Quotes About Origins

I didn't actually grow up in London.

People expect me to be that guy. But I'm more east London boy than east Baltimore.

I am half Bengali and half Marathi.

I have never wanted to check out the family folklore that we could be traced back to a dominie at the hamlet of Balquhidder in the Scottish highlands.

Shakespeare's 'Othello' was inspired by Cinthio's 'A Moorish Captain'; his 'Hamlet' came from Saxo Grammaticus's 'Amleth.'

You mortals arose from the possibility she made and, though she always liked to think so, are consequently not of her direct design.

The second came not as they are ordinarily born—that is, head foremost as a man climbs from a lower place into a high—but feet foremost as a man lets himself down into a lower place. His grandmother was holding his brother, not knowing that two were to be born, and for that reason his feet beat the ground for a time with no one to draw him forth. Because of this his mother called him John Sandwalker.

he was made from excellent human dough

how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

With Bound, we wanted to pull at conventions, because you begin to wonder, Why do these stereotypes exist? Where do they come from? You use that as the subtext.

When I read the news that Wonder Woman was going to be resurrected for a blockbuster movie in 2016, 'Batman vs. Superman', it made me excited - and anxious. Would the producers give her a role as fierce as her origins - and maybe some shoulder straps - or would she just be cartoon eye candy?

Without Wonder Woman, there would be no Black Canary; without a Superman, there would be no Flash. They all come from that.

As comfortable as I was with my adoption, the nature-versus-nurture question has been a big one for me. I adore my parents, but I always wondered if I would feel a different kind of love-not more or less, just different-for someone who was biologically related.

I'm a mixture of Anglo-Saxon, a bit of Spanish and one-eighth American. I've often wondered if I have an Asiatic ancestor from the East as well because I have deep-set eyes. Make-up artists are constantly trying to shade my eyelids, and I have to point out that I don't have any!

I don't think that books are wondrous, magical things that come from nowhere. It's important that a book has clues about where and how it was written.

I just go back to my roots. I was literally born 26 miles from Martinsville High School where Coach Wooden grew up, and then my dad coached there for four years.

Living in the woods is part of my origins, it's like when I was a kid.

The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks and the Romans, they influenced the early world before there was a place called Europe.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

English is full of Scandinavian words. Margate, Ramsgate, Billingsgate, any town with a 'gate' on it takes their suffix from the Danish word 'gade' which simply means 'street.'

I feel a great kinship with my origins, even though I only learned a few words of Arabic.

Imagine thousands and thousands of years ago, when the human race was born in Africa, if we'd not allowed them to get out of Africa then we wouldn't exist.

For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.

My parents met because my father was an actor friend of one of my mom's brothers, but my mother has never set foot on the stage - she's quite shy. So it's a strange thing because people say, 'Oh, coming from acting parents,' when the idea of acting would literally make my mother just want to throw up.