Anita Shreve Quotes

Real life isn't a series of interconnected events occurring one after another - like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.

The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history

I love to think about chance - about how one little overheard word, one pebble in a shoe, can change the universe.

Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

It's a lot of random situations that combine in a certain volatile form and create a bigger-than- the-whole situation that nobody could have predicted.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

You can't plan for the future, because some guy's going to land in a spaceship with three heads and a big beak and take over everything.

There's always going to be the circumstances you can't plan for. There's always the unexpected relevance and the serendipity.

The world is deterministic, but it's chaotic and emergent.

Most of the things that have happened in my life have been pretty arbitrary. I walk into a room, and someone hits me with a two-by-four, and that changes my life. I'm not sure what I've learned from anything.

It's hard to define change in oneself unless something really dramatic happens, like you give up some vice, fall in love, or something like that.

The best thing you can do is fall in love. My life has been changed by falling in love.

Who then can calculate the path of the molecule? how do we know that the creations of worlds are not determined by the fall of grains of sand?

Nothing will behave in the logical way you have come to expect.

Most of the time-- 99 percent of the time-- you just don't know how and why the threads are looped together, and that's okay. Do a good thing and something bad happens. Do a bad thing and something good happens. Do nothing and everything explodes.

You know, there’s a philosopher who says, “As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on ? And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don’t.

He would conclude that nothing was real except chance.

Whoever shall review his life, will find that the whole tenor of his conduct has been determined by some accident of no apparent moment.

We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.

You're not the same after, say, an incredible love affair that went very well or a love affair that went bad. Or something that happens to your health, or something that happened to somebody else's health, that is close to you. Or something that happens professionally.

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.

The expected is what keeps us steady. It's the unexpected that changes our lives forever.

I've seen women who were nightmare party girls, who were just crazy, and then they have a baby and this thing comes over them and changes them. Or there are women who you think are going to be the most doting mother in the world, and then they're not. You don't know how you'll be affected, when that happens.

Once I started writing all the time and interacting with poets, I made a conscious decision to identify myself as a poet. It's funny how much a single word can provide focus and direction. As soon as I claimed that identity, I started clearing more and more space for poetry in my life and applying poetic tools to other areas of my life. The world became a different place, and I witnessed it through different kinds of eyes.

Nico strode forward. The enemy army fell back before him like he radiated death, which of course he did. Through the face guard of his skull-shaped helmet, he smiled. "Got your message. Is it too late to join the party?" "Son of Hades." Kronos spit on the ground. "Do you love death so much you wish to experience it?" "Your death," Nico said, "would be great for me." "I'm immortal, you fool! I have escaped Tartarus. You have no business here, and no chance to live." Nico drew his sword-three feet of wicked sharp Stygian iron, black as a nightmare. "I don't agree.