"They get so hot that the nuclei of the atoms fuse together deep within them to make the oxygen we breathe, the carbon in our muscles, the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood. You, me, everyone: We are made of star stuff."

"Many of us suspect that all of this — all the worlds, stars, galaxies and clusters in our observable universe — is but one tiny bubble in an infinite ocean of other universes."

“Every person you’ve ever heard of lies right in there. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves, every thing in the history books happened here in the last 14 seconds of the cosmic calendar.”

"Bruno was no scientist. His vision of the cosmos was a lucky guess because he had no evidence to support it. Like most guesses, it could well have turned out wrong. But once the idea was in the air, it gave others a target to aim at -- if only to disprove it."

"Each one of these little worlds is as far from its nearest neighbor as Earth is from Saturn"

"These are the snows of yesteryear. Drifting mountains of ice and rock, the preserved remnants of the birth of the solar system."

"When our amphibious ancestors left the water for the land their eyes, exquisitely evolved to see in water, were lousy for seeing in the air. Our vision has never been as good since. We like to think of our eyes as state of the art, but 375 million years later, we still can't see things right in front of our noses."

"Halley hunted down every astronomical observation of a comet recorded in Europe between 1472 and 1698... All Halley had were his books and his mind … Halley had to take the observations made for each comet and find the shape of its actual path through space … In an arduous, tour-de-force of mathematical brilliance, Halley discovered that comets were bound to the sun in long, elliptical orbits."

"You've probably never noticed them because they're so small, about the size of a pinpoint, but they're tough...they've been in business for half a billion years. We used to think that life was finicky... But we were wrong."

"Because the distances between the stars are so great compared to their sizes, few, if any stars in either galaxy will actually collide. Any life on the worlds of that far-off future should be safe, but they would be treated to an amazing billion-year-long light show. A dance of a half trillion stars."