Quotes & Sayings About Big Events

What could he have done or said differently? What change would have altered the course of events? In the big picture, nothing. In the small picture, so much. — Margaret Atwood

Individual events. Events beyond law. Events so numerous and so uncoordinated that, flaunting their freedom from formula, they yet fabricate firm form. — John Archibald Wheeler

Make your character flawed in a serious, big, scary, potentially life-wrecking way. When you start with a badly flawed character, the arc will be all about correcting that flaw - about your character growing into a better person, the kind of mythic hero archetype he was "meant to be" but couldn't become until this adventure - the events of your plot - pushed him to change himself for the better. — Libbie Hawker

It's not about having a Silicon Valley attitude - it's about having an entrepreneurial attitude. It's about partnering with other organizations in and around your area. It's about thinking big with entrepreneurs that sit next to you in your coworking space. It's about collaborating with tech gurus, social media wizards and community leaders at cool business events. It's the people that make a community an entrepreneurial one - not the location - and it's up to you to contribute. — Brad Feld

With Katrina, it's almost like the sequel that doesn't live up to the original. It's certainly a shocking event and a tragedy, but somehow as a big event it doesn't seem to carry as much weight with the public as 9/11 did. — Gilbert Gottfried

I've never had big problems about being long on the court. During the U.S. Open I played three events (singles, doubles, mixed doubles) and some people asked me if I want to stay overnight on the court. — Martina Hingis

I'm not big on looking back beyond the moment in which decisions and events occur. I'm always pushing forward. — David Stern

Timing is a big factor in seeing our desires met, and God's timing is perfect. Do not give up on a dream if it seems impossible or out of reach. Nothing is impossible for Yahweh! However, because man has the gift of free will and continually chooses rebellion and sin over submission, the heavenly Father may need time to align events and transform hearts. It takes time to mold self-willed lumps of clay into vessels of honor and gratitude. — Cheryl Zelenka

I used to be a person who just peaked for the big events, not doing too many competitions, but now you've got to go round chasing all the points because if you're not taking them, someone else is. — Jade Jones

They may be big in Switzerland, but so are yodellers, and nobody wants to watch them fight. Heavyweight title fights should be huge events, not an afterthought in a country most famous for producing chocolate. — David Haye

It is not the big events that hurt the most but rather the smallest questionable shift in tone at the end of a spoken word that can plow most deeply into the heart. — Steve Martin

In the end it's not just the big and small events that make you who you are, make your life what it is, it's how you choose to react to them-that's where you have control over your life. — Lisa Unger

Most big life events are like that. You think they'll be emotionally one-sided, but when you actually get into them, it's always more complex. - Nathan — Catherine Ryan Hyde

I tend to avoid melodrama. I try to create very realistic settings and very realistic experiences and realistic responses to these experiences. Melodrama is the use of really big events that may or may not happen in real life - certainly they do, but they're not events that are common to most people. Most of the things that happen in my novels are things that could happen to people in real life. — Nicholas Sparks

Hockey lends itself to special events, including the Olympic competition: a glorious tournament of the best players in the world, putting on their national jerseys and playing on big rinks with no-goon Olympic rules and referee enforcement. — George Vecsey

'What was there before the Big Bang?' That's a question that both kids and adults love to pose to anyone who seems sympathetic. After all, if the universe has only been around for roughly 14 billion years, isn't it legitimate to ask what was in existence before the mother-of-all-events cranked up the cosmos? — Seth Shostak

Big sporting events and spectacles might give the national morale a shot in the arm, but they are too transient and taste-specific to stand as robust symbols of nationhood. — Julian Baggini

About the Story

Not all the details in this story are true. The times some events occurred have been changed, and the conversations are made up. Most of the things Tad Lincoln did in this story reportedly happened, including saving Jack the turkey and bombarding the Cabinet Room door with his toy cannon. Tad really was determined to raise money to help wounded soldiers and did persuade his father to pardon a woman's husband so he wouldn't be shot. Although Tad's antics often annoyed his father's staff, most agreed he had a big heart and a special way with animals. Once he even hitched goats to a chair and ran them through the White House, upsetting a gathering of dignified ladies. Nothing was too surprising when it came to Tad.
Although several presidents had declared occasional days of thanksgiving, none had ever officially made it a national holiday. Abraham Lincoln finally did so with his Proclamation of Thanksgiving on October 3, 1863. — Gary Hines

