"Above them Phileas Fogg moved in majestic indifference. He was following his own rational orbit around the world, without bothering at all about the asteroids gravitating around him." (Jules Verne, "Around the World in Eighty Days", 1873)
"Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. The gas had not heard of planets and organisms before, but identified Kuranes merely as one from the infinity where matter, energy, and gravitation exist." (H P Lovecraft, "Celephais", 1922)
"Earth - it was a place where you could stop being afraid, a place where fear of suffocation was not, where fear of blowout was not, where nobody went berserk with the chokers or dreamed of poisoned air or worried about shorthorn cancer or burn blindness or meteorite dust or low-gravity muscular atrophy. A place where there was wind to blow your sweat away." (Walter M Miller Jr, "The Lineman", 1957)
"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," The Beat Cluster", 1961)
"His vessel found itself between two vortices of gravitation called Bakhrida and Scintilla; Bakhrida speeds up time, Scintilla on the other hand slows it down, and between them lies a zone of stagnation, in which the present, becalmed, flows neither backward nor forward. There Heptodius froze alive, and remains to this day, along with the countless frigates and galleons of other astromariners, pirates, and spaceswashers, not aging in the least, suspended in the silence and excruciating boredom that is Eternity." (Stanislaw Lem, "How Erg the Self-Inducing Slew a Paleface", 1965)
"Every so often some idiot tries to abolish marriage. Such attempts work as well as repealing the law of gravity, making pi equal to three point zero, or moving mountains by prayer. Marriage is not something thought up by priests and inflicted on mankind; marriage is as much a part of mankind’s evolutionary equipment as his eyes, and as useful to the race as eyes are to an individual." (Robert A Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love", 1973)
"The force of gravity-though it is the first force with which we are acquainted, and though it is always with us, and though it is the one with a strength we most thoroughly appreciate-is by far the weakest known force in nature. It is first and rearmost." (Isaac Asimov, 1976)
"A rocket is the most lavishly expensive transportation ever invented. In a typical rocketship mission half the effort is spent fighting gravity to go up and the other half is spent fighting gravity in letting down - as crashing is considered an unsatisfactory end to a mission." (Robert A Heinlein, "The Cat Who Walks through Walls", 1985)
"Belief is a force. It’s a weak force, by comparison with gravity; when it comes to moving mountains, gravity wins every time. But it still exists." (Terry Pratchett, "Pyramids", 1989)
"Of all the forces in the universe, the hardest to overcome is the force of habit. Gravity is easy-peasy by comparison." (Terry Pratchett, "Johnny and the Dead", 1993)
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