Galway Kinnell Quotes

When you're experimenting you have to try so many things before you choose what you want, and you may go days getting nothing but exhaustion.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?

Basic research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.

Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.

I don't know exactly how it's done. I let it alone a good deal.

Let there be nothing untried; for nothing happens by itself, but men obtain all things by trying.

You try a lot of things and you don't know what the hell you're doing. If you're actually inventing something you shouldn't know what you're doing.

It is most important in creative science not to give up. If you are an optimist you will be willing to "try" more than if you are a pessimist.

There is no map, and charting a path ahead will not be easy. We will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.

As long as one keeps searching, the answers will come.

As long as we keep searching, the answers come.

Sometimes you just have to try, even if you know it won’t work.

The beginning is never the clear, precise end of a thread, the beginning is a long, painfully slow process that requires time and patience in order to find out in which direction it is heading, a process that feels its way along the path ahead like a blind man the beginning is just the beginning, what came before is nigh on worthless.

Nothing is really broke, so it's not like I can fix it. I just have to keep trying to find what I'm looking for.

I see something, find it marvelous, want to try and do it. Whether it fails or whether it comes off in the end becomes secondary. . . . So long as I've learned something about why.

Here the people could stand it no longer and complained of the long voyage; but the Admiral cheered them as best he could, holding out good hope of the advantages they would have. He added that it was useless to complain, he had come [to go] to the Indies, and so had to continue it until he found them, with the help of Our Lord.

I must keep on trying, just to keep the experiment going until I get tired of it all. Even if the last result is not necessarily the best, I stop when my interest in the problem wanes.

Science is exploration. The fundamental nature of exploration is that we don't know what's there. We can guess and hope and aim to find out certain things, but we have to expect surprises.

I'm sort of an experimenter; I thought it'd be interesting to play around and see what's there.

I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.

Try on 100 different hats if you can, until you find the one that suits you best. It's a trial and error thing.

You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental.

There's so much happenstance, so many accidents - stumbling into something and finding it interesting and living with it over time and building on it. It's okay to work from doubt. You need to be willing to not know.

We may not find the answers. We may not find Bigfoot. We may not find a chupacabra. We may not find out who was responsible for killing JFK, but we're going to keep looking, asking, probing. And one day - you know what? - we may get some of those answers.

It takes 10 million failures to find the right stuff.