Consecutive Quotes & Sayings

When I first learned of the existence of pi, I knew immediately that we had something in common. We share a parallel path. Certainly there are many times when I too have been considered irrational. Often when alone in my room, I silently ponder the equation for the area of a circle. Area (A) equals R-squared (RR) times the constant pi (C). Then I thought, by assigning the designation (K) and assuming there was an nth or final numeric digit to pi, it all might somehow become rational. The random rolling numbers that could at some point define that ultimate integer, passed through my mind. To me they were like the consecutive series of episodes that define my life. It seemed that it was more than a coincidence that when I took the variables and the constants from the equation and put them all together, A-R-R-C-K, it spells my name. That is why I need to get to the truth. — John Lack

Apparently, I was taking U.S. History again this year, which was the only history taught at Jackson, making the name redundant. I would be spending my second consecutive year studying the "War of Northern Aggression" with Mr. Lee, no relation. But as we all knew, in spirit Mr. Lee and the famous Confederate general were one and the same. Mr. Lee was one of the few teachers who actually hated me. Last year, on a dare from Link, I had written a paper called "The War of Southern Aggression," and Mr. Lee had given me a D. Guess the teachers actually did read the papers sometimes, after all. — Kami Garcia

Inspiration is solitary, never consecutive. — Alphonse De Lamartine

The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglebooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody. — Vladimir Nabokov

This is all part of my cunning plan to make ten pounds daily by spending twelve consecutive hours online. — Neil Fraser Addison

I had sent her to four consecutive psychiatrists, and not one of them had gotten me sober. — Alcoholics Anonymous

Dr. Adler had instructed me to always say whatever I was thinking, but this was difficult for me, for the act of thinking and the act of articulating those thoughts were not synchronous to me, or even necessarily consecutive. I knew that I thought and spoke in the same language and that theoretically there should be no reason why I could not express my thoughts as they occurred or soon thereafter, but the language in which I thought and the language in which I spoke, though both English, often seemed divided by a gap that could not be simultaneously, or even retrospectively, bridged. — Peter Cameron

The probability of ten consecutive heads is 0.1 percent; thus, when you have millions of coin tossers, or investors, in the end there will be thousands of very successful practitioners of coin tossing, or stock picking. — Alan Greenspan

All my friends are always telling me how hard it is to have kids. 'Oh, David, it's so hard.' That's not hard. I'll tell you what hard is. Try talking your girlfriend into her third consecutive abortion. Yeah, that's hard, that takes finesse. You're just inconvenienced. — David Cross

I was asked in an interview once: You're writing another book with a female lead? Aren't you afraid you're going to be pigeonholed? And I thought, I write a team superhero book, an uplifting solo hero book, I write a horror-western, and I write a ghost story. What am I gonna be pigeonholed as? Has a man in the history of men ever been asked if he was going to be pigeonholed because he wrote two consecutive books with male leads? — Kelly Sue DeConnick

He was also active in his local community, a tireless worker for the Democratic Party and, for three consecutive years, director of Chicago's annual Polish Constitution Day Parade. Through this latter activity, he was introduced to (and photographed with) First Lady Rosalynn Carter on May 6, 1978. Mrs Carter signed the photo: "To John Gacy. Best wishes. Rosalynn Carter. — Robert Keller

Prayer of Application to the Holy Spirit
Holy Spirit who solves all promblems, who lights all roads so that I can attain my goal. You who give me the divine giftto forgive and forget all evil against meand that in all instances of my life you are with me. I want in this short prayer to thank you for all things and to confirm once again that I never want to be separated from you, even and in spite of all matrial illusion. I want to be with you in eternal glory. Thank you for your mercy toward me and mine.
The person must say this prayer for three consecutive days. After three days the favor requested will be granted even if it may appear difficult. This prayer,including these instructions must be published immediately after the favor is granted without mentioning the favor; only your initials should appear at the bottom.
MK — James Redfield

There is perhaps no better way to appreciate the dizzying stupidity of the United States than to chat with 25 consecutive morning radio hosts. — Adam Mansbach

