Quotes About Curiosity

It was really true what they said: you don't look for something out of the ordinary unless you have reason to.

When Americans find out I grew up in the tenements, the question they invariably ask me is "how did you end up there?" Americans, it seems, find comfort in reasons and explanations. They honestly believe that if they can find the reason for someone else's misfortune, they can avoid that misfortune themselves. If they could find out how I ended up in the tenements, they could assure themselves that it could never have happened to them.

I can always be tempted by a library.

Living is really hard, but death is forever. We're all going to die eventually, so what's your rush' Even if you think committing suicide will make you seem tragic and romantic and cool, you'll never know what happened anyway. Don't you want to know how your life was supposed to turn out. Wouldn't you like to see what you're made of?

And incidents of clandestine cake mix use were not isolated! Busybodies excused themselves from parties just long enough to rifle through the kitchen trash cans for empty cake mix boxes.

A world without boredom would be dull.

Sometimes asking God for a reason for something is like asking Him why the sky is blue. There is a complex, scientific reason for it, Claire, but most children, including you, are content with knowing it is blue because it is. If we understood everything about everything, we would have no need for faith.

the world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper," a quote by W. B. Yeats

children, as they grow, learn about the world and their place in it by testing what they know and experimenting with what they don't.

The gaping unknown

Knowledge is a beautiful thing, but there are a few things I wish I didn't know.

I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived. It wasn't like going to a store with my mom, which guaranteed a tug-of-war between what I wanted and what my mother was willing to buy me; in the library I could have anything I wanted.

You read and read and read and read," she said, "and then what?

Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.

There are a lot of surprising things in the library; a lot of things you don't think of when you try to imagine all of what a library might contain.

There are so many things in a library, so many books and so much stuff, that I sometimes wondered if any one single person could possibly know what all of it is. I preferred thinking that no one does - I liked the idea that the library is more expansive and grand than one single mind, and that it requires many people together to form a complete index of its bounty.

By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

I grew up in libraries, or at least it feels that way.

Our visits to the library were never long enough for me. The place was so bountiful. I loved wandering around the bookshelves, scanning the spines until something happened to catch my eye. Those visits were dreamy, frictionless interludes that promised I would leave richer than I arrived.

grew up in libraries

checkout machine

She cocked her head at me. "You read and read and read and read," she said, "and then what?

wanted librarians to simply adore the act of reading for its own sake, and perhaps, as a collateral benefit, they could inspire their patrons to read with a similarly insatiable appetite.

Over the years, he has become a sort of library himsel: He is the repository of endless stories about the library's most interesting patrons.