Quotes About Discovery

I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....

All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own.

the lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out

Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.

A blind lover, don't know what I love till I write it out

Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless.

Il y a toujours une histoire, une histoire qui attend. Qui existe à peine. À laquelle on ne s'attache que peu à peu et qu'on nourrit. On découvre la carapace qui contiendra notre personnage et le mettra à l'épreuve. On trouve alors le chemin que sera sa vie. (p.179)

The jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known.

As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.

those who had risked everything at a riverbend on a left turn and so discovered a fortune.

The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever.

my arms. The lost sequence in a life, they say, is the thing we always search out.

Fenelon-Barnes wanted the fossil trees he discovered to bear his name. He even wanted a tribe to take his name, and spent a year on the negotiations. Then Bauchan outdid him, having a type of sand dune named after him. But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation.

Whenever her father was alone with a dog in a house he would lean over and smell the skin at the base of its paw. This, he would say, as if coming away from a brandy snifter, is the greatest smell in the world! A bouquet! Great rumours of travel!

I once traveled with a guide who was taking me to Faya. He didn't speak for nine hours. At the end of it he pointed to the horizon and said, 'Faya!' That was a good day.

At one point he put his nose close to a volume called Raymond, or Life and Death by Sir Oliver Hodge.

A writer's mind must never be closed. It's his duty to be curious and my duty to feed the curiosity. Think of it as the start of a big adventure.

The ships slowly picked their way through, guided from patch to patch of open water by the shouts from the crow's nest. Tern, cape pigeon and white petrel flew around the ship. Seals on the ice were so slow to take fright that they were easily bludgeoned on the head and brought on board for food. In the stomach of one of them they found 9 lb of granite stones, which puzzled Ross, as they were a thousand miles from the nearest land.

Die Erebus war nicht zufällig nach dem Gott der Unterwelt benannt, und für die Männer an Bord muss es sich angefühlt haben, als wären sie dort angekommen

You go deep enough or far out enough in consciousness and you will bump into the sacred. It's not something we generate; it's something out there waiting to be discovered. And this reliably happens to nonbelievers as well as believers." Second, that, whether occasioned by drugs or other means, these experiences of mystical consciousness are in all likelihood the primal basis of religion.

I think of childhood as the R&D stage of the species, concerned exclusively with learning and exploring. We adults are production and marketing.

There is another word for this extremist noticing—this sense of first sight unencumbered by knowingness, by the already-been-theres and seen-thats of the adult mind—and that word, of course, is wonder.

quotation from William Blake that, it occurred to me later, neatly aligned the way of the scientist with that of the mystic: "The true method of knowledge is experiment.