Quotes about Discovery

She talks with wolves, without knowing what sort of beasts they are: Where have you been all my life? they ask. Where have I been all my life? she replies.

Perhaps they were looking for passion; perhaps they delved into this book as into a mysterious parcel - a gift box at the bottom of which, hidden in layers of rustling tissue paper, lay something they'd always longed for but couldn't ever grasp.

Stick a shovel in the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light.

You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?

If I'd been older I would've asked what it was right away, but I didn't because I wanted to postpone the moment when I would know what it was. In stories I'd read, I'd come across the words nameless dread. They'd just been words then, but now that's exactly what I felt.

That birthday was the day I discovered that I was a fraud. Or not a fraud, like a bad magician: a fake, like a fake antique. I was a forgery, done on purpose.

Opening up their sack, the children chorus, "Oh Snowman, what have we found?" They lift out the objects, hold them up as if offering them for sale: a hubcap, a piano key, a chunk of pale-green pop bottle smoothed by the ocean. A plastic BlyssPluss container, empty; a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins, ditto. A computer mouse, or the busted remains of one, with a long wiry tail.

Maybe I don't really want to know what's going on. Maybe I'd rather not know. Maybe I couldn't bear to know. The Fall was a fall from innocence to knowledge.

Then I remembered something I'd seen and hadn't noticed, at the time. It wasn't the army. It was some other army.

But what if she discovers the truth? What he suspects is the truth. That he's patchwork, a tin man, his heart stuffed with sawdust. He thinks of her waiting for him, somewhere else, an island, subtropical, not muggy, her long hair waving in the sea breeze, a red hibiscus tucked behind one ear. If he's lucky she'll wait till that happens, till he can get there to be with her.

I think the biggest innovations of the 21st century will be at the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning.

There was a time when I had all the answers. My real growth began when I discovered that the questions to which I had the answers were not the important questions.