Quotes About Extremes

I have such an extreme attitude about work, where I can just completely be derelict of my responsibilities and then when I am not derelict, I am completely indulged in it. I swing pretty wildly from the two extremes.

People have obsessions and fears and passions which they don't admit to. I think every character is interesting and has extremes. It's the novelist privilege to see how odd everyone is.

It was a world, in other words, where the two halves face the monotonous extremes of heat and cold, while the region of possible life is the girdling ribbon of the twilight zone.

When I was running across the country, I was doing 40 or 50 miles a day in sleeting snow with zero visibility for five or six days in a row. Ten to 12 hours of running in that is monotony beyond belief.

I'm zero to a hundred in almost every facet of my life.

I never liked the middle ground-the most boring place in the world.

Extremes meet, and there is no better example than the naughtiness of humility.

To shy away from human extremes and human sensuality makes for bone-dry fiction. A world parched of our sexual releases and our tumultuous daily emotional lives is deeply impoverished. It is not lifelike, at least life as I remember living it.

I am not by any means a philosopher, although I have worked with some talented people in the discipline. But certain philosophical concepts deeply inform the way I think about the world. The idea of 'opposing truths at extremes' is a powerful concept that I came to appreciate in my twenties.

What did John Ashcroft say about moderates, he said, quote, there are two things you find in the middle of the road, a moderate and a dead skunk and I don't want to be either.

Unless you were high up in a building or happened to glimpse it at the end of one of the big avenues going east-west, all you knew of the sunset was a darkening in the air. No wonder people in New York were so unbalanced. They were totally untouched by the rhythms of nature. You were only aware of nature when something extreme happened, like a snowstorm or heatwave.

Maximum of an average is necessarily less volatile than the average maximum

our world is dominated by the extreme, the unknown, and the very improbable (improbable according our current knowledge)—and all the while we spend our time engaged in small talk, focusing on the known, and the repeated. This

Because the bell curve ignores large deviations, cannot handle them, yet makes us confident that we have tamed uncertainty. Its

Outliers are increasingly unlikely. You

There are two possible ways to approach phenomena. The first is to rule out the extraordinary and focus on the "normal." The examiner leaves aside "outliers" and studies ordinary cases. The second approach is to consider that in order to understand a phenomenon, one needs first to consider the extremes—particularly if, like the Black Swan, they carry an extraordinary cumulative effect.

This dovetails into the "barbell" strategy of taking maximum exposure to the positive Black Swans while remaining paranoid about the negative ones.

the last fifty years, the ten most extreme days in the financial markets represent half the returns. Ten days in fifty years. Meanwhile, we are mired in chitchat.

Instead of having medium risk, you have high risk on one side and no risk on the other.

The union two abysses does not produce a height.

To be either too good or too bad drew attention. As much as he hated being the lettuce, it was his comfort zone.

There have always been, and will always be, those who exist on the fringe of reason

I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely.

For each Joan of Arc there is a Hitler perched at the other end of the teeter-totter.