Quotes & Sayings About Heads Or Tails

A few years ago, long after it had been closed, Eli said he saw a girl swimming in it, coming out of the water in a bikini, laughing at her frigthtened boyfriend, seaweed snaking around her. He said she looked like a mermaid.
Deenie always pictured it like in one of those books of mythology she used to love, a girl rising from the foam gritted with pearls, mussels, the glitter of the sea.
"It looks beautiful", her mother had said once when they were driving by at night, its waters opaline. "It is beautiful. But it makes people sick."
To Deenie, it was one of many interesting things that adults said would kill you: Easter lilles, jellyfish, copperhead snakes with their diamond heads, tails bright as sulfur. Don't touch, don't taste, don't get too close.
And then, last week. — Megan Abbott

It's impossible to have a coin with only one side. You can't have heads without tails. Innovation is like that. Initiative is like that. Art is like that.
You can't have success unless you're prepared to have failure.
As soon as you say, 'failure is not an option,' you've just said, 'innovation is not an option.' — Seth Godin

Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way to make heads or tails of it is going through intuition. — David Lynch

I was a young kid; I did a little time in the Billerica House of Correction, and it basically turned my life around because I said, 'Oh, I'll never be locked up again. They're not taking away my privacy.' So I flipped a coin: heads - Miami, tails -California. — Alex Rocco

Neither are the pig-skins, in common use to hold wine, and hung out in the sun in all directions, by any means ornamental, as they always preserve the form of very bloated pigs, with their heads and legs cut off, dangling upside-down by their own tails. — Charles Dickens

Heads: This girl
Tails: That girl — Lisa Schroeder

Another mistaken notion connected with the law of large numbers is the idea that an event is more or less likely to occur because it has or has not happened recently. The idea that the odds of an event with a fixed probability increase or decrease depending on recent occurrences of the event is called the gambler's fallacy. For example, if Kerrich landed, say, 44 heads in the first 100 tosses, the coin would not develop a bias towards the tails in order to catch up! That's what is at the root of such ideas as "her luck has run out" and "He is due." That does not happen. For what it's worth, a good streak doesn't jinx you, and a bad one, unfortunately , does not mean better luck is in store. — Leonard Mlodinow

Wall Street sometimes gets confused between risk and uncertainty, and you can profit handsomely from that confusion. The low-risk, high-uncertainty [situation] gives us our most sought after coin-toss odds. Heads, I win; tails, I don't lose much. — Mohnish Pabrai

Above all, mine is a love story. Unlike most love stories, this one involves chance, gravity, a dash of head trauma. It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails. I was heads. Had it gone my way, there might not be a story at all. Just a chapter, or a sentence in a book whose greater theme had yet to be determined. Maybe this chapter would've had the faintest whisper of love about it. But maybe not. Sometimes, a girl needs to lose. — Gabrielle Zevin

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again. — Laura Lippman

Hardly anybody is exactly normal in any way, just as one hundred tossed pennies will rarely come up exactly fifty heads and fifty tails. — Darrell Huff

Because hate's just the flip side of love. Like heads and tails on a dime. If you don't know what it feels like to love someone, how would you know what hate is? One can't exist without the other. — Jodi Picoult

We're deciding the fate of the multiverse with a flip of a coin. Heads or tails, doc. If that isn't a game, I don't know what is. — E.C. Myers

I have often had apparitions of hosts of serpents with heads at their tails, but not one was able to bite me; and many other visions. — Jan Hus

Donkeys ... I've decided that donkeys are universally cute. Really cute. So cute that donkeys defy any arguments of preferences being relative. When you pet their noses, they blink their eyes and bashfully look away as if embarrassed. And when donkeys hee-haw, they have their mouths and lips curled up as if they are smiling. Boyfriend and girlfriend donkeys rest their heads on each other's rumpt and fan each other's faces with their tails. And kid donkeys, the size of an average dog, trot around with big smiles on their faces and floppy, dangly, long donkey ears. Too cute. — Johnny Rico

There are three sides to every coin (Heads, Tails, and The Edge). Your ability to understand contrasting points of view and your ability to glean what information you believe to be valuable from each side is a crucial skill. — Robert Kiyosaki

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested them and brought them to a stand, with a wary "Wo-ho! so-ho- then!" the near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it - like an unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind. — Charles Dickens

