Weightlessness Quotes

Weightlessness makes astronauts lose taste and smell in space. In the absence of gravity, molecules cannot be volatile, so few of them get into our noses deeply enough to register as odors. This is a problem for nutritionists designing space food. ~ Diane Ackerman

The birds had been given everything they needed. A home in the thin, pure air: a moment of weightlessness, a reprieve from the gravity of life ~ Vanessa Diffenbaugh

We hope to create thousands of astronauts over the next few years and bring alive their dream of seeing the majestic beauty of our planet from above, the stars in all their glory and the amazing sensations of weightlessness and space flight. ~ Richard Branson

When I was a child and heard about angels, I was both frightened and fascinated by the thought of these enormous, invisible presences in our midst. I conceived of them not as white-robed androgynes with yellow locks and thick gold wings, which was how my friend Matty Wilson had described them to me
Matty was the predecessor of all sorts of arcane knowledge
but as big, dark, blundering men, massive in their weightlessness, given to pranks and ponderous play, who might knock you over, or break you in half, without meaning to. When a child from Miss Molyneaux's infant school in Carrickdrum fell under the hoofs of a dray-horse one day and was trampled to death, I, a watchful six year old, knew who was to blame; I pictured his guardian angel standing over the child's crushed form with his big hands helplessly extended, not sure whether to be contrite or to laugh. ~ John Banville

My ice-cream is melting just as quickly as Danny's and is dripping down my chin, across my wrist, and onto my thigh. I laugh, throwing my head back and covering my eyes so as not to be blinded by happiness, and it is in this moment of weightlessness that I am suddenly aware of the lightest touch on my skin, like the wings of a butterfly. It flutters against my thigh then lingers on my wrist, but before its delicate wings reach my face, I force my eyes open and see only fragments: pink lips, a tanned cheek, the features and lines of a face silhouetted against the bright sunlight. My nostrils draw in his scent for the very first time and it is so strong that he is not just next to me but intimately close. His smell instantly takes me prisoner, overpowering me to such an extent that I have forgotten who and where I am.
I know that, moments before, Alex was using his lips and tongue to clean the melted ice-cream off my thigh and wrist and inadvertently treating me to the most ecstatic experience of my life. My body and mind are adrift in a sea of bliss, the sounds of the park suddenly fade away, and the world and everyone in it cease to exist. All I can see is a blindingly bright light and all I can feel are a man's moist lips touching mine. Alex's hot, passionate mouth is kissing me greedily as if there is finally enough air; as if he had been suffocating, but now he can breathe.
I know that a kiss like this is neither flirting nor dating and can sense with every fibr ~ Victoria Sobolev

Birds in flight fascinate me. I admire eagles and falcons. I'm inspired by a feather but also its color, its graphics, its weightlessness and its engineering. It's so elaborate. In fact I try and transpose the beauty of a bird to women. ~ Alexander McQueen

Why are you so good to me Peter?"
My head tilts back against the tree. My eyes are too heavy to keep open. I feel the vague sensation of his hands sliding under me, weightlessness as he lifts me up and settles me against his broad chest.
On the edge of sleep, I hear him whisper,"That's for me to know and you to never find out. ~ Dan Krokos

I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling red in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead of me. It's the beautiful thing about youth. There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential. I ~ Blake Crouch

Life continues even if no one has proven to us the shape and size of the Earth, even if no one has informed us about the composition of air and the depth of sky.
We will not float in weightlessness simply because we have not read the lesson on gravity. ~ Danail Hristov

Love has a certain weightlessness to it, much as my meaty penis would on the moon. ~ Jarod Kintz

On the brightening air drifts a scent of refreshed stone, moistened soil. She feels the earthy fingerprint of the cold morning air spread over her skin as if she is in the act of undressing. Her body has an early morning weightlessness about it. She might almost be a memory of herself. Conjured up by the sleeping city. ~ Glenn Haybittle

I pass a construction site, abandoned for the night, and a few blocks later, the playground of the elementary school my son attended, the metal sliding board gleaming under a streetlamp and the swings stirring in the breeze.
There's an energy to these autumn nights that touches something primal inside of me. Something from long ago. From my childhood in western Iowa. I think of high school football games and the stadium lights blazing down on the players. I smell ripening apples, and the sour reek of beer from keg parties in the cornfields. I feel the wind in my face as I ride in the bed of an old pickup truck down a country road at night, dust swirling in the taillights and the entire span of my life yawning out ahead o me.
It's the beautiful thing about youth.
There's a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
I love my life, but I haven't felt that lightness of being in ages. Autumn nights like this are as close as I get. ~ Blake Crouch

