Quotes About Origins

We vibrate to the rhythms of our mother's blood before she herself is born...

It is not altogether a bad thing to have criminal ancestors. An arsonist grandfather may bequeath one a nose for smelling smoke.

An apocryphal story — the word "apocryphal" here means "obviously untrue" — tells of two people, long ago, who were very bored, and that instead of complaining about it they sat up all night and invented the game of chess so that everyone else in the world, on evenings when there is nothing to do, can also be bored by the perplexing and tedious game they invented.

The expression "following suit" is a curious one, because it has nothing to do with walking behind a matching set of clothing.

because nobody can exactly agree what they are made of, where they come from, or how often they should appear.

Now it's my turn," Riley said. "What's your first name? Where'd you grow up? Who's your favorite Batman?

opened in 1874.

Unlike science, creationism cannot predict anything, and it cannot provide satisfactory answers about the past.

The thing that always attracted me to New York was the sense of being in a place where a lot of people had a lot of stories not unlike mine. Everybody comes from somewhere else. Everyone's got a Polish grandmother, some kind of metamorphosis in their family circumstances. That's a very big thing - the experience of not living where you started.

The main way that being adopted has shaped my songwriting is that I was asked at an early age to consider the circumstances that led to my life, and in a way, I was introduced to how fragile and unlikely life is from the beginning.

If someone's liver doesn't work, we blame it on the genes; if someone's brain doesn't work properly, we blame the school. It's actually more humane to think of the condition as genetic. For instance, you don't want to say that someone is born unpleasant, but sometimes that might be true.

It was unthinkable not long ago that a biologist or paleontologist would be at the same conference as an astrophysicist. Now we have accumulated so much data in each of these branches of science as it relates to origins that we have learned that no one discipline can answer questions of origins alone.

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

It's not unusual for a luxury company to be born from a single product and then diversify. Louis Vuitton began with luggage, and Gucci with leather goods.

I'm a simple man. Grew up in a small town. Came from humble beginnings. No silver spoon.

It was deeply important for me to understand where Mandela came from. Because we know where he was going, and that's a famous story, but who was he? Where did he come from? What was his upbringing?

My mom and dad met at U. Conn., and their lives couldn't have been more different in terms of their upbringing.

I had a very modest upbringing.

My upbringing in Rampur has contributed a lot to what I am today.

I would describe myself as having a healthy income, but I sure wouldn't describe the son of a postmaster and an encyclopedia saleswoman as upper class, by any stretch of the imagination. I would describe myself as decidedly middle class. I think I'm extremely fortunate.

I would say I came from upper middle class family.

I am from Michigan; I am from Grosse Pointe. I was upper class growing up there.

As a kid, my dad moved us to the upper town, which was in a higher class of people, and we would see the lower town below. Every day, we could see where we came from and where we were now.

My mother was from upstate New York; she's of Irish and German descent. My father was from Ghana.