Because what if instead of a story told in consecutive order, life is a cacophony of moments we never leave? What if the most traumatic or the most beautiful experiences we have trap us in a kind of feedback loop, where at least some part of our minds remains obsessed, even as our bodies move on? — Noah Hawley

Laura Vaughan, who set a women's record at the Hardrock in 1997, the only year she ran it, also was the first person to finish the Wasatch Front 100 for ten consecutive years and the first woman to break 24 hours. That makes her fast. What makes her tough, though - what makes her a bona fide Hardrocker - is that in 1996, nine weeks after giving birth to a son, she ran the Wasatch and breastfed her baby at the aid stations. Her ten-year ring from the event is engraved "Lactating Laura." Tough? — Scott Jurek

Pennebaker began his studies in the 1980s when he asked students to write about traumatic, stressful or emotional events for twenty minutes over three consecutive days. His results found improvements in both physical and psychological health. People were happier and healthier when they wrote, including reduced visits to doctors, positive effects on blood pressure, improved liver and immune system functioning and less use of pain medication. Writing also had beneficial effects on emotional health and enhanced social relationships. — Patricia McAdoo

Making the playoffs three consecutive seasons is a great accomplishment. — Pau Gasol

Arleen thanked Pana. Getting off the phone, she thanked Jesus. She smiled. When she smiled she looked like a different person. The press had loosened its grip. From landlords, she had heard eighty-nine nos but one yes.

Jori accepted his mother's high five. He and his brother would have to switch schools. Jori didn't care. He switched schools all the time. Between seventh and eighth grades, he had attended five different schools - when he went at all. At the domestic-violence shelter alone, Jori had racked up seventeen consecutive absences. Arleen saw school as a higher-order need, something to worry about after she found a house. — Matthew Desmond

Poets, if they're genuine, must keep repeating "I don't know." Each poem marks an effort to answer this statement, but as soon as the final period hits the page, the poet begins to hesitate, starts to realize that this particular answer was pure makeshift that's absolutely inadequate to boot. So the poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvre. — Wislawa Szymborska

The 22nd Amendment should probably be modified to say two consecutive terms instead of two terms for a lifetime. — William J. Clinton

On the other side of that line was freedom - the kind of freedom that can never be taken away from you. It was freedom from our self-imposed limitations. Although through our training we have grown to believe that running 52 consecutive miles was possible, none of us really believed in our heart of hearts that it was probable. As individuals, each of us struggled with their own fear and self-doubt. But the moment we cross that finish line, we have given ourselves the gift of freedom from our fears, our self-doubt, and our self-imposed limitations. — Hal Elrod

We dare them to apply a principle for 40 days to their kids. They don't have to be 40 consecutive days ... Already people that even tested the book for us had amazing responses from their kids. — Alex Kendrick

The job description of mother is clearly in need of revision. As it stands, the shifts are 24 hours, for a period of approximately 1,825 consecutive days. The benefits are sorely in need of amendment: no vacations, no sick leave, no lunch hours, no breaks. Moreover, it is the only unpaid position I know of that can result in arrest if you fail to show up for work. — Mary Blakely

We met three years prior, in 2003, when I created the first-ever Shakespeare program in a solitary confinement unit, and we spent three years working together in that unit. Now we have received unprecedented permission to work together, alone, unsupervised, to create a series of Shakespeare workbooks for prisoners. Newton is gesticulating so animatedly that it draws the attention of an officer walking by our little classroom. He pops his head inside. "Everything okay in here?" he asks. "Just reading Shakespeare," I reply. He shakes his head and walks on. "That is crazy!" Newton repeats, his head still in the book. A record ten and a half consecutive years in solitary confinement, and he's not crazy, he's not dangerous - he's reading Shakespeare. And maybe, just maybe, it is because he's reading Shakespeare that he is not crazy, or dangerous. — Laura Bates

i need you to french me into the fucking dirt. need you to actually care about me and ineed you to know that i just get tired sometimes. need to think that you are a betterperson than i am and never say it. need you here with me, on our literal death mattress,lying perfectly still in the middle of every single consecutive and increasingly sober night


thats all i need, because i know no one ever really says what they really mean and iknow that there exists a world beneath this one where all the things that get left unsaidbecome all the things you really want. its my moms basement, but i cant go back — Heiko Julien

