Chaos Quotes - Page 12

• We grow in direct proportion to the amount of chaos we can sustain and dissipate

  Ilya Prigogine

  Proportion, Grows, Direct

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• Writers seek to create order out of the chaos of everyday life, and to extract meaning from both the tragic and the mundane

  Hope Edelman

  Order, Everyday, Tragic

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• A chaos of mind and body - a time for weeping at sunsets and at the glamour of moonlight - a confusion and profusion of beliefs and hopes, in God, in Truth, in Love, and in Eternity - an ability to be transported by the beauty of physical objects - a heart to ache or swell- a joy so hoyful and a sorrow so sorrowful that oceans could lie between them.

  T. H. White

  Lying, Ocean, Heart

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• I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Art, Book

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• Fiction cannot recite the numbing numbers, but it can be that witness, that memory. A storyteller can attempt to tell the human tale, can make a galaxy out of the chaos, can point to the fact that some people survived even as most people died. And can remind us that the swallows still sing around the smokestacks.

  Jane Yolen

  Memories, Numbers, People

  Jane Yolen (1990). “The Devil's Arithmetic”, p.100, Penguin

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• She felt... how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.

  Virginia Woolf

  Beach, Littles, Lighthouse

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.286, Wordsworth Editions

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• Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, Mean, Soul

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• The lions sing and the hills take flight.
  The moon by day, and the sun by night.
  Blind woman, deaf man, jackdaw fool.
  Let the Lord of Chaos rule.

  Robert Jordan

  Children, Moon, Night

  "Lord of Chaos". Book by Robert Jordan, 1994.

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• Unless, of course, there's no such thing as chance;...in which case, we should either-optimistically-get up and cheer, because if everything is planned in advance, then we all have a meaning and are spared the terror of knowing ourselves to be random, without a why; or else, of course, we might-as pessimists-give up right here and now, understanding the futility of thought decision action, since nothing we think makes any difference anyway, things will be as they will. Where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?

  Salman Rushdie

  Cheer, Giving Up, Fate

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• Imagine: you've spent all day traipsing round London, lost in a maze of chaos, trying to find a hidden illusion; you've been living on hope, ignoring reality, fuelled only by feelings you don't understand. You've been looking for a dream, never truly believing you'd find it, but now – incredibly – you have. It's right there in front of you – just behind that off-white door. It's there ...

  Kevin Brooks

  Dream, Believe, Reality

  "Candy".

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• In fact, he sorely hoped that it would happen, because otherwise, the world made no sense, there was no justice, and life was just a tangled ball of chaos.

  Christopher Moore

  Justice, Tangled, World

  Christopher Moore (2009). “A Dirty Job: A Novel”, p.225, Hachette UK

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• The world spins. We stumble on. It is enough.

  Colum McCann

  Inspirational, World, Enough

  Colum McCann (2009). “Let the Great World Spin: A Novel”, p.349, Random House

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• Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.

  Lewis Hyde

  Art, Memories, Inspiration

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• The chaos surrounding her was confusing. Everyone was suddenly talking at the same time. Perhaps she should try to swoon after all, Christine considered. No, the settee was already taken, and the floor didn't look all that appealing. She settled on wringing her hands. It was the best she could do to look upset.

  Julie Garwood

  Taken, Hands, Talking

  Julie Garwood (2010). “The Lion's Lady”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

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• Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.

  Desmond Tutu

  Life, Artist, Order

  Desmond Tutu, Mpho Tutu (2010). “Made For Goodness: And why this makes all the difference”, p.48, Random House

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• And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.

  Alan Moore

  Daughter, Mother, Children

  "Watchmen". Comic book limited series by Alan Moore, September 1986 – October 1987.

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• Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O any thing, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness, serious vanity, Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms, Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health, Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

  William Shakespeare

  Hate, Unrequited Love, Sleep

  William Shakespeare (2008). “Romeo and Juliet”, p.40, Barron's Educational Series

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• i understand that the world was nothing: a mechanical chaos of casual, brute enmity on which we stupidly impose our hopes and fears. i understood that, finally and absolutely, i alone exist. all the rest, i saw, is merely what pushes me, or what i push against, blindly - as blindly as all that is not myself pushes back. i create the whole universe, blink by blink.

  John Gardner

  Enmity, World, Saws

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• It's creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos. What it's going to be, I don't know. Even after all that rushing around, where we've ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. And maybe knowing isn't the point. Where we're standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Dark, Night, Reality

  "Choke". Book by Chuck Palahniuk, May 22, 2001.

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• One of the great fallacies of our time is that the Nazis rose to power because they imposed order on chaos. Precisely the opposite is true - they were successful because they imposed chaos on order. They tore up the commandments, they denied the super-ego, what you will. They said, "You may persecute the minority, you may kill, you may torture, you may couple and breed without love." They offered humanity all its great temptations. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

  John Fowles

  Love, Time, Couple

  John Fowles (1968). “The Magus”, Pan

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• Writers. For some reason, a lot of you reject what you hear and see in your heads. If you go too long ignoring it, it builds up and then you do all sorts of weird things. Mumble to yourself. Nightmares. Day-dreams. Total anarchy and chaos. Before you know it, the writer is either sitting in corner feverishly humming to his- or herself or on Prozac. You’re not on Prozac, are you? (Esther)

  Sherrilyn Kenyon

  Dream, Long, Esther

  Sherrilyn Kenyon (2010). “In Other Worlds”, p.117, Penguin

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• Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together) in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself.

  Virginia Woolf

  Night, Light, Years

  Virginia Woolf (2007). “Selected Works of Virginia Woolf”, p.343, Wordsworth Editions

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• No structure, even an artificial one, enjoys the process of entropy. It is the ultimate fate of everything, and everything resists it.

  Philip K. Dick

  Fate, Structure, Process

  Philip K. Dick (2013). “Galactic Pot-Healer”, p.103, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• He thought that he was sick in his heart if you could be sick in that place.

  James Joyce

  Heart, Sick, Ifs

  James Joyce (2016). “JAMES JOYCE Premium Collection: Ulysses, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Chamber Music & Exiles”, p.11, e-artnow

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• All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Past, Slaughterhouse Five, Moments

  Harold Bloom, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (2009). “Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-five”, p.8, Infobase Publishing

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