Ellen Hopkins Quotes

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 worlds collide. When one things happens, it just starts a domino effect - everything else goes on.

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

Nothing to do with anything, something to do with everything.

We know from chaos theory that even if you had a perfect model of the world, you'd need infinite precision in order to predict future events. With sociopolitical or economic phenomena, we don't have anything like that.

You cannot do only one thing.

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about 'and'.

Occurrences in this domain are beyond the reach of exact prediction because of the variety of factors in operation, not because of any lack of order in nature.

Human history is highly nonlinear and unpredictable.

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

There's no limit to how complicated things can get, on account of one thing always leading to another.

History is messy, undetermined, and layered.

Understand: any phenomenon in the world is by nature complex. The people you deal with are equally complex. Any action sets off a limitless chain of reactions. It is never so simple as A leads to B. B will lead to C, D and beyond.

It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a facade of order - and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.

You have to realize the truth of biologist Julian Huxley's idea that 'Life is just one damn relatedness after another' "So you must have the models, and you must see the relatedness and the effects from the relatedness.

The world is not an unsolved problem for scientists or sociologists. The world is a living mystery.

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

Everything is deeply intertwingled.

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

I see the world in very fluid, contradictory, emerging, interconnected terms, and with that kind of circuitry I just don't feel the need to say what is going to happen or will not happen.

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

There are only patterns. Patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns, patterns hidden by patterns, patterns within patterns.

A single ray of light from a distant star falling upon the eye of a tyrant in bygone times may have altered the course of his life, may have changed the destiny of nations, may have transformed the surface of the globe, so intricate, so inconceivably complex are the processes in Nature.

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.

Everything...affects everything