Dakota Fanning Quotes

I longed to know the world's name.

I write novels because there is something I don't understand in reality.

We're all like detectives. We want to figure things out. Life, you know, we want to figure out life, and we want to figure out what's going on, so it's beautiful. It's beautiful that people are thinking.

It’s what we chase but never find. It is the mystery of our lives, the understanding that even when we have everything we want it is one day to leave us. It’s the something unseen, the lurking devastation, the darkness that gives our lives dimension.

And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up.

Finding a name for something is a way of conjuring its existence, of making it possible for people to see a pattern where they didn't see anything before.

Religion is a by-product of fear. For much of human history it may have been a necessary evil, but why was it more evil than necessary? Isn’t killing people in the name of god a pretty good definition of insanity?

I think a part of evolution is the desire to know yourself, and know the world you live in, and discover everything you can about the world you live in. That world can be the microcosm of your own emotions, or a society, or the cosmos. There's this constant desire for knowledge.

People are afraid of things they don't understand.

I enjoy telling these stories that I ultimately think get a disservice on a lot of network television. I enjoy getting people to change their perspective. I enjoy pushing myself into learning and understanding things from a very different point of view. It's scary to do that. It's scary to kind of put yourself in somebody else's position.

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you realize the mystery. Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations. Yet mystery and manifestations arise from the same source. This source is called darkness. Darkness within darkness. The gateway to all understanding.

Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.

One of my students told me that every time she learns the name of a plant, she feels as if she is meeting someone new. Giving a name to something is a way of knowing it.

Sometimes you find the panel, but it doesn’t open; sometimes it opens, and your gaze meets nothing but a mouse skeleton. But at least you’ve looked. That’s the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don’t, but between those who want to know everything and those who don’t. This search is a sign of love I maintain.

The whole movement of an essay is propelled by a fundamentally human impulse to want to figure things out.

All I know is a door into the dark

In the meantime the groans changed into the protracted, thunderous roar by which all living creatures are struck with terror, and the nerves of people, who do not know what fear is, shake, just as the window-panes rattle from distant cannonading.

Your name?” I repeated, hoping it was my imagination that my voice faltered. “Call me Patch. I mean it. Call me

Many people fear the words Lord and God.

More people have been killed in the name of God than for any other reason.

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

I do not know the names of all the weeds and plants, I have to do as Adam did in his garden... name things as I find them.

We have names for everything. What if we forgot about those names? And we stopped seeing things as something? What if we just observed things, watched things, without giving them a name, without coming to a conclusion? What do you think would happen? You would transcend everything.

What is your name?" "Again sir, that is no concern of yours." "A mystery," he said. "I shall have to call you Clorinda." ..... "Judith! What the devil? exclaimed Peregrine. "Has there been an accident?" "Judith," repeated the gentleman of the curricle pensively. "I prefer Clorinda.

At that moment, Harry fully understood for the first time why people said Dumbledore was the only wizard Voldemort had ever feared. The look upon Dumbledore's face as he stared down at the unconscious form of Mad-Eye moody was more terrible than Harry could have ever imagined. There was no benign smile upon Dumbledore's face, no twinkle in the eyes behind the spectacles. There was cold fury in every line of the ancient face; a sense of power radiated from Dumbledore as though he were giving off burning heat.