Quotes About Exploration

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolor picture of blue irises, and why the window opens only partly and why the glass in it is shatter-proof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Our curiosity is supposed to have limits, though these have never been defined exactly.

For me the experience of writing is really an experience of losing control.… I think it's very much like dreaming or like surfing. You go out there and wait for a wave, and when it comes it takes you somewhere and you don't know where it'll go.

I'd like another dimension of space, and also the tombs and the dead women, please.

You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?

Though at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.

Possibly, then, writing has to do with darkness, and a desire or perhaps a compulsion to enter it, and, with luck, to illuminate it, and to bring something back out to the light.

I'm beginning to feel that I've discovered something worth knowing. There's a way out of places you want to leave, but can't. Fainting is like stepping sideways, out of your own body, out of time or into another time. When you wake up it's later. Time has gone on without you.

She'd love to go over him with a fine-toothed comb. Rummage around in him. Turn him upside down. Empty him out.

Virginia Woolf said that writing a novel is like walking through a dark room, holding a lantern which lights up what is already in the room anyway.

Opening up their sack, the children chorus, "Oh Snowman, what have we found?" They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for the trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

Men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory.

This is perhaps why Dante chooses the poet Virgil to be his guide in the Inferno; in visiting a strange location, it's always best to go with someone who's been there before, and – most important of all on a sightseeing tour of Hell – who might also know how to get you out again.

I know why there is no glass, in front of the watercolour picture of blue irises, and why the window only opens partly and why the glass in it is shatterproof. It isn't running away they're afraid of. We wouldn't get far. It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

it is better to journey than to arrive, as long as we journey in firm faith and for selfless ends. Let

Mushrooms were the roses in the garden of that unseen world, because

Curiosity got the cat in trouble. Let's go.

When did the body first set out on its own adventures, after having ditched its old travelling companions, the mind and the soul?

at that time men and women tried each other on, casually, like suits, rejecting whatever did not fit.

It's those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge.

Well of course people cross genres all the time. You could have something called science-fiction-fantasy. Some galaxy far, far away and in another time with spaceships, but also dragons. And there's no rule that says you can't do that.