I just want to bring people in a little bit to the idea of sitting down on a Sunday three consecutive weeks and having that water cooler moment that really was a sort of a national sensation in the U.K., 'cause it's kind of fun. — Benedict Cumberbatch

I'm a hard-nosed businessman, that if a company is paying its way, increasing profits for thirty-odd consecutive years, you don't put it into receivership. — Sean Quinn

Life is a wave, which in no two consecutive moments of its existence is composed of the same particles. — John Tyndall

It is common error to infer that things which are consecutive in order of time have necessarily the relation of cause and effect. — Jacob Bigelow

The third sign we have for ascertaining whether this dryness be the purgation of sense, is inability to meditate and make reflections, and to excite the imagination, as before, notwithstanding all the efforts we may make; for God begins now to communicate Himself, no longer through the channel of sense, as formerly, in consecutive reflections, by which we arranged and divided our knowledge, but in pure spirit, which admits not of successive reflections, and in the act of pure contemplation, to which neither the interior nor the exterior senses of our lower nature can ascend. Hence it is that the fancy and the imagination cannot help or suggest any reflections, nor use them ever afterwards. — San Juan De La Cruz

There is a sequence in my 'Detective Comics' run where you can't find consecutive issues by the same artist. That's intentional. That was done on purpose. — Greg Rucka

That night, they spoke in hushed voices around the fire, almost expecting to see or hear something jump from the shadows. Gonjo had been spotted dancing on the railway station on last two consecutive nights. Such an innocuous act as dancing could surely have been ignored but the gravity of the matter lay in the chilling fact that Gonjo had died a week back. Those hushed voices were only adding more fuel to the fire, not the one which kept them warm, but the wildfire of ghostly hauntings by the Begunkodor railway station. What happened at the station this particular night, however, would clearly disabuse any misgivings towards the ghost of the dancing woman - Excerpt from the story 'Begunkodor Ghost Station — Manish Mahajan

The most devoted complete a 25-mile run every day for a thousand consecutive days. They wear straw sandals and carry a knife at their waist, to be used to kill themselves should they fail to continue. After five years, they conduct a nine-day fast, after which their senses are heightened to such a degree that they can hear ash fall from an incense stick. In the seventh year of their pilgrimage, the monks undertake the "Great Marathon" of 52.5 miles a day every day for a year. — Scott Jurek

In 1998, while serving two consecutive life sentences, Puente began corresponding with a writer named Shane Bugbee and sending him recipes which were subsequently published in a book called Cooking with a Serial Killer.
Call me crazy, but I wouldn't touch that food with a ten-foot pole. — Jodi Picoult

Whenever commandments are given they create difficulties for people, because by the time they are given they are already out of date. Life moves so fast; it is a dynamism, it is not static. It is not a stagnant pool, it is a Ganges, it goes on flowing. It is never the same for two consecutive moments. So one thing may be right this moment, and may not be right the next. Then what to do? The only possible thing is make people so aware that they themselves can decide how to respond to a changing life. — Rajneesh

Character is proportionate to N, the number of consecutive failures without being discouraged, or equivalently, the number of successive rejections without being intimidated. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Lay down a method also for your reading; let it be in a consistent and consecutive course, and not in that desultory and unmethodical manner, in which many people read scraps of different authors, upon different subjects. — Philip Dormer Stanhope

people who regularly practice appreciation or gratitude - who, for example, "count their blessings" once a week over the course of one to twelve consecutive weeks or pen appreciation letters to people who've been kind and meaningful - become reliably happier and healthier, and remain happier for as long as six months after the experiment is over. — Sonja Lyubomirsky

