Quotes About Curiosity

For those of us with a bookish bent, reading is a reflexive response to everything. This is how we deal with the world and anything that comes our way. We have always known that there is a book for every occasion and every obsession. When in doubt, we are always looking things up.

They were collectors of words the same way so many of the gravel diggers were collectors of fossils. They kept an ear constantly alert for them, the rare, the unusual, the unique.

There must be more to stories than you think.

Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins and dragons? The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainment of human company he is more likely to seek out the drunken poet or the wild-eyed crone than a damsel with a cornet.

They stood in silence, looking at floorboards and corners of cornices and other such insignificances, their curiosity and compassion at the ready. They were waiting so hard that when the door cracked and Bellman appeared, they jumped.

For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist.

There were some for whom the world was such a tricky thing that they marvelled at it without feeling any need to puzzle it out.

Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.

Yesterday or the day before, while I had been going about my business, quietly and in private, some unknown person—some stranger—had gone to the trouble of marking my name onto this envelope. Who was it who had had his mind's eye on me while I hadn't suspected a thing?

holding up a single picture and studying it with a frown. She's seen a ghost

The cat was on the window ledge, gazing intently into the garden.

know what it is like to finish a book and find oneself wondering, a day or a week later, what happened to the butcher or who got the diamonds, or whether or not the dowager was ever reconciled with her niece. I

stood with my hand on the handle of the third door. The rule of three, Miss Winter had said. But I wasn't in the mood for her story anymore. Her dangerous house with its indoor rain and trick mirror had lost its interest for me.

could just see the movements of Miss Winter's lashes. They crouched and quivered around the eye, like the long legs of a spider around its body.

do you believe in ghosts?

But there was more. Did she know I had noticed? I had made no outward sign. But I had noticed. Today Miss Winter had said I.

One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn't one, Miss Lea?

Thomas Ambrose Proctor!

I smiled into the clever eyes. "Find out for me," I said, "whether Oliver

her to me and asked if I

Don't be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused.…Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die, world without end, amen." —George Saunders

Am I really admitting that my sister is determined to marry a man she has only seen once and doesn't much like the look of? It is half real and half pretense - and I have an idea that it is a game most girls play when they meet an eligible young men. They just...wonder.

My God - it's a green child! said the American. What is this place - the House of Usher?

But during the many happy hours that Cadpig was to sit watching it in the warm kitchen she never liked it quite so much as that other television, that still silent television she had seen on Christmas Eve when the puppies had rested so peacefully in that strange lofty building. She often remembered that building and wondered who owned it. Someone very kind she was sure for in front of every one of the many seats there had been a little carpet-eared puppy-sized dog-bed.