Unknown Origins Quotes

It's a good rule of thumb, it seems to me: if you're not allowed to see where something comes from, don't put it in your mouth.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

Since I was five, I've known that I was adopted, which is a politically correct term for being clueless about one's own origins.

No one really knows who I am or where I came from in America, and there's something quite nice about that.

I was lingering out on the pavement. There was a missing person inside of myself and I needed to find him . . . I felt done for, an empty burned-out wreck . . . Wherever I am, I'm a '60s troubadour, a folk-rock relic, a wordsmith from bygone days, a fictitious head of state from a place nobody knows.

[My father] impressed upon me from the first, that the manner in which the world came into existence was a subject on which nothing was known: that the question, "Who made me?" cannot be answered, because we have no experience or authentic information from which to answer it; and that any answer only throws the difficulty a step further back, since the question immediately presents itself, "Who made God?

You know nothing... And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire who made that vampire knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge.

It can be annoying not to know who you are, where you came from, or what you're doing. To try to create a character without a whole lot of information can be taxing.

I was born to a woman I never knew and raised by another who took in orphans. I do not know my background, my lineage, my biological or cultural heritage. But when I meet someone new, I treat them with respect.... For after all, they could be my people.

Maybe one day I'll make a record that's really mysterious and no one knows where it came from or what I wrote it about. But thus far, I've just wanted to explain everything properly.

Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.

They have been playing golf for 800 years and nobody has satisfactorily said why.

We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.

Every branch of human knowledge, if traced up to its source and final principles, vanishes into mystery.

Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.

We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and silk: but what is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?

You never know where inspiration is going to come from.

But Gulf War Syndrome is not one cause, not one illness. It is many causes, many illnesses.

When you're from an unknown place, I think it's hard for you to believe it's possible. You think you have to go to L.A. or New York to make it, but I don't think that's true. I'm glad to be an example that you can make it from where you are. All you need is talent and hard work.

Human existence is girt round with mystery: the narrow region of our experience is a small island in the midst of a boundless sea. To add to the mystery, the domain of our earthly existence is not only an island of infinite space, but also in infinite time. The past and the future are alike shrouded from us: we neither know the origin of anything which is, nor its final destination.

I wanted an idea of the future, a new femininity. I wanted you to feel that you wouldn't quite know where these women were coming from and where they were going to.

Drink! For you know not whence you came nor why.

Poetry arrived in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where it came from, from winter or a river. I don't know how or when.

In the realm of strong A.I. or in the realm of human consciousness, I think that it's been something that troubles humans or forces us to look at it over and over for millennia, or as long as we've really been conscious, because there is no answer. There is no explanation for us, even for a one percent grip to hold on to. So we just don't know why we're here, we don't know how consciousness is created.