Quotes About Exploration

Life was meant to be lived, and curiosity must be kept alive. One must never, for whatever reason, turn his back on life.

Everything is interesting if you know how to work on it.

We climbed slowly toward the greatest of our terrors of that time, we went to expose ourselves to fear and interrogate it.

She was like that, she threw things off balance just to see if she could put them back in some other way.

For the first time, I left Naples, left Campania. I discovered that I was afraid of everything: afraid of taking the wrong train, afraid of having to pee and not knowing where to do it, afraid that it would be night and I wouldn't be able to orient myself in an unfamiliar city, afraid of being robbed. I put all my money in my bra, as my mother did, and spent hours in a state of wary anxiety that coexisted seamlessly with a growing sense of liberation.

It was marvelous to cross borders, to let oneself go within other cultures, discover the provisional nature of what I had taken for absolute.

Lei era così, rompeva equilibri solo per vedere in quali altri modi poteva ricomporli.

Words for being lost or for being found.

In my spare time I didn't go out, I sat and read novels I got from the library: Grazia Deledda, Pirandello, Chekhov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky.

Ahead of us were many hours when no one in our families would look for us. When I think of the pleasure of being free, I think of the start of that day, of coming out of the tunnel and finding ourselves on a road that went straight as far as the eye could see, the road that, according to what Rino had told Lila, if you got to the end arrived at the sea. I felt joyfully open to the unknown.

A book should push the reader to confront himself and the world

How wonderful to travel, how wonderful to know someone who knows everything, whose intelligence and looks and kindness are extraordinary, and who explains to you the value of what by yourself you wouldn't be able to appreciate.

Literary genres are safe areas, solid platforms. There I can place a pale sketch of a story and practise with calm, wary pleasure. But really I am waiting for my brain to get distracted, to slip up, for other I's — many — outside the margins to join together, take my hand, begin to pull me with the writing where I'm afraid to go, where it hurts me to go, where, if I go too far, I won't necessarily know how to get back.

In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.

Extraviados en sí mismos, ignoraban que una vida no basta para descubrir los infinitos sabores de la menta, las luces de una noche o la multitud de colores de que están hechos los colores.

André Pieyre de Mandiargues rompe una nuez: -Así es tu cerebro, Leonora. -No, el mío va mucho más lejos, perfora la bóveda celeste. Poseer un telescopio sin su otra mitad esencial, el microscopio, es un símbolo de la más negra incomprensión. La tarea del ojo derecho es ver en telescopio mientras el ojo izquierdo se asoma al microscopio.

Wer suchet, der findet Anstößiges, auf das er insgeheim hofft.

The self-explorer, whether he wants to or not, becomes the explorer of everything else. He learns to see himself, but suddenly, provided he was honest, all the rest appears, and it is as rich as he was, and, as a final crowning, richer.

A head full of stars, just not in constellation yet.

Travelling, one accepts everything; indignation stays at home. One looks, one listens, one is roused to enthusiasm by the most dreadful things because they are new. Good travellers are heartless.

I leafed through the phrase book. If a Martian read it, the Martian would probably decide to avoid Hungary.

Spiderwebs attached themselves, like long trails of agglutinative suffixes, onto our arms and faces.

For the first time in my life, I couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to study or to do. I still had the old idea of being a writer, but that was being, not doing. It didn't say what you were supposed to do.

And I had never heard anyone describe so accurately the difference between last year and this year: Last year, I admired wines. This, I'm wandering inside the red world.