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Quote by John Pipkin

“The basis of English law is as simple as this: If you would know the future’s shape, look to the past.”

Quote by John Pipkin

Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

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The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

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“Once when I was a little child of six or so, I watched a spider spinning its web in a corner of the house. Before the spider had even finished its job, a mosquito flew right into the web and was trapped there. The spider didn't pay it any attention at first, but went on with what it was doing; only when it was finished did it creep over on its pointy toes and sting that poor mosquito to death. As I sat there on that wooden floor and watched Hatsumomo come reaching for me with her delicate fingers, I knew I was trapped in a web she had spun for me.”

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“Is this not the very thing that drives an adventurous man to navigate uncharted oceans, to traverse continents and mountains, to pilot virgin estuaries and hidden coves—this promise of inscribing a name steadfast upon what he finds? There are few parcels of earth left to be claimed; yet even as the known world shrinks, the heavens grow ever more infinite. An explorer of the skies need never leave his home or fret over the swiftness of other expeditions; he might give whatever name he chooses to any new thing that wanders into his view.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

Source: The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

“But if watching the sky is to be his duty, how should he begin? Now and then he has spotted one of the five bright planets or recognized a constellation, but he knows little about the turning of the heavens. When he contemplates the great distances between this and that, and the vast multitude of solitary objects spread over the celestial dome, he cannot fathom how one goes about searching for what is yet unknown.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

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“Here the sky is wrapped in silk. The breathings of so many men and animals, and the smoke of your coal, and the fog, oh, it is too much. The Paris sky is perfect. A man must see clearly, to see something new.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

Source: The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

“Sometimes he counts himself to sleep by imagining the miles between stars like the succession of footsteps cleaving him from his home, as if mastering the distance in thought might blunt the separation. But if a man cannot return to the place of his birth, then what is there to stay his restless feet? What center will hold him from wandering endlessly? It should not be so difficult, he thinks, to know one’s place in the order of things.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

Source: The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

“Time lost to pointless delay can never be regained. It is the most reprehensible kind of theft. Why was it that men did not grasp this simple fact? Money comes and goes and comes again, and knowledge can be acquired and forgotten and rediscovered, but time once lost is lost for good, each passing second irretrievable.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

Source: The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

“He tracks the rise and fall of the glittering darkness thronged with specks and tendrils of luminous secrets. Falling stars crackle in the cold air and prickle his skin. They flash in the corner of his vision where the eye’s discernment of light and shadow is most acute.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

Source: The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

“The same ratios that govern music give laws to optics and to the movement of the heavens as well. Simple. Elegant. Predictable.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

Source: The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

“...but at night when he turns the awkward [telescope] skyward, he catches his breath at the clarity of the image and the vast populations of stars unknown to him until then, the riotous glittering in the dark crevices between constellations, a convocation of bright spirits waiting to be found.”

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Book:The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

Source: The Blind Astronomer's Daughter

“Sketches of mad skies spilling stars caught in spiraling gyres, diagrams for constructing sextants tall as a man and armillary spheres to mimic the motion of the cosmos. He decides that he must have all of it, that he will cram the little observatory with maps and charts, clocks and compasses, and instruments for bringing the sky nearer.”

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Author:John Pipkin