Quotes About Discovery

They say time finds you out, don't they?

Every bird you downed bore pebbles in its gizzard from a land the maps ignored.

Metti insieme due persone che insieme non sono mai state; a volte il mondo cambia e a volte no. Può darsi che si schiantino e prendano fuoco, o che prendano fuoco e si schiantino. Ma a volte, invece, ne nasce qualcosa di nuovo, e allora il mondo cambia. Insieme, in quel primo momento esaltante, con quella sensazione esplosiva di ascesa, esse sono più grandi dei loro sé individuali. Insieme, vedono più lontano, più chiaro.

My own [story] is the simplest ... it hardly amounts to more than a convincing proof of my existence - and yet I find it the hardest to begin.

Still, I'm not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.

you have blown a large breach in the walls of my existence.

First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

What he didn't—or couldn't—tell Joan was his terrifying discovery that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve itself into pity and anger. The anger wasn't at Susan, but at whatever it was that had obliterated her. But even so, anger. And anger in a man caused him disgust. So now, along with pity and anger, he had self-disgust to deal with as well. And this was part of his shame.

I think that in life you have to discover what you're good at, recognise what you can't do, decide what you want, aim for it, and try not to regret things afterwards.

One had turned gay, after all these years, having suddenly started noticing the napes of young men's necks.

But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn't, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden.

What he didn't – or couldn't – tell Joan was his terrifying discovery that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve itself into pity and anger.

The couple that never talk to each other never discover how little they have in common.

she realized she felt happy, as if the sensation were so lost to her that it took a while for her to identify it.

I didn't know it until the end. All stories worth telling are love stories.

When you're in the world looking for only one thing, you find it or it finds you. The obsession can be mutual

All this time, you've been lying to me!

Good God. He doesn't know me at *all*. How crushing. How illuminating. How ... potentially very useful.

He wasn't at all what she expected. No: this wasn't true. He was everything she'd expected from everything she'd read about him—he was irritating, frivolous, arrogant, disconcertingly charming. It was just that she would not have suspected his intelligence had depth, that his wit was in part defense, that his charm was a result of, in part, startlingly acute perception and even…grace.

eyes fixed on her as though she were the first sign of land after months at sea.

When she pulled it out, something tum- bled out along with it: a soft copper lock of her own hair. She went blank for a moment, thrown oddly off bal ance. The things lined up neatly on the floor in front of her were like words to a sentence in a language she had only begun learning, a sentence punctuated poignantly by a copper curl. They told a story Rebecca sensed she already half knew, she could feel it radiating, increasing in light, on the far reaches of her awareness.

In his presence, unanticipated corners of her character seemed to be unfolding like a secret letter written long ago.