Quotes About Sequence

History is one damn thing after another.

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny.

It was the first in a sequence of impossibly rich and voluminous banquets whose menus raised the question of whether any of the city's leading men could possibly have a functional artery.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order.

A story isn't what happens. It's how it happens.

The key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back.

Now it all seems so simple. Events intersect free of any logic of sequence; they cover space and time in an even, translucent layer. Memory re-creates them from the back, from the front, or sideways, but to them it makes no difference.

Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time--it is the clue, like Ariadne's, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music.

when you gain an understanding of the structure that lies beneath stories. When you understand the bone structure of a plot skeleton, you'll know how to build a story.

Then the auctioneer introduced himself [,,,,]. He started to speak into the microphone, a maddening, jammed-up sequence of words that crashed like bumper cars, after which everything sorted itself into some kind of sense again, and after the fact you could understand most of what he'd said.

Time is what keeps things from happening all at once.

What's great in theater is that you can sustain the arc of a character for a full three hours, whereas in film or TV, you have to create that arc in little pieces, and usually out of sequence.

What attracted me to immunology was that the whole thing seemed to revolve around a very simple experiment: take two different antibody molecules and compare their primary sequences.

Look at the opening sequence of 'The Blues Brothers,' which starts at the prison. The way it was filmed, it does not look like a comedy. I thought that was great.

The process of writing is like creating a game of dominoes: The first domino creates the second incident, and so forth until the end.

I believe that everything we think and feel and do produces a result and that we have to deal with that result - that result is then something that produces another result, so on and so forth, so yes, I do believe in causality.

The study of the amino acid sequence around the disulphide bonds of the immunoglobulins was my own short-cut to the understanding of antibody diversity.

Because TV is mostly close up, it has to be fast. And because it has to be fast, you don't have time to explain completely, by a sequence shot, what's happening between people. So instead of experiencing what's happening, say, when a couple is dancing, dialogue is used to explain.

The eye searches for shapes. It searches for a beginning, a middle, and an end.

I'll tell you one thing you can't do: you can't put your shoes on, then your socks on.

First the stalk -- then the roots. First the need -- then the means to satisfy that need. First the nucleus -- then the elements needed for its growth.

It's not the story though, not the friend leaning toward you, saying "And then I realized—," which is the part of stories one never quite believes. I had the idea that the world's so full of pain it must sometimes make a kind of singing. And that the sequence helps, as much as order helps— First an ego, and then pain, and then the singing.

And so Mary at last turned her attention to Ponter's nuclear DNA. She'd thought it would be even more difficult to find a difference there, and indeed, despite much searching, she hadn't found any sequence of nucleotides that was reliably different between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens sapiens; all her primers matched strings on DNA from both kinds of humans.