I love a good cliffhanger. I love when big events happen in shows. I love shows that aren't afraid to take risks and to really do what's best for the story line and realistic for the story line. — Candice Accola

Both Hegel and Marx believed that the evolution of human societies was not open-ended, but would end when mankind had achieved a form of society that satisfied its deepest and most fundamental longings. Both thinkers thus posited an "end of history": for Hegel this was the liberal state, while for Marx it was a communist society. This did not mean that the natural cycle of birth, life, and death would end, that important events would no longer happen, or that newspapers reporting them would cease to be published. It meant, rather, that there would be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions had been settled. — Francis Fukuyama

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they'd changed things just by being there. — William Gibson

As the week's events on reality television demonstrate, there is an ugly underbelly in society only too ready to point the finger at the foreigner, or those who might not fit in. [on celeb big brother — John Sentamu

The waves get high, they get low. It's been a wonderful journey, every bit of it, and that's from every praise to every criticism ... To be able to able to hang around athletics for a lifetime and to meet all these wonderful people I've come in contact with, to have been around as many big events as I have, I can't imagine a day when I did not have something to make me happy about sports. — Brent Musburger

the universe is big and old and, as a result, rare events happen all the time. Go out some night into the woods or desert where you can see stars and hold up your hand to the sky, making a tiny circle between your thumb and forefinger about the size of a dime. Hold it up to a dark patch of the sky where there are no visible stars. In that dark patch, with a large enough telescope of the type we now have in service today, you could discern perhaps 100,000 galaxies, each containing billions of stars. Since supernovae explode once per hundred years per, with 100,000 galaxies in view, you should expect to see, on average, about three stars explode on a given night. — Lawrence M. Krauss

I love the Capitol rotunda. It's just so big and so grand, and I love being in the Capitol at night when it's empty, and you can go stand in the Capitol rotunda and bask in the silence of history. You can sort of imagine all of the things that have happened inside that Rotunda from presidents lying in state to other important events. — Kevin Yoder

column writing is an act of chemistry - precisely because you must conjure it up yourself. A column doesn't write itself the way a breaking news story does. A column has to be created. This act of chemistry usually involves mixing three basic ingredients: your own values, priorities, and aspirations; how you think the biggest forces, the world's biggest gears and pulleys, are shaping events; and what you've learned about people and culture - how they react or don't - when the big forces impact them. When — Thomas L. Friedman

I worry about exposing him to bands like Journey, the appreciation of which will surely bring him nothing but the opprobrium of his peers. Though he has often been resistant - children so seldom know what is good for them - I have taught him to appreciate all the groundbreaking musicmakers of our time - Big Country, Haircut 100, Loverboy - and he is lucky for it. His brain is my laboratory, my depository. Into it I can stuff the books I choose, the television shows, the movies, my opinion about elected officials, historical events, neighbors, passersby. He is my twenty-four-hour classroom, my captive audience, forced to ingest everything I deem worthwhile. He is a lucky, lucky boy! And no one can stop me. — Dave Eggers

That was the way things worked. When you were looking for the big fight, the moment that you thought would knock everything over, nothing much happened at all. — Ann Patchett

The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative. — Nicholson Baker

While eating our feast, we watch The Big Lebowski, which is sort of bizarre, because Alex was trying to get me to watch this a couple of months ago. And the Roths have it on DVD, so they are all amazed I've never seen it. Turns out, it's really good. And what's even better, in addition to Porter preparing me for the sound of gunshots in the movie - so I won't be caught off guard - and quoting lines along with the actors, which makes me smile despite the dreary events of the day, is when he leans close and whispers into my ear, "You belong here with me."
And for that moment, I believe that I do. — Jenn Bennett

In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H.R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable. In Haldeman's words, "There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events...Just as Eisenhower linked up the nation's cities by highways so that you could get there, the Nixon legacy would have linked them by cable communication so you wouldn't have to go there." One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers, seemingly oblivious to its Big Brother aspects. Fortunately the Watergate scandal intervened, and Nixon was forced to resign before "the Wired Nation" could be hooked up. — David Wallechinsky

