Quotes About Exploration

The bottom line is that finding orphan planets - small, faint, and located who-knows-where - is not for the faint of heart. The task is comparable to observing a match flame at the distance of Pluto. The WISE satellite, a hi-tech, space-based infrared telescope especially suited for such work, has found only a few.

Fiction is a house with many stately mansions, but also one in which it is wise, at least sometimes, to swing from the chandeliers.

What we need is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out.

When you stop doing something, it doesn't mean you are rejecting the previous work. That's the mistake; it's not rejecting it, it's saying, 'I have exploited it enough now and I wish to take a look at another corner.'

I wish to present myself in front of the camera, each time under the features of a different woman. I would like to live and apprehend the problems, the conflicts, the feelings and the impulses of women radically different from me.

I wish I was one of those persnickety types who buys guidebooks and studies them, but I don't have the inclination or time. I'm more of a 'get on the plane, arrive at the destination and see what happens' kind of traveler.

I have a number of places on my wish list, including Antarctica, the Norwegian fjords, and the Amazon. I have a passion for wilderness, and Siberia is on my list - however, that may be a bridge too far.

So if you're a robot and you're living on this planet, you can do things that you can't do in real life - things that you wished you could do: like fly; like have a car that flies; like have furniture that is alive.

I would like to explore and see this country. I have had so many opportunities to see it from the air! I would like to climb the mountains that I wished I could climb at the time but had to get back to Washington.

As I traveled from one country to another, no one knew anything about me. So I could be anybody, I could speak as I wished, act as I wished, dress as I wished.

I grew up in Los Angeles and always wished I'd spent a childhood in a far different place.

I really wished I had done the backpacking-through-Europe thing when I was younger, but I was busy doing musical theater.

One of my most persistent, long-term fantasy wishes is not that I could fly or become invisible, but that I could make sound recording be invented decades or even centuries earlier than it was, so I could hear what people in the 1830s or 1750s actually sounded like.

Anyone who wants to look at sunlight naturally wipes his eye clear first, in order to make, at any rate, some approximation to the purity of that on which he looks; and a person wishing to see a city or country goes to the place in order to do so.

I teach 18- to 21-year-olds - the 'Harry Potter' generation. They grew up as voracious readers, reading books in this exploding genre. But at some point, I would love for them to give Umberto Eco or A.S. Byatt a try. I hope 'A Discovery of Witches' will serve as a kind of stepping-stone.

All the experience of the greatest city in the world could not withhold me.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either.

The scientific imagination always restrains itself within the limits of probability.

If you are of sound mind and body, many exciting and challenging adventures are within your reach irrespective of your age.

I had - and continued to have - great fun exploring the Revelation Space universe, but it was always clear to me that I wanted to write other kinds of books, even within what might be termed the fairly narrow overlapping genre categories of hard SF and space opera.

I often visited a particular plant four or five miles distant, half a dozen times within a fortnight, that I might know exactly when it opened.

The movement of search can only be from the known to the known, and all that the mind can do is to be aware that this movement will never uncover the unknown. Any movement on the part of the known is still within the field of the known.

We crossed the Himalayas in less than two minutes, and then you realise, 'Oh My God, within an hour and a half, we have gone around the whole planet.'

Some people say there's nothing new under the sun. I still think that there's room to create, you know. And intuition doesn't necessarily come from under this sun. It comes from within.