Quotes About Curiosity

Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

I wanted to see as much as I could. I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it. I certainly learned a lot of things I never would have learned otherwise this way, and even when they surprised me or made me sick I never let on, but pretended that's the way I knew things were all the time.

I looked at the baby in the lap of the woman opposite. I had no idea how old it was, I never did, with babies—for all I knew it could talk a blue streak and had twenty teeth behind its pursed, pink lips.

I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time Ã¢â'¬Â¦

What do you do? I asked the man, to break the silence shooting up around me on all sides, thick as jungle grass

The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that's all there was to read about in the papers--goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being bummed alive all along your nerves.

I'm very interested in everything. The words fell with a hollow flatness on to Jay Cee's desk, like so many wooden nickels.

Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test tube into another, and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.

I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time...

I liked looking on at other people in crucial situations. If there was a road accident or a street fight or a baby pickled in a laboratory jar for me to look at, I'd stop and look so hard I never forgot it.

Actually, it wasn't the idea of Buddy sleeping with somebody that bothered me. I mean I'd read about all sorts of people sleeping with each other, and if it had been any other boy I would merely have asked him the most interesting details, and maybe gone out and slept with somebody myself just to even things up, and then thought no more about it.

I had never met a misogynist before. I could tell Marco was a woman-hater, because in spite of all the models and TV starlets in the room that night he paid attention to nobody but me. Not out of kindness or even curiosity, but because I'd happened to be dealt to him, like a playing card in a pack of identical cards.

Facevo collezione di uomini con nomi interessanti.

His name was Cal, which I thought must be short for something, but I couldn't think what it would be short for, unless it was California.

I knew chemistry would be worse, because I'd seen a big chart of the ninety-odd elements hung up in the chemistry lab, and all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them.

It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn't help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

What I couldn't stand was this shrinking everything into letters and numbers. Instead of leaf shapes and enlarged diagrams of the holes the leaves breathe through and fascinating words like carotene and xanthophyll on the blackboard, there were these hideous, cramped, scorpion-lettered formulas in Mr. Manzi's special red chalk.

It is the exception that interests the devil.

turned and grinned at the littlest, with big brown eyes and peeling nose, pink and brown patches of skin, tow head, husky voice; he catapulted back into a bank of dry seaweed on the afterdeck and the other little boys laughed; big, bright awake eyes, dancing, merry; curious, and shy too; patched faded overalls; lean and brown and agile; pokes and fisticuffs. Mice and squirrel and cocker spaniel faces.

I read through the phone book once, never mind when, and it satisfied a deep need in me to realize how many people aren't called Smith. Anyhow

you don't want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch = "She was the sort of girl …." And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can …

The known is finite, the unknown is infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to claim a little more land.

waited for the flash of green, which I have never seen but some people say exists.

We read many books, because we cannot know enough people.