Quotes About Exploration

But there's a whole world waiting, still, and there are good things in it.

He saw nothing except the endless ribbon of road unfolding in twisting narrow curves.

All of it was new to him. After a life of Sameness and predictability, he was awed by the surprises that lay beyond each curve of the road. He slowed the bike again and again to look with wonder at wildflowers, go enjoy the throaty warble of a new bird nearby, or merely to watch the way wind shifted the leaves in the trees. During his twelve years in the community, he had never felt such simple moments of exquisite happiness.

The books in his own dwelling were the only books that Jonas had ever seen. He had never known that other books existed. But this room's walls were completely covered by bookcases, filled, which reached to the ceiling. There must have been hundreds—perhaps thousands—of books, their titles embossed in shiny letters. Jonas stared at them. He couldn't imagine what the thousands of pages contained.

Some books had shiny pages that showed paintings of landscapes unlike anything Matty had ever seen, or of people costumed in odd ways, or of battles, and there were many quiet painted scenes of a woman holding a newborn child.

But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

Let's experiment. Someone must have figured it out once, in order to write a book. Why can't we do the same thing?

Jonas repeated it. "Love." It was a word and concept new to him.

He saw all of the light and colour and history it contained and carried in its slow-moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going.

What is in here?" he asked loudly.

I'm trying to ruin it! Will had bellowed back. So I can figure out how to do it perfectly! How can you learn anything if you won't take risks?

What you are is a question only you can answer.

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.

the unknown breeds dragons in map margins

Learn everything that existed in the universe, and whatever was left, that dwarfish-man-shaped hole in the center, would be him by process of elimination.

Between one breath and the next, the vision took him. It came not as a chain of reason, more words words words, but as a blinding image, all complete in its first moment, inherent, holistic, gestalt, inspired. Every hour of his life from now on would be but the linear exploration of its fullness.

So the unknown breeds dragons in map margins, she reflected...

I have to find a boat. Somehow.

Let's go over a little astrography. Geography is the mother of strategy, they say.

With the opposable thumb our ancestors made weapons, harnessed fire, fashioned tools and implements, created works of art, and hitch-hiked.

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.

We have joined the caravan, you might say, at a certain point; we will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in a lifetime see all that we would like to see or learn all that we hunger to know.

Every man contains within himself a ghost continent.

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.