It's funny how, when you look back on the big things that have happened in your life, you realize that there were small things you might have done which would completely have changed the course of events. — Stuart Prebble

Everyone goes to the 'Grands-Boulevards' (in Paris, ed.) and let himself loose ... Do not picture these in costume, they are not for the most part ... perhaps a clown with a big nose, or two girls with bare necks and short skirts ... the parade of the queens of the halls (markets) is also one of the events ... Some are pretty but look awkward in their silk dresses and crowns, particularly as the broad sun displays their defects - perhaps a neck too thin or a painted face which shows ghastley white in the sunlight. — Edward Hopper

The beauty of life is in small details, not in big events. — Jim Jarmusch

The true test of the American ideal is whether we're able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life's big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams. — Barack Obama

My greatest influences in my sport have been two former number one English lady darts players, Deta Hedman and Mandy Solomons. Deta helped me at international events and both helped me to cope with the big occasion which gave me the confidence I needed to become a champion. — Trina Gulliver

When I look back on my life, I marvel at how it hasn't been the major decisions that have most impacted its course. It's been the tiny, seemingly inconsequential ones. Think about it. Think about the sudden events that have affected your life. With most of them, wasn't it just a matter of seconds one way or the other? Wasn't it the little decisions that caused you to cross this street or that, to move yourself into or out of harm's way? These are the things that get you in the end. Who you marry, what you choose as your profession, how you were raised - yes, that is the big picture. But, as they say, the devil's in the details. Well, — Lisa Unger

An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction. — Rusty Schweickart

It's probably fair to say that Obama's ideas were too big for America's appetite. It would have been nice had he made a few incremental repairs to the economy and left the transformative events for a less stressful time. — Kathleen Parker

The planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one. — Elizabeth Kolbert

The guns of the big events rumble through our pages, but the tiny firecrackers are constantly hissing and popping there as well; it appears that much of my life as a journalist has been devoted to sedulously setting off firecrackers. — Brendan Gill

When things don't turn out the way we want, about the only thing we can do is know God is still there piecing together all the scraps of the events in our lives the way He has planned. He sees the big picture even when we don't. — Jody Hedlund

Big shows are more like events and small shows are more like traditional gigs. — Kelly Jones

Three events. Three gold medals. I was news, big news, in the sports world. — Esther Williams

Every time I go to big events, it's a trip. I feel like that kid who shouldn't really be there. — Zac Efron

The broad mass of a nation will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one. The greater the lie, the greater chance that it will be believed. All epoch-making events have been produced not by the written, but the spoken word. — Adolf Hitler

When the next big problem comes online, be it the Euro crisis, nuclear proliferation, an overstretched Internet, a killer flu, or any of the other possibilities I consider in X-Events, we will suffer a complexity overload. — John L. Casti

No life is perfect. There's always something that hurts, but it's important to appreciate the good things, too." He kissed my cheek, breathing warmth over me. "If it wasn't the end of the wolrd, it'd be something else. Maybe not this big or terrible, but there are always events in life that can make you unhappy if you let them. — Jodi Meadows

We don't ask for opinions on our outfit all the time - but for a big of event, like the Emmys, absolutely. I actually sent my sister a picture of the [J Mendel] dress I wore to the Emmys before I chose it, and she was obsessed. She was like, "Oh, I want that." And I said, "Let me wear it first!" — Kate Mara

Risk is what you control and fortune is really all about risk. Bottom Line: Fortune comes from big money bets on very low probability events — Ziad K. Abdelnour

I mean, so if I've talked to whites in City of Refuge, sometimes they'll wonder, "Why do we do things a certain way, and why do we make a big deal out of events?" And what's happening is they're falling back on their understanding of the way that church should work. It's not always working exactly like that, and they feel frustration or confusion. Sometimes people leave. That's certainly common in mixed churches. — Michael Emerson

Cumulative errors depend largely on the big surprises, the big opportunities. Not only do economic, financial, and political predictors miss them, but they are quite ashamed to say anything outlandish to their clients and yet events, it turns out, are almost always outlandish. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The big bang, the most cataclysmic event we can imagine, on closer inspection appears finely orchestrated. — George Smoot

