I rather stumbled into philosophy. When I began my undergraduate career at Cambridge, I studied mathematics.
One night I dreamed I was running. When I woke up I forgot I had a limp, so I walked totally normal until I remembered, 'oh, yeah, I have a limp'. Then I immediately stumbled. That showed me that if you have control over your mind, you can do anything.
What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark.
I stumbled into soul music at a very young age. It had something that really spoke to me. Nowadays it's not only American gospel or soul music, it's whenever somebody decides to do music in a way that's honest and passionate. I got into the Motown songs. It had to do with where I come from - we don't really have that where I come from, the sense of mystery and the pain. Sweden has been a wealthy and happy country for some time now. I think I got really drawn to that.
I think we stumbled onto our own sort of lore back in high school. We weren't with the drinkers, we were more the psychedelic warriors. We sat around watching horror films.
I was blinded by stupidity for a brief moment in our life, for a flicker in the eternity in which you and I live, and I stumbled.
I toyed with making portraits based on people's discarded shopping lists found on the street, or old diaries bought on eBay, or other forms of borrowed stories. When I stumbled across the Missed Connections listings, I knew immediately I'd found it.
Friedman stumbled in, late to the seminar as usual and reeking of cigar smoke and whiskey. He hadn't read the paper being presented, and halfway through he just gets up, walks up to the podium, socks the mother****er right in the face and takes a piss all over his lecture notes.
It's much harder to say "I'm going to kill three of the biggest characters in your universe in a gruesome bloodbath. " There can be a lot of differing opinions in a mainstream comic book, you know? "Rogue would never do this!" But I can say, "No, Rogue suffered the death of Charles Xavier and it broke her down and she stumbled into a dark place and she started fixating on the Scarlet Witch as the cause of it all" which, there is a logical chain of events that lead to the Scarlet Witch. And in the confusion, she thought Wanda was up to doing it again and she did what she thought was best.
The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.
In the city of flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice. I stumbled lost in the blue shade of her pavements. Here was a dreamy stillness, a swaying, the splash of an oar. Then, when I least expected it, suddenly I stepped out into the great square, the sunlight, and she was a flock of birds scattering with soft cries in my arms.
If I stumbled badly in doing the job, I think it would have made life more difficult for women, and that was a great concern of mine and still is.
. . . informed ignorance provides the natural state of mind for research scientists at the ever-shifting frontiers of knowledge. People who believe themselves ignorant of nothing have neither looked for, nor stumbled upon, the boundary between what is known and unknown in the cosmos.
