One thing I enjoyed about Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets by Jessica A. Fox was that the author included a quote at the head of every chapter. Before giving the book away, I paged through it and created this list of quotes that I particularly liked. Note: I did not verify the quotes, but I modified a few for length and/or to match online sources.
- “When you choose one way out of many, all the ways you don’t take are snuffed out like candles, as if they’d never existed.” —Philip Pullman, The Amber Spyglass
- “He folded his fear into a perfect rose. He held it out in the palm of his hand. She took it from him and put it in her hair.”—Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
- “Imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.” —John Keats, from a letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be.”— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- “It will come sometime. Some beautiful morning she will just wake up and find it is Tomorrow. Not Today but Tomorrow. And then things will happen . . . wonderful things.”—L.M. Montgomery, Anne of the Island
- “Now behind the eyes and secrets of the dreamers in the streets rocked to sleep by the sea, see the titbits and topsyturvies, bobs and buttontops, bags and bones, ash and rind and dandruff and nailparings, saliva and snowflakes and moulted feathers of dreams, the wrecks and sprats and shells and fishbones, whale-juice and moonshine and small salt fry dished up by the hidden sea.”—Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood
- “We are all filled with a longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed.”–Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
- “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”—Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
- “When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.”—Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
- “That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable, silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift, silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are not….”—Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History
Plus one more for good measure:
“God created a world full of small worlds.”—Yiddish Proverb