Quotes About Unpredictability

The scientist must be free to follow unexpected paths as they appear.

You can't rely on anything. First my father was a respectable minister, and next thing I know he's a lovesick idiot talking baby talk to a woman who gets paid to sing at funerals and weddings. "And one day my mother is my mother, wearing an apron and high heels, and next time I look, she has a crewcut and a necktie.

It wasn't fair, for people to go and change on him, while his back was turned being dead. To change without giving notice, or even asking permission.

In general, people were not road maps. People were not hieroglyphs or books. They were not stories. A person was a collection of accidents. A person was an infinite pile of rocks with things growing underneath.

Who can know anybody?' said the bookshop owner. 'Every person is like thousands of books. New, reprinting, in stock, out of stock, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, rubbish. The lot. Different every day. One's lucky to be able to put his hand on the one that's wanted, let alone know it.

But what I did sense was an emptiness like a black hole inside of him, and there was no predicting what might emerge from a place like that.

At the moment, she felt like she couldn't possibly be surprised . . . and she knew from experience that feeling that way was usually when the universe decided to shake things up a little more, to try and find out what a person was created from, clay or sand, adapt or crumble. As

This is not what I had planned; but perhaps the story you finish is never the one you begin. (Once

My biggest strength is that no one can read my forehand

Success and failure are equally surprising.

One thing I've learned is that strange things do happen. They happen all the time. Today, for instance, my best friend Jill's cat spoke. We were making brownies in the kitchen when we heard it say, 'Let me out.

odds don't matter. The natural world defies statistics.

Even when you kept your eyes wide open, the world would surprise you.

Lightening, like love, is never ruled by logic. Accidents happen, and they always will.

Sometimes you think you know what's going to happen next, and then the world surprises you

Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was an immaculate anonymity.

Nothing is ever certain

I for one like chaos. Chaos looks good on me.

I suspect that human beings were generally catastrophists at heart until their instinctive awareness of the earth's unpredictability was gradually supplanted by a belief in uniformitarianism—a regime of ideas that was supported by scientific theories like Lyell's, and also by a range of governmental practices that were informed by statistics and probability.

being a parent … there is no plan. It's just a set of mistakes you hardly notice making.

To live in the realm of the unpredictable is to be all potentials at once. Can you become comfortable in this empty space? If you can, you are at the nexus of a great creative power, the "I am.

You don't want to start A Game of Thrones when you might catch fire all of a sudden. There's something horribly unfair about dying in the middle of a good story, before you have a chance to see how it all comes out. Of course, I suppose everyone always dies in the middle of a good story, in a sense. Your own story. Or the story of your children. Or your grandchildren. Death is a raw deal for narrative junkies.

Every so often, the universe must just get bored and decide to really cut loose.

Whenever you deal with science fiction you are setting up a world of rules. I think you work hard to establish the rules. And you also have to work even harder to maintain those rules, and within that find excitement and unpredictability and all that stuff.