Quotes About Exploration

like people were all runny and liquid, running over this surface and that, looking for a container to hold everything in place, trying one thing, then the next, incessantly looking for the right one. Except the containers were only big enough for one personality trat at a time; you had to grab on to one trait, bring it out for a while, then put it back and pull out another one. For a while, we were loving; then we were alienated and angry, then ironic, then depressed.

A curious mind probing for truth may well set your scribbling ass free.

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers. Let me keep company always with those who say Look! and laugh in astonishment, and bow their heads.

It's not a competition, it's a doorway.

What will you do with your one precious, wild life?

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving

You're like a little wild thing that was never sent to school.

No, I'd never been to this country before. No, I didn't know where the roads would lead me. No, I didn't intend to turn back.

What kind of life is it always to plan and do, to promise and finish, to wish for the near and the safe? Yes, by the heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want a boat I couldn't steer.

When death comes…. I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what it's going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?

All my life I have been restless- I have felt there is something more wonderful than gloss- than wholeness- than staying at home.

A Voice from I Don't Know Where

How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?

But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus.

I don't want to end up simply having visited the world.

I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and then foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.

quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place.

What lay on the road was no mere handful of snake. It was the copperhead at last, golden under the street lamp. I hope to see everything in this world before I die.

Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.

Now of all voyagers I remember, who among them Did not board ship with grief among their maps?

I know several lives worth living.

I know I can walk through the world