Quotes About Alternate

Thinking about the world as it isn't, but might be or might have been, is called counterfactual thinking.

We are limited by our agreements on possibility. Agreement is a common exclusion of alternate possibilities. Agreement is the cement of social structure. Two or three gathered together, agreeing on what they are after, may create a subset in which their goals can be achieved, even though folly in the eyes of the world. The world in this case means a set of expectancies agreed upon, a set excluding other possibilities.

Anybody can be replaced. I can be replaced.

Well, he said, don't you know that there are souls forever in torment? They must have alternate dream and action, the purest passions and the most violent satisfactions, and that way one stumbles into all sorts of whims, of follies.

I hate when there's a deleted scene on a DVD with no explanation, or you have to go out of your way to find an alternate audio track.

Nie ma drugich szans, s? tylko inne. Jak?kolwiek podejmiesz decyzj?, ?ycie zawsze b?dzie inne ni? wtedy, gdyby? podj?? inn?.

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss.

'Tammy,' the new movie starring, produced, and co-written by Melissa McCarthy, could be an artifact from some alternate universe: the creatures there resemble Earthlings but have an entirely different and debased idea of what's funny.

Maybe this would be a good time to look in another direction and hum the Jeopardy

But everything that never was is also a thing that might have been – and such a thing has more existence than you or I, for it has a thousand potential existences, and we have only the one we were born to. And of all those possibilities, what could be more fantastical a transformation?

With Bayesian networks, we had taught machines to think in shades of grey, and this was an important step toward humanlike thinking. But we still couldn't teach machines to understand causes and effects. We couldn't explain to a computer why turning the dial of a barometer won't cause rain.... Without the ability to envision alternate realities and contrast them with the currently existing reality, a machine...cannot answer the most basic question that makes us human: "Why?

The serious student of the Bible cannot dismiss homosexual behavior simply as an alternate lifestyle. Nor can it be argued that homosexuals were "born this way" or that such behavior is an illness.

But I'm not dead. I just disappeared. I do that. I move into another world, a different world. Like boarding a train running parallel. That's what disappearing is. Don't you see?

The moment that most fascinated me in Ursula Le Guin's 'The Lathe of Heaven' was its descriptions of times of transition from one reality to another.

In another life, I could have been you, she'd say. Yeah, but then I wouldn't have been the same person in that life. Yeah, that's right. Let's work on it.

En todas las ficciones, cada vez que un hombre se enfrenta con diversas alternativas, opta por una y elimina las otras; en la del casi inextricable Ts'ui Pên, opta simultáneamente por todas. Crea, así, diversos porvenires, diversos tiempos, que también proliferan y se bifurcan.

When it came to the location of clandestine meetings, all operatives held to the acronym PACE. It stood for: primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency.

The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism.

Go then, there are other worlds than these.

When the movie 'Sliding Doors' came out, it almost sent me into existential crisis because I think about that all the time. Like, 'Wait. If I left my house five minutes later, maybe this would have happened and I'd be on this different track of my life. How would that affect me?'

I think human beings will always still really enjoy using our imaginations, and 'Fringe' allows you to do that. It's slightly scary and believable. There just might be an alternate universe. There just might be people on the other side that are like us, living a different life.

The mind reels when we realize that, according to this interpretation of quantum mechanics, all possible worlds coexist with us. Although wormholes might be necessary to reach such alternate worlds, these quantum realities exist in the very same room that we live in. They coexist with us wherever we go.

I was an English major, so I love discussing possibilities and alternate theories.