Quotes About Exploration

For human suffering there is a reason; perhaps the reason has not been found because the right questions have not been asked, or pressed far enough.

She was halfway up the stairs, the flashlight beam bobbing on the steps in front of her, when she heard a small sound. Mice. Please let it be mice. A funny thing to wish, considering how much she hated mice.

Thankfully, Plott hadn't taken them very far inside.

She felt good from making a lot of noise, she felt good from the hard work from walking so far in her tin can stilts, she felt good from calling a grown-up pieface and from the triumph of singing backwards from ninety-nine to one. She felt good from being out after dark with the rain on her face and the streetlights shining down on her.

One spring day Ramona had got lost, because she started out to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Ralph curled up on a heap of shredded Kleenex and took a good long nap. When he awoke refreshed, his first thought was of the motorcycle.

RAMONA AND THE MILLION DOLLARS

RALPH S. MOUSE

Honestly, Henry, sometimes I wonder how you get into these things.

It should have been enough. He should have been content to stay home without venturing out into the world looking for speed and excitement. Outside in the hall Ralph heard

I was heading to Nebraska. Now there's a sentence you don't want to say too often if you can possibly help it.

Our instinct may be to see the impossibility of tracking everything down as frustrating, dispiriting, perhaps even appalling, but it can just as well be viewed as almost unbearably exciting. We live on a planet that has a more or less infinite capacity to surprise. What reasoning person could possibly want it any other way?

I wanted to quit and to do this forever, sleep in a bed and in a tent, see what was over the next hill and never see a hill again. All of this all at once, every moment, on the trail or off.

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

There is something about the momentum of travel that makes you want to just keep moving, to never stop.

London isn't a place at all. It's a million little places.

To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.

Daniel Boone, who not only wrestled bears but tried to date their sisters, described corners of the southern Appalachians as "so wild and horrid that it is impossible to behold them without terror.

A significant fraction of thru-hikers reach Katahdin, then turn around and start back to Georgia. They just can't stop walking, which kind of makes you wonder.

To tell you the truth, I'm amazed we've come this far, he said, and I agreed. We had hiked 500 miles, a million and a quarter steps, since setting off from Amicalola. We had grounds to be proud. We were real hikers now. We had shit in the woods and slept with bears. We had become, we would forever be, mountain men.

The romance of travel wasn't always terribly evident to those who were actually experiencing it.

If there's one thing the AT teaches, it is low-level ecstasy—something we could all do with more of in our lives.

The real significance of Magellan's voyage was not that it was the first to circumnavigate the planet, but that it was the first to realize just how big that planet was.