“...for the first time I couldn't feel really interested in my mother's letter. The small concerns of home, instead of coming close to me and enveloping me as I read about them, remained small and far away; they were like magic lantern slides without a lantern to bring them back to life. I didn't belong there, I felt; my place was here; here I was a planet, albeit a small one, and carried messages for other planets. And my mother's harping on the heat seemed irrelevant and almost irritating; she ought to know, I felt, that I was enjoying it, that I was invulnerable to it, invulnerable to everything...”

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”

“There are more stars than there are people. Billions, Alan had said, and millions of them might have planets just as good as ours. Ever since I can remember, I’ve felt too big. But now I felt small. Too small. Too small to count. Every star is massive, but there are so many of them. How could anyone care about one star when there were so many spare? And what if stars were small? What if all the stars were just pixels? And earth was less than a pixel? What does that make us? And what does that make me? Not even dust. I felt tiny. For the first time in my life I felt too small.”

“I worried constantly. I felt that my son was chipping away at me. This small thing and then that small thing.”

“Certain moments in my life are imprinted in me memory.They're easy to recall with perfect clarity, whether I want to remember them or not. Any small thing can trigger them: a phrase, a smell, a thought. It brings everything back like I'm reliving that moment, a brief scene in the movie of my life, complete with how horrible I felt at the time. And I usually felt horrible in those moments that I want to forget that stick around.”

“When I consider the small span of my life absorbed in the eternity of all time, or the small part of space which I can touch or see engulfed by the infinite immensity of spaces that I know not and that know me not, I am frightened and astonished to see myself here instead of there … now instead of then.”