Tasneem Zehra Husain:

Personally, I've begun to think of knowledge as a fractal. Rich and intricate worlds lie between points that appear adjacent. The circumscribed area may well be finite, but the boundary is infinitely long. Out on the perimeter, we can walk forever and never run out of places to explore. What could possibly be better?

Decius:

Noticing is easier in a foreign place because mundane things are unusual. It's the sameness of the familiar that closes minds.

Rishidev Chaudhuri:

I remember only vaguely the last place I lived, mostly facts rather than emotional textures or spiritual resonances. And, the facts themselves are elusive; when pinned down they emerge as false or inconsistent or, worse, meaningless without the substrate necessary to render them intelligible. And meanwhile the world around becomes ever more solid, losing the fingerprints of transience and history so that I barely remember what it was like to be new here, for things to not have always been the case, for me to have lived elsewhere or to have seen things differently.

Ed Caesar:

The clues that remain will always prove insufficient to our curiosity. Each archaeological advance yields more questions, and more theories to be tested. Our ignorance shrinks by fractions. What we know is always dwarfed by what we can never know.

Christopher Knight:

Solitude did increase my perception. But here's the tricky thing -- when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn't even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.