Before the eyes of monks intent on meditation, what is the meaning of those ridiculous grotesques, those monstrous shapes and shapely monsters? Those sordid apes? Those lions, those centaurs, those half-human creatures, with mouths in their bellies, with single feet, ears like sails? Those spotted tigers, those fighting warriors, those hunters blowing their horns, and those many bodies with single heads and many heads with single bodies? Quadrupeds with serpents' tails, and fish with quadrupeds' faces, and here an animal who seems a horse in front and a ram behind, and there a horse with horns, and so on; by now it is more pleasurable for a monk to read marble than manuscript, and to admire the works of man than to meditate on the law of God. Shame! For the desire of your eyes and for your smiles! — Umberto Eco

The Chinese said of themselves several thousand years ago: China is a sea that salts all the waters that flow into it. Theres another Chinese saying about their country which is much more modernit dates only from the fourth century. This is the saying: The tail of China is large and will not be wagged. I like that one. The British democracy approves the principles of movable party heads and unwaggable national tails. It is due to the working of these important forces that I have the honour to be addressing you at this moment. — Winston Churchill

I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails. — Karl Kraus

Once there was a man and a woman. When they met sparks flew, meteors collided, asteroids turned cartwheels and atoms split. He loved her from here to eternity, she loved him to the moon and back. They were two peas in a pod, heads and tails and noughts and crosses. — Grace McCleen

That's when I tossed a coin. If it came up heads, I'd take on Sakamochi and...

If the coin came up tails, I decided I'd take part in the game. — Koushun Takami

Look at a coin from your pocket. On one side is "heads" - the symbol of the political authority which minted the coin; on the other side is "tails" - the precise specification of the amount the coin is worth as payment in exchange. One side reminds us that states underwrite currencies and the money is originally a relation between persons in society, a token perhaps. The other reveals the coin as a thing, capable of entering into definite relations with other things. — Keith Hart

What I am going to propose is that you write a novel.
As you know, the practical advantages of being able to write out your thoughts fluently are very great. For one thing, when you are used to writing them out, they present themselves, one after another. When you are not used to writing them out, they mill around among themselves usually and you see nothing but heads and tails of them when you sit down to get them on paper. I know from my own experience that the first two or three hours of every exam I ever took were spent simply getting my pen warmed up, and by then it was too late. — Ted Hughes

In life you are given two ends; one to think with and the other to sit on. Your success in life depends on which end you use most. Heads you win, tails you lose. — Conrad Burns

If we have drifted 10 heads above the zero line in our coin flip experiment, what is the probability of getting 10 tails in a row to return us to zero? About 1 in 1,000. — Donald G. Reinertsen

Only an object can suffer, but phenomenally subject and object, being one whole, spin like a coin so that the intervals between pile et face (heads and tails) are imperceptible. Consequently pain, or pleasure, appear to be continual.

Noumenally, on the contrary, there is no object to suffer pain or pleasure. Noumenon is invulnerable, and cannot be otherwise. Noumenon is the unmanifested aspect of what we, sentient beings, are: Phenomenon is our manifestation. — Wei Wu Wei

Bilbo had never seen or imagined anything of the kind. They were high up in a narrow place, with a dreadful fall into a dim valley at one side of them. There they were sheltering under a hanging rock for the night, and he lay beneath a blanket and shook from head to toe. When he peeped out in the lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang. Then came a wind and a rain, and the wind whipped the rain and the hail about in every direction, so that an overhanging rock was no protection at all. Soon they were getting drenched and their ponies were standing with their heads down and their tails between their legs, and some of them were whinnying with fright. They could hear the giants guffawing and shouting all over the mountainsides. — J.R.R. Tolkien

There were many times my pants were so thin I could sit on a dime and tell if it was heads or tails. — Jonathan Swift

At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails. How will you wager? Reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong. — Blaise Pascal

Maybe we're standing like coins on the edge?"
Allie considered this. "Meaning?"
"Meaning, we might be able to shake things up a little, and find a way to come up heads."
"Or tails," suggested Allie.
"What are you talking about?" said Lief.
"Life and death. — Neal Shusterman

I can follow pretty much every programming language out there, I can make a two-hundred-year-old diary out of some really nasty ingredients, I can even make sense out of the instruction booklets that come with IKEA furniture, but I can*not* make heads or tails of this nonsense right here. — Keith R.A. DeCandido

