Galaxy Stars Quotes & Sayings

We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times - a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universe and extraterrestrial civilizations whose radio messages are at this moment reaching the Earth. How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor. — Carl Sagan

Don't choose someone who's no good for you," Kade says slowly. "You deserve someone who looks at you like he's just won a galaxy with all its stars." "That's — J.C. Reed

Arthur followed Ford's finger, and saw where it was pointing. For a moment it still didn't register, then his mind nearly blew up. "What? Harmless? Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word!" Ford shrugged. "Well, there are a hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, and only a limited amount of space in the book's microprocessors," he said, "and no one knew much about the Earth, of course." "Well, for God's sake, I hope you managed to rectify that a bit." "Oh yes, well, I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement." "And what does it say now?" asked Arthur. "Mostly harmless, — Douglas Adams

And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed. — Arthur C. Clarke

Sam rocked backwards and felt all the breath leave his body. Sam felt all his breath leave the room, the apartment, the building. the city. Sam felt all his breath leave the world, the night, and travel up to the stars where it turned to ice and stretched atom-thin into every corner of the galaxy. Then it retracted, gathering up all the black world, and wound its way back through interstellar space and dark matter and the secrets of infinity, back into the earth's orbit, back into his night in his city, back into his very lungs. It was okay. He was just trying to help, to ease woes and mend hearts and cool seared souls, to guide the bereaved out of the land of the lost, to make the mourning a little less lonesome. He was forgiven. — Laurie Frankel

The first voyagers to the stars will be creatures whose life cycle is matched to the voyage: the aeons involved in traversing the galaxy are not daunting to immortal beings. By the end of the third millennium, travel to other stars could be technically feasible. But would there be sufficient motive? — Martin Rees

Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here). — Richard Dawkins

We looked at the sky. So many stars, it seemed like a celebration, a grand, illicit party the galaxy was holding after the humans had been put to bed. — E. Lockhart

It happened a long time ago," she said quietly. Wells nodded. The words I know formed in his brain but got lost somewhere on the way to his mouth. His eyes began to prickle and he turned away quickly. Eight billion. That's how many people had died during the Cataclysm. It'd always seemed as abstract as any huge figure, like the age of Earth, or the number of stars in the galaxy. Yet now, he'd give anything to know that the people who'd eaten dinner together in this kitchen, with those plates, had somehow made it off the burning planet. "Wells, — Kass Morgan

I felt him there with me. The real David. My David.
David, you are still here. Alive. Alive in me.
Alive in the galaxy.
Alive in the stars.
Alive in the sky.
Alive in the sea.
Alive in the palm trees.
Alive in feathers.
Alive in birds.
Alive in the mountains.
Alive in the coyotes.
Alive in books.
Alive in sound.
Alive in mom.
Alive in dad.
Alive in Bobby.
Alive in me.
Alive in soil.
Alive in branches.
Alive in fossils.
Alive in tongues.
Alive in eyes.
Alive in cries.
Alive in bodies.
Alive in past, present and future.
Alive forever. — Kelly Easton

The Milky Way Galaxy is one of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies notable neither in mass nor in brightness nor in how its stars are configured and arrayed. Some modern deep sky photographs show more galaxies beyond the Milky Way than stars within the Milky Way. Every one of them is an island universe containing perhaps a hundred billion suns. Such an image is a profound sermon on humility. — Carl Sagan

Living in a galaxy is like living in a neighborhood where the house down the street might have burned down four thousand years ago but you wouldn't know it for another three thousand years. — Amy Leach

The science of mathematics applies to the clouds; the radiance of starlight nourishes the rose; no thinker will dare say that the scent of hawthorn is valueless to the constellations ... The cheese-mite has its worth; the smallest is large and the largest is small ... Light does not carry the scents of earth into the upper air without knowing what it is doing with them; darkness confers the essence of the stars upon the sleeping flowers ... Where the telescope ends the microscope begins, and which has the wider vision? You may choose. A patch of mould is a galaxy of blossom; a nebula is an antheap of stars. There is the same affinity, if still more inconceivable, between the things of the mind and material things. — Victor Hugo

There are more stolen bikes in my garage than there are stars in the galaxy. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

With that, everything was suddenly thrown into greater relief, a kind of super three-dimensionality that enhanced the presence and realness of everything in my perceptual field, from the small insects close to my face all the way to the galaxy of stars behind the moon. I was looking at everything from the larger perspective of the entire Universe. — James Redfield

