Michel Ardan: They are no more our likenesses than the Selenites are! We inhabit a new world, peopled by ourselves—the projectile! I am Barbicane’s likeness, and Barbicane is Nicholl’s. Beyond us, around us, human nature is at an end, and we are the only…
Book 1870
Around the Moon quotes
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About the book
The sequel to From the Earth to the Moon. Barbicane, Captain Nicholl and the Frenchman Michel Ardan ride inside a giant cannon shell fired from Florida, and the book follows their days in flight: arguing, joking, doing the mathematics of their path, and studying the Moon up close as no one has before.
6 quotes
Will direct communication with the moon ever be established? Will they ever lay the foundation of a traveling service through the solar world? Will they go from one planet to another, from Jupiter to Mercury, and after awhile from one star to another, from…
Barbicane: If then these Selenites have existed their hundreds of thousands of years, and if their brain is of the same organization of the human brain, they have already invented all that we have invented, and even what we may invent in future ages. They…
Michel Ardan: But we shall be regular Herculeses in the moon! Nicholl: Yes … for if the height of the Selenites is in proportion to the density of their globe, they will be scarcely a foot high. Michel Ardan: Lilliputians! … I shall play the part of Gulliver…
Nothing belonging to a living world—everything to a dead world, where avalanches, rolling from the summits of the mountains, would disperse noiselessly at the bottom of the abyss, retaining the motion, but wanting the sound. In any case it was the image of…
Nicholl: Yes … now that I do not know where I am going, I want to know why I am going. Michel Ardan: Why? … why? To take possession of the moon in the name of the United States; to add a fortieth State to the Union; to colonize the lunar regions; to cultivate…