BROWSED this far into the magazine, you've likely noticed something unusual about this issue: it has three consecutive covers. Why? Good question. The theme of The Atlantic 's annual Ideas Issue this year is creativity - which is a hard concept to define, let alone to illustrate. We could have gone with an illuminated lightbulb, or photographed Brad Pitt painting at an easel, but those options didn't seem very ... creative. — Anonymous

Seances is an internet project where I intended to adapt at least a hundred and maybe three hundred lost films into ten and twenty minute long fragmentary versions. We then uploaded them to an internet archive that fragmented them even more. We treated them like shreds of lost movie spirits and allowed these spirits to interrupt each other in non-consecutive collisions that formed new movies. — Guy Maddin

Every few years, in the world of sport, someone ascends to the most rarefied of all levels - the one at which it becomes news not when they win, but when they lose. It must have been like that in the early Fifties, when a tubby Italian called Alberto Ascari was stitching together nine Grand Prix wins in a row, a record not even Fangio, Clark or Senna could match. Or when the great Real Madrid side of Alfredo Di Stefano and Ferenc Puskas won the first five European Cup finals, between 1956 and 1960. Or when Martina Navratilova dominated Wimbledon's Centre Court, winning nine ladies' singles titles in thirteen years. The current Australian cricket team is in just such a run at present, having just completed nine consecutive victories, putting them four wins away from establishing an all-time record. And then there is Tiger Woods. — Richard Williams

Look at my haircut. I am ready for the war. The objective is to win the Premiershp. I don't want to dominate, to finish without defeat, record points or goals or consecutive wins. The Premiership is so difficult you cannot be focused on that. I just think about winning. — Jose Mourinho

Every day I beat my own previous record for the number of consecutive days I've stayed alive. — George Carlin

Consecutive reading of biblical books forces everyone who wants to hear to put himself, or to allow himself to be found, where God has acted once and for all for the salvation of men. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

If we get chased out of Iraq with our tail between our legs, that will be the fifth consecutive Third-world country with no hint of a Navy or an Air Force to have whipped us in the past 40 years. — Hunter S. Thompson

Impermanence means that everything changes and that nothing remains the same in any consecutive moments. And although things change every moment, they still cannot be accurately described as the same or as different from what they were a moment ago. — Thich Nhat Hanh

However the machine would permit us to test the hypothesis for any special value of n. We could carry out such tests for a sequence of consecutive values n=2,3,.. up to, say, n=100. If the result of at least one test were negative, the hypothesis would prove to be false; otherwise our confidence in the hypothesis would increase, and we should feel encouraged to attempt establishing the hypothesis, instead of trying to construct a counterexample. — Alfred Tarski

That God appears at time's beginning is not too difficult to comprehend, but that He appears at the beginning and end of time simultaneously is not so easy to grasp; yet it is true. Time is known to us by a succession of events. It is the way we account for consecutive changes in the universe. Changes take place not all at once but in succession, one after the other, and it is the relation of "after" to "before" that gives us our idea of time. We wait for the sun to move from east to west or for the hour hand to move around the face of the clock, but God is not compelled so to wait. For Him everything that will happen has already happened. — A.W. Tozer

Chess continues to advance over time, so the players of the future will inevitably surpass me in the quality of their play, assuming the rules and regulations allow them to play serious chess. But it will likely be a long time before anyone spends 20 consecutive years as number, one as I did. — Garry Kasparov

This is man: a writer of books, a putter-down of words, a painter of pictures, a maker of ten thousand philosophies. He grows passionate over ideas, he hurls scorn and mockery at another's work, he finds the one way, the true way, for himself, and calls all others false
yet in the billion books upon the shelves there is not one that can tell him how to draw a single fleeting breath in peace and comfort. He makes histories of the universe, he directs the destiny of the nations, but he does not know his own history, and he cannot direct his own destiny with dignity or wisdom for ten consecutive minutes. — Thomas Wolfe

Playing behind a first-ballot Hall of Famer, who also is the all-time record holder for consecutive starts by a quarterback, it's a different mind-set. You just have to challenge yourself in ways that you never challenged yourself before. — Aaron Rodgers

