Satellite Boy Quotes

He was Mo-Maw’s youngest son, but he was also her confidant, her lady’s maid, and errand boy. He was her one flattering mirror, and her teenage diary, her electric blanket, her doormat. He was her best pal, the dog she hardly walked, and her greatest romance. He was her cheer on a dreich morning, the only laughter in her audience. Jodie shunted him again but Mungo only grumbled and curled tighter around her. Her brother was her mother’s minor moon, her warmest sun, and at the exact same time, a tiny satellite that she had forgotten about. He would orbit her for an eternity, even as she, and then he, broke into bits.

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day- A sunny day with the leaves just turning, The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play Your first game of fotball, then, like a satellite Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away Behind a scatter of boys. I can see You walking away from me towards the school with the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free Into a wilderness, the gait of one Who finds no path where the path should be. That hesitant figure, eddying away Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem, Has something I never quite grasp to convey About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay. I had worse partings, but none that so Gnaws at my mind still. Perhaps it is roughly Saying what God alone could perfectly show- How selfhood begins with a walking away, And love proved in the letting go.

He had intended at first to send Ford down in the Chili. It was not gratitude that changed his mind, but respect. Once he had lost office Ford had gone straight to Huxley Field north of Novak Tower, cleared for the vacation satellite Monte Carlo, and had jumped for the New Frontiers instead. Lazarus liked that. "Go for broke" took courage and character that most people didn’t have. Don’t grab a toothbrush, don’t wind the cat-just do it! "Of course you’re coming along," he said easily: "You’re my kind of boy, Slayton.

How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes,

For his part, Jazz knew he was handsome. It had nothing to do with looking in the mirror, which he rarely did. It had everything to do with the way the girls at school looked at him, the way they became satellites when he walked by, their orbits contorted by his own mysterious gravity. If attention could be measured like the Doppler effect, girls would show a massive blue shift in his presence. In the last year or so, he had even remarked the scrutiny of older women—teachers, cashiers at stores, the woman who delivered UPS packages to his house. What had once been a maternal flavor in their glances had taken on a lingering, cool sort of appraisal. He could almost hear them thinking, Not yet. But soon. Despite his upbringing, despite the infamy of his father, they still watched him. Or maybe because of it. Maybe Howie was right about bad boys.

Did you know that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two little mongrels on the streets of Moscow. Pchelka, which means Little Bee, and Mushka, which means Little Fly. They went up in Sputnik 6. They were supposed to get into orbit and come right back. But the rockets misfired and shot them into space. Whenever I look at the night sky, I think about those dogs. Wearing these hand-stitched spacesuits, bright orange, with their paws sticking out. Big fishbowl helmets. How… crazy. Floating out and out into space. How bewildered they must have been, dying from oxygen deprivation. For what? They would have happily spent their days rummaging through trashcans. For all anyone knows these dogs are still out there. Two dead mongrels in a satellite. Two dog skeletons in silly spacesuits. Gleaming dog skulls inside fishbowl helmets. They’ll spin through the universe until they burn up in the atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Or get sucked into a black hole to be crushed into a ball of black matter no bigger than an ant turd.

If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences, for instance, I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where anything is professed and practised but the art of life;—to survey the world through a telescope or a microscope, and never with his natural eye; to study chemistry, and not learn how his bread is made, or mechanics, and not learn how it is earned; to discover new satellites to Neptune, and not detect the motes in his eyes, or to what vagabond he is a satellite himself; or to be devoured by the monsters that swarm all around him, while contemplating the monsters in a drop of vinegar. Which would have advanced the most at the end of a month—the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this—or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the meanwhile, and had received a Rodgers' penknife from his father?

Zach’s Fanfare #2” (MFSB)* “Comeback Kid” (Sleigh Bells) “Monkey Gone to Heaven” (The Pixies) “Spaceman” (Harry Nilsson) “Going Down” (Freddie King) “I’m Bad” (Rocket to Memphis) “Pumped Up Kicks” (Foster the People) “Nobody Does It Better” (Me First and the Gimme Gimmes) “Skull & Crossbones” (Sparkle Moore & Dan Belloc and His Orchestra) “Switchblade Smiles” (Kasabian) “I Wanna Destroy You” (The Soft Boys) “Drain You” (Foxy Shazam) “T.O.R.N.A.D.O.” (The Go! Team) “Woman of Mass Destruction” (The Woolly Bandits) “Tough Lover” (Nick Curran and the Lowlifes) “(I’m Stuck in a Pagoda With) Tricia Toyota” (The Dickies) “Apache” (The Sugarhill Gang) “For Whom the Bell Tolls” (Metallica) “We All Go Back to Where We Belong” (R.E.M.) “Change Reaction” (David Uosikkinen) “Satellite” (The Hooters) “Fanfare for Rocky” (Bill Conti)*

Eventually, at 7:22 A.M. on the morning of May 26, 1998, with tears still pouring down my frozen cheeks, the summit of Mount Everest opened her arms and welcomed me in. As if she now considered me somehow worthy of this place. My pulse raced, and in a haze I found myself suddenly standing on top of the world. Alan embraced me, mumbling excitedly into his mask. Neil was still staggering toward us. As he approached, the wind began to die away. The sun was now rising over the hidden land of Tibet, and the mountains beneath us were bathed in a crimson red. Neil knelt and crossed himself on the summit. Then, together, with our masks of, we hugged as brothers. I got to my feet and began to look around. I swore that I could see halfway around the world. The horizon seemed to bend at the edges. It was the curvature of our earth. Technology can put a man on the moon but not up here. There truly was some magic to this place. The radio suddenly crackled to my left. Neil spoke into it excitedly. “Base camp. We’ve run out of earth.” The voice on the other end exploded with jubilation. Neil passed the radio to me. For weeks I had planned what I would say if I reached the top, but all that just fell apart. I strained into the radio and spoke without thinking. “I just want to get home.” The memory of what went on then begins to fade. We took several photos with both the SAS and the DLE flags flying on the summit, as promised, and I scooped some snow into an empty Juice Plus vitamin bottle I had with me.* It was all I would take with me from the summit. I remember having some vague conversation on the radio--patched through from base camp via a satellite phone--with my family some three thousand miles away: the people who had given me the inspiration to climb. But up there, the time flew by, and like all moments of magic, nothing can last forever. We had to get down. It was already 7:48 A.M. Neil checked my oxygen. “Bear, you’re right down. You better get going, buddy, and fast.” I had just under a fifth of a tank to get me back to the Balcony. I heaved the pack and tank onto my shoulders, fitted my mask, and turned around. The summit was gone. I knew that I would never see it again. *Years later, Shara and I christened our three boys with this snow water from Everest’s summit. Life moments.