Mark Z. Danielewski Quotes

Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

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

If we had the fundamental laws of nature tomorrow, we still wouldn't understand consciousness. We wouldn't even understand turbulence.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

A formula can be very simple, and create a universe of bottomless complexity.

...All the wonders of our universe can in effect be captured by simple rules, yet ... there can be no way to know all the consequences of these rules, except in effect just to watch and see how they unfold.

Entropy shakes its angry fist at you for being clever enough to organize the world. (p 2)

I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

You've never heard of Chaos theory? Non-linear equations? Strange attractors? Ms. Sattler, I refuse to believe you're not familiar with the concept of attraction.

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

Death is simple. Life is messy. Give me life, the more complicated the better.

Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy.

I didn't answer, but, please - nothing is obvious with boys. For such simple creatures, they are quite baffling.

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.

Life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation -- it is part of the equation.

Life is chaotic and unpredictable. If a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, it could cause people at the opposite end of the globe to watch a Discovery Channel special on butterflies

My take is that the kind of complexity which says we can always generate complexity from simple interactions following for example rules.

No matter what I do, no matter how predictable I try to make my life, it will not be any more predictable than the rest of the world. Which is chaotic.

[Golf]is deceptively simple, endlessly complicated. A child can play it well, and a grown man can never master it. Any single round of it is full of unexpected triumphs and perfect shots that end in disaster. It is almost a science, yet it is a puzzle without an answer. It is gratifying and tantalizing, precise and unpredictable. It requires complete concentration and total relaxation. It satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time, rewarding and maddening. And it is without doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.

What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable ... no matter how much hate mail I get.

You get pseudo-order when you seek order; you only get a measure of order and control when you embrace randomness.

It is a simple procedure to calculate the number of seeds in an apple. But who among us can ever say how many apples are in a seed?

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.