Quotes About Discovery

When I began writing this story, I thought I had some idea of what it was about. I was wrong. In my life writing I've discovered that there are times when a story, like architecture, is carefully designed, erected, and furnished. Then there are tales that take their own way, and I find myself being dragged along after them like a white-knuckled water skier behind a speedboat.

should not surprise us that, at the end of a journey, our destination looks different than we imagined at the beginning. Everything looks different up close.

Mysteries we did find, and they were many. But I learned that something can be too mysterious, too alien - so mysterious or alien as to approach being meaningless:

What else are we going to do? An alien starship, Bartolomeo. As far as we know, this is the first and only time in human history that we have had any contact, any evidence of an intelligent alien civilization. We can't just stop now, leave it all behind as if it didn't exist." That

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

I read because one life isn't enough.

Sometimes life drives you to do entirely new things, things you never believed you could do.

Faraday's principle of induction,

I like to travel and connect.

You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It's like I had the word "book," and you put one in my hands. I had the world "game," and you taught me how to play. I had the word "life," and then you came along and said, "Oh! You mean this.

The price to sequence a base [of the human genome] has fallen 100 million times. That's the equivalent of you filling up your car with gas in 1998, waiting until 2011, and now you can drive to Jupiter and back twice.

For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in the world, Leviathan gasping on his hook, he is saved from extreme mental disorder by the most profound affirmation of the real.

The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.

Structure is one of the things that I always hope will reveal itself to me.

About 15 years ago I went though a period of a year or so when I just couldn't find anything good. My wife noticed I was having trouble reading menus. I bought some cheap reading glasses in a drug store. I got home and suddenly all these books that weren't good were good.

You just kind of have faith. If that sounds kind of mystical, it's because I really don't know how it works, but I trust that it does. I try to write the way I read, in order to find out what happens next.

Ultimately, your theme will find you. You don't have to go looking for it.

What I discovered I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became.

You've been going round and round—haven't you? Round and round! You didn't know you were going somewhere, but you were! Like a paper boat in a whirlpool—round and round! And now you've arrived at the center!

Die Zwerge, die wir in den Höhlen des Donnerbergs gefunden haben, sahen anders aus. Ihre Gesichter waren grau wie Stein.« »Sie waren tot«, erinnerte Leandra mich. »Das könnte es erklären«, nickte ich.

At midnight I looked about to discover that I was the oldest living human being in the world. A twinge of shame. I should be at home, I thought, in my slippers and my bronchitic scarf.

You're trying not to tell him you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.

You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you don't even have a name for.