Quotes About Wonder

I spend most flights staring out into that endless cloudscape and watching the planet drift by below. I never understand people who close the window shade. There's magic out there.

I've seen tons of pictures. But when I first looked out the window at the Earth, it's hard to describe. There are no words.

I'd love to go to space. I would love to peek out a giant window and look back at the blue marble. There's no question; I'd love to do that.

Books were the window from which I looked out of a rather meager and decidedly narrow room onto a rich and wonderful universe. I loved the look and feel of books, even the smell... Libraries were treasure houses. I always entered them with a slight thrill of disbelief that all their endless riches were mine for the borrowing.

I always love novels that open up a subject to me - like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside.

On my first flight, I don't know if maybe it's a function of time, or if I was less stressed on my second flight, but just being able to tell what part of the planet we were flying over by the reflected light coming through the window - that was pretty special.

When you're a birder, you have all sorts of reference books, and you know about migratory patterns and technical stuff. Most people just look out the window, and say 'is that a pigeon?'

I remember being a child eagerly looking out the Amtrak window, waiting for the New York City skyline to emerge.

My favorite place is Central Park because you never know what you're going to find there. I also like that when I look out the windows of surrounding hotels, it's seems like I'm looking out over a forest.

When I was 8, I got a little toy propeller plane: You could turn it on and the people disappeared from the little windows and stewardesses appeared, and it ran along the ground.

God, I love daydreaming out plane windows.

I shall always be able to come up with new fantasies. As long as there are people walking around in the street, as long as I have books to read and windows to look out of, I'm not going to use them up.

One of my favorite activities when I was a teenager was going riding on the back of a horse with a friend of mine. Because we were rather high up, I could see into peoples' lighted windows as we trotted past. Questions would rise up inside: Who lives there? Are they happy? What are they doing? Any dogs or cats in sight?

My childhood bedroom - if childhood could be about ten years old - had a bed which was under windows which faced north. At about age 10, I started watching the stars just move through the night.

Forests, lakes, and rivers, clouds and winds, stars and flowers, stupendous glaciers and crystal snowflakes - every form of animate or inanimate existence, leaves its impress upon the soul of man.

I can write, He floated up to the ceiling, and a baby rabbit came out of his pocket, grew wings, and flew away. And you will believe that it really happened. That's magic, isn't it?

It still amazes me, when I go out and fly the T-38, and I'm looking at those little, short, skinny little wings, and that thing's flying. It's just amazing to me, even now.

I'd love to grow a pair of discreet wings so I could just fly around a bit and impress people.

This is magic we're talking about. It's supposed to go places science can't, defy logic, wink at technology, fill us all with the sensawunda that comes of gazing upon a fictional world and seeing something truly different from our own.

'Alphabet' by the late Danish poet Inger Christensen. It's a book-length abecedarian poem. It's an activist text but also a portal to wonder.

People ask, 'What are the scientific questions you're going to answer?' New Horizons doesn't have any of those; it's purely about raw exploration... We're not 'rewriting the textbook' - we're writing the textbook from scratch.

Scientific facts are often described in textbooks as if they just sort of exist, like nickels someone picked up on the street. But science at the cutting edge, conducted by sharp minds probing deep into nature, is not about self-evident facts. It is about mystery and not knowing. It is about taking huge risks.

One thing that sticks in my mind is when I was a kid, and I had just learned to read, I came across one of my older sister's textbooks that explained compound pulley. I thought that was really neat, and I still do.

Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.