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Quotes About Discovery

later you might discover that what you said is not true. When you do not know that what you are saying is untrue, you are making a mistake.
~ Joy Berry
Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world, nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.
~ Joy Harjo
you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
if you blunder by accident into a secret it's like you've pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you're brave or reckless enough you can even step inside-taking a chance what you'll learn is worth what it costs.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Unfamiliar places could be more dangerous than familiar places, unexpectedly. The boy had been discovering that an unfamiliar place was more easily "haunted" than a familiar place simply because there was less there to distract the memory.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Love is what can't be helped. When it waxes, and when it wanes. Love is what happens when you've been looking another way. Love is that sensation of something on the back of your neck, tell yourself it's nothing, a strand of hair, at last you touch it and discover it's an insect—you cast off with a curse.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Beyond Boothbay, beyond the fifth of July...?
~ Joyce Carol Oates
I am snatching at things to prove my life.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
For it has been revealed to me as a fact, that where the dull-essential nature of our lives is eliminated, such as age, identity, education, employment, place of residence, family ties, daily routine, etc., the thrilling-essential is revealed.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
creature approached Robb
~ Joyce Carol Oates
How bizarre it seems to us, Hudson had been looking for a route to the Pacific Ocean, as his predecessor Christopher Columbus had been looking for a route to the East Indies . . . I thought The routes we think we are taking are not the routes we will take. The routes that take us. I
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Faith' and 'science' inhabit totally different spheres, and do not overlap, even to share the same vocabulary.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
I told you Clara, I don't stay in one place long. And nobody comes with me. I don't marry none of them either. Erase me from your head because you're just not the one kid. Not just that you're young, which you are, but what I want is a voice. A way a woman talks to me, says things to me I don't know and am astonished to hear and I'll know her as soon as I hear her.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Secrets! As a child you come to see the world's crisscrossed with them like electromagnetic waves, maybe even held together by them. But you can't know. Not, as kids say, for sure. And if you blunder by accident into a secret it's like you've pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you're brave or reckless enough you can even step inside—taking a chance what you'll learn is worth what it costs.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
One day, Mom removed the soiled, torn prom dress from the hack of Marianne's closet where it was hidden. She hadn't needed to ask Marianne where the dress was. Found it, unerring, without wishing to examine it; wadded it into a ball and stuffed it in a paper bag with other household trash. Mom's eyes gleaming with tears, but she wasn't crying, nor was Marianne. Not a word uttered.
~ Joyce Carol Oates
Juan Felipe Herrera
~ the void extends
The saddest thing that can happen to a person is to find out their memories are lies.
~ Juan Gabriel Vásquez