Patterns Quotes - Page 11

• The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews Not to be born is the best for man The second best is a formal order The dance's pattern, dance while you can. Dance, dance, for the figure is easy The tune is catching and will not stop Dance till the stars come down from the rafters Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

  W. H. Auden

  Stars, Heart, Men

  Letter from Iceland (1937, by Auden and MacNeice) "Letter to William Coldstream, Esq."

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• Things happen they way they're meant to. There's a pattern and a shape to everything...Nothing happens without a reason...Nothing is impossible...(Page 180).

  Rosamunde Pilcher

  Shapes, Pages, Way

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• Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.

  Kate Morton

  Memories, War, Past

  Kate Morton (2010). “The Kate Morton Collection: The House at Riverton and The Forgotten Garden”, p.274, Simon and Schuster

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• My dear young women, with all my heart I urge you not to look to contemporary culture for your role models and mentors. Please look to your faithful mothers for a pattern to follow. Model yourselves after them, not after celebrities whose standards are not the Lord's standards and whose values may not reflect an eternal perspective. Look to your mother.

  M. Russell Ballard

  Mother, Heart, Role Models

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• I’m not a woman you bring home to Mother, pick out china patterns with, or Mary forefend, breed. I’ve seen a chunk of the universe, true, but there’s still so much more to see. I doubt I’ll ever cure this wanderlust, and I’m content with dedicating my life to failing to sate it... He’s never going to sit at my feet and write me poems, which is good because I hate poetry, except dirty ones that rhyme.

  Ann Aguirre

  Mother, Hate, Dirty

  Ann Aguirre (2008). “Wanderlust”, p.31, Penguin

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• Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.

  Alan Moore

  Long, Imagine, Existence

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

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• For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle, it was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning. (The Child from the Sea)

  Elizabeth Goudge

  Children, Dark, Sea

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• The ancients believed in fate because they recognized how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behavior. The burden is intolerable.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Strong, Lying, Fate

  Jeanette Winterson (2006). “Weight”, Canongate Books

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• A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.

  Rollo May

  Giving, World, Narrative

  Rollo May (1991). “The Cry for Myth”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.

  David Mitchell

  Myth

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• Our self discoveries make us each a microcosm of the larger pattern of history. The inertia of introspection leads toward recollection, for only through memory is the past recaptured and understood. In the fact of experiencing and making the present, we are all actors.

  Terence McKenna

  Memories, Past, Discovery

  Terence McKenna (1998). “True Hallucinations: And, the Archaic Revival”, M J F Books

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• Perceiving the world as well designed and thus the product of a designer, and even seeing divine providence in the daily affairs of life, may be the product of a brain adapted to finding patterns in nature. (38)

  Michael Shermer

  Brain, World, May

  Michael Shermer (2007). “Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design”, p.38, Macmillan

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• …God is a giant quiltmaker. With an infinite variety of designs. And the quilt is grown so big and confusing, the pattern is impossible to see, the squares and diamonds and triangles don’t fit well together anymore, it’s all become meaningless. So He has abandoned it.

  Rohinton Mistry

  Quilts, Squares, Design

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• Understand the nature and influence of repeating patterns, from childhood experiences or even from past lives. Wthout understanding, patterns tend to repeat, unnecessarily damaging the relationship.

  Brian Weiss

  Past, Childhood, Understanding

  Brian Weiss (2008). “Messages from the Masters: Tapping into the Power of Love”, p.37, Hachette UK

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• ...the reasons just reassemble themselves in different patterns every time I think about it.

  Gregory Maguire

  Thinking, Different, Reason

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• as they die, the ones we love, we lose our witnesses, our watchers, those who know and understand the tiny little meaningless patterns, those words drawn in water with a stick. And there is nothing left but the endless flow.

  Anne Rice

  Water, Losing Someone, Littles

  Anne Rice (2013). “The Mayfair Witches Series 3-Book Bundle: Witching Hour, Lasher, Taltos”, p.176, Ballantine Books

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• The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

  Chip Heath

  Attention, Way, Break

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• He was appalled by the examination system, when it was explained to him, he could not imagine a greater detterent to the natural wish to learn than this pattern of cramming in information and disgorging it on demand.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Wish, Demand, Examination

  "The Dispossesed". Book by Ursula K. Le Guin, 1978.

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• And because we are alive, the universe must be said to be alive. We are its consciousness as well as our own. We rise out of the cosmos and we see its mesh of patterns, and it strikes us as beautiful. And that feeling is the most important thing in all the universe—its culmination, like the color of the flower at first bloom on a wet morning.

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Beautiful, Morning, Flower

  Kim Stanley Robinson (2003). “Green Mars”, p.19, Spectra

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• It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.

  Bell Hooks

  White, People, Focus

  "Ain't I a Woman?". Book by Gloria Jean Watkins, 1981.

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• In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet…But within this strict form the poet has complete freedom to say whatever he wants…You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Believe, Writing, Lines

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• Some people spend their whole lives looking for themselves, yet our self is the one thing we surely cannot lose (how like a cheap philosopher I am become, staying in this benighted place). From the moment we are conceived it is the pattern in our blood and our bones are printed through with it like sticks of seaside rock. Nora, on the other hand, says that she’s surprised anyone knows who they are, considering that every cell and molecule in our bodies has been replaced many times over since we were born.

  Kate Atkinson

  Rocks, Self, Cells

  Kate Atkinson (2013). “Emotionally Weird: A Novel”, p.11, Macmillan

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• We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.

  William Gibson

  Life, Risk, Spinning

  William Gibson (2003). “Pattern Recognition”, p.54, Penguin

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• But love, I’ve come to understand, is more than three words mumbled before bedtime. Love is sustained by action, a pattern of devotion in the things we do for each other every day.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Love, Life, Marriage

  FaceBook post by Nicholas Sparks from Apr 02, 2013

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• We search for patterns, you see, only to find where the patterns break. And it’s there, in that fissure, that we pitch our tents and wait.

  Nicole Krauss

  Waiting, Tents, Break

  Nicole Krauss (2011). “Great House: A Novel”, p.89, W. W. Norton & Company

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