Emma Donoghue Quotes

the sea is a place of mystery. One by one, the mysteries of yesterday have been solved. But the solution seems always to bring with it another, perhaps a deeper mystery. I doubt that the last, final mysteries of the sea will ever be resolved. In fact, I cherish a very unscientific hope that they will not be.

There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me, it'd be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why.

Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.

Although our intellect always longs for clarity and certainty, our nature often finds uncertainty fascinating.

Fortunately, nature is as generous with its problems as Nobel with his fortune. The more we know, the more aware we are of what we know not.

The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.

Indeed, the most important product of knowledge is ignorance.

By not going to school I learned that the world is a beautiful place and needs to be discovered.

At least in part, people are attracted to subjects where they can identify at a basic level with the people who do it. The extraordinary aesthetic of the natural world is not obvious to someone who never leaves the inner city. Appreciation of the elegance and power of physical law is an acquired taste.

I don't think you want to give all the answers, but I think every answer you do give should bring up another question, and not all questions should be answered.

Every clarification breeds new questions.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.

The scientist should treasure the riddles he can't solve, not explain them away at the outset.

I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.

One can never know enough. The unknown and its call lies even in what we know.

I find that each job that I do, the thing that gets me there is when I'm not smarter than it, when I don't know instantly how that thing is made. Because if I do, then it's boring. Or it would be simple.

You discover how confounding the world is when you try to draw it. You look at a car, and you try to see its car-ness, and you're like an immigrant to your own world. You don't have to travel to encounter weirdness. You wake up to it.

I'll never know everything. My life would be a lot worse if there was nothing I knew the answers about - and if there was nothing I didn't know the answers about.

The unknown is very appealing to me. I like to be surprised. I love the idea I might know less at the end of reading something than I do at the beginning.

The more you learn, the more you learn you don't know.

The farther you go, the less you know.

For me, the child is a veritable image of becoming, of possibility, poised to reach towards what is not yet, towards a growing that cannot be predetermined or prescribed. I see her and I fill the space with others like her, risking, straining, wanting to find out, to ask their own questions, to experience a world that is shared.

It's a lot easier to be lost than found. It's the reason we're always searching and rarely discovered--so many locks not enough keys.

It's such an interesting world. It wouldn't be half so interesting if we knew all about everything, would it?