Quotes About Discovery

Why revere the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.

Now I'm starting to think he wasn't supposed to be my whole life, he was just this doorway to me.

It's one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.

He needs to go rub his soul against life.

How strange to read of a place in a book, and then stand on it, listen to the birds sing, and spit on the cobbles if you want.

Once you start cooking, one thing leads to another. A new recipe is as exciting as a blind date. A new ingredient, heaven help me, is an intoxicating affair.

She would just be catching up when I'd go again, swimming farther out into life because I still hadn't found a rock to stand on.

When something extraordinary shows up in your life in the middle of the night, you give it a name and make it the best home you can.

I'm too fascinated to hide indoors or stay cooped up in our yard. Curiosity killed the cat, I know, but I try to land on my feet.

I thought I'd had a pretty hard life. But I keep finding out that life can be hard in ways I never knew about.

Every family's its own trip to China.

Take one trip overland here and you'll know forever that a road in the jungle is a sweet, flat, impossible dream.

Lately whenever I'd scratched somebody's surface I'd turned up a ghost story.

I thought everything in the world was already discovered. Already in my books. A lot of dead stuff that put me to sleep. That was the day I understood the world is still living.

I think most people are the same. Until they've gone somewhere.

When the rain pours down especially, we have long hours of captivity, in which my sisters determinedly grow bored. But are there books, books there are! Rattling words on the page calling my eyes to dance with them. Everyone else will finish with the singular plowing through, and Ada still has discoveries ahead and behind.

In exchange for his first taste of powdered milk, Pascal showed me a tree we could climb to find a bird's nest. After we handled and examined the pink-skinned baby birds, he popped one of them into his mouth like a jujube. It seemed to please him a lot. He offered a baby bird to me, pantomiming that I should eat it. I understood perfectly well what he meant, but I refused. He did not seem disappointed to have to eat the whole brood himself.

Scientists are not like other people, sir. We cannot slam our portals. We have to follow evidence where it leads, even if no one likes that place. Even if it suggests that all we have ever believed might be mistaken.

Don't you miss it, any of it?' … 'I couldn't say.' She thought about it. 'Not cars or electric lights, not movies. Books I can get if I ask. But walking around in a library, putting my hands on books I never knew about, that I miss. Any thing else, I don't know.

I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I'd discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way.

Thatcher thought Mary was not invisible, but as free as any woman could be. And in the grip of fresh discoveries, always.

My thoughts kept straying onto random paths...hoping to get lost in a thicket.

The pale-skinned boy stood shivering in water up to his waist, thinking these were the most awful words in any language: You will be surprised. The moment when everything is about to change.