Quotes About Discovery

in that moment she realised that Archie had never told her anything, never let her see anything, that he didn't want her to know.

A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that doesn't mean she can't have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones

Last century's magic is this year's science.

There are worse things than minotaurs at the centre.

Soon the bare but civilized streets of St. Paul gave way to emptier places with shorter buildings and fewer streetlights … and then no buildings, and no streetlights, and after a few turns I was urging the Nissan along a two-lane road in the middle of what could best be described as the geographic center of Godforsaken, Bumblefuck. The

it is not really the difference the oppressor fears so much as the similarity. He fears he will discover in himself the same aches, the same longings as those of the people he has shit on... . He fears he will have to change his life once he has seen himself in the bodies of the people he has called different.

It's hard to go. It's scary and lonely…and half the time you'll be wondering why the hell you're in Cincinnati or Austin or North Dakota or Mongolia or wherever your melodious little finger-plucking heinie takes you. There will be boondoggles and discombobulated days, freaked-out nights and metaphorical flat tires. But it will be soul-smashingly beautiful… It will open up your life.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me

And so I walked on.

There are some things you can't understand yet. Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

The wanting was a wilderness and I had to find my own way out of the woods. It took me four years, seven months, and three days to do it. I didn't know where I was going until I got there. It was a place called the Bridge of the Gods.

There are stories you'll learn if you're strong enough to travel there. One of them might cure you.

Walk without a stick into the darkest woods. Believe that the fairy tale is true.

Foot speed was a profoundly different way of moving through the world than my normal modes of travel. Miles weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.

saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

weren't things that blazed dully past. They were long, intimate straggles of weeds and clumps of dirt, blades of grass and flowers that bent in the wind, trees that lumbered and screeched. They were the sound of my breath and my feet hitting the trail one step at a time and the click of my ski pole. The PCT had taught me what a mile was. I was humble before each and every one.

We yogied this from day hikers for you.

Of all the things I'd been skeptical about, I didn't feel skeptical about this: the wilderness had a clarity that included me.

When the path reveals itself, follow it.

Your life will be a great and continuous unfolding.

the thread of my life that had been severed. I could feel it unspooling behind me—the old thread I'd lost, the new one I was spinning—while I hiked that morning,

A glorious something else awaits.

It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way. (207)

It was a world I'd never been to and yet had known was there all along, one I'd staggered to in sorrow and confusion and fear and hope. A world I thought would both make me into the woman I knew I could become and turn me back into the girl I'd once been.