Quotes About Discovery

I hadn't done any of the things that I normally did with girls, yet somehow I'd fallen in love.

Henry's girl! She smiled. No, she was not Henry's girl. She was Sarah. And that was sufficient. And with such a late start it would be some time before she got to know herself. Half in a dream now, she wondered if at the end of that time she would need someone else and who it would be.

The old frontiers have been conquered, and the boundaries of the new are not so clearly marked.

For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough.

Thankfully, Plott hadn't taken them very far inside.

Life, Henry discovered, was suddenly so full of interesting things to do that he rode his bicycle through a pile of autumn leaves in the gutter just for the joy of hearing them crackle. "Clank, clank!" Ramona yelled after him. "Clank, clank!" answered Henry.

One spring day Ramona had got lost, because she started out to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Honestly, Henry, sometimes I wonder how you get into these things.

Figuring out the long word before her name took a while, and

But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn't know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.

Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

It is always quietly thrilling to find yourself looking at a world you know well but have never seen from such an angle before.

The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.

If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives.

Salamanders are interesting, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.

As a student, frustrated by the limitations of conventional mathematics, he invented an entirely new form, the calculus, but then told no-one about it for twenty-seven years5.

To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.

On the fourth night, just as I was facing the dismal prospect of finishing my only book and thereafter having nothing to do in the evenings but lie in the half light and listen to Katz snore, I was delighted, thrilled, sublimely gratified to find that some earlier user had left a Graham Greene paperback. If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low level ecstasy, something we can all do with more of in our lives

Skull of an early modern human, dating from 90,000 years ago, found at Qafzeh in Israel. Found at the same site were remains of Neandertals, suggesting that here at least the two species coexisted, possibly for thousands of years.