Gennie,you should have told me you hadn't been with a man before." And how was it possible, he wondered, that she'd let no man touch her before? That he was the first...the only.
"Why?" she said flatly,wishing he would go, wishing she had the strength to leave. "It was my business."
Swearing,he shifted,leaning over her. His eyes were dark and angry, but when she tried to pull away,he pinned her. "I don't have much gentleness," he told her, and the words were unsteady with feeling. "But I would have used all I had,I would have tried to find more,for you." When she only stared at him, Grant lowered his forehead to hers. "Gennie..."
Her doubts,her fears,melted at that one softly murmured word. "I wasn't looking for gentleness then," she whispered. Framing his face with her hands, she lifted it. "But now..." She smiled, and watched the frown fade from his eyes.
He dropped a kiss on her lips, soft, more like whisper,then rising, lifted her into his arms. Gennie laughed at the feeling of weightlessness and ease. "What're you doing now?"
"Taking you inside so you can warm up, dry off and make love with me again-maybe not in that order."
Gennie curled her arms around his neck. "I'm beginning to like your ideas. What about our clothes?"
"We can salvage what's left of them later." He pushed open the door of the lighthouse. "We won't be needing them for quite a while."
"Definitely like your ideas." She pressed her mouth against his throat. ~ Nora Roberts

Nihilism is the moral equivalent of weightlessness. ~ Myself

We're free out here, really free for the first time. We're floating, literally. Gravity can't bow our backs or break our arches or tame our ideas. You know, it's only out here that stupid people like us can really think. The weightlessness gets our thoughts and we can sort them. Ideas grow out here like nowhere else - it's the right environment for them. Anyone can get into space, if he wants to hard enough. The ticket is a dream. ~ Fritz Leiber

My sense of weightlessness, I think, comes from the fact that I know so little about my past.. ~ Gillian Flynn

The Sucking [of the blood] mesmerized me; the warm struggling of the man was soothing to the tension of my hands; and there came the beating of the drum again, which was the drumbeat of his heart - only this time it beat in perfect rhythm with the drumbeat of my own heart, the two resounding in every fiber of my being, until the bet began to grow slower and slower, so that each was a soft rumble that that threatened to go on without end.I was drowsing, falling into weightlessness; ~ Anne Rice

I still dream about being on the space station with the feeling of being weightless. The weightlessness is the most amazing, relaxing and natural feeling. ~ Helen Sharman

I had started Zero-G specifically to broaden the public for access to weightlessness. ~ Peter Diamandis

When I turned to climb the third wave, I saw at my feet a small leaf, perhaps an inch long, pointed, withered to bright chestnut but still smooth. It was supported above the soil in the grey points of short grasses which did not bend beneath its weightlessness. It was curved in all three planes. Fibrous veins displayed its structure. It was quite still. And as I watched its stillness spread; first to me. I wanted not to move by a hair's breadth. Lest the bond between it and me should break. The stillness spread to the grass around us. It encompassed the hill. The beech wood became attendant on it. The whole valley slowly filled with it. The leaf, and I its participant, had drawn the mileswide landscape into an attentive, breathless synthesis ... there was no movement, no sound and no distinction or identifying of parts in all that had been there united. For there was no 'I' that gazed ... through that tiny gateway I became one with what was boundless. ~ Geoffrey Vickers

The diplomatic kids had a hectic sort of life, being constantly thrown from one end of the world to the other and always playing tennis, no matter who was being machine-gunned in the streets, you were always extraterritorial, history was not permitted to touch you, it was only buzzing around your tennis court in a bloody sort of way. You were so well protected that you went to pieces. Diplomatic immunity could do very strange things to you, it was like weightlessness. You had to remind yourself constantly that you actually existed, and you were not supposed to identify yourself too much with the suffering of whatever country you were posted to. But then, who needs reality anyway? ~ Romain Gary

In weightlessness, one of the physiological changes is a fluid shift. Your blood and fluid is equally distributed in your body. So that makes your calves and thighs and waist skinnier, and it makes your chest and women's breasts broader. The downside is your face is kind of puffy ~ Mike Mullane

In the early days of space travel, one interesting problem emerged from experiments with weightlessness. Americans found that ... normal ink pen would not work without gravity feed. Scientists undertook extensive research, finally developed high-technology pen to work in conditions of no gravity. In Russia, scientist faced with the same problem found a different solution. Instead of pen, they used pencil. ~ Marina Lewycka

In flight from intellectual heaviness, [he] arrives at intelligent weightlessness. Every notion is flipped this way and that; the answer to every question is yes and no; the proliferating examples from all the arts ... overwhelm the observations that they are designed to illustrate; the general impression in one of uncontrollable articulateness. [He] does not think his thoughts; he convenes them. There is not a sign of struggle anywhere. ~ Leon Wieseltier