[O]ne might ask why, in a galaxy of a few hundred billion stars, the aliens are so intent on coming to Earth at all. It would be as if every vertebrate in North America somehow felt drawn to a particular house in Peoria, Illinois. Are we really that interesting? — Seth Shostak

I gaze out, to the stars. I remember the first time I saw real stars, through the hatch window. They were beautiful then, but now, seeing them here, all around me, beautiful feels like an inadequate word. I see the stars as a part of the universe, and having spent my life behind walls, suddenly having none fills me with both awe and terror. Emotion courses through my veins, choking me. I feel so insignificant, a tiny speck surrounded by a million stars.
A million suns.
Centuries away is Sol. Circling around it is Sol-Earth, the planet Amy came from. And one of these other stars is the Centauri binary system, where the new planet spins, waiting for us.
And here we are, in the middle, surrounded by a sea of stars.
Any of them could hold a planet. Any of them could hold a home.
But all of them are out of reach. — Beth Revis

Estimates are that at least 70 per cent of all stars are accompanied by planets, and since the latter can occur in systems rather than as individuals (think of our own solar system), the number of planets in the Milky Way galaxy is of order one trillion. — Seth Shostak

We are all as much extraordinary phenomena of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars and the form of a galaxy. — Alan Watts

But I guessed that no matter how strong it was, love alone couldn't turn a speck of dust into a galaxy of stars. — Tiffanie DeBartolo

I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythm of Earth's day, Earth's year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart. — Stephen Baxter

You have come from the Citadel - I know, you see, something of your journeyings and history - that great fortress of bygone days, so you must possess some feeling for the past. Has it never struck you that mankind was richer by far, and happier too, a chiliad gone than it is now?" "Everyone knows," I said, "that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past." "As it was then, so shall it be again. Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun. — Gene Wolfe

Beautiful girls in fairy stories are as common as pebbles on the beach. Magnolia-skinned milkmaids rub shoulders with starry-eyed princesses and, in fact, counting two eyes in each bright-eyed damsel would result in a whole galaxy of twinkling stars. — Eloisa James

He's seeing the actual Milky Way streaked across the sky. The whole of his entire galaxy, right there in front of him. Billions and billions of stars. Billions and billions of worlds. All of them, all of those seemingly endless possibilities, not fictional, but real, out there, existing, right now. There is so much more out there than just the world he knows, so much more than his tiny Washington town, so much more than even London. Or England. Or hell, for that matter.
So much more that he'll never see. So much more that he'll never get to. So much that he can only glimpse enough of to know that it's forever beyond his reach. — Patrick Ness

I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthromorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. — Stanley Kubrick

Sometimes it seemed that one of the stars came loose from the firmament and sailed off with dizzying speed to a far corner of the night. In the dark hours before sunrise, constellations came apart and reformed and fell in burning streaks. — Joe Hill

The bottom line is, like, one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up. That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds. — Seth Shostak

There are a vast number of stars within our galaxy. The number is not so large as the number of cometary nuclei around the Sun but is nevertheless hardly modest. It's about 400 billion stars, of which the Sun is one. — Carl Sagan

We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars. We live in a galaxy that is about one hundred thousand light-years across and is slowly rotating; the stars in its spiral arms orbit around its center about once every hundred million years. Our sun is just an ordinary, average-sized, yellow star, near the outer edge of one of the spiral arms. — Stephen Hawking

I stared up in disbelief at the information my eyes fed my brain, and lost myself to the stars.
For the first time in my life I had a greater idea of how infinitesimally small our planet really is and, furthermore, how tiny and insignificant I am in the grand scheme of the vast universe.
I took a seat on a rock next to Lily and took in the moment to comprehend the vastness of everything else, and the incredible smallness of I. — Craig Stone

There are as many atoms in each molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. This is true for dogs, and bears, and every living thing. We are, each of us, a little universe. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons. Given the billions of neurons, this means there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissue as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. — David Eagleman

The greatest mystery was not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxy of the stars, but that in this prison we can fashion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness. — Maurice S. Friedman

