Thanks, and thanks for featuring! I believe the quote is from his novel Contact, but I actually first encountered it when a friend from work asked me to give a reading at his wedding and it stuck with me.
Photograph of Earth from six billion miles away, named by 19A. "To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the ________, the only home we've ever known."
14A
French fries or collard greens
15A
Artists' stands
16A
Pots' companions
18A
Meadow
19A
Astronomer and author, speaker of 12A and 30A
22A
What comes before Vegas
23A
Desperate
24A
Numerical description of change in a physical system, with dimensions of momentum times distance
26A
Exam for aspiring JDs
30A
"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only ___________"
32A
Warms, like the sun does to a greenhouse
33A
Fracas
34A
Ici ___ ("Here and there", along the Champs-Elysees)
35A
Olfactory stimuli
Verticales
1D
Dines
2D
Lao neighbor
3D
____ Lang Syne
4D
Newspaper articles and mentions on social media, in brief
5D
Adjective for the Beatles
6D
Takes to court, like 19A did to Apple
7D
Early Ford
8D
Purloined
9D
_____ good example
11D
Extremely luminous body in the center of a galaxy
13D
Gravitational _______, distortion seen in images from the James Webb Space Telescope