Quotes About Discovery

I am think about your request in writing. You see you will get something from me. I find myself yielding to it, almost as one of our human victims yields to us, discovering perhaps as the rain continues to fall outside, as the café continues with its noisy chatter, to think that this might not be the agony I presumed-reading back over the two thousand years-but almost a pleasure, like the act of drinking blood itself.

I reach now for a victim who is not easy for me to overcome: my own past. Perhaps this victim will flee from me with a speed that equals my own. Whatever, I seek now a victim that I have never faced. And there is a thrill of the hunt in it, what the modern world calls investigation.

I had to know who this painter was. I had to see his work. I had fallen in love with him. Was he young? Was he old? Was he alive? Was he dead? I had to know.

Not made by human hands, you see, but by the power invested in me, which passed through me and I had only to take up the brush and there the Virgin and the Saints were mine to discover.

and I thought I might take him home and see how he works. It's really neat the way all those little bone things fit together, like a zipper.

I used to toy with the notion that when we die we find out what our lives have amounted to, finally. I'd never imagined that we could find that out when somebody else dies.

I write because I want to have more than one life.

I read so that I can live more than one life in more than one place.

I read so I can live more than one life in more than one place !

She reminded herself of the day she had fallen in love with him. "It was a beautiful, breezy, yellow-and-green afternoon," she'd begin, and it would all come back to her—the newness of it, the whole new world magically opening before her at the moment when she first realized that this person that she'd barely noticed all these years was, in fact, a treasure.

it was all so new to her, he guessed.

a car that wasn't familiar to her.

her sister's snuffly breaths across the room. Okay, then: think of Derek's proposal. He had no idea how much he'd asked of her, suggesting she give up her work with Dr. Brogan. The discovery of language had been her great epiphany in college.

That's what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you onto another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It's geometrically progressive—all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.

We live in all we seek.

I am a fugitive and a vagabond, a sojourner seeking signs.

I had been chipping at the world idly, and had by accident uncovered vast and labyrinthine further worlds within it.

I wake up thinking: What am I reading? What will I read next? I'm terrified that I'll run out, that I will read through all I want to, and be forced to learn wildflowers at last, to keep awake.

When you open a book," the sentimental library posters said, "anything can happen." This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone's way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one.

I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again

Love so sprang at her, she honestly thought no one had ever looked into it. Where was it in literature? Someone would have written something. She must not have recognized it. Time to read everything again.

There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin.

A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.