I feel quite at home writing short stories but nervous and anxious when writing novels, as if the bad time of consecutive failures might arise again. — Charles Baxter

I've gone from being one of the youngest governors to now the longest consecutive serving governor in the country. — John Engler

Seemingly every year at least one of the league's top sluggers can be found in Boston's lineup - and often times more than one. David Ortiz was second or third in slugging five consecutive seasons from 2003-07. Manny Ramirez was in the top five in slugging six consecutive seasons from 2001-06. Manny and Big Papi were one-two in slugging in 2004, and from 2003-06 Boston's big bats gave the club two of the league's top five sluggers - something no other team in the league could boast. — Tucker Elliot

There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Why shouldn't you use numeric ids in your URLs? First, your competitors can see just how many auctions you create. Numeric consecutive ids also allow people to write automated spiders to steal your content. It's a window into your database. And finally, words in URLs just look better. (Google "German tank problem" to learn about how serial numbers on German tanks helped the allies win World War II.) — Obie Fernandez

At 15 I auditioned for 42nd Street in Australia. Dein Perry was in that show. I actually got the job but I couldn't do it because I was only 15. Legally I needed to have another 15-year-old to cover consecutive nights. — Adam Garcia

We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see. — Tom Stoppard

This will be their 19th consecutive game without a win unless they can get an equaliser. — Alan Green

Any man who watches more than three consecutive football games on TV in one day can be declared legally dead. — Joyce Brothers

As a rule of thumb, four consecutive lines of dialogue is about as much as you want to have without a tag. — Diana Gabaldon

Caring means cultivating the skills of an active listener. That is easier said than done, as an anecdote about the extraordinary social skills of British politicianBenjamin Disraeli and his rival William Gladstone illustrates ... The rivalry between the two statesmen piqued the curiosity of American Jennie Jerome, admired beauty and the mother of Winston Churchill. Ms. Jerome arranged to dine with Gladstone and then with Disraeli, on consecutive evenings. Afterward, she described the difference between the two men this way: "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But when I sat next to Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman. — Marian Deegan

To be the first player to do it three consecutive years (fifty or more home runs), you go back through the thousands of power hitters who played this game and nobody has ever done it, and I can sit here and say I'm the first. I'm pretty proud of that. — Mark McGwire

Just beat my record for most consecutive days without dying. — Bill Murray

Don't trust anyone who has been in school for the past 24 consecutive years. — Craig Bruce

Since then, I have not missed five consecutive days in getting some type of aerobic exercise, mostly jogging. — Kenneth H. Cooper

In study at the Mayo Clinic covering fifty consecutive young women with hypothyroidism, twenty-eight has menstrual disturbances. Abnormally profuse menses was a common disturbance; frequent bleeding between periods was another; in some cases, both problems were present. Thyroid therapy relived the disturbances. — Broda Otto Barnes

I don't know why you'd want to have sex with me one nightand sleep on the sofa the next," she said.
Well, of course,they weren't consecutive nights," he said. — Nick Hornby

Joe DiMaggio batted safely in 56 consecutive games in 1941, the same season Ted Williams batted .406 - but did you know that also in 1941, Jeff Heath, an outfielder who spent a decade playing for the Indians, became the first player in AL history to hit 20 doubles, 20 triples, and 20 home runs in the same season? It's true. — Tucker Elliot

It's easy to forget, given her scandal-tinged life and tragic death, how incredibly talented Whitney Houston was. She holds the world record as the most-awarded female act of all time, with over 415 major recognitions during her career. She is the only artist to chart seven consecutive number one songs. — Charles Duhigg

The inspiration for the book came after a visitation from a spiritual being that materialized before me on two consecutive nights. Although I crumpled into unconsciousness at the outset of each encounter and consciously remembered hearing only an initial word or two from the entity, I awakened on the dawn after the second visit with the ideas for The Divine Fire bubbling in my brain. — Brad Steiger

