Quotes About Origins

'Sanctus' deals with creation myths in every culture. It fascinates me that all cultures, evolving independently, have similar models of mankind's origins, of a Greater Being, of the flood, and so on. It's amazing how they crop up time and time again.

It's very difficult to escape your background. You know, I don't think it's necessary to even try to escape it. More and more, I start to think that it's necessary to see exactly what it is that you inherited on both ends of the stick: your timidity, your courage, your self-deceit, and your honesty - and all the rest of it.

I'm very aware of my own background. I'm Irish, French, and then a little bit of everything else thrown in, ranging from German to Native American. We're talking about tiny drops of blood.

I was born and bred in a tiny, low-ceilinged ground-floor apartment.

I come from a tiny mining town in the rainforest in an island at the end of the world. My grandparents were illiterate.

Was not from a mixture of two races that the Titans sprang?

No matter where I go or what title I may achieve, I will always be the son of exiles.

I wasn't born into land or titles, or new money, or an oil rig.

I was born in a house without a light or a toilet, so why would I forget who I am or where I come from?

The best creative no longer has to originate in Chicago or London; it will be coming from Stockholm, Tokyo, and Seoul as well.

As Will Burton says, "pain has a story, a narrative," and knowing it reveals human complexity which is an invitation to decency. When we try to understand, we discover causes, origins, and consequences about each other and our selves.

A millennial belief in a Holy God may have the effect of deepening the soul, but it is also obviously archaic, and modern influences would presently bring me up to date and reveal how antiquated my origins were. To turn away from those origins, however, has always seemed to me an utter impossibility. It would be a treason to my first consciousness to un-Jew myself.

It's not a new, radical idea for work to have meaning and for workers to have both great freedom and pride in the work itself. Instead those ideas are rooted in the origins of work; we've just lost our way.

Just one question, you arrogant fucking cocksucker" said Locke. "I'll grant the Lamora part is easy to spot; the truth is, I didn't know about the apt translation when I took the name. I borrowed it from this old sausage dealer who was kind to me once, back in Catchfire before the plague. I just liked the way it sounded. "But what the fuck" he said slowly, "ever gave you the idea that Locke was the first name I was actually born with?

But what the fuck ... ever gave you the idea that Locke was the first name I was actually born with?

The word "BAE" which is popular in North American society is actually the Danish word for poop.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

I step through origins like a dog turning its memories of wilderness on the kitchen mat: the bog floor shakes, water cheeps and lisps as I walk down rushes and heather. I love this turf-face, it's black incisions, the cooped secrets of process and ritual: -"Kinship

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

To speak from a particular place and time is not provincialism but part of a writer's identity.

The first time I met Bill Clinton was actually 1988.

While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.

I am a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.