Doris Kearns Goodwin Quotes

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

Everything is a reaction.

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.

What happened yesterday affects today; what happens today will affect tomorrow/

Nothing in life is without cause and effect. Nothing is merely a shell. Everything has some motive.

Yes, I do believe that there is a cause and effect and a ripple effect upon everything everybody does, and they have positive consequences and negative consequences. If you start to focus on the kind of minutia of that, it's really quite extraordinary.

Every person's every action has an effect.

We work because it's a chain reaction, each subject leads to the next.

One of the things that has really hit home for me is that the world is how we decide it is going to be. Very few things just happen. They grow out of history, and they grow out of the present, and the more we can get a sense of how our actions lead into other actions in the future, hopefully we'll learn to make better decisions.

Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.

Things always happen in series.

'Saw VI' has a really interesting theme about the ripple effect. Everything you do affects the guy next to you, which affects the guy next to him, which affects her over here. And you might think that what you're doing is not that significant, but just the way you respond to other people makes the world the way it is.

Suspense is very important. Even though this is humor and they're short stories, that theory of building suspense is still there.

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

In the fabric of human events, one thing leads to another. Every mistake is in a sense the product of all the mistakes that have gone before it, from which fact it derives a sort of cosmic forgiveness; and at the same time every mistake is in a sense the determinant of all the mistakes of the future, from which it derives a sort of cosmic unforgivableness.

Events are as much the parents of the future as they were the children of the past.

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.

Cause and effect are two sides of one fact.

The process of writing is like creating a game of dominoes: The first domino creates the second incident, and so forth until the end.

You cannot go through life without cause and effect.

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

There are threads in our lives. You pull one, and everything else gets affected.

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

Events do not really have beginnings or ends. Behind every event is the previous one, causing, or helping to cause, what follows.

Everything is the way it is because everything was the way it was