Patricia MacLachlan Quotes

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions.

The enduring appeal of mystery stories for all of us is that the world is a pretty confusing place. There's a lot of really unanswered things, and perhaps the scariest notion would be that there might not always be answers out there for us.

Human beings are not capable of creating a thought that truly conceives of this existence. Nobody knows if we are really here, alive, or anything. It's a mystery.

Some questions don't have answers, which is a terribly difficult lesson to learn.

There are many things in life that cannot be explained.

In life nothing is taken to its ultimate conclusion, life is a half-way house, a place of obligatory compromise; and, in dealing in logical conclusions, a man steps out of life -- or so it would be quite legitimate to argue.

You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.' And how long is that going to take?' I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.' That could be a long time.' I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.

Yes, we know more than ever before, and it's a wonder that we get to inhabit a world full of driverless cars and 3D printers. But that doesn't mean that we know any more about the essential things in life - love, faith, death - and it would be dangerous to assume we did. The only thing that gets us through sometimes is a proper, humbled sense that we don't have a clue, we can't be sure what's going to happen next and life will always be much larger than our ideas of it.

As human beings, don't we need questions without answers as well as questions with answers, questions that we might someday answer and questions that we can never answer?

Life would be unbearably dull if we had answers to all our questions.

If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of life which maintains itself without reason.

Truly, that reason upon which we plume ourselves, though it may answer for little things, yet for great decisions is hardly surer than a toss up.

Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again.

Myths, whether in written or visual form, serve a vital role of asking unanswerable questions and providing unquestionable answers. Most of us, most of the time, have a low tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. We want to reduce the cognitive dissonance of not knowing by filling the gaps with answers. Traditionally, religious myths have served that role, but today — the age of science — science fiction is our mythology.

We all want to know what went wrong, even when there isn't really an answer to that question.

It is important to realize that our inability to answer a question says nothing about whether the question itself has an answer.

The history of science shows that great mysteries get solved. It may be that there's an answer that humans are too stupid to understand. I'm intrigued by that possibility.

Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.

Let me tell you one thing about why writers write: had I known the answer to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel.

We have millions of questions that need answers because there are so many things that the reasoning mind cannot explain. It is not important if the answer is correct; just the answer itself makes us feel safe.

Whence come I and whither go I? That is the great unfathomable question. Science has no answer to it.

There are periods in life when you get caught up in the whole field of relativity and lose your moorings with the absolute.

If you ask me to tell you anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron… my answer is “How should I know?”… I am not dismayed by ultimate mysteries… I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is behind the clatter I make while I type this paragraph.

I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first to find out.