I had not been involved in any way in planning the event in Mobile. My staff maybe, had really been contacted, but I had never talked to Donald Trump about him coming to Mobile, and I decided - I had something else to do but it became so clear that it was going to be such a big event that I should be there. And he had already adopted my immigration views, in large part, and he was saying things I thought were valuable, about immigration. — Jeff Sessions

I was always interested in sport. My family are big sports' fans. We always had all the locals round watching big sporting events. I wasn't particularly sporty myself. I played a lot of hockey and rode, still do ride, but I just had a general interest in it. When I was given the opportunity to do sport stories I used to grab them. — Jill Douglas

When I was first writing, I was writing mostly about sporting events, which was really what my assignments were. I was working on the Tour de France bike race and the Barcelona Olympic Games, and those songs tend to be very big, very bombastic-type music, which is the type of music that I love to write. — John Tesh

During good times, it's easy to deride "big government" and talk about the inevitability of cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses their free market religion and wants to know that their government has their backs. And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it's that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods - disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands - are going to keep coming. — Naomi Klein

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. — Joshua Foer

Bruce worked very hard on an obscure document about prophecy and how some people could experience events that were later realized. Scientists did not find any rational explanation for this but often called it a process of intuitive repetition. Bruce also read about second thoughts, often quite unlike the original. They came to some people like a flash, in the middle of the night. Finally, he read a combination of intuitive repetitions and that blazing nights could, as the result of revelation, find of great importance. He read that it was one of those big inventors' ways of approaching a new unknown. These were difficult concepts to understand, and Bruce fell asleep while reading. — J.M.K. Walkow

Gary Klein is a renowned and expert researcher on decision-making and cites the following aspects that experts have the ability to see which novices do not.196 1. Experts see patterns that novices do not detect. 2. Experts see anomalies - events that did not happen. 3. Experts see the big picture (situational awareness). 4. Experts create opportunities and improvisations. 5. Experts have the ability to predict future events using their previous experiences. 6. Experts see differences too small for novices to detect. 7. Experts know their own limitations. With an understanding of the differences between the experienced and the novice, we can begin to design a plan to overcome the shortfalls. Fortunately, understanding that it isn't a "matter of intelligence, but a matter of experience" means that we can systematically set about gaining the experience necessary. — Patrick Van Horne

To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes can happen very quickly. — Malcolm Gladwell

I feel like whatever you've done in your career, good or bad, it's nothing but preparation for the big events to come. — Kevin Hart

the human tendency to treat big events as fundamentally different from smaller ones. — Ed Catmull

Every last minute of my life has been preordained and I'm sick and tired of it.
How this feels is I'm just another task in God's daily planner: the Italian Renaissance penciled in for right after the Dark Ages.
...
The Information Age is scheduled immediately after the Industrial Revolution. Then the Postmodern Era, then the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Famine. Check. Pestilence. Check. War. Check. Death. Check. And between the big events, the earthquakes and the tidal waves, God's got me squeezed in for a cameo appearance. Then maybe in thirty years, or maybe next year, God's daily planner has me finished. — Chuck Palahniuk

The costs savings was a big win, but now we also have a schedule of events and are clearly aware of when our contracts begin and end ... we are much more strategic about how we source now. — Jason Kennedy

I'm not a big filmophile. I don't watch movies a lot for a hobby. I spend all my time watching sporting events. Because, opposed to movies, you can never tell how they're going to end. — Michael Douglas

Seven Steps to Success
1) Make a commitment to grow daily.
2) Value the process more than events.
3) Don't wait for inspiration.
4) Be willing to sacrifice pleasure for opportunity.
5) Dream big.
6) Plan your priorities.
7) Give up to go up. — John C. Maxwell

I am a huge sports fan and spend a lot of my time away from work watching sports, going to sporting events, stuff like that. So it is a big thrill to see these people who I have so much respect for and to find out that they're all really fun, super-nice people. It's very exciting. — Will Forte

I have a lot of trouble forgiving myself for being so dumb ... But yes, of course, the big generous compassionate view that you should take of yourself and of all events is: what a glorious circus train this has been, and what a wonderful messy parade, and all of those steps took me here, where I precisely need to be now, so God bless it. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Sometimes something catastrophic can occur in a split second that changes a person's life forever; other times one minor incident can lead to another and then another and another, eventually setting off just as big a change in a body's life. — Jeannette Walls