So poets keep on trying, and sooner or later the consecutive results of their self-dissatisfaction are clipped together with a giant paperclip by literary historians and called their oeuvres. — Wislawa Szymborska

Speech and prose are not the same thing. They have different wave-lengths, for speech moves at the speed of light, where prose moves at the speed of the alphabet, and must be consecutive and grammatical and word-perfect. Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do nothing more. — James Kenneth Stephen

Few, as I have said, are the humorists who can induce this state. To master and dissolve us, to give us the joy of being worn down and tired out with laughter, is a success to be won by no man save in virtue of a rare staying-power. Laughter becomes extreme only if it be consecutive. There must be no pauses for recovery. Touch-and-go humour, however happy, is not enough. The jester must be able to grapple his theme and hang on to it, twisting it this way and that, and making it yield magically all manner of strange and precious things. — Max Beerbohm

But I think it's more normal for my team to have no success than it is to win two consecutive European cups. — Jose Mourinho

I do not begin my novel at the beginning, I do not reach chapter three before I reach chapter four, I do not go dutifully from one page to the next, in consecutive order; no, I pick out a bit here and a bit there, till I have filled all the gaps on paper. This is why I like writing my stories and novels on index cards, numbering them later when the whole set is complete. Every card is rewritten many times. — Vladimir Nabokov

So there are three consecutive frustrations: the frustration of need, the frustration of fantasized satisfaction not working, and the frustration of satisfaction in the real world being at odds with the wished-for, fantasized satisfaction. Three frustrations, three disturbances, and two disillusionments. It is, what has been called in a different context, a cumulative trauma; the cumulative trauma of desire. And this is when it works. — Adam Phillips

According to Hugh Fudenberg, MD, the world's leading immunogeneticist and 13th most quoted biologist of our times (nearly 850 papers in peer review journals), if an individual has had five consecutive flu shots between 1970 and 1980 (the years studied) his/her chances of getting Alzheimer's Disease is ten times higher than if they had one, two or no shots. I asked Dr. Fudenberg why this was so and he said it was due to the mercury and aluminum that is in every flu shot (and most childhood shots). The gradual mercury and aluminum buildup in the brain causes cognitive dysfunction. Is that why Alzheimer's is expected to quadruple?219 — James Perloff

You know they're not going to lose 162 consecutive games. — Harry Caray

What we call life ... is the combination of the Five Aggregates, a combination of physical and mental energies. These are constantly changing; they do not remain the same for two consecutive moments. Every moment they are born and they die. 'When the Aggregates arise, decay and die, O bhikkhu, every moment you are born, decay, and die.' This, even dow during this life time, every moment we are born and die, but we continue. If we can understand that in this life we can continue without a permanent, unchanging substance like Self or Soul, why can't we understand that those forces themselves can continue without a Self or a Soul behind them after the non-functioning of the body? — Walpola Rahula

I wrote in the mornings, often in cafes, on the way to the office. I gave myself a daily word minimum, usually 750. I tried to save revision for the weekends, when I had more consecutive hours to string together. — Christopher Castellani

Celtic have scored in the 50th consecutive game in which they've managed to score — Barry Davies

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing
articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence. — Shirley Hazzard

There is no labor from which most people shrink as they do from that of sustained and consecutive thought; it is the hardest work in the world — Wallace D. Wattles

At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I had the school record at Haberdashers for consecutive detentions for simply speaking out of turn. — Simon Schama

Over the past two generations, 48 percent of all African American families have lived in the poorest quarter of neighborhoods in each generation. The most common experience for black families since the 1970s, by a wide margin, has been to live in the poorest American neighborhoods over consecutive generations. Only 7 percent of white families have experienced similar poverty in their neighborhood environments for consecutive generations. By contrast, persistent neighborhood advantage is virtually nonexistent for black families. One out of every one hundred black families in the United States has lived in affluent neighborhoods over the past two generations, compared to roughly one out of five white families. — Patrick Sharkey

Winning the Origins Lottery Nontheistic models adhere to a central premise that humans arose by strictly natural unguided steps from a bacterial life-form that sprang into being 3.8 billion years ago. Famed evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala, an advocate for the hypothesis that natural selection and mutations can efficiently generate distinctly different species, nevertheless calculated the probability that humans (or a similarly intelligent species) arose from single-celled organisms as a possibility so small (10-1,000,000) that it might as well be zero (roughly equivalent to the likelihood of winning the California lottery 150,000 consecutive times with the purchase of just one ticket each time).2 He and other evolutionary biologists agree that natural selection and mutations could have yielded any of a virtually infinite number of other outcomes. Astrophysicists Brandon Carter, John Barrow, and Frank Tipler produced an even smaller probability. — Hugh Ross

It was like the baseball gods were showing off just for him, in honor of his first day of big league baseball. And surely the baseball gods were smiling that day, because the next batter was Larry Brown, and he was a scrawny, scrappy 23-year-old kid who'd never hit a big league home run. And yet he stepped to the plate and became just the second player in baseball history to connect and give his team four consecutive home runs. — Tucker Elliot

I've been able to do pretty well. I don't work as many consecutive nights as I used to, but I'm still working over 100 nights a year, so that's good for me. — Mose Allison

Varium et mutabile! murmurs the man sagely - "A woman's privilege is to change her mind!" If the nature of his industry were such that he had to change his mind from cooking to cleaning, from cleaning to sewing, from sewing to nursing, from nursing to teaching, and so, backward, forward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night - he too would become adept in the lightning-change act. The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests - and so grows broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few more. — Charlotte Perkins Gilman

By the time I walked down the aisle - or rather, into a judge's chambers - I had lived fourteen independent years, early adult years that my mother had spent married. I had made friends and fallen out with friends, had moved in and out of apartments, had been hired, fired, promoted, and quit. I had had roommates I liked and roommates I didn't like and I had lived on my own; I'd been on several forms of birth control and navigated a few serious medical questions; I'd paid my own bills and failed to pay my own bills; I'd fallen in love and fallen out of love and spent five consecutive years with nary a fling. I'd learned my way around new neighborhoods, felt scared and felt completely at home; I'd been heartbroken, afraid, jubilant, and bored. I was a grown-up: a reasonably complicated person. I'd become that person not in the company of any one man, but alongside my friends, my family, my city, my work, and, simply, by myself. I was not alone. — Rebecca Traister

For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any books however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly. — John Calvin

Taken as a whole, the last four administrations represent the culmination of a century of executive abuse. With each successive president from forty-one to forty-four the disease grew worse. By the time Obama leaves office in 2017, Americans will have suffered under twenty-eight consecutive years of unconstitutional executive usurpation of power. An elected king? The British taxpayer spends around $50 million annually to support the entire royal family. With an annual budget that exceeds $1 billion for expenses, including travel, the American president supplanted the British monarch in everything but a title long ago. — Brion McClanahan

When I tried to access one of the other entertainment libraries, Vintage Movies, the system informed me that I wouldn't be granted access to a wider selection of entertainment options until I had received an above-average rating in three consecutive employee performance reviews. Then the system asked me if I wanted more information on the Indentured Employee Entertainment Reward Program. I didn't. — Ernest Cline

He winced when he stood
lumbago, he explained, from turning one too many sentences arounder that day
and said that he still his evening's reading. He did not do justice to a writer unless he read him on consecutive days and for no less than three hours at a sitting. Otherwise, despite his note taking and underlining, he lost touch with a book's inner life and might as well not have begun. Sometimes, when he unavoidably had to miss a day, he would go back and begin all over again, rather than be nagged by his sense that he was wronginger a serious author. — Philip Roth

Stocks in the United States plunged in 2002 amid fears of war and terrorism, a weak economy, rising oil prices and dozens of corporate scandals. It was the third consecutive annual decline, the first time that has happened in 60 years. — Alex Berenson

I am not a consecutive writer. — Dr. Seuss

Mabutt has now played seven consecutive games for England, this is his seventh — Martin Tyler