Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals
1827
Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals
1827
Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals is a biography of the pioneering American astronomer Maria Mitchell, first published in 1827. The book chronicles her upbringing on Nantucket Island, her Quaker heritage, and her early experiences in astronomy, highlighting her significant contributions to science in a male-dominated field. It provides a multifaceted portrait of Mitchell, detailing both her scientific achievements and personal life, reflecting the values and challenges faced by women of her time.
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“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.””
— Maria Mitchell
“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.””
— Maria Mitchell
“A billion stars go spinning through the night,glittering above your head,But in you is the presence that will bewhen all the stars are dead.””
— Maria Mitchell
“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.””
— Maria Mitchell
“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,in which you see me hurrying.Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;I am only one of my many mouths,and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.I am the rest between two notes,which are somehow always in discordbecause Death’s note wants to climb over”
— Maria Mitchell
“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joyof being No-one's sleep under so manylids.””
— Maria Mitchell
“There is time only to work slowlyThere is no time not to love””
— Maria Mitchell
“Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to grown up, half for the sakeof those with nothing left but their grownupness.””
— Maria Mitchell
“Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.””
— Maria Mitchell