This is where the pivotal events of my childhood unfolded, while I ate banana and root beer Popsicles, two by two, tucking the sticks neatly under the skirt of the chair. It's where Sunnybank Lad met Lady, Ken met his friend Flicka, Atlanta burned, Manderley burned, Lassie came home, Jim ran away, Alice got small, Wilbur got big, David Copperfield was born, Beth died, and, on an endless gloomy winter afternoon, Jody shot his yearling. — Jo Ann Beard

As long as anti-gay legislation exists in any state, I strongly believe big events such as the Final Four and Super Bowl should not be held in those states' cities. — Charles Barkley

It was striking how little control we had of events, particularly in view of how assiduously we cultivated the appearance of being in charge by smoking big cigars and saying fuck all the time. — Michael Lewis

As events developed, the debate about jobs and energy extraction in general became more divisive. Those at one extreme embraced the industry as an expression of old-fashioned free enterprise. It offered work that built character and brought deserving rewards for those with initiative, whether they be roughnecks working twelve-hour shifts, investors staking their capital, or researchers staking their reputation on the next big discovery. At the other end of the spectrum were those who saw the industry as a relic of grandfather clauses and cronyism that dated to a period of predatory exploitation, when fantastical deals were pitched by door-to-door peddlers, manufacturing waste was buried in lagoons on private property, and unions were nonexistent. The middle ground was occupied by an untold number of consumers used to cheap plentiful energy, and property owners, who had their worries but also were able to calculate how much a mineral rights lease might be worth. — Tom Wilber

Something out of the ordinary course of business is taking place that creates an investment opportunity. The list of corporate events that can result in big profits for you runs the gamut - spinoffs, mergers, restructurings, rights offerings, bankruptcies, liquidations, asset sales, distributions. — Joel Greenblatt

One further factor, possibly the most crucial, was inherent to the way SARS-CoV affects the human body: Symptoms tend to appear in a person before, rather than after, that person becomes highly infectious. The headache, the fever, and the chills - maybe even the cough - precede the major discharge of virus toward other people. Even among some of the superspreaders, in 2003, this seems to have been true. That order of events allowed many SARS cases to be recognized, hospitalized, and placed in isolation before they hit their peak of infectivity. The downside was that hospital staff took the first big blasts of secondary infection; the upside was that those blasts generally weren't emitted by people still feeling healthy enough to ride a bus or a subway to work. This was an enormously consequential factor in the SARS episode - not just lucky but salvational. — David Quammen

Life's journey is one big path with series of events. All these events are connected. — Lailah Gifty Akita

Strange, how such a small realization can affect everyone's life forever. In movies there is always a carefully staged moment - a big crescendo of music, close- ups of the actors' faces, the camera slowly pulling away to let all this sink in for the viewer ... but, in real life, most all of the extraordinary things happen with no more loudness than a whisper. — Silas House

We sort of read two or three big newspapers but we don't get the flavor of the local events, the local news as much. — Jane Smiley

I've always been a big advocate of making shows affordable because a lot of these bottle-service clubs and events are geared toward really expensive experiences. Club music is for everyone, and it drives me crazy that people are getting priced out. — Kaskade

I guess I feel very strongly that I disagree with the notion of personalizing history and movements and big events. — Bernadine Dohrn

It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act,' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3,000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war. — Dick Cheney

What I'm feeling, I think, is joy. And it's been some time since I've felt that blinkered rush of happiness, This might be one of those rare events that lasts, one that'll be remembered and recalled as months and years wind and ravel. One of those sweet, significant moments that leaves a footprint in your mind. A photograph couldn't ever tell its story. It's like something you have to live to understand. One of those freak collisions of fizzing meteors and looming celestial bodies and floating debris and one single beautiful red ball that bursts into your life and through your body like an enormous firework. Where things shift into focus for a moment, and everything makes sense. And it becomes one of those things inside you, a pearl among sludge, one of those big exaggerated memories you can invoke at any moment to peel away a little layer of how you felt, like a lick of ice cream. The flavor of grace. — Craig Silvey

