Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

The future had suddenly become unknowable: anything could happen: the train of my life had jumped the rails and headed off across the fields and coming down the lane with me, then.

A merciless fate threw me into this maelstrom … the gale of the world carried me away.

History goes out of control almost as often as nature does.

Destiny and history are untidy.

Life's messy.

Chaos is what we have. That is what I believe.

I make my world chaotic. It's like a whirlpool.

Chaos is the undercurrent of everything that happens in life.

One thing I could tell you is that I'm all over the place.

The characters in my novels, from the very first one, are always on some quixotic effort of attempting to control something that is uncontrollable - some element of the world that is essentially random and out of control.

My senses of space, of distance, and of direction entirely vanished. When I looked for the ground I sometimes looked down, sometimes up, sometimes left, sometimes right. I thought I was very high up when I would suddenly be thown to earth in a near vertical spin. I thought I was very low to the ground and I was pulled up to 3,000 feet in two minutes by the 500-horsepower motor. It danced, it pushed, it tossed. . . . Ah! la la!

It's hard to represent chaos, or like an absence of something. It's much easier to represent the presence of something or a situation.

Life, in both its knowing and its doing, has become today a "free fall," so to say, into the next minute, into the future. So that, whereas, formerly, those not wishing to hazard the adventure of an individual life could rest within the pale of a comfortably guaranteed social order, today all the walls have burst. It is not left to us to chooseto hazard the adventure of an unprecedented life: adventure is upon us, like a tidal wave.

One might as well attempt to calculate mathematically the contingent forms of the tinkling bits of glass in a kaleidoscope as to look through the tube of the future and foretell its pattern.

I'm definitely more attracted to chaos than to order.

I for one like chaos. Chaos looks good on me.

It's just a crazy damned life, that's all.

Life is fits and starts, mostly fits.

History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

This tremendous friction which cannot, as in mechanics, be reduced to a few points, is everywhere in contact with chance, and brings about effects that cannot be measured just because they are largely due to chance.

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

My life shows a clear pattern of total unpredictability.

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.

Can you collect chaos? Not collecting, that is the ultimate gathering. What can you gather without gathering yourself.

Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything.