Quotes About Exploration

We need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here - and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must.

Getting found almost always means being lost for a while

Write about your childhoods, I tell them for the umpteenth time. Write about that time in your life when you were so intensely interested in the world, when your powers of observation were at their most acute, when you felt things so deeply. Exploring and understanding your childhood will give you the ability to empathize, and that understanding and empathy will teach you to write with intelligence and insight and compassion.

Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth. What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you'll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you've already been in.

W]hen you're dreaming, you're not the one calling the shots. So it's a reprieve.

We cannot arrange lasting safety or happiness for our most beloved people. They have to find their own ways, their own answers.

New is life.

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I'm sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

Augustine said that to look for God is to find him

Soon I got lost in a good way, with a book, which is also to get found, and my staunchest lifelong light.

Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.

What a miracle it is that out of these small, flat, rigid squares of paper unfolds world after world after world, worlds that sing to you, comfort and quiet or excite you.

We spend long enough in one place to make friends and understand different ways of doing things. That's far better, to my mind, than never moving out of one valley all your born days, and never hearing a new way of speaking or a new way of doing. Keeps the brain blood circulating; shifts ideas and opens eyes and hearts.

Then enter a program that gets me out of this wretched asshole of a midden system.

I can only find you by looking deeper, that's how love leads us into the world.

I began the piling of words, to dig myself out to dare myself

Travel Far, Pay No Fare... a book can take you anywhere.

That is the magical thing about books. You can listen to all the greatest people who have ever lived, anywhere in the world, in any civilization. You can see what is completely different about them, things you never imagined.

It was his own soul he was exploring, the one territory from which there was no escape, the one enemy which must always be faced, sooner or later, more certain than anything else in life or death.

They could not find the light if they had not the courage to explore the darkness.

And if they are forced to a new idea, they turn it over like a child with a toy.

I may go alone, Mr. Rathbone, but I am perfectly sure I would not find the ground uninhabited when I got there!