Quotes About Discovery

Jump, and you will find out how to unfold your wings as you fall.

If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.

Who has more pockets than a magician? A boy. Whose pockets contain *more* than a magicians? A boy's.

The library is always an adventure!

One day you discover you are alive. Explosion! Concussion! Illumination! Delight! You laugh, you dance around, you shout. But, not long after, the sun goes out. Snow falls, but no one sees it, on an August noon.

It's just...It's just, if I didn't see these windows until today, what else did I miss?

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

Forgive, I hope you won't be upset, but when I was a boy I used to look up and see you behind your desk, so near but far away, and, how can I say this, I used to think that you were Mrs. God, and that the library was a whole world, and that no matter what part of the world or what people or thing I wanted to see and read, you'd find and give it to me.

I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! You think they're backing you up, and then they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives.

I feel like I've been saving up a lot of things, and I don't know what.

I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders, imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths beneath my skin and behind my eye.

Life is trying things to see if they work.

The things you're looking for...are in the world, but the only way the average chap will see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.

The third planet is incapable of supporting life," stated the husband patiently. "Our scientists have said there's far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.

If it seems I've come the long way around, perhaps I have. But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange -- we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.

Science fiction is the art of the possible not the impossible.

Live in the library, for Christ's sake! Don't live on your goddamn computers and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library!

I use a library the same way I've been describing the creative process as a writer — I don't go in with lists of things to read, I go in blindly and reach up on shelves and take down books and open them and fall in love immediately. And if I don't fall in love that quickly, shut the book, back on the shelf, find another book, and fall in love with it . You can only go with loves in this life.

For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.

We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. A writer's work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything.

Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face. A book lit, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering.

See the world: It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.

Touch a scientist and you touch a child.

Teachers say if you write a story you must never name what you're trying to write. Just do it. When it's over you'll know what you've done.