Cosmos - Carl | Sagan

She opened Cosmos to the first page and began reading again. This time, not as a granddaughter mourning, but as a student taking a very old, very beautiful exam.

She thought: Every atom in my left hand came from a different star than the atoms in my right hand. My heart pumps iron that once shone at the center of a sun. I am older than the Earth. I am younger than the light from Andromeda. Cosmos - Carl Sagan

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” She opened Cosmos to the first page and began reading again

And then she thought of the final pages of Cosmos , where Sagan wrote about the Voyager spacecraft—how it would sail through the silent dark for billions of years, carrying a golden record with greetings in fifty-five languages, the sound of a mother kissing her child, and music from a planet that had only just learned to look up. My heart pumps iron that once shone at the center of a sun

Somewhere, across the galaxy, photons that had touched her grandfather’s face were still traveling outward at the speed of light. They would never stop. Neither would the carbon from his smile, the calcium from his hands.

“We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean,” Sagan wrote. “We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.”