Quotes About Exploration

For me, Shambhala, you see, turned out to be not a goal but an absence. Not the discovery of a place but the act of leaving the futureless place where I was. And in the process I arrived at Constantinople.

You go from dream to dream inside me. You have passage to my last shabby corner, and there, among the debris, you've found life. I'm no longer sure which of all the words, images, dreams or ghosts are 'yours' and which are 'mine.' It's past sorting out.

Some of us are Outlaws, and some Trespassers upon the very World.

Could we have been so much in the midst of life? With such a sense of grand adventure about it all?

I still don't even know for sure what a tendril is.

When you gentlemen come to stand at the Boundary between the Settl'd and the Unpossess'd, just about to enter the Deep Woods, you will recognize the Sensation....

so claim'd are the Surveyors in their contra-solar Return by Might-it-bes, and If-it-weres, - not to mention What-was-thats.

It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.

Before long, Maxine finds herself wandering around clicking on everything, faces, litter on the floor, labels on bottles behind the bar, after a while interested not so much in where she might get to than the texture of the search itself.

Things then did not delay in turning curious.

The Stars are so close you won't need a Telescope." "The Fish jump into your Arms. The Indians know Magick." "We'll go there. We'll live there." "We'll fish there. And you too.

Suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory ?

What's known as bleeding-edge technology," sez Lucas. "No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.

Latitudes and Departures

Slothrop's Progress: London the secular city instructs him: turn any corner and he can find himself inside a parable.

ROCKETMAN WAS HERE.

We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky.

They were invading Gravity itself, and a beachhead had to be laid down.

Rocketman! Spaceman! Welcome to our virgin planet. We only want to be left in some kind of peace here, O.K.? If you kill us, don't eat us. If you eat, don't digest. Let us come out the other end again, like diamonds in the shit of smugglers.

Quibbles about the fact that some other European explorers touched the hemisphere earlier, or that the Indians knew it was here all along, trivialize this turning point in the history of the world.

The worst political blunder in the history of civilization was probably the decision of the emperor of China in the year 1433 to stop exploring the oceans and to destroy the ships capable of exploration and the written records of their voyages. . . The decision was the result of powerful people pursuing partisan squabbles and neglecting the long-range interests of the empire. This is a disease to which governments of all kinds, including democracies, are fatally susceptible. Freeman Dyson

I have two rooms and a huge balcony, and so many mountains that I haven't even begun to climb them yet.

The shortness of life! The shortness of life!' I've only one night or one day, and there's this vast dangerous garden, waiting out there, undiscovered, unexplored.

The mind I love must have wild places.