Recent studies have considered the detection of a spaceship visiting our parish of the galaxy. In my opinion that last thought should bring a blush to every human cheek ... Fecklessness might be the main theme of the aliens' report on the new-found source of radio pollution ... that emanates from beings who have mastered a lot of physics, chemistry and biology and yet let their children starve-while all around their planet the energy of their mother star runs to waste in a desert of space. — Nigel Calder

You know; when I look at the night sky and I see this enormous splendor of stars and galaxies, I sometimes ask the question, well how many worlds are we talking about? Well do the math, there are about 100 billion galaxies that are in the visible universe and each galaxy in turn contains about 100 billion stars, you multiply and you get about ten billion trillion stars. Well I think it is the height of arrogance to believe that we are alone in the universe, my attitude is that the universe is teaming, teaming with different kinds of life forms — Michio Kaku

Long ago, when an early galaxy began to pour light out into the surrounding darkness, no witness could have known that billions of years later some remote clumps of rock and metal, ice and organic molecules would fall together to make place called Earth; or that life would arise and thinking beings evolve who would one day capture a little of that galactic light, and try to puzzle out what had sent it on its way. And after the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being
and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. — Carl Sagan

Consider now the Milky Way. Here also we see an innumerable dust, only the grains of this dust are no longer atoms but stars; these grains also move with great velocities, they act at a distance one upon another, but this action is so slight at great distances that their trajectories are rectilineal; nevertheless, from time to time, two of them may come near enough together to be deviated from their course, like a comet that passed too close to Jupiter. In a word, in the eyes of a giant, to whom our Suns were what our atoms are to us, the Milky Way would only look like a bubble of gas. — Henri Poincare

It is unlikely that we will ever see a star being born. Stars are like animals in the wild. We may see the very young, but never their actual birth, which is a veiled and secret event. Stars are born inside thick clouds of dust and gas in the spiral arms of the galaxy, so thick that visible light cannot penetrate them. — Heinz Pagels

I cannot possibly conceive of my planet Earth as the centre of a three-tiered universe. I know rather that the sun, around which my planet Earth revolves, is a middle sized star in a galaxy called the Milky Way that has over a hundred billion other suns or stars within it. — John Shelby Spong

Charles Wallace and the unicorn moved through the time-spinning reaches of a far glazy, and he realized that the galaxy itself was part of a mighty orchestra, and each star and planet within the galaxy added its own instrument to the music of the spheres. As long as the ancient harmonies were sung, the universe would not entirely lose its joy. — Madeleine L'Engle

In the eternal night of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, two civilization had swept through like two shooting stars, and the universe had remembered their light. — Liu Cixin

A doctor, a logician and a marine biologist had also just arrived, flown in at phenomenal expense from Maximegalon to try to reason with the lead singer who had locked himself in the bathroom with a bottle of pills and was refusing to come out till it could be proved conclusively to him that he wasn't a fish. The bass player was busy machine-gunning his bedroom and the drummer was nowhere on board.
Frantic inquiries led to the discovery that he was standing on a beach on Santraginus V over a hundred light years away where, he claimed, he had been happy for over half an hour now and had found a small stone that would be his friend. — Douglas Adams

A chess master can keep track of more choices than the number of stars in the galaxy within an instant, but these are people that have truly learned and mastered the choices that they have and how to deal with those choices over a very, very long period of training, so essentially what they're really doing is ruling out all the irrelevant choices and only zeroing in on the most relevant, useful choices at the moment. — Sheena Iyengar

There is little chance that aliens from two societies anywhere in the Galaxy will be culturally close enough to really 'get along.' This is something to ponder as you watch the famous cantina scene in Star Wars ... Does this make sense, given the overwhelmingly likely situation that galactic civilizations differ in their level of evolutionary development by thousands or millions of years? Would you share drinks with a trilobite, an ourang-outang, or a saber-toothed tiger? Or would you just arrange to have a few specimens stuffed and carted off to the local museum? — Seth Shostak

What I am really saying is that you don't need to do anything, because if you see yourself in the correct way, you are all as much extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of the stars, and the form of a galaxy. You are all just like that, and there is nothing wrong with you at all. — Alan W. Watts

