupulously wanting of the play of power than those around them

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.

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. A house, a field, some sheep for example. And there are those who manage somehow, by some miracle of being, to simplify their inner lives so that outer things can be ambitious and limitless. Those people can swap out a house for a spaceship, a field for a universe.

One day their journeys to space will seem nothing but a coach excursion, and the horizons of possibility that open out at their fingers will only confirm their own smallness and briefness.

Buddha came at six seconds to midnight, half a second later the Hindu gods, in another half-second came Christ and a second and a half later Allah.

the more you look at it the less substance it has

Happy reading! (✿◡‿◡)