Quotes About Origins

Where are you from?" he asked. Leni never knew how to answer that question. It implied a permanence, a before that had never existed for her. She'd never thought of any place as home.

In other words, America was founded by a nutty religious cult.

Like most babies smell like butter His smell smelled like no other He was born scentless and senseless He was born a scentless apprentice

To create a life is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you.

Like ginseng roots, our buried pasts have different shapes.

What Chinese identity?" Ming shouts. To his horror, she looks, again, like a little girl. He sees her at six years old, standing on the playground, watching the sun shine on the blond hair of her classmates. He can't stand it. Even though he's been there, is familiar with the origins of self-hatred, knows he can't bear it because it reminds him of himself, he can't speak to her any more. He puts his headphones on and turns up the sound.

Do you even really know how vampires are made?' 'Well, when a mommy vampire and a daddy vampire love each other very much...

Our fathers were demons,' Catarina said. 'Our mothers were heroes.

I think the Big Bang theory must have been invented by a man. A woman would have wanted it to take longer and insisted on a commitment.

His knowledge of his origins was Harry's strength - more than any other man I had ever known. His women were the decorations of his success; no particular woman, it seemed, was essential to him.

Legends, then, are seldom formed out of thin air. They grow out of something real. That original something may be extremely different from the final legend, but the kernel of truth is there nevertheless.

However wretched her origins, she chose freely to continue her crimes against us from the moment she woke to this life. It is easy to forgive beautiful women, especially when they lay a sorrowful tale before you like a sugar-dusted meal. It does not mean they deserve forgiveness.

Twelve mothers and twelve fathers were stacked into the long, thin house, each with four children, drawing the old cobalt-and-silver curtains down the center of rooms to make labyrinths of twelve dining rooms, twelve stting rooms, twelve bedrooms. It could be said, and was, that Marya Morevna had twelve mothers and twelve fathers, and so did all the children of that long, thin house.

Il ne faut pas avoir peur de regarder les choses en face. La vie est le résultat de la malpropreté. Si la nature avait été bien tenue, la vie ne serait jamais apparue. La vie est née de quelques vagues saletés au fond d'une flaque d'eau boueuse. La vie, donc l'homme. Il n'y a vraiment pas de quoi être fier.

But the stories that grow up around a king are strong vines with a fierce grip. They pull life from whatever surfaces they cling to, while the roots, maybe, wither and rot until you cannot find the place from which the seed of the vine has truly sprung. That was my task: to uncover those earliest roots. And he had directed me to the seedbed.

he is one of those good teachers who "are capable of retracing in detail, and holding accurately in their minds the origins, progress, mode of development, in short, the history of their own notions and thoughts, their knowledge and their intellect" (Z 1376).

Uniform ideas originating among entire peoples unknown to each other must have a common ground of truth [D4].

Ryman himself said—all mistakes proceed from initial conditions.

the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then

Not Grey ones! Gryphons! – No one likes the name Of something grey. Every word rings With what conditioned it: its origins: Grey, grievous, grumpy, gruesome, gravely, grimly, Similarly harmonious etymologically, Disharmonise us.

That's the trouble with people—they cherish their comforts, but they don't want to know where they come from.

As the plant springs from, and could not be without, the seed, so every act of a man springs from the hidden seeds of thought, and could not have appeared without them. This applies equally to those acts called spontaneous and unpremeditated as to those, which are deliberately executed.

We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key -could we but find it- to all we later become

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him--he may be forced to--but nothing will efface his origins, the marks of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station. On this acceptance, literally, the life of a writer depends.