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his. — Ted Kooser

We're plotting to steal time itself from you ... We're going to spike it to the floor as it slips by. And just as you come over to see why it's so still, we'll pull it out from under you
and send you spinning off around the galaxy's edge. We're planning to pluck all the best stars out of the sky and stuff them in our pockets ... so that when we meet you once again and thrust our hands deep inside to hide our embarrassment, our fingertips will smart on them, as if they were desert grains, caught down in the seams, and we'll smile at you on your way to a glory that, for all our stellar thefts, we shall never be able to duplicate. — Samuel R. Delany

i will forever be colliding
with a billion unnamed
undiscovered stars, each of us
on our own orbital paths. — Sanober Khan

If the Earth is the size of a pea in New York, then the Sun is a beachball 50m away, Pluto is 4km away, and the next nearest star is in Tokyo. Now shrink Pluto's orbit into a coffee cup; then our Milky Way Galaxy fills North America. — Wayne Hays

We celebrate, we create, as citizens of Shatter. We hold a bond of unending happiness. This planet, at the edge of the galaxy, is our testament to life.
Our dragons, in the sky, came from the stars. They brought many new things to explore.
From the Blessings of the Father Dragon, a poem — L'Poni Baldwin

You don't 'have' a life, you 'are' life. The One Life, the one consciousness that pervades the entire universe and takes temporary form to experience itself as a stone or blade of grass, as an animal, a person, a star or a galaxy. — Eckhart Tolle

For the fact is that neuroscientists who study memory remain unclear on the question of whether each time we remember something we are accessing a stable "memory fragment" - often called a "trace" or an "engram" - or whether each time we remember something we are literally creating a new "trace" to house the thought. And since no one has yet been able to discern the material of these traces, nor to locate them in the brain, how one thinks of them remains mostly a matter of metaphor: they could be "scribbles," "holograms," or "imprints"; they could live in "spirals," "rooms," or "storage units." Personally, when I imagine my mind in the act of remembering, I see Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, roving about in a milky, navy-blue galaxy shot through with twinkling cartoon stars. — Maggie Nelson

But to Vasili, for a moment that would be imprinted on his memory forever, that sharp-edged outline held a completely different, and wholly impossible, scene. It was as if a window had suddenly been opened onto another universe.
The vision lasted for less that a second, before his involuntary blink reflex cut it off. He was looking into a field not of stars, but of suns, as if into the crowded heart of a galaxy, or the core of a globular cluster. In that moment, Vasili Orlov lost forever the skies of Earth. From now on they would seem intolerably empty; even mighty Orion and glorious Scorpio would be scarcely noticeable patterns of feeble sparks, not worthy of a second glance. — Arthur C. Clarke

We look up and we hope the stars look down, we pray that there may be stars for us to follow, stars moving across the heavens and leading us to our destiny, but it's only our vanity. We look at the galaxy and fall in love, but the universe cares less about us than we do about it, and the stars stay in their courses however much we may wish upon them to do otherwise. It's true that if you watch the sky-wheel turn for a while you'll see a meteor fall, flame and die. That's not a star worth following; it's just an unlucky rock. Our fates are here on earth. There are no guiding stars. — Salman Rushdie

We begin with the stars, then ascend up and away out to the galaxy, the universe, and beyond. What did Buzz Lightyear say in Toy Story? "To Infinity and Beyond!" It's a big universe. I — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Your mind is a galaxy. More dark than light. But the light makes it worthwhile. Which is to say, don't kill yourself. Even when the darkness is total. Always know that life is not still. Time is space. You are moving through that galaxy. Wait for the stars. 10. — Matt Haig

And may my bronze name / touch always her thousand fingers / grow brighter with her weeping / until I am fixed like a galaxy / and memorized / in her secret and fragile skies. — Leonard Cohen

The brain is its own galaxy, with more cells than stars in the Milky Way. The most powerful organ in the body, it rivals any supercomputer, processing 90,000 to 150,000 thoughts a day through billions of neurons and trillions of synaptic connections. Now that we have found a pathway to retrieving memories that before were inaccessible, we are perfecting its function too quickly. — Gwendolyn Womack

Alcohol
I once visited a supermarket that had a petition to allow it to sell alcohol. I signed the petition telling the check-out girl that clouds of alcohol molecules were the largest objects in the galaxy, some five billion times the mass of our sun, and that it was from such clouds that worlds and stars were formed.
To which the check-out girl replied: "You're not from around here are you. — Bo Fowler

I feel that I'm in on the ground floor of something that human beings will be concentrating on for the next 1,000 years-if we don't destroy ourselves in the meantime. It's possible that 50 years from now we're going to end up out of this solar system, batting around the universe, at least within our galaxy, investigating other stars and other systems. — Deke Slayton