The outlandish 2000 election and Bush's victory had come along at the perfect time, helping Stewart, the correspondents, and the writers sharpen The Daily Show's tone of bemused mockery. The next world-changing events would have just as big an effect - and a late-night, basic cable comedy show would become an unlikely outlet for mourning, an antidote to anxiety, and gradually a center of principled, patriotic dissent. — Chris Smith

even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang. — Stephen Hawking

Today is your big moment. Moments, really. The life you've been waiting for is happening all around you. The scene unfolding right outside your window is worth more than the most beautiful painting, and the crackers and peanut butter that you're having for lunch on the coffee table are as profound, in their own way, as the Last Supper. This is it. This is life in all its glory, swirling and unfolding around us, disguised as pedantic, pedestrian non-events. But pull off the mask and you will find your life, waiting to be made, chosen, woven, crafted. -Cold Tangerines — Shauna Niequist

After all, our lives are but a sequence of accidents - a clanking chain of chance events. A string of choices, casual or deliberate, which add up to that one big calamity we call life. — Rohinton Mistry

We still carry this old caveman-imprint idea that we're small, nature's big, and it's everything we can manage to hang on and survive. When big geophysical events happen - a huge earthquake, tsunami, or volcanic eruption - we're reminded of that. — James Balog

Hospitality has never been about having House Beautiful with perfectly coordinated accessories and the most up-to-date equipment, nor is it dependent upon having large chunks of leisure time and a big entertainment budget to spend, nor does it require special training in the culinary arts or event planning. Hospitality is about a heart for service, the creativity to stretch whatever we do have available, and the energy to give the time necessary to add a flourish to the ordinary events of life. — Dorothy Kelley Patterson

If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize. — Arlie Russell Hochschild

Quantum fluctuations are, at their root, completely a-causal, in the sense that cause and effect and ordering of events in time is not a part of how these fluctuations work. Because of this, there seem not to be any correlations built into these kinds of fluctuations because 'law' as we understand the term requires some kind of cause-and-effect structure to pre-exist. Quantum fluctuations can precede physical law, but it seems that the converse is not true. So in the big bang, the establishment of 'law' came after the event itself, but of course even the concept of time and causality may not have been quite the same back then as they are now. — Sten F. Odenwald

How do you separate fantasy from reality? How can you be sure the story of your life both from long ago and minute to minute is true? There is a pleasant vindication to be found when you accept that you can't. No one can, yet we persist and thrive. Who you think you are is sort of like a movie based on true events, which is not necessarily a bad thing. The details may be embellished, but the big picture, the general idea, is probably a good story worth hearing about. — David McRaney

Life's full of events - they occur and you adjust, you roll and move on. But at some point you realize some events are actually developments. You realize there's a big plan out there you know nothing about, and a development is a first step in that new direction. Sometimes things feel like big-time developmens but in time you adjust, you find a new way and realize they didn't throw you off course, they didn't change you. They were just events.
The tricky part is telling the difference between the two. — Adam Johnson

The nuclear industry has this amazing record, even equipment from generations one and two. But nuclear mishaps tend to come in these big events - Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and now Fukushima - so it's more visible. — Bill Gates

Most of all, I believe God has chosen to bless this series. In doing so, he's giving the country and maybe the world, one last, big wake-up call before the events transpire. — Tim LaHaye

It used to be thought that the events that changed the world were things like big bombs, maniac politicians, huge earthquakes, or vast population movements, but it has now been realized that this is a very old-fashioned view held by people totally out of touch with modern thought. The things that really change the world, according to Chaos theory, are the tiny things. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazonian jungle, and subsequently a storm ravages half of Europe. — Neil Gaiman

He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist. — Tracy Kidder

There's too much of everything - too many bands, too many albums, too much information all the time. You're seeing fewer album releases treated as big events, because of the influx. It's almost a "here this week, forgotten next week" thing. — Matt Smith

Life isn't just about major characters and the big events. It's about everyone, everything, in between. — Michelle Richmond

Positive belief leaves no room for excuses; it questions why the feats and quests cannot be attained. When your beliefs are strong enough, you will not define yourself on the basis of past and present limitations or life events. Your success can only be as big as the size of your beliefs, for it is the size of your beliefs that will either limit your dream or allow it to explode. — Archibald Marwizi