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THOMAS HARDY::TESS OF THE d'URBERVILLES (1891)::: "I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive." The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a gallows. "What -- really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said. "A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at all." GEORGE ELIOT::DANIEL DERONDA::: "...now look up the river," said Mordecai, turning again towards it and speaking in undertones of what may be called an excited calm--so absorbed by a sense of fulfilment that he was conscious of no barrier to a complete understanding between him and Deronda. "See the sky, how it is slowly fading. I have always loved this bridge: I stood on it when I was a little boy. It is a meeting-place for the spiritual messengers. It is true--what the Masters said--that each order of things has its angel: that means the full message of each from what is afar. Here I have listened to the messages of earth and sky; when I was stronger I used to stay and watch for the stars in the deep heavens. But this time just about sunset was always what I loved best. It has sunk into me and dwelt with me--fading, slowly fading: it was my own decline: it paused--it waited, till at last it brought me my new life--my new self--who will live when this breath is all breathed out."
"In the next few hours, Chris read me one essay about two little pink babies and I read her one in which Louis Armstrong landed on the moon and yelled, "Low Gravity!"" - "Veils" from A JAR OF FANS by Jeannine Atkins Haydenville, MA: BikeDoggie Press, 1990 "One of these days, Alice-- bang! zoom! TO THE MOON!" - Jackie Gleason, The Honeymooners quotes from the right stuff: 58, 99, 103, 111, 157, 249, 336, 367 suborbital arc: 113, 218 "I, for one, don't want to go to bed by the light of a communist moon." - Lyndon Johnson ON THE MOON LANDING: Picasso: it means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it and i don't care. jesse jackson: how can this nation swell and swagger with technological pride when it has a spiritual will so crippled, when it is so weak, so wicked, so blinded and misdirected in its priorities? Nixon: because of what you've done, the heavens have become a part of man's world. as you talk to us from the sea of tranquility it requires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to earth. for one priceless moment in the whole history of man all the people on this earth are truly one -- one in their pride in what you've done and one in our prayers that you will return safely to earth. lewis mumford: the most conspicuous scientific and technical achievements of our age... are all direct products of war... The moon landing is no exception: it is a symbolic act of war. quotes from mailer: 4-5, 15, 16-17, 25, 33, 35, 40, 45 (private life), 47-8, 51-2, 56, 62, 67, 76, 79, 88, 108, 109, 118, 141, 174, 184, 208-9, 296, 300, 312, 331, 356, 370, 410 "There is no cry for help stronger than that of a man alone." - Ludwig Wittgenstein "It is not worthwhile to go around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar." Henry David Thoreau "The earth is the cradle of humanity, but it will not stay in the cradle forever." Konstantine Tsiolkovsky "One poor man, obviously deranged, wrote from Israel, enclosing reams of data on the gigantic ants that infested the moon. It would be disaster, he pointed out, for the LM to come down on or near one of these anthills, and he would be happy to provide us with his detailed maps showing the location of each hill--for a price, of course." -- Michael Collins "Failure to master space means being second best in every aspect, in the crucial arena of our Cold War world. In the eyes of the world first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything." _ Johnson "We must master the highest technology or be crushed." vi lenin "Science and industry, these are my dreams. They are everything today." Dmitri I. Mendeleev "It seems to me that the basic drive to reach out for the sun, to shed the bondsof gravity, has been with me ever since my infancy. Anyway, I distinctly recall that my favorite dream in very early childhood, before I could even read books, was a dim consciousness of a realm devoid of gravity where one could move unhampered anywhere, freer than a bird in flight." Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (father of Russian rocketry) "Thirty years later, I still have dreams in which I fly up to the stars in my mcahine, and I feel as excited as on that memorable night." Tsiolkovsky "Korolev came to the Politburo to report on his work. I don't want to exaggerate, but I'd say we gawked at what he showed us as if we were sheep seeing a new gate for the first time. When he showed us on of his rockets, we thought it looked like nothing but a huge, cigar-shaped tube, and we didn't believe it would fly. Korolev took us on a tour of the launching pad and tried to explain to us how a rocket worked. We were like peasants in a market place..." - Nikita Khrushchev "For progress there is no cure." John von Neumann "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8000 people... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Eisenhower (1953) "If the newspapers printed a dispatch that the Soviet Union palnned sending the first man to Hell, our federal agencies would appear the next day, crying, 'We can't let them beat us to it!'" Hyman Rickover "If we really cooperated on man-in-space, neither country would have a program because the necessary large support in money and manpower was only because of the competitive element and for political reasons." Academician Sedov Krushchev: "We have a frequently quoted joke: He who cannot bear earth any longer may fly to the moon. But we are all right on earth."
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