Quotes About Exploration

Thales did something different. He asked questions to which he didn't know the answers.

Once in a while I lie there, as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

Since Marco Polo, he thought, this climate has defeated Western civilization.

We whizzed along down through the skeleton remnants of Iowa.

The road we were lost on cut straight through the middle of the world. It was still daytime, but the sun had no more power than an ornament or a sponge.

Get out of that comfortable rut.

Break the daily and weekly routine you have set. Get out of that comfortable route.

Feeling after God is dangerous business.

You was in all sorts of places, huh?" "Yeah, I was. Saw the world." "What'd you think of it?" "Different languages, same shit.

It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land.

It's like I'm in a beautiful library but none of the books have titles.

His father was gone. He was no longer a son. He was a man without history or expectation. A blank slate, beholden to none. He felt like a pilgrim who'd pushed off from the shore of a homeland he'd never see again, crossed a black sea under a black sky, and landed in the new world, which waited, unformed, as if it had always been waiting. For him. To give the country a name, to remake it in his image so it could espouse his values and export them across the globe.

È un'isola, capo. Ci troveranno sempre.

There is a huge new frontier awaiting our exploration, and it is not the macrocosm of the universe but the microcosm of the mind.

In our haste to modernize under the banner of science, we seem to have gone too far in casting out all mystery and magic from our world.

If I Am murdered en route it will have been well worth while!

Sirine buys sweet, dense Mexican candies, pastel-colored Korean candies, crackling layers of tea leaves, lemongrass, kaffir leaves, Chinese medicinal herbs and powders, Japanese ointments and pastes. She tastes everything edible, studies the new flavors, tests the shock of them; and she learns, every time she tastes, about balance and composition, addition and subtraction.

She lifts the lid from the pan of smoked green wheat kernels and dips in a spoon. Here. Taste. He holds the spoon in his mouth for a moment. She knows what he is tasting, how the broth is flavored with pepper and garlic and lustrous, deep smokiness. And try this, she says. Vibrant vegetable greens, garlic, and lemon. And this. Herbal, meaty, vaguely fruity.

You invent yourself...You look at other women-or men; you try on their lives for size. You take what you can use, and you look inside yourself for what you can't find elsewhere. And always...always...you wonder if you're doing it right.

You could tell from the books whether a library was meant for show or not. Books that were used had an open, interested feel to them, even if closed and neatly lined up on a shelf in strict order with their fellows. You felt as though the book took as much interest in you as you did in it and was willing to help when you reached for it.

Getting up once in the dark to go adventuring is a lark. Twice in two days smacks of masochism.

Jamie felt a strong desire to go across and see what the open books were, to go to the shelves and run his knuckles gently over the leather and wood and buckrum of the bindings until a book should speak to him and come willingly into his hand.

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop. The line from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland drifted through my mind, and I smiled. Good advice, I supposed – but only if you happened to know where the beginning was, and I didn't quite.

Would you go down there, Roger?" she asked softly. "Jump overboard, dive in, go on down through that dark until your lungs were bursting, not knowing whether there are things with teeth and great heavy bodies waiting?