The result was unreal. The most incredible feeling came over me. Weightlessness. Like the vise that engulfed me had evaporated. There was no more tightness. I could breathe freely. My head didn't hurt. My stomach didn't hurt. After a few moments, the only thing that hurt was the cut on my arm. I sat there and closed my eyes, reveling in the physical pain that was a hundred times easier to handle than what I had been dealing with. ~ S.M. Koz

I feel like I'm waiting here. Waiting for something that hasn't happened yet. Something that isn't yet. But that's all I feel and nothing else. I don't know if I even exist. And then someone flips a switch and the light is gone, the room is gone, the weightlessness is gone. I want to ask to wait, because I wasn't finished yet, but I don't have a chance. There is no gentle pulling. No coaxing. No choice. I'm wrenched out. Yanked, as if my head is being snapped back. I'm in the dark and everything is pain. There are too many sensations at once. Every nerve ending is on fire. Like the shock of being born. And then, there are flashes of everything. Color, voices, machines, harsh words. The pain doesn't flash. The pain is constant, steady, never-ending. It's the only thing I know. I don't want to be awake anymore. ~ Katja Millay

I don't know how it happens. We move our faces at the same time, and then our lips are touching. I've lost my worries. Traded them in for the sun and the taste of his tongue and the thought that in sixty years we'll be ashes - we'll be tossed into the air and after a moment of weightlessness we'll be everywhere and nowhere. But for now there's quick breathing and the feeling like he has my heart in his palm as it beats outside my chest. ~ Lauren DeStefano

The idea in our culture of body solely as sculpture is wrong. Body is not marble. That is not its purpose. Its purpose is to protect, contain, support and fire the spirit and soul within it, to be a repository for memory, to fill us with feeling - that is the supreme psychic nourishment. It is to lift us and propel us, to fill us with feeling to prove that we exist, that we are here, to give us grounding, heft, weight. It is wrong to think of it as a place we leave in order to soar to the spirit. The body is the launcher of those experiences. Without body there would be no sensations of crossing thresholds, there would be no sense of lifting, no sense of height, weightlessness. All that comes from the body. The body is the rocket launcher. In its nose capsule, the soul looks out the window into the mysterious starry night and is dazzled. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

To test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved "slowly and insecurely" and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an "ovoid cupola." Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading "Experiments with Human Subjects" - a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased - von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X's inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force ~ Mary Roach

There it is again, right in my head, I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME -
But this time it's different -
There's a lightness -
A breath-stealing feeling -
A weightlessness to it that makes my stomach rise -
"I give you a gift," he says, his voice floating thru my head like a cloud on fire. "The same gift I've given to my captains. Use it. Use it to defeat me. I dare you."
I look into his eyes, into the blackness of them, the blackness that swallows me whole -
I AM THE CIRCLE AND THE CIRCLE IS ME.
And that's all I can hear in the whole world. ~ Patrick Ness

It is weight that gives meaning to weightlessness ... ~ Isamu Noguchi

Weightlessness was wonderful, and I was surprised at how natural it felt. ~ Ron Garan

Something, most certainly, happens to a diver's emotions underwater. It is not merely a side effect of the pleasing, vaguely erotic sensation of water pressure on the body. Nor is it alone the peculiar sense of weightlessness, which permits a diver to hang motionless in open water, observing sea life large as whales around him; not the ability of a diver, descending in that condition, to slowly tumble and rotate in all three spatial planes. It is not the exhilaration from disorientation that comes when one's point of view starts to lose its "lefts" and "down" and gains instead something else, a unique perception that grows out of the ease of movement in three dimensions. It is not from the diminishment of gravity to a force little more emphatic than a suggestion. It is not solely exposure to an unfamiliar intensity of life. It is not a state of rapture with the bottomless blue world beneath one's feet…it is some complicated mix of these emotions, together with the constant proximity of real terror. ~ Barry Lopez

Once you are in the orbit of your destiny, weightlessness is the only result. ~ Baba Amte

Nathaniel and I'd made the decision not to have children. They aren't conducive to a life in space, you know? I mean there's the radiation, and the weightlessness, but more it was that I was gone all the time. I couldn't give up the stars… but I found myself wishing that we hadn't made that decision. Part of it was wishing that I had some connection to the next generation. More of it was wanting someone to share the burden of decision with me.

What happens after Nathaniel dies? What do I have left here? More specifically, how much will I regret not going on the Mission?

And if I'm in space, how much will I regret abandoning my husband to die alone? ~ Mary Robinette Kowal