The last thing you need is to get sick in space

Absently Anton runs his fingers over a lump that’s appeared on his neck the last fortnight and that he tries to obscure by raising the collar of his polo shirt. The last thing you need is to get sick in space. They’ll worry and send you home and, because you can’t fly back on your own, two others will have to go with you, and to cut short the missions of those two others would be unforgivable. He’ll say nothing to the flight surgeon or to his fellow crew and he’ll hope nobody notices. It’s the size of a cherry in the low hollow of his neck, and perfectly painless.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 1,359

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night

From the space station’s distance mankind is a creature that comes out only at night. Mankind is the light of cities and the illuminated filament of roads. By day, it’s gone. It hides in plain sight.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 302

She would survive the blazing heat and tumble of her re-entry only to be pulled from her capsule and fold like a paper crane

Anyone in Mongolia or those easternmost wildernesses of Russia, or anyone at least who knows about such things, would be aware that now, in their cold afternoon sky, higher than any aeroplane, a spacecraft is passing and that some human is up there hefting a lift-bar with her legs, willing her muscles not to give in to the seduction of weightlessness, nor her bones to birdness. Else that poor spacefarer will be in all kinds of trouble when she lands back on earth where legs, once more, are very much a thing. Without that hefting and sweating and pressing she would survive the blazing heat and tumble of her re-entry only to be pulled from her capsule and fold like a paper crane.

S. Harvey, Orbital (2024), loc. 268

They wield their language like a club against their enemies

Though his surname is Afrikaans, though his father is more Afrikaans than English, though he himself speaks Afrikaans without any English accent, he could not pass for a moment as an Afrikaner. The range of Afrikaans he commands is thin and bodiless; there is a whole dense world of slang and allusion commanded by real Afrikaans boys—of which obscenity is only a part—to which he has no access. There is a manner that Afrikaners have in common too—a surliness, an intransigence, and, not far behind it, a threat of physical force (he thinks of them as rhinoceroses, huge, lumbering, strong-sinewed, thudding against each other as they pass)—that he does not share and in fact shrinks from. They wield their language like a club against their enemies.

J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood (1997), 124

Imagine having the power to command the ocean. It makes my fingers itch to possess it.

Mother gestures for us to fall in behind her as she and the priest lead the way towards the wooden church, the crowd parting like the sea before Moses. That’s one Bible story I like. Forget all the business with healing the blind and washing the feet of the poor. Imagine having the power to command the ocean. It makes my fingers itch to possess it.

L. Holland, Sistersong (2021), 24

The essence of Austria is not the center but the periphery

Of course, it is the Slovenes, the Polish and Ruthenian Galicians, the caftan Jews from Boryslaw, the horse traders from Bacska, the Muslims from Sarajevo, the Maroni crickets from Mostar who sing our national anthem 'Gott Erhalte.' But the German students from Brunn and Eger, the dentists, pharmacists, hairdresser's assistants, art photographers from Linz, Graz, Knittelfeld, the goiters from the Alpine valleys, they all sing 'Die Wacht am Rhein.' Austria will perish for this loyalty to the Nibelung, gentlemen! The essence of Austria is not the center but the periphery. Austria is not to be found in the Alps, where you find chamois, edelweiss, and gentians, but hardly any trace of a double eagle.

J. Roth, The Emperor's Tomb (1938), loc. 168

One could be a Nazi without ever seeing or thinking about Jews

It irked me that nobody in England seemed to grasp that Nazism had been about building a new world order based on the noble ideals I still found so satisfying. For it had not taken me many weeks in the country to discover that the English definition of Nazi could be summed up in a single word, ‘Jew-gasser’. That was so misguided, such a mistake. Yes, we were taught to despise Jews, but what English people didn’t seem to appreciate was that for Nazis like me everything to do with Jews had been a minor issue, that one could be a Nazi without ever seeing or thinking about Jews.

K. Fitzherbert, True to both my selves (1997), loc. 3630

I think about these kind of things a lot. The ability to see things selectively without even trying is underappreciated in historical (and political) analysis.