Anita Shreve Quotes

Nothing happens in a vacuum in life: every action has a series of consequences, and sometimes it takes a long time to fully understand the consequences of our actions.

I wouldn't change a single thing, because one change alters every moment that follows it.

It is remarkable how a seemingly insignificant action or event can change entire lives.

If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions. But we can't know better until knowing better is useless.

A small, seemingly inconsequential event can determine a life.

Every person's every action has an effect.

How strange a thing like that happens to a man. He dabbles in something and does not realise that it is his life.

Everything we do, I'd imagine, influences everything we will do.

Every cause produces more than one effect.

And that's what I liked about it, because they are, in the beginning, your little beautiful stock figures, who then make a decision to preserve their futures, but the decision they make isn't completely right, and it destroys their futures.

In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we force them.

Every action we have is going to have repercussions in ways we could not anticipate.

I've always been drawn to the idea that small choices in our lives could have drastic effects on our future.

There is no act, however trivial, but has its train of consequences.

Every action and decision we take – or don’t – ripples into the future. For the first time we have the capability, the technology, and the knowledge to direct these ripples.

By your hand, millions - billions - of lives will be altered, caught up in a chain of events begun by you this day.

Whenever you made a choice, especially one you'd been resisting, it always affected everything else, some in big ways, like a tremor beneath your feet, others in so tiny a shift you hardly noticed a change at all. But it was happening.

One little ripple started today could create a typhoon fifteen years from now.

Sometimes people fail to see that individual decisions have universal consequences.

Everything you do has some effect, some impact.

Maybe if I didn't pick up that one person, I wouldn't have picked up forty-two thousand.

The tragic evils of our life are so commonly unintentional. We did not start out for that poor, cheap goal. That aim was not in our minds at all....Look to the road you are walking on. He who picks up one end of [a] stick picks up the other.He who chooses the beginning of a road chooses the place it leads to.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

You must know that in any moment a decision you make can change the course of your life forever, the very next person who you stand behind in line or sit next to on an aeroplane, the very next phone call you make or receive, the very next movie you see or book you read or page you turn could be the one single thing that causes the floodgates to open, and all of the things that you've been waiting for to fall into place.

Every great decision creates ripples. Like a huge boulder dropping in a lake. The ripples merge and rebound off the banks in unforseeable ways. The heavier the decision, the larger the waves, the more uncertain the consequences.