Quotes About Discovery

Sure, he said. He started moving the bits around. Lets see. This looks like it must say . . . and so then this would go here . . . and this . . . He paused and looked up at her. Haven't we done this before?

But that was what made things so exciting--nothing was ever how you expected it to be.

She loved to run. She could run forever. And she loved exploring every nook and cranny of the city, which was what a messenger got to do.

What are those?

Mysterious Words from the Past

This world was huge. There must be another place in it for the people of Ember.

I first noticed I was missing on a Thursday.

I could see why Archimedes got all excited. There was nothing finer than the feeling that came rushing through you when it clicked and you suddenly understood something that had puzzled you. It made you think it just might be possible to get a handle on this old world after all.

You mean you own land worth a million dollars?" I was thunderstruck. All those years in Welch with no food, no coal, no plumbing, and Mom had been sitting on land worth a million dollars?

I never met a kid I couldn't teach. Every kid was good at something, and the trick was to find out what it was, then use it to teach him everything else. It was good work, the kind of work that let you sleep soundly at night and, when you awoke, look forward to the next day.

What I loved most about calling myself a reporter was that it gave me an excuse to show up anyplace.

I found the gas, he said. Now all's I need to do is find the brake.

I began to feel like I was getting the whole story for the first time, that I was being handed the missing pieces to the puzzle, and the world was making a little more sense.

switchbacks, passing walls of limestone and sandstone layered like giant stacks of old papers.

After all those years of roaming, they'd found home.

I have crossed the seas, I have left cities behind me, and I have followed the source of rivers towards their source or plunged into forests, always making for other cities. I have had women, I have fought with men ; and I could never turn back any more than a record can spin in reverse. And all that was leading me where ? To this very moment...

But an adventure never returns nor is prolonged.

It was a long period of time where I tried to figure out what worked, what didn't work.

I got my Nobel Prize for my lab work.

I have the "thing" worked out - the trick or the surprise or the pivotal fact. Then I just start somewhere and let the story work itself out.

I was a liberal arts junkie and I figured, well, I'll go work for somebody somewhere. All I knew was that I was going to have to come home and figure it out.

When I work I always find something.

A lot of the best work I've ever done started out as something completely different because I gave myself permission to have space around my time and expectations.

I was the kind of kid whose parents would drop him off at the local town library on their way to work, and I'd go and work my way through the children's area.