The Lady's Guide to Celestial Mechanics
Olivia Waite
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I am tired of twisting myself into painful shapes for mere scraps of respect or consideration. Tired of bending this way and that in search of approval that will only ever be half granted.”
“Women’s ideas are treated as though they sprung from nowhere, to be claimed by the first man who comes along. Every generation had women stand up and ask to be counted—and every generation of brilliant, insightful, educated men has raised a hand and wiped those women’s names from the greater historical record.”
“They don’t let you have anything whole, you know. If you don’t follow the pattern. You have to find your happiness in bits and pieces instead. But it can still add up to something beautiful.”
“We thought we were separate satellites, but we aren’t. We’re stars, and though we might burn separately, we’ll always be in one another’s orbit.”
“Once people saw what I did, really saw it and acknowledged it, they’d believe other women were capable of thinking, of learning, of discovering the world in the same way that men are. But tonight I learned that there were other women before me. So very, very many of them. They were here all along: spotting comets, naming stars, pointing telescopes at the sky alongside their fathers and brothers and sons. And still the men they worked with scorned them. Scoffed at them. Gave the credit and the glory to the men who stole their work—or borrowed it or expanded it. Rarely cited it directly.”
“It was as though someone had taken the case off the universe, and let the reader peer at the naked machinery that powered the stars.”
“Every moon, sun, comet, planet, and star is itself a center, and exerts its own force upon all the rest. Nothing in the universe stands alone.”
“The point of fashion is not for the gentlemen: they call it trivial because they cannot bear the thought of women having a whole silent language between themselves.”
“You could take a robin, put it in a cage, and carry it with you around the world- but if you never opened the cage door, how much of a difference would you have made to the robin's life? All it would know was the view through the bars.”
“Truth doesn’t belong to any one scholar: it requires all of us.”
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Book Keywords:
feminism, womens-rights, freedom
