Wallace Stegner Quotes

Knowledge is an unending adventure at the edge of uncertainty.

What really excites me is the unknown, and getting to grips with something you have no idea about.

I guess we’ll be traveling in uncharted waters.” “That’ll be fun,” Phil said.

The First Book: Go ahead, it won't bite. Well... maybe a little. More a nip, like. A tingle. It's pleasurable, really. You see, it keeps on opening. You may fall in. Sure, it's hard to get started; remember learning to use knife and fork? Dig in: you'll never reach bottom. It's not like it's the end of the world -- just the world as you think you know it.

One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge.

The biggest adventure is to move into an area in which you are not an expert. Sometimes I joke that I am not interested in doing re-search, only search.

I don't know what's on the other side.

'Gonzo' means taking an unknown thing to an unknown place for a known purpose. But sometimes we're lost in an unknown place for no known purpose.

The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home.

If we don’t go, we don’t know.

I kind of like not knowing how to do something - it's more exciting.

I'm so curious about knowing the unknown; it can be scary, but I see it as a game.

I do like not knowing where I'm going, wandering in strange woods, whistling and following bread crumbs.

The unknown is the province of the student; it is the field for his lifes adventure, and it is a wide field full of beckonings

There's so much to explore! And personally, I don't know. It's such a crapshoot.

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.

‎"I go to seek a Great Perhaps.

There are books on my shelf that I'm not into. They are things I don't know anything about yet. It's going to lead me off into a new place. The books don't represent an interest; they represent a source of my ignorance.

So we all embark wondering what lies over the horizon, what’s around the next bend. And isn’t that, in the end, what drives us?

Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what's out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.

It's fun to discover things. I wouldn't want everything laid out, simply and too obviously.

Uncertainty is the necessary companion of all explorers.

If we know exactly where we're going, exactly how to get there, and exactly what we'll see along the way, we won't learn anything.

It is very risky. But each time a child opens a book, he pushes open the gate that separates him from Elsewhere.

A book should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land.