Quotes About Exploration

Knight's Armament SR-25, integral suppressor, twenty-round magazine, and oooh, the Leupold Mark 4 HAMR. Haven't played with one of these before. Gonna

If you want something you've never had before, you have to do something you've never done before.

I had come to the canyon with expectations. I wanted to see snowy egrets flying against the black schist at dusk; I saw blue-winged teal against the green waters at dawn. I had wanted to hear thunder rolling in the thousand-foot depths; I heard the guttural caw of four ravens…what any of us had come to see or do fell away. We found ourselves at each turn with what we had not imagined.

In any new country we want panoramas.

And one can better understand figures in arctic exploration so obsessed with their own achievement that they found it irksome to acknowledge the Eskimos, unnamed companions, and indefatigable dogs who helped them.

on my right Baker Creek has cut a steep-banked gash into the badlands to the west.

Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine.

Traveling encourages the revision of received wisdoms and the shedding of prejudices. It turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity.

It is our imagination that gives shape to the universe.

The young man visiting the archeological site on Skraeling Island is the same fellow who at the end of the book encounters a stranger on the road to Port Famine, but also not.

What we need is to discover the continent again. We need to see the land with a less acquisitive frame of mind.

When we enter the landscape to learn something, we are obligated, I think, to pay attention rather than constantly to pose questions.

For how can this be? How can it be? That from all the Ridgefield Parks of our time we will assemble to build the great engines which will take us to the stars... and some of the stars will bring death and others will bring life and then there are those which will bring us nothing at all, but the engines will continue, they will go on forever. And so, in a fashion, after our fashion, will we.

the modern university is a kind of intellectual shopping mall.

virtual katabasis.

the art of the possible.

Innovations are financial risks.

We turn from all we know and all we fear.

Boredom can be a very good thing for someone in a creative jam.

I'm like the curious cat. You know what they say—satisfaction brought him back.

You can't blame human nature, and there was nothing more human than curiosity.

Hitchhiking around Canada with a buddy after my senior year of college was the closest thing to an adventure I'd ever had, and given the cheerful, helpful nature of most Canadians, it wasn't much of an adventure.

What do you read? I've never given a very satisfactory answer to that question, because it causes a kind of circuit overload in my brain. The easy answer ?Everything I can get my hands on!? is true enough, but not helpful.

She had a bottle of water in her pack—a big one with a squeeze-top—but suddenly all Trisha wanted in the world was to prime the pump in the little hut and get a drink, cold and fresh, from its rusty lip. She would drink and pretend she was Bilbo Baggins, on his way to the Misty Mountains.