Gail Carriger Quotes

Science is exploration. The fundamental nature of exploration is that we don't know what's there. We can guess and hope and aim to find out certain things, but we have to expect surprises.

When I'm an audience member I do not want to go and see something that I already know, I want to see something that I don't know. I want to be surprised and stimulated to think about something. I want the magic. I want to be in a situation of uncertainty; that's what excites me.

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.

One of the most constant and sustaining truths of my life has been this: I love the library.

Libraries raised me.

With every book, you go back to school. You become a student. You become an investigative reporter. You spend a little time learning what it's like to live in someone else's shoes.

Sometimes you read something, and you have to read more and more about the background.

I ransack public libraries & find them full of sunk treasure.

When I don't know the answer to something, I write a book about it because it gives me a chance to explore it and go to some people who do have the answers.

Quoting her mother: The trouble with a book is you never know what's in it until it's too late!

Basically, I'm a perpetual student. I start by finding a subject I really don't know very much, but that I'm curious about. I learn about it through books in a library, by doing interviews with people who know a lot about the subject, and by going out on my own and seeing for myself what's happening.

If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle them, and, as it were, fondle them. Let them fall open where they will. Make a voyage of discovery, taking soundings of uncharted seas.

There are 20,000 million books I could have to read, but I can pick the ones and know that I'm learning something that I didn't know before. That's the glory of writing. It's not even so much the writing, it's what you learn - especially history - because so much of it is research.

Anything worth anything can be found in books.

The first thing we pulled out was a lump of white gunk. “Wax,” Carter pronounced. “Fascinating.

There is so much left of it to explore.

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

Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.

That's the beautiful thing about science - that it's all about things we don't understand, not just the things we do understand.

I used to have weird practices in crowded used-book stores in New York where I'd go in and just stomp my foot and see what fell from the shelf. And of course, because it's an unexpected encounter, there's always some magic that comes from it.

Cram your head with characters and stories. Abuse your library privileges. Never stop looking at the world, and never stop reading to find out what sense other people have made of it. If people give you a hard time and tell you to get your nose out of a book, tell them you're working. Tell them it's research. Tell them to pipe down and leave you alone.

I was really intrigued by them, became fascinated by them because they were asking questions that couldn't be answered almost, or were making statements that you couldn't quite understand. Like, 'I'm investigating things that begin with the letter M.' That took me through a whole stratosphere of possibilities, and doing a little research and discovered that the M is mercury.

A book is like a door. You walk through the cover and you don't know what you're going to find.

Researching books gets you into nothing but trouble.

Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring in a library.