Quotes About Exploration

The Japanese have a nice way of putting it: "The day you cease to travel, you will have arrived.

If only life were like a Jules Verne novel, thinks Marie-Laure, and you could page ahead when you most needed to, and learn what would happen.

Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

Every hour, Robert thinks, all over the globe, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.

Am I following a path already laid out for me, or am I making it myself?

Not-knowing is always more thrilling than knowing. Not-knowing is where hope and art and possibility and invention come from. It is not-knowing, that old, old thing, that allows everything to be renewed.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you.

to write a story is to inch backward and forward along a series of planks you are cantilevering out into the darkness, plank by plank, inch by inch, and the best you can hope is that each day you find yourself a little bit farther out over the abyss.

Ojalá la vida fuera como una novela de Julio Verne y uno pudiera pasar las páginas cuando lo necesita para saber lo que va a suceder más adelante.

she loves to ask them about their lives, to wonder what adventures they've had, what lusts, what secret follies they carry in their hearts.

There, thinks Werner when he finds it again, there: a feeling like shutting your eyes and feeling your way down a mile-long thread until your fingernails find the tiny lump of a knot.

No footprints in the sand. Pebbles and bits of weed are strung in scalloped lines. Three outer islands bear low stone forts; a green lantern glows on the tip of a jetty. It feels appropriate somehow, to have reached the edge of the continent, to have only the hammered sea left in front of him.

To know her is to realize the thousand forms of inquiry.

Gates were creaking open inside him - paths, long sealed off, revealed themselves once more.

It doesn't hurt, she explains. And there is no darkness, not the kind they imagine. Everything is composed of webs and lattices and upheavals of sound and texture.

with a prodigious curiosity but little perseverance.

Don't be so quick to dismiss yourself," he says. "Sometimes the things we think are lost are only hidden, waiting to be rediscovered.

Parachuting through the air around him, blown out of the firs, are hundreds of pine needles bundled in twos. He catches one, imagines it as a little man with a truncated torso and long slender legs. The NeedleMan ventures across the clearing on his pointy feet.

make the raised dots form letters, the letters words, the words a world.

Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

It's as if the city has become a library of books in an unknown language.