Quotes About Exploration

Fiction isn't what 'was'. It's 'what if'?

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the pages of a book I can be anybody

We had to scramble for seats in the day coach, lugging one straw valise between us and a gallon jug of lemonade. And a thermos bottle of the kind the Spanish-American War soldiers carried, with our own well water for brushing our teeth. We'd heard that St. Louis water comes straight out of the Mississippi River, and there's enough silt in it to settle at the bottom of the glass. We'd go to their fair, but we weren't going to drink their water.

I read because one life isn't enough, and in the page of a book I can be anybody.

If you can't have fun with Science, what good is it? -Einstein

A seed that lands upside down in the ground will wheel --root and stem--in a great U-turn until it rights itself. But a human child can know it's pointed wrong and still consider the direction well worth a try.

They share a lot, astronomy and childhood. Both are voyages across huge distances. Both search for facts beyond their grasp. Both theorize wildly and let possibilities multiply without limits. Both are humbled every few weeks. Both operate out of ignorance. Both are mystified by time. Both are forever starting out.

Sun and water are questions endlessly worth answering.

Life is something we need to stop correcting. My boy was a pocket universe I could never hope to fathom. Every one of us is an experiment, and we don't even know what the experiment is testing.

We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

I felt us traveling on a small craft, piloting through the capital city of the reigning global superpower on the coast of the third largest continent of a smallish, rocky world near the inner rim of the habitable zone of a G-type dwarf star that lay a quarter of the way out to the edge of a dense, large, barred, spiral galaxy that drifted through a thinly spread local cluster in the dead center of the entire universe.

A thing can travel everywhere, just by holding still.

Where the deer bound, where the trout rise, where your horse stops to slather a drink from icy water while the sun is warm on the back of your neck, where every breath you draw is exhilaration — that is where the Aspens grow. . . .

I read then, everything I could lay hands on. Reading was my virgin continent. I read instantly upon awakening, and was still at it well past the hour that consciousness shut down. I read for nothing, for a pleasure difficult to describe and impossible afterward to recover.

She writes her favorite lines in the inside covers of her field notebooks and peeks at them when department politics and the cruelty of frightened humans get her down. The words withstand the full brutality of day. We all travel the Milky Way together, trees and men. . . . In every walk with nature one receives far more than he seeks. The clearest way into the universe is through a forest wilderness.

English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide.

Do not invent anything; simply discover it.

The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.

They can't believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.

High above Adam's prison, new creatures sweep up into satellite orbit and back down to the planet's surface, obeying the old, first hungers, the primal commands - look, listen, taste, touch, feel, say, join. They gossip to one other, these new species, exchanging discoveries, as living code has exchanged itself from the beginning. They begin to link up, to fuse together, to merge their cells and form small communities. There's no saying what they might become, in seventy plus seventy years.

I let the class out, ten minutes early. My students would have to figure out the rest of the origin of life on their own.

imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

Her real life starts this night - a long, postmortem bonus round. Nothing in the years to come can do worse than she was ready to do to herself. Human estimation can no longer touch her. She's free now to experiment. To discover anything.

The game's best AIs are smarter than last year's interplanetary probes. Play becomes the engine of human growth. But