If you cannot always elicit a straight answer from the unconscious brain, how can you access its knowledge? Sometimes the trick is merely to probe what your gut is telling you. So the next time a friend laments that she cannot decide between two options, tell her the easiest way to solve her problem: flip a coin. She should specify which option belongs to heads and which to tails, and then let the coin fly. The important part is to assess her gut feeling after the coin lands. If she feels a subtle sense of relief at being "told" what to do by the coin, that's the right choice for her. If, instead, she concludes that it's ludicrous for her to make a decision based on a coin toss, that will cue her to choose the other option. — David Eagleman

I love to read, and so I've been reading everything I can, not intensely, but I love to read so I read "Origin of Species" by Darwin and I can't make head or tail of E=MC squared by Einstein, but I try to baffle my way through that. — Anthony Hopkins

When you live alone you no longer know what it is to tell a story: the plausible disappears at the same time as the friends. You let events flow by too: you suddenly see people appear who speak and then go away; you plunge into stories of which you can't make head or tail: you'd make a terrible witness. — Jean-Paul Sartre

He had a particular facination with the I Ching, that art of tossing three coins three times and divining a pattern out of heads and tails. Pete would begin with questions:
What determined the pattern? Was it random? Was it a higher power? Was is mathematical? Wasn't poker based on mathematical probability and not just luck? Did that mean randomness was actually mathematical? And if the I Ching was governed by mathematics, hey, wouldn't that mean the I Ching was actually predictable, a prescribed answer? And if it was prescribed, did that mean that your life followed the I Ching, like some sort of equation? Or did the I Ching simply capture correctly what had already been determined as the next series of events in your life? — Amy Tan

When I was signing up for the University of Southern California's music program, I flipped a coin to decide my major. If it came up heads, it would be flute - tails would be voice. — Sondra Radvanovsky

Flip a coin. Life or death. Heads or tails. You never know. — Laurie Nadel

I felt different, changing. Like today was my day, if I could just figure out how. Like danger, but my danger, sweet tricky urgent luck, tumbling through the air, heads or tails? — Tana French

Conversion, then, involves repentance (turning from sin and unbelief) and faith (trusting in Christ alone for salvation).9 They are really two sides of the same coin. One side is tails - turn tail on the fruits of unbelief. The other side is heads - head straight for Jesus and trust His promises. You can't have the one without the other any more than you can face two ways at once or serve two masters. — John Piper

If a coin comes down heads, that means that the possibility of its coming down tails has collapsed. Until that moment the two possibilities were equal.
But on another world, it does come down tails. And when that happens, the two worlds split apart. — Philip Pullman

Melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin. — Gunter Grass

What you have to remember," said Mr. Ibis, testily, "is that life and death are different sides of the same coin. Like the heads and tails of a quarter." "And if I had a double-headed quarter?" "You don't. They only belong to fools, and gods. — Neil Gaiman

Chicago does not go to the world, the world comes to Chicago! Who needs New York? Who has taller buildings than our tall buildings? Who's got a busier airport than our airport? You want Picasso? We got Picasso, big Picasso. Nobody can make heads or tails of it. It's a lion? No, a seahorse. Looks to me like a radiator with wings. Who gives a damn, people, a Picasso's a Picasso. — Peter Orner

Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side. — Barbara Kingsolver

Even now she can't decide. She thinks about flipping a coin. Heads she goes, tails she stays. But isn't indecisiveness an early sign of mental illness? — Judy Blume

I had to get out of the Boston area, so I flipped a coin and said, 'Heads - Miami, tails - California. I was in my mid-20s and came out here with no training. Acting wasn't even in my mind. — Alex Rocco

Now, it has been independently shown that people hate to lose something more than they enjoy gaining it. For example, they don't mind paying for something with a credit card even when told there is a discount for cash, but they hate paying the same amount if they are told there is a surcharge for using credit. As a result, people will often refuse to gamble for an expected profit (they turn down bets such as "Heads, you win $120; tails, you pay $100), but they will gamble to avoid an expected loss (such as "Heads, you no longer owe $120; tails, you now owe an additional $100"). (This kind of behavior drives economists crazy, but is avidly studied by investment firms hoping to turn it to their advantage.) The combination of people's loss aversion with the effects of framing explains the paradoxical result: the "gain" metaphor made the doctors risk-averse; the "loss" metaphor made them gamblers. — Steven Pinker

