And I know what I told my father was true: let us taste the world, and we’ll do whatever it takes to shape it into our home.

— Beth Revis

And I look at Harley, and the billions of stars are in his eyes, and he's drinking them up, pouring them into his soul.

— Beth Revis

Don’t you understand? You are Elder. When you take my role as Eldest, you must dedicate your whole life to this one idea: you are the caretaker of every single person on the ship. They are your responsibility. You can never show weakness in front of them: you are their strength. You can never let them see you in despair: you are their hope. Furthermore, you must always be everything to everyone on board.

— Beth Revis

Everyone, this is the new girl. Elder knows her. New girl, this is everyone.” A few people look up politely; some actually smile. Most, however, look wary at best, disgusted at worse. The nurse closest to me jabs her finger behind her ear and starts whispering to nobody.“What’s wrong with her?” I ask Harley as he leads me to the table he was sitting at.“Oh, don’t worry, we’re all mad here.” I giggle, mostly from nerves. “It’s a good thing I read Alice in Wonder-land. I definitely think I’ve fallen into the rabbit hole.”“Read what?” Harley asks.“Never mind.” All around me, eyes follow my every move.“Look,” I say loudly. “I know I look different. But I’m just a person, like you.” I hold my head up high, looking them all in the eyes, trying to hold their stares for as long as possible.“You tell ’em,” says Harley with another Cheshire grin.

— Beth Revis

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

I’ve heard that when you’re in a life-or-death situation, like a car accident or a gunfight, all your senses shoot up to almost superhuman level, everything slows down, and you’re hyper-aware of what’s happening around you. As the shuttle careens toward the earth, the exact opposite is true for me. Everything silences, even the screams and shouts from the people on the other side of the metal door, the crashes that I pray aren’t bodies, the hissing of rockets, Elder’s cursing, my pounding heartbeat. I feel nothing—not the seat belt biting into my flesh, not my clenching jaw, nothing. My whole body is numb. Scent and taste disappear. The only thing about my body that works is my eyes, and they are filled with the image before them. The ground seems to leap up at us as we hurtle toward it. Through the blurry image of the world below us, I see the outline of land—a continent. And at once, my heart lurches with the desire to know this world, to make it our home. My eyes drink up the image of the planet—and my stomach sinks with the knowledge that this is a coastline I’ve never seen before. I could spin a globe of Earth around and still be able to recognize the way Spain and Portugal reach into the Atlantic, the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, the pointy end of India. But this continent—it dips and curves in ways I don’t recognize, swirls into an unknown sea, creating peninsulas in shapes I do not know, scattering out islands in a pattern I cannot connect. And it’s not until I see this that I realize: this world may one day become our home, but it will never be the home I left behind.

— Beth Revis

I would use the same word to describe both my joy and the rain: torrential. This—this—this is all I ever wanted from the world: wide-open spaces and cooling rain and the chance to run.

— Beth Revis

Kayleigh was right. Without the pills, you really do feel nothing. And nothing can be nice.

— Beth Revis

More than the sound of my own beating heart, I miss the sound of a ticking clock. Time passes, it must pass, but I have no more assurance of moving through time than I have that I am moving through space. In a way, I’m glad: this means perhaps 300 years and 364 days have passed, and tomorrow I will wake up. Sometimes after a cross-country meet or a long day at school, I’d fall into bed with all my clothes on and be out before I knew it. When I’d finally open my eyes, it would feel like I’d just shut them for a minute, but really, the whole rest of the day and half the night was gone. But. There were other times when I’d collapse onto my mattress, shut my eyes and dream, and it felt like I’d lived a whole lifetime in that dream, but when I woke up, it had only been a few minutes. What if only a year has gone by? What if we haven’t even left yet? That is my greatest fear.

— Beth Revis

My heart will never forget what it’s like to fade in and out of time, to never know if one year or a thousand have passed by, to torture yourself with the idea of your soul trapped behind ice for all eternity. I know what torture there is behind ice.

— Beth Revis