Space - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Nothing can be prettier than to see the movement, in perfectly harmonic relations, of planets round their centres, of satellites around planets, of suns, with their planets and satellites, around their centres, and of these in turn around theirs. And to persons who have loved earth as much as I do, and who, while at school there, have studied other worlds and stars, then distant, as carefully as I have, nothing, as I say, can be more charming than to see at once all this play and interplay; to see comets passing from system to system, warming themselves now at one white sun, and then at a party-colored double; to see the people on them changing customs and costumes as they change their light, and to hear their quaint discussions as they justify the new and ridicule the old.

- Edward Everett Hale, ''Hands Off'' (1881)

There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope.

- H. G.Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)

Over me, around me, closing in on me, embracing me ever nearer, was the Eternal; that which was before the beginning and that which triumphs over the end; that enormous void in which all light and life and being is but the thin and vanishing splendour of a falling star, the cold, the stillness, the silence - the infinite and final Night of space.

- H. G.Wells, The First Men in the Moon (1901)

You know what empty space and stars do to a man. The bigness of things gives him a colossal inferiority complex, and it puts him in the mood for anything.What I mean is, a man doesn't care.

- Ross Rocklynne, ''At the Center of Gravity'' (1936)

Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other.

- E. E. ''Doc'' Smith, Triplanetary, revised (1948)

He knew now where he belonged - in space, where he was born. Any planet was merely a hotel to him; space was his home.

- Robert A. Heinlein, Between Planets (1951)

The infinite chasm of open space seemed suddenly even more dark and cold and dreadful than it was, and for an instant he hungered fiercely for the quiet peace of this forgotten world.

- JackWilliamson, ''The Peddler's Nose'' (1951)

Overhead wheeled the stars, the million suns of space, fire and ice and the giant sprawl of constellations, the MilkyWay a rush of curdled silver, the far, mysterious glow of nebulae, hugeness and loneliness to break a human heart.

- Poul Anderson, ''Garden in the Void'' (1952)

Why are we trying to get into space anyhow? There's nothing out there but a lot of nothing, and some balls of rock nobody wants.

- James Blish, ''First Strike'' (1953)

What can there be concerning outer space but ignorance?

- Nigel Kneale, The Quatermass Experiment (TV miniseries, 1953)

Down there, lost years and miles away, some tiny dot of a woman was opening her microscopic door to listen to an atom's song. Lost, lost, and packed away in cotton wool, like a specimen slide: one spring morning on Earth. Black miles above, so far that sixty Earths could have been piled one on another to make a pole for his perch, Wesson swung in his endless circle within a circle. Yet, vast as was the gulf beneath him, all this - Earth, Moon, orbital stations, ships; yes, the Sun and all the rest of the planets, too - was the merest sniff of space, to be pinched up between thumb and finger.

- Damon Knight, ''Stranger Station'' (1956)

Suddenly the friendly protecting sky seemed to have been torn open above me as the veiling cloud was torn, and through the rent the whole Outside poured in upon me, the black freezing spaces of the galaxy, the blaze and strangeness of a billion billion suns. I shrank beneath that vastness. I was nothing, nobody, an infinitesimal fleck in a cosmos too huge to be borne.

- Leigh Brackett, ''The Queer Ones'' (1957)

He was aware now of the turning earth that had produced him, and the immeasurably great turning of a galaxy which had produced the earth. In his own being he felt the forward thrust of star clouds; the ordered turbulence of spiral arms ablaze with condensations of sapphire, swirling about a red nucleus of older stars.

- Doris Pitkin Buck, ''Spanish Spoken'' (1957)

There were still some meteorites coming in, making bright little winks of fire where they bit into the plain. Deadly stingers out of nowhere, heading nowhere, impartially orbiting, random as rain, random as death. The debris of creation.

- Walter M. Miller, Jr., ''The Lineman'' (1957)

Hammond had seen space before, the hosts of stars marching forever across the black meadows of heaven, burning companies of hot gold and smoky red and ice-blue and green, trailing bannerets of nebulosity, a maze of light so vast that it was hard to think of each gleaming point as a mighty sun boiling with atomic fire as it plunged falling with its planets through infinity.

- Edmond Hamilton, The Star of Life, revised (1959)

Here were the stars, and the constellations, and the island universes, and the nebulae that curved and spiraled and stretched in great gaseous bands across the heavens like fiery diamonds in some vast showcase. And here, and here, and here were the others, all of them, all of them waiting. Softly, he spoke their names, as though they were old friends not seen in too long a time. It would take a million million lifetimes to visit only a small number of them, but he had that and more. ''Which way first?'' he wondered. ''Which way?'' Around him, patiently, the universe waited.

- Charles E. Fritch, ''The Castaway'' (1963)

Space gnawed at men's minds.

- Lester del Rey, Siege Perilous (1966)

For years astrophysicists have been racking their brains over the reason for the great difference in the amounts of cosmic dust in various galaxies. The answer, I think, is quite simple: the higher a civilization is, the more dust and refuse it produces. This is a problem more for janitors than for astrophysicists.

- Stanislaw Lem, ''Let Us Save the Universe (An Open Letter from Ijon Tichy, Space Traveller)'' (1966), translated by Joel Stern and Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek (1981)

Space is infinite. It is dark. Space is neutral. Stars occupy minute areas of space. They are clustered a few billion here. A few billion there. Space does not threaten. Space does not comfort. Space is the absence of time and of matter.

- Michael Moorcock, The Black Corridor (1969)

Space is not black. It runs, shivers and spins with a thousand colors, of which the visible spectrum is only a minute fraction.

- Bob Shaw, The Palace of Eternity (1969)

Whole worlds formed in a pregnant void: not spherical worlds merely, but dodeka-spherical, and those much more intricate than that. Not merely seven colors to play with, but seven to the seventh and to the seventh again. Stars vivid in the bright light. You who have seen stars only in darkness be silent! Asteroids that they ate like peanuts, for now they were all metamorphic giants. Galaxies like herds of rampaging elephants. Bridges so long that both ends of them receded over the light-speed edges.Waterfalls, of a finer water, that bounced off galaxy clusters as if they were boulders.

- R. A. Lafferty, ''Sky'' (1971)

It was still too early in the night to lie on her back and stare at the evil constellations, letting the infinite horror of space invade her mind.

- George Alec Effinger, ''How It Felt'' (1974)

Reynolds liked the moon. If he had not, he would never have elected to return here to stay. It was the Earth he hated. Better than the moon was space itself, the dark endless void beyond the reach of man's ugly grasping hands.

- Gordon Eklund and Gregory Benford, ''If the Stars Are Gods'' (1974)

Space [. . .] is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the street to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.

- Douglas Adams, ''Fit the Second,'' episode of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series, 1978)

You can't know space unless you were born there.

- Joe Haldeman, Worlds (1981)

One of the interesting things about space [. . .] is how dull it is.

- Douglas Adams, Life, the Universe, and Everything (1982)

Space is an unnatural environment, and it takes an unnatural effort from unnatural people to prosper there.

- Bruce Sterling, ''Swarm'' (1982)

For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide.

- Carl Sagan, Contact (1985)

Izzie scanned the blackness of space above them, broken only by the splash of stars where planets whirled and life quickened and grew and danced and knew nothing of this desolation.

- Sydney Long, ''For the Right Reason'' (1995)

We ignore the blackness of outer space and pay attention to the stars.

- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age, or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)