Quotes About Discovery

So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.

The months passed; my life of tiptoeing and eavesdropping continued. I worked hard at seeing without being seen and hearing without being heard. I discovered the cracks between door frames and nearly closed doors, the listening posts in hallways and on stairs, the thin places in walls. Most of what I heard came in fragments and even silences, but I was becoming good at fitting these fragments together and filling in the unsaid parts of sentences.

Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.

Opening up their sack, the children chorus, "Oh Snowman, what have we found?" They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

This bug is something new though. We've got the bioprint.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for the trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

I will press this, somewhere. Under the mattress. Leave it there, for the next woman, the one who comes after me, to find. But there's someone in the room, behind me. I

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

He feels like saying that of course there's lint on Mr. Wiggly, or dust at any rate, or maybe rust; what does she expect, because as she is well aware Mr. Wiggly has been on the shelf for some time.

Curiosity got the cat in trouble. Let's go.

Then I remembered something I'd seen and hadn't noticed, at the time. It wasn't the army. It was some other army.

at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

But what if she discovers the truth? What he suspects is the truth. That he's patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust. He thinks of her waiting for him, somewhere else, an island, subtropical, not muggy, her long hair waving in the sea breeze, a red hibiscus tucked behind one ear. If he's lucky she'll wait till that happens, till he can get there to be with her.

It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

They are entering the forest of amnesia, where things have lost their names.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn't happen, but other planets.

I would have to go into the tunnel whether I wanted to or not - the tunnel was the road of going on, and there was more of the road on the other side of it - but the entrance was where [my teacher] had to stop. Inside the tunnel was what I was meant to learn

Being able to read and write did not provide the answers to all questions. It led to other questions, and then to others.

From the electrical-engineering editor Thomas Commerford Martin came eloquent support: "Mr. Tesla has been held a visionary, deceived by the flash of casual shooting stars; but the growing conviction of his professional brethren is that because he saw farther, he saw first the low lights flickering on tangible new continents of science. . . .

To wonder is to begin to know

There would be more genuine rejoicing at the discovery of a complete new novel by Jane Austen than any other literary discovery, short of a new major play by Shakespeare.

Adventures always have to be at least a little uncomfortable or who would know you'd had one? 

There is no respect for hidden music

On a voyage of exploration, how can you price what you'll find before you even set sail?