Quotes About Discovery

Love makes your soul crawl out from its hiding space,' to quote the late, great Zora Neale Hurston. It

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I'm sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

it may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward. I

publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

Ferlinghetti writing "I am waiting for the rebirth of wonder

Augustine said that to look for God is to find him

Soon I got lost in a good way, with a book, which is also to get found, and my staunchest lifelong light.

Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.

to search for God is to have found God is deeply profound, because the belief we hold in the existence of another world opens space within us, and around us, which creates a more radiant reality.

It's like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony

And the story begins to materialize, and another thing is happening, which is that you are learning what you aren't writing, and this is helping you to find out what you are writing.

There's no way to tell until you've got it all down, and then there might just be one sentence or one character or one theme that you end up using. But you get it all down. You just write. I heard Natalie Goldberg, the author of Writing Down the Bones, speak on writing once. Someone asked her for the best possible writing advice she had to offer, and she held up a yellow legal pad, pretended her fingers held a pen, and scribbled away.

Writing a first draft is very much like watching a Polaroid develop. You can't—and, in fact, you're not supposed to—know exactly what the picture is going to look like until it has finished developing.

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise you'll be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer's job is to see what's behind it, to see that bleak, unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words -- not just any words, but if we can, into rhythm and blues.

So often lately he'd come to realize that things were not as they seemed. There were hidden facets to everything. You'd think you had what you wanted in your grasp and, when you looked closely, it wasn't what it had seemed to be from a distance.

I can only find you by looking deeper, that's how love leads us into the world.

Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

Sometimes things work out differently than you expect, and sometimes that's when the best things happen.

And then, some morning in the second week, the mind wakes, comes to life again. Not in a city sense—no—but beach-wise. It begins to drift, to play, to turn over in gentle careless rolls like those lazy waves on the beach. One never knows what chance treasures these easy unconscious rollers may toss up, on the smooth white sand of the conscious mind; what perfectly rounded stone, what rare shell from the ocean floor. Perhaps a channeled whelk, a moon shell, or even an argonaut.

Travel Far, Pay No Fare... a book can take you anywhere.

Science is just the latest theory we have, and as soon as another one comes along, a new discovery, a new way of interpreting them, then there's a new answer! It's not like mathematics that always adds up the same way, if you do it right. Science is a method of reaching a conclusion, not a conclusion itself.

They could not find the light if they had not the courage to explore the darkness.

And if they are forced to a new idea, they turn it over like a child with a toy.