Source: Journey to Ixtlan
Source: The Complete Poems
"Doing What I Know" (song)
Song lyrics
Source: Gilbert O'Sullivan, "Doing What I Know" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlkC9AFrSNU (song on YouTube)
“If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am.”
As quoted in Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (1988) by Leslie Halliwell, p. 622
“I am a runner. That's what I do. That's who I am. Running is all I know, or want, or care about.”
Source: The Running Dream
“I don’t know what I want.
Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long.”
"I want everything" http://home.earthlink.net/~2lulah2/everything.htm in What I Want from Life (1934) edited by Edmund George Cousins, p. 108
Context: I don’t know what I want.
Nobody knows — or if they do, they don’t know for long. I mean, you don’t want the same thing long enough for it to be What You Want From Life in capital letters.
Well, maybe some people do. Maybe there's a few simple folks — or maybe a few million, I don't know — who fix their hearts, and their minds, and their everlasting souls on a thing, and keep on all their lives hoping for it. Living for it. Wanting It From Life.
But these are the people who never get it.
“Although personal calling I sense—who am I? even if I am, I don't know.”
“If I Am,” p. 7
Circling: 1978-1987 (1993), Sequence: “Recircling”
“Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.”
In an interview in the New York Times (16 December 1957), cited in a footnote on page 32 of "Work, Society, and Culture" by Yves Reni Marie Simon, and also in a footnote (in German) on page 360 of "Vita activa oder Vom taetigen Leben" by Hannah Arend (1981)
Variants:
Basic research is when I'm doing what I don't know I'm doing.
Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.
“I am nobody! Who are you? Are you a nobody, too?”
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1960)
Variant: 288: I'm Nobody! Who are you?
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you — Nobody — Too?