We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering. — Carl Sagan

Our sun is one of a 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living thing in that enormous immensity. — Wernher Von Braun

I just want to be
the size of a galaxy
so I can eat all the stars and gas giants
without them noticing
and getting upset.
Is that so bad?
Isn't that
what love looks like?
Isn't that
what you want, too? — Catherynne M Valente

There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy. — Carl Sagan

The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he's but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves to be the center of things - scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with the sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other. — M. Scott Peck

Mr. McCleod: And if there's anything I want you guys to take with you from this class, as you're abusing your bodies over break, is three things: the heart is the body's strongest muscle, that the brain has more cells in it than our galaxy has stars, and that the body is 72% water. So wherever you go over vacation, don't get too dehydrated. — Laura Kasischke

The large-scale homogeneity of the universe makes it very difficult to believe that the structure of the universe is determined by anything so peripheral as some complicated molecular structure on a minor planet orbiting a very average star in the outer suburbs of a fairly typical galaxy. — Stephen Hawking

If we're thinking about old civilizations, those that formed a long time ago and there were stars and planets around long before Earth even existed, then these are going to be towards the center of the galaxy. That is the place to look if you think there are ancient civilizations that have made beacons or some other way of attracting our attention. — Paul Davies

I'll not always be here on guard. The stars twinkle in the Milky Way and the wind sighs for songs across the empty fields of a planet a Galaxy away.
You won't always be here.
But before you go, whisper this to your sons and their sons - The work was free. Keep it so. — L. Ron Hubbard

We living things are a late outgrowth of the metabolism of our galaxy. The carbon that enters into our composition was cooked in a remote past in a dying star. The waters of ancient seas set the pattern of ions in our blood. The ancient atmospheres moulded our metabolism. — George Wald

One in 200 stars has habitable Earth-like planets surrounding it - in the galaxy, half a billion stars have Earth-like planets going around them - that's huge, half a billion. So when we look at the night sky, it makes sense that someone is looking back at us. — Michio Kaku

There are at least as many galaxies in our observable universe as there are stars in our galaxy. — Martin Rees

Many of the stars in the universe are thousands of times bigger than the earth. God focuses on the earth, a little speck of dust in the galaxy, and even loves each of us intensely as if each of us are the only person who exists. — Paul Silway

In the year 3,000,002,012 the Andromeda Galaxy may collide with our Milky Way. At first this sounds miserable, like a collision of two bird flocks. But galaxy members fly farly, not tip to tip. In a galactic collision the stars do not actually collide - as with crisscrossing marching bands, only the interstices collide. (Oh to be like a galaxy, to mingle without wrecking. But then we would have to be composed of so much more sky.) The spaces between stars are so wide that thousands of galaxies have to converge before the stars will crash. — Amy Leach

All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy. When it was over, the host of the planetary systems still lived on, with here and there a casualty, and here and there among the stars a new planetary birth, and here and there a fresh disaster. — Olaf Stapledon

The peculiar idea that bigger is better has been around for at least as long as I have, and it's always bothered me. There is within it the implication that it is more difficult for God to care about a gnat than about a galaxy. Creation is just as visible in a grain of sand as in a skyful of stars.
The church is not immune from the bigger-is-better heresy. One woman told of going to a meeting where only a handful of people turned out, and these faithful few were scolded by the visiting preacher for the sparseness of the congregation. And she said indignantly, 'Our Lord said *feed* my sheep, not count them!' I often feel that I'm being counted, rather than fed, and so I am hungry. — Madeleine L'Engle

There's a large cluster of stars that are orbiting the center of our galaxy. And by measuring the motion of stars, and in particular, their orbits, we can figure out whether or not there's a central black hole. — Andrea M. Ghez

Where in the world would a star be without the love of the sky? — Munia Khan

A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough. — Douglas Adams

Recent results from astronomers who study the occasional gravitational lensing of unknown worlds by intervening stars suggest that orphan planets could be at least as numerous as the stars. In other words, there could be hundreds of billions of orphan worlds shuffling through our galaxy. — Seth Shostak

Will once said each galaxy has about a hundred billion stars. He said that ninety-eight percent of what exists around us we can't even see. Sometimes I let go and float out there, staring back at earth. I lose track of time. Will told me to forget time, that it was relative. He said light was the thing. At the speed of light, time stands still. It's the wild card. It makes things happen. (The Speed of Light) — Kiana Davenport

Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centers of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That's kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It's not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

Thanks to dreams, in the history of the galaxy the world has been reinvented more often than there are stars. — Lloyd Jones

Is it not careless to become too local when there are four hundred billion stars in our galaxy alone. — A.R. Ammons

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy. — Stephen Hawking

We can trace the elements. They were forged in the centers of high-mass stars that went unstable at the ends of their lives, they exploded, scattered their enriched contents across the galaxy, sprinkled into gas clouds that then collapsed and formed stars and planets and life. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The central region of the Milky Way, known as the bulge, is stuffed with literally tens of billions of stars. And most of these are old - considerably older than our Sun or its neighbors - because this part of the galaxy formed first. Consequently, bulge stars are generally deficient in heavy elements. — Seth Shostak

His eyes were like galaxies, and everyone could get lost in them. How many stars flickered there, no one knew, but every time he glanced upon someone, a new star ignited, a new star was caught in the gravity of his stare. — Dean F. Wilson

Palpatine felt that the universe beyond the edges of our maps was where his power came from. Over the many years he, with our aid, sent men and women beyond known space. They built labs and communication stations on distant moons, asteroids, out there in the wilds. We must follow them. Retreat from the galaxy. Go out beyond the veil of stars. We must seek the source of the dark side like a man looking for a wellspring of water. — Chuck Wendig

Kid says to me, "You play baseball? What position? Left out?" and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is only one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put it that way, the comment loses it's importance. — Jodi Picoult

What science tells us is that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star, itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars, itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different from millions of other galaxy clusters, themselves whirling away from one another in an expanding cosmic bubble universe that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes. — Michael Shermer

I think I know the real reason." "Which is?" "Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol. — Iain Banks

In their explorations, they encountered life in many forms and watched the workings of evolution on a thousand worlds. They saw how often the first faint sparks of intelligence flickered and died in the cosmic night. And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped. And — Arthur C. Clarke

The city lies at the galaxy's dust-stranded edge, enfolding a moon that used to be a world, or a world that used to be a moon; no one is certain anymore. In the mornings its skies are radiant with clouds like the plumage of a bird ever-rising, and in the evenings the stars scatter light across skies stitched and unstitched by the comings and goings of fire-winged starships. Its walls are made of metal the color of undyed silk, and its streets bloom with aleatory lights, small solemn symphonies, the occasional duel. — Yoon Ha Lee

Finally, from what we now know about the cosmos, to think that all this was created for just one species among the tens of millions of species who live on one planet circling one of a couple of hundred billion stars that are located in one galaxy among hundreds of billions of galaxies, all of which are in one universe among perhaps an infinite number of universes all nestled within a grand cosmic multiverse, is provincially insular and anthropocentrically blinkered. Which is more likely? That the universe was designed just for us, or that we see the universe as having been designed just for us? — Michael Shermer

There's as many atoms in a single molecule of your DNA as there are stars in the typical galaxy. We are, each of us, a little universe. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The vortex. You can see the entire galaxy up there. More stars than you ever knew existed. — Lisa Kessler

It was some kind of cosmic switching device, routing the traffic of the stars through unimaginable dimensions of space and time. He was passing through a Grand Central Station of the galaxy. — Arthur C. Clarke

Alastor Cluster is thousands of years old; men by the trillions fill the galaxy. Great mentors here, there, everywhere, across the whole pageant of existence have propounded problems and solved them. Everything conceivable has been achieved and all goals attained: not once, but thousands of times over. It is well known that we live in the golden afternoon of the human race; hence, in the name of the Thirty Thousand Stars, where will you find a fresh area of knowledge which must urgently be advanced from Rabendary Meadow? — Jack Vance

Perhaps [God] resided only above England. Or perhaps He had retired and now lived quietly in some remote Condominium Galaxy where He enjoyed a game of intergalactic golf now and again, deftly driving, pitching and putting stars into eighteen black holes in space, loosing devils on us whenever He scored a bogey. Or perhaps He hid behind every tree, rock and bush, or was closer than my very breath. Whatever He did, however He did it, Whoever and Whatever He wasn't or was, if he wanted my attention He'd have to leave off making Himself so scarce. — David James Duncan