Heads:It goes weel.
Tails:It doesn't — Lisa Schroeder

His chest, heaving harder this time. His words, almost gasping this time. "You destroy me."
I am falling to pieces in his arms.
My fists are full of unlucky pennies and my heart is a jukebox demanding a few nickels and my head is flipping quarters heads or tails heads or tails heads or tails heads or tails
"Juliette," he says, and he mouths the name, barely speaking at all, and he's pouring molten lava into my limbs and I never even knew I could melt straight to death.
"I want you," he says. He says "I want all of you. I want you inside and out and catching your breath and aching for me like I ache for you." He says it like it's a lit cigarette lodged in his throat, like he wants to dip me in warm honey and he says "It's never been a secret. I've never tried to hide that from you. I've never pretended I wanted anything less. — Tahereh Mafi

Courage was the fundamental quality in her character. Nothing was capable of giving her any excitement and of curing her of an ever-present tendency to boredom, but the idea that she was playing heads or tails with her whole existence. — Stendhal

Slight and ridiculous as the incident was, it made him appear such a little fiend, and withal such a keen and knowing one, that the old woman felt too much afraid of him to utter a single word, and suffered herself to be led with extraordinary politeness to the breakfast-table. Here he by no means diminished the impression he had just produced, for he ate hard eggs, shell and all, devoured gigantic prawns with the heads and tails on, chewed tobacco and water-cresses at the same time and with extraordinary greediness, drank boiling tea without winking, bit his fork and spoon till they bent again, and in short performed so many horrifying and uncommon acts that the women were nearly frightened out of their wits, and began to doubt if he were really a human creature. — Charles Dickens

I could tell you that when you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you'll settle it by flipping a coin. But don't go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails? — David Brooks

Liver, lungs, heads, tails, kidneys, testicles, all of these things which are traditional, delicious and nutritious parts of our gastronomy go to waste. — Tristram Stuart

Shadow took a quarter from his pocket, tails up. He flicked it up in the air, knocking it against his finger as it left his hand to give it a wobble that made it look as if it were turning, caught it, slapped it down on the back of his hand. "Call," he said. "Why?" asked Wednesday. "I don't want to work for anyone with worse luck than me. Call." "Heads," said Mr. Wednesday. "Sorry," said Shadow, revealing the coin without even bothering to glance at it. "It was tails. I rigged the toss. — Neil Gaiman

In life there are heads and there are tails however when one starts to excrete thoughts out of the latter and proceed to relieve yourself out of the former than you've become too full of yourself. — Ryan Cayne

They are white, four-limbed, about the size of a full-grown human, but that's where the comparisons stop. Naked, with long reptilian tails, arched backs, and heads that jut forward. — Suzanne Collins

In retrospect, the strategy pursued by LTCM can be seen as a variant on the ancient "martingale" betting strategy. As Slate writer (and mathematician and novelist) Jordan Ellenberg explained, the strategy can be illustrated by betting on a coin: Bet 100 bucks on heads. If you win, you walk away $100 richer. If you lose, no problem; on the next flip, bet $200 on heads, and if you win this time, take your $100 profit and quit. If you lose, you're down $300 on the day; so you double down again and bet $400. The coin can't come up tails forever! Eventually, you've got to win your $100 back. (Ellenberg 2008) — John Quiggin

Well, well, the world must turn upon its axis, And all mankind turn with it, heads or tails, And live and die, make love and pay our taxes, And as the veering winds shift, shift our sails. — Lord Byron

It began with a coin toss. The coin came up tails; I was heads. — Gabrielle Zevin

It's hard to describe the feeling. And I knew from Horus's memory that this kind of union was very rare-like the one time when the coin doesn't land heads or tails, but stands on it's edge, perfectly balanced. He did not control me. I did not use him for power. We acted as one.
Our voices spoke in harmony. "Now."
And the magic bonds that held us shattered.
My combat avatar formed around me, lifting me off the floor and encasing me with golden energy. I stepped forward and raised my sword. The falcon warrior mimicked the movement, perfectly attuned to my wishes.
Set turned and regarded me with cold eyes.
"So, Horus," he said. "You managed to find the pedals of your little bike, eh? That does not mean you can ride."
"I am Carter Kane," I said. "Blood of the Pharaohs, Eye of Horus. And now, Set-brother,uncle,traitor-I'm going to crush you like a gnat. — Rick Riordan