Quotes About Curiosity

In the school library there's an old Book Week poster that says 'Get Lost in a Book.' Well, we do that. We lose ourselves in books for hours and hours—books about all kinds of people and tons of different places. Then we come back, and we bring things with us. When we get lost like that, I think we find all kinds of cool stuff.

My first, and most lasting, addiction has always been to the obsessive study of any matter that took hold of my curiosity.

The young Melville felt constricted by prevailing standards of taste, and knew that in order to make a place for himself in the emerging American literary scene he would have to push his readers to expand their range of curiosity and tolerance.

Talk is cheap, exploration and discovery is hard

He also liked to root around in sales and street markets, and picked up a violin in London, on Farringdon Road, for which he took some lessons.

And remember to ask questions, and notice everything, the orchids and the fruit flies, the children rummaging for food in piles of shit, and the ibis that flies across the moon at dusk. Let us go at least as far as the falls.

When I got home, the neighborhood would be so quiet that after a few weeks in other places, I'd want to yell at all the silent houses I drove past: What are you doing in there? Eating, shitting, watching TV—writing novels?

Watching my little 18 month old confidently waddle around his weekend exploring the world, I realized that one of the things that's so joyful about being around little one's is that they haven't absorbed all of our cultural programming yet.

My mum, who comes from Goa, wanted us to develop our minds when we were kids, so she used to turn the electricity off at weekends so we couldn't sit watching the telly.

When high school students ask to spend their afternoons and weekends in my laboratory, I am amazed: I didn't develop that kind of enthusiasm for science until I was 28 years old.

I grew up having the library as the best place ever. I spent a lot of weekends there as a kid - my parents would drop me off and leave me there all day. I would just sit in the back and read whatever I could find.

I taught my son to read with tabloids. We would sit to read the 'Weekly World News' together.

Imagine you wake up one morning with a knock at the door, and when you answer, there's Denzel Washington announcing that he's going to be filming on your street for several weeks.

I went to law school. I found it interesting for the first three weeks.

I was raised in a strict Southern household in Lexington, South Carolina, and I remember sneaking off to watch 'Pet Cemetery' as a kid. After seeing those animals reincarnate, I screamed and couldn't sleep for weeks, but watched it again and again.

The Falstaff people, romantics all, went for it. They were so anxious to find out what I was going to do that they could hardly bear to wait out the two weeks. I was rather anxious to find out what I was going to do, too.

My father was an engineer - he wasn't literary, not a writer or a journalist, but he was one of the world's great readers. Every two weeks, he'd take me to our local branch library and pull books off the shelf for me, stacking them up in my arms - 'Have you read this? And this? And this?'

I strongly encourage listening to the radio to hear something you haven't heard before. It's a very healthy thing to do. It's strange: unless you reload your iPods every couple of weeks, you're listening to and recycling the same music all of the time. I'm serious. Listen to your radio station.

I think, basically, what I'm good for is reading - a lot. I think I'll always be more of a reader than a writer, definitely. There are sooo many books in the world I haven't read, sometimes I feel as if they're all piled on top of my head weighing me down and saying, 'Hurry up.'

When I shoot, I try to feel the body and the face and the weight of the actor, because the character until that moment is only in the pages of the script. And very often, I pull from the life of my actors. I'm always curious about what these characters and these actors are hiding about their lives.

And, uh, I did that, and there was nothing more ridiculous to me than finding the weight of the earth because I didn't care how much the earth weighed.

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a civil engineer. No joke. I would come home from school and build bridges out of toothpicks and see how much weight they would hold before falling.

That's really why I want to go to space - I want to be weightless for so long that it gets boring.

I know it sounds weird